"Sometimes," said Keidansky, "it is grossly immoral to live up to your highest principle." And in reply to my half-uttered protest, he quickly continued: "No, no; I am not jesting. It's a sad business, this jesting about the human tragedy. For what is it but mocking each other's wounds, laughing at one another's infirmities in this great lazaretto, where we are all pitiful patients? What is it but scoffing at our sores, grinning at our gashes, deriding our diseases, laughing at our own weaknesses? No, I am not jesting," and the speaker eyed me strangely as he looked up from his manuscript on the little table in Machtell's cafÉ.

"Beneath the levity is lead," he said slowly. "Behind all the fun is crushing failure. Behind all the satire is sorrowful shortcoming. Behind the smile is a searing smart. Grief lurks in the grin. Through all the drollery despair peers forth, and there is nothing more lugubrious than laughter. Comedy is made up of error, failure, confusion, misunderstanding, misfortune, misdirected efforts and wasted energy. Whenever error ends fatally it is called tragic, but that is not the worst. The real tragedy is not the play that ends with the death of the leading characters, but the one in which they are condemned to struggle and live on and laugh and be laughed at. Each one of us is his own caricature. There is so little to do, yet we all overdo it. We all reduce our lives to absurdities. Our efforts exaggerate their importance and betray our barbarities.

"We overdraw our characters and all our lifetime suffer in our own estimation. The more serious we are the more extravagant is the farce. As we creep along the roads, the shadows we cast mock and menace us.

"We are poor debtors, all. With infinite intentions in a world of infinitesimal possibilities, our efforts constantly caricature and cartoon our aims. All our works are filled with comic illustrations galore. We make them ourselves, and they overshadow our works. Did you ever see any one fall on the street and a lot of lookers-on laugh? Well, that is in a measure the history and interpretation of humor.

"We seek and do not find; we fight and do not conquer; we play and do not win; we attempt, but do not achieve; we aspire and do not attain; we desire and are not gratified; we long for light yet grope on in darkness; we struggle and are defeated; we strive for salvation and discover it to be a mere sham; our labor is lost, our love is not returned, our devotion is not understood, our wings are broken at the point of flying, all our yearnings are in vain; and then, the newspaper humorist writes half a column of pointed jottings out of these things; or else the literary comedian will prepare a series of funny papers. Do you understand now what an appalling, grim and gruesome spectacle there is behind all these little jests? And how tragic it is for the humorist who sees it all? They say that a Scotchman laughs on the third day after he hears a joke. It does not take so long to find that there is nothing to laugh at. It is all so sad. Think what a tremendous tragedy the funny paragrapher sums up in a few lines and sells to 'Puck' for $2.98. Come, take up a column of comicalities in any publication and see what is at the bottom of every jest. What is it about? Is it about a man and a woman linked together by law, with a Chinese wall of misunderstanding between them, 'so strangely unlike and so strongly attached to each other' that it is hell for both of them? Or, is it about a woman who wears her life away in the farce of 'Vanitas Vanitatum?' Is it about the greedy mercenary who loses his soul to gain the world? Or is it about one who gives up the world to gain nothing?

"Is it about an enthusiastic youth who, to escape the materialism of his surroundings, jumps from the frying-pan into Bohemia; or is it about a philosopher who, gazing at the stars, falls into a mud puddle? Is it about the poet starving in a garret, or is it about the artist lost in the quest of the unattainable? Is it about the moral principle trampled under foot because of the material advantage, or is it about the low life of him who longs for the highest? What is it about? Is it about a man who bleeds and a woman who laughs, or is it about beings who sell themselves for life with promises to love, honor, cherish and protect? Is it about some one groping in darkness, grappling with the impossible, or is it about a great republic gone mad over the visit of an effete representative of monarchy? Perhaps it is about a bright American girl in quest of a titled idiot, or else about a being so degraded that he is in mortal fear of work and has a horror for soap! It may be about mediocrity dreaming of talent, of failures chasing the phantoms of success, of fading beauty, waning love, of the stumbling of the blind, or of any and all the confusions of error and the thousands of misunderstandings of the home and of people who are near and fail to be dear to each other. The list is too long. It can never be exhausted. But at the bottom of any one of the jests, old or new, you will find an excruciating little tragedy. It is all so sad, sorrowful and depressing. The humor of the situation? Say rather the tragedy of the case.

"And to look behind, to peer through the panorama, to see all this, to have a sense of humor and to have it bad, is not such a cheerful thing as it is thought to be, for it is also a sense of our hopelessness. It is a sad business, this jesting about the human tragedy—or the human farce. In other words, it is to see the futility of all our efforts, the failure of all our fighting, the uselessness of our aspirations, the emptiness of our aims, the vanity of our strivings, the nothingness of it all. Life, with all its faults and foibles and failures, with all its incongruities, irreconcilables, clashes and unfitnesses, stretches out before you as just so much material for sardonic satire. Scrambling, squabbling, scurrying, seething, squally squads and crowds of humanity, how gruesomely grotesque it all is and how ludicrous! With all its heroics, brave deeds and still greater bravadoes, with all its gloried wonders and wonderful achievements, with all its glorious boasts, lofty hopes and superb masteries, with all our arts and philosophies, humanity and the whole world seems to me like a swarming mole-hill, and at times moves me to nothing but to laughter. It is so ridiculous, all the mimicry of the whole microcosm. Tell me, have you ever been seized by a sense of the utter absurdity of it all, so that you laughed and laughed until there were tears of blood, almost, in your eyes?

"I wonder if you know what it is to have a mocking demon within you to laugh and leer at everything you do, at every step you take, at your best deeds, finest words, greatest strides, noblest endeavors. Imagine a voice that at every turn of the road—especially when you act your grandest, talk your loudest, achieve your highest—that at every turn of the road exclaims: 'How absurd, how silly of you!' Imagine a state of mind when all is farce around you and your own caricature is your constant companion. Such things happen to some people, and to them everything is so unreal, so absurd, so stupid; the greatest events, the sublimest utterances, are ever so laughable. The more seriously the people play their parts the more ridiculous the performance seems. The greater the tragedy the more laughter. What is so funny as Hamlet's soliloquy? What are so laughable as the ravings of Job? And so it sometimes feels with the other sublimely sad things that have been written. The moving finger writes, and the mocking voice within laughs—laughs at everything and you can take nothing seriously. You take up the best, the most pathetic things you have written yourself, and even these make you smile. Such things have been said before and they were absurd and out of place—in the first place. Whatever you do you hear the mocking voice from within say: 'Silly creature, those things have been done before, and they have only led fools to their dusty death.' You whisper the sweetest things, prompted by love to your lady fair, and the voice from within: 'Silly fool, these things have been said before and the course of true love never did run long.' You have a feeling that it is all histrionic, all acting, all farce, and that we are all overdoing our parts tremendously. Strutting, swaggering, blustering, bombastic swashbucklers all. It is not life. It is an historical novel. It will sink into nothingness. 'O, Thor, du Thor, du prahlender Thor!' Do you remember Bret Harte's parody on Hugo's 'Les MisÉrables'? So easily is the sublime tipped over and made ridiculous. 'Tis but a slight step from pathos to bathos. But wait until I address this letter to the New York 'Abend Blatt.' Abe Cahan came over here and spoke for the Socialists this afternoon, so I wrote the thing up. He is in the other room with that blatant crowd of Jewish actors. They are taking him to task for one of his reviews in the 'Arbeiter Zeitung' of a recent performance of theirs. They never know exactly what a critic means except when he does not criticise. They are to give here Gordin's 'Jewish King Lear' to-morrow night. You don't know Cahan? He is one of the brightest, biggest men in our movement. I come in here," Keidansky explained, "because these actors are so ignorant of the conventions, simple and natural, and I like them for it.

"There is a story by J. L. Peretz," Keidansky continued, after he had folded up and addressed his communication, "that I want to tell you apropos of what I have been saying. Peretz is one of the literary masters of to-day, but he writes in Yiddish, so the world misses his greatness. The story is about a reformer, a revolutionary, an idealist. He addresses a meeting in behalf of his cause, speaks fervently, passionately, 'spits fire,' waves a sharp sword at his audience and makes a ringing appeal for the truth. In the room where he speaks there is a mirror. Accidentally he looks into it. He sees himself. His enthusiasm leaves him at once, his fervor vanishes, he loses his power of speech, becomes calm, indifferent, and finishes his oration in disgust. He no longer feels the saint and hero he felt. While speaking so excitedly he looked like a murderer in the mirror. After this he has an unearthly dream about the part of hell that is allotted to reformers. When he wakes up he receives a postal card asking him to come to another meeting of the revolutionists. He immediately burns the card. This is giving but the faintest outlines of the story, but you see Peretz, like Heine, also has the sense of humor developed to a tragic extent—to the extent of seeing the absurdity, futility and irony of it all—even our grandest efforts.

"Yes, so it seems to some eyes, and so it is at least to those who see it so. After all, what is it? A cry and a struggle and a sigh, a flash of light and a streak of dawn and darkness, and then we stand by the grave and weep for the dead that the living may see our tears. Ah, the helplessness and hopelessness of it all; the desolation and despondency, the thoughts that paralyze the mind and stifle the soul; all things out of joint, out of proportion, and Fate cries out to you in the slang phrase 'you don't fit!' Ah, the humor of the entire procession and the deep tragic background behind it. Seek and you will find, and when you find you shall not want it. Wealth makes us weary of it. Fame brings her wreath and finds her poet dead. Faith consoles, but we have the consciousness all along that we are sick and are taking medicine. 'Love grows hate for love's sake and life takes death for guide.' Love? Have ever two souls come near each other? Those whom we love most understand us least. Happiness? The art of finding happiness is one of the lost arts. No one is ever consciously happy. Knowledge is almost positive proof that we cannot know. With it we are more puzzled than we were without it. The last word of science is 'wait.' What do we know? Moses went up to heaven, but God refused to be interviewed. The people, like the modern editor, insisted upon a story and so we have the Bible. But science and the higher criticism has interrupted our reading and spoiled the pleasure of it. What do we know? Even Professor Daniel De Leon does not know everything. Man asks questions, investigates, 'und ein Narr wartet auf Antwort.' Life contains more emptiness than anything else. Life is a long wait for that which does not come. Is life worth living? 'Tis not worthwhile asking the question."

"If that is so, or seems so," I hazarded the question, "then why be here?"

"Why, to see it all, to enjoy the tragedy," Keidansky answered with swift enthusiasm. "I would not advise my best friend to commit suicide. Such an exciting farce. What would life be, what would art be without the tragic elements in it? It's great! But I began to tell you why it is sometimes grossly immoral to live up to your highest principles, when my train of thought was wrecked. Some other time. Come, let's go into the other room and I'll introduce you to the players and to Comrade Cahan—if he is still alive."