Candle and the flame : poems / by George Sylvester Viereck [electronic text]

A NEW ENGLAND BALLAD

THIS poem embodies a Hellenic conception of Christ. My Christ, like the Aryan Christ of Houston Stewart Chamberlain ("The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century"), is a joyous figure pointing not to death, but to

life.

"Many founders of religions,"

declares Chamberlain,

"have imposed penance in respect to food upon themselves and their disciples; not so Christ; He emphasizes particularly that He had not fasted like John, but had so lived that men called Him 'a glutton and a wine-bibber.'… What Buddha teaches is, so to speak, a physical process; it is the actual extinction of the physical and intellectual being; whoever wishes to be redeemed must take the three vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience. In the case of Christ we find nothing similar: He attends marriages, He declares wedlock to be a holy ordinance of God, and even the errors of the flesh He judges so leniently that He himself has not a word of condemnation for the adulteress; He indeed speaks of wealth as rendering the 'conversion' of the will more difficult—as, for example, when He says that it is more difficult for a rich man to enter into that kingdom of God which lies within us than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, but He immediately adds —and this is the characteristic and decisive part —'the things which are impossible with men are possible with God.'"

Christ, Chamberlain might have added, suffered woman to anoint His forehead with spikenard, and to dry His weary feet with the caress of her hair. Jesus to me is the beautiful youth who confounded the scribes in the temple, not the sorrowful bearded figure of the last movement. Wilde, too, in "De Profundis," dwells on the Greek aspect of Christ. The synthesis of Greek and Christian always has been to me a subject of fascination. I can trace the growth of the idea in my own work. More than seven years ago, in the final stanza of

"Hadrian" (Gedichte, 1904) this conception is clearly foreshadowed.

"Where unto Beauty sacrifice is givenThere let us kneel to worship and adore,Whether its star transcendent rose in heavenO'er Grecian hill or galilean shore."

In "Before the Cross" and "Provocatio ad Mariam" (Nineveh) the pendulum swings, and my spirit turns again to Golgotha. "Spring" speaks of a healthy pagan reaction. I am again a denizen of Greece. But, unlike Swinburne's, my paganism never blasphemes. "Prince Jesus, set me free,'" is my prayer. A drop of blood slowly drips from the wounded head. I am free.

"O sweet Lord Spring, I am free at lastTo follow wherever thy feet have passed,Over the dales and over the rills,To the gladsome Grecian hills."

The pagan note pervades the last chord of Nineveh. But no philosophy can emancipate us from the Nazarene.

"We are not,"

as Chamberlain remarks,

"Christians because we were brought up in this or that church, because we want to be Christians; if we are Christians, it is because we cannot help it, because neither the chaotic bustle of life, nor the delirium of selfishness nor artificial training of thought can dispel the Vision of the Man of Sorrow when once it has been seen."

In "A New England Ballad" I attempt to reconcile what is Greek and what is Christian in me. I was delighted when, years after, I found in Chamberlain my philosophic justification.

"A New England Ballad" is my answer to Puritanism. Puritanism may have exhausted its force externally, but the virus of intolerance still corrodes our minds. Puritanism crucified Whitman and slandered Poe; its breath is deadly to art. I love Merry Old England, but for New England, at least in this aspect, I have no affection. I regard it as a duty to my Germanic ancestors to supply an antidote to the poison bequeathed to us by the Pilgrim Fathers.

"Barred in His name the magic bowerOf mimic kings and queens that seem," etc.

Not only in New England, but in New York, theatrical presentations on the Sabbath are, at this writing, illegal.

"…through a gate obscure and smallHe watched a pale-faced stripling crawlInto a closely-shuttered place…"

Though Shakespeare be barred on Sunday, the peripatetic Venus and traffickers in vice ply their trade every day in the week.

"Wearing the hunted look, uncanny,Of them that love not much, but many."

"Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much: but to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little"

(Saint Luke vi:47). "Quia multum amavit"— there is nothing more beautiful in the world, except one sentence in "De Profundis ":

"Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground"…

"The sleek, the oily PhariseesWith the complacent smile of yore—Dear God, how He remembered these!"

Garments are subject to fashion, but the Pharisee of today is brother under his skin to the Pharisee of Jerusalem.

"… He I am who at His mother's sign, And for her glory, turned the waterIn the six water-pots to wine!"

In view of the campaign waged by intolerant females, in favour of Prohibition, the fact that Jesus performed His first miracle, the turning of water into wine, at the request of His mother (Saint John ii: I-II,) , assumes additional pregnance. Christ's opinion of wine was evidently as pronounced as His opinion of the Sabbath.

"The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath."

"Columbus has not crossed the mainTo open up new worlds to pain."

Small as may be the baggage of our immigrants, they bring with them too often the intolerance and the prejudices of the Old World. Here, as Professor Sumner remarks, America has missed her great opportunity, the opportunityof creating a continent entirely free from prejudice and convention.

"The awful beauty of Apollo,The loving kindness which is Christ."

Since Nietzsche, every thinker has formulated his conception of the Overman. My Overman is both Christian

and pagan. He transcends man, but is still human. He is Christ-Apollo.