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Title: The Little Review, November 1914 (Vol. 1, No. 8)
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Editor: Margaret C. Anderson
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LITTLE REVIEW, NOVEMBER 1914
(VOL. 1, NO. 8) ***
THE LITTLE REVIEW
Literature Drama Music Art
MARGARET C. ANDERSON
EDITOR
NOVEMBER, 1914
Lyrics of an Italian Scharmel Iris
Zarathustra Vs. Rheims George Soule
The Cost of War Clarence Darrow
A Social Comedy Lawrence Langner
“The Immutable” Margaret C. Anderson
Poems Maxwell Bodenheim
The Spiritual Dangers of Writing Vers Libre Eunice Tietjens
Tagore’s “Union” Basanta Koomar Roy
War, the Only Hygiene of the World Marinetti
Noise George Burman Foster
The Birth of a Poem Maximilian Voloshin
Editorials
My Friend, the Incurable Ibn Gabirol
London Letter E. Buxton Shanks
New York Letter George Soule
The Theatre
Harold Bauer in Chicago Herman Schuchert
A Ferrer School in Chicago Rudolf von Liebich
The Old Spirit and the New Ways in Art William Saphier
Book Discussion
Sentence Reviews
The Reader Critic
Published Monthly
15 cents a copy
MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Publisher
Fine Arts Building
CHICAGO
$1.50 a year
Entered as second-class matter at Postoffice, Chicago.
THE LITTLE REVIEW
Vol. I
NOVEMBER, 1914
No. 8
Copyright, 1914, by Margaret C. Anderson.
Lyrics of an Italian
SCHARMEL IRIS
The Forest of the Sky
High in the forest of the sky
The stars and branches interlace;
As cloth-of-gold the fallen leaves lie
Where twilight-peacocks lord the place,
Spendthrifts of pride and grace.
The grapes on vines are rubies red,
They burn as flame, when day is done.
The Dusk, brown Princess, turns her head
While sunset-panthers past her run
To caverns of the Sun.
She throws cord-reins of sunbeams wrought,
About the sunset-panthers, fleet,
And rides them joyously, when caught,
Across the poppied fields of wheat—
Their hearts with terror beat.
They reach the caverns of the Sun,
The raven-clouds above them fly;
Dame Night her tapestry’s begun.
High, o’er the forest of the sky
The moon, a boat, sails by.
Iteration
My son is dead and I am going blind,
And in the Ishmael-wind of grief
I tremble like a leaf;
I have no mind for any word you say:
My son is dead and I am going blind.
April
I loved her more than moon or sun—
There is no moon or sun for me;
Of lovely things to look upon,
The loveliest was she.
She does not hear me, though I sing—
And, oh, my heart is like to break!
The world awakens with the Spring,
But she—she does not wake!
Scarlet—White
(_Struck at the double standard_)
The woman who is scarlet now
Was soul of whiteness yesterday;
A void is she wherein a man
May leave his lust to-day.
’Twas with the kiss Ischariot
A traitor bore her heart away;
Her body now is leased by men
That kneel at church to pray.
Three Apples
I who am Giver of Life
Out of the cradle of dawn
Bring you this infant of song.—
He has a golden tongue
And wings upon his feet.
The apple of silver he holds
Once lay at the breast of the moon;
I give him an apple of gold
’Twas forged in the fires of the sun;
This apple of copper I give
That Sunset concealed in her hair.
When from the husk of dusk I shake the stars,
Down slumber’s vine I’ll send him dreams in dew,
And peace will overtake him like a song
Like thoughts of love invade a lover’s mind.
The spear-scars of the red world he will wear
As women in their hair may wear a rose.
On the rosary of his days
He will say a prayer for your sake,
The hounds-o’-wonder will lie at his side,
And lick the dust-o’-the-world from his feet.
The apple of silver will work him a charm
When under his pillow he lays it at night;
The apple of copper will warm his heart
When a heart he loves grows cold on his own;
The apple of gold will teach him a song
For children to sing when he blows on a reed;
The dew will hear and run to the sun,
The sun will whisper it in my ear,
And you, being dead, the song will hear.
Zarathustra Vs. Rheims
GEORGE SOULE
Hauptmann and Rolland have quarreled about the war, Hæckel has
repudiated his English honorary degrees, and now Thomas Hardy has placed
on Nietzsche the responsibility for the destruction of the cathedral of
Rheims. The tragedy of nationalism, it seems, is not content with
ruining lives and art; it must also vitiate philosophy and culture.
“Nietzsche and his followers, Treitschke, Von Bernhardi, and others,”
writes Hardy. In the next sentence he speaks of “off-hand assumptions.”
One is tempted to write, “Christ and his followers, Czar Nicholas,
Kaiser Wilhelm, and others!”
Nietzsche has been claimed as a prophet by hereditary aristocrats, by
anarchists, by socialists, by artists, and by militarists. There is even
a book to prove that he who called himself “the Antichrist” was a
supporter of the Catholic Church. One suspects, however, that the Jesuit
who wrote it had a subtle sense of truth.
The most fundamental truth about Nietzsche is that the torrent of his
inspiration is open to everyone who can drink of it. His value, his
quality, consist not in the fact that he said this or that, but that
life in him was strong and beautiful. This is true of all prophets; how
much more so, then, of the one who threw to the winds all stiffness of
orthodoxy and insisted on a transvaluation of all values! “O my soul, to
thy domain gave I all wisdom to drink, all new wines, and also all
immemorially old strong wines of wisdom,” said Zarathustra.
But even in his teachings we can find no justification of the present
shame of Europe. It was Darwin who laid the foundation for the
philosophy of the survival of the fittest and the struggle for
existence. With the shallow inferences from these conceptions Nietzsche
had no patience. If the fittest survives, the fittest is not necessarily
the best. The brute force which makes for survival had no attraction for
Nietzsche. He called upon man’s will to make itself the deciding factor
in the struggle. When he argued for strength, he argued for the strength
of the beautiful and noble, not strength for its own sake. Of what avail
is a great individual to the world if he makes himself weak and
sacrifices himself to an inferior enemy? The French gunners who defended
the Cathedral of Rheims might justly claim the approval of Nietzsche. If
the Allies had turned the other cheek and allowed their countries to be
overrun by German militarism, they would then have proved themselves
Christian and truly anti-Nietzschean.
Moreover, Nietzsche uncompromisingly opposed the supremacy of mere
numbers, the supremacy of non-spiritual values. He argued after the war
of 1870 that the victory of Prussian arms endangered rather than helped
Prussian culture. Culture is a thing of the spirit; it was undermined by
the tide of smug satisfaction in the triumph of militarism.
“You say that a good cause will even justify war; I tell you that it is
the good war that justifies all causes,” wrote Nietzsche. It is the
logic of the newspaper paragrapher which makes this statement a
justification of militarism. _The good war_—what is that? It is the
quality of heroism, the unreckoning love of beauty, the pride of the
soul in its own strength and purity. It is the opponent of mere
contentment and sluggishness. It is the militant virtue which has
inspired great souls since the beginning of the world; it is the hope of
future man. If a cause is not justified by the good war what can be said
for it? It is a pathetic absurdity to think that Nietzsche would have
found the good war in the present struggle for territory and commercial
supremacy. No, gentlemen of letters, fight the Kaiser if you must, but
do not aim your clods at the prophets in your hasty partisanship!
For it is in this very Nietzsche and his good war that mankind will now
find its spirit of hope. We who see that wars of gunpowder are evil, we
who intend to abolish them, cannot do so by denying our own strength and
appealing helplessly to some external power in the sky. We must say with
Zarathustra,
“How could I endure to be a man, if man were not also the composer, the
riddle-reader, and the redeemer of chance!
“To redeem what is past, and to transform every ‘It was’ into ‘Thus
would I have it!’ that only do I call redemption!
“Will—so is the emancipator and joy-bringer called: thus have I taught
you, my friends!”
In _Ecce Homo_ the word “German” has become something like his
worst term of abuse. He believes only in French culture; all
other culture is a misunderstanding. In his deepest instincts
Nietzsche asserts to be so foreign to everything German, that the
mere presence of a German “retards his digestion.” German
intellect is to him indigestion. If he has been so enthusiastic
in his devotion to Wagner, this was because in Wagner he honored
the foreigner, because in him he saw the incarnate protest
against all German virtues, the “counter-poison” (he believed in
Wagner’s Jewish descent). He allows the Germans no honor as
philosophers: Leibnitz and Kant were “the two greatest clogs upon
the intellectual integrity of Europe.” No less passionately does
he deny to the Germans all honor as musicians: “A German _cannot_
know what music is. The men who pass as German musicians are
foreigners, Slavs, Croats, Italians, Dutchmen, or Jews.” He
abhors the “licentiousness” of the Germans in historical matters:
“History is actually written on Imperial German and Antisemitic
lines, and Mr. Treitschke is not ashamed of himself.” The Germans
have on their conscience every crime against culture committed in
the last four centuries (they deprived the Renaissance of its
meaning; they wrecked it by the Reformation). When, upon the
bridge of two centuries of decadence, a _force majeure_ of
genius and will revealed itself, strong enough to weld Europe
into political and economic unity, the Germans finally with their
“Wars of Liberation,” robbed Europe of the meaning of Napoleon’s
existence, a prodigy of meaning. Thus they have upon their
conscience all that followed, nationalism, the _névrose
nationale_ from which Europe is suffering, and the perpetuation
of the system of little states, of petty politics.—_George
Brandes in “Friedrich Nietzsche.”_
The Cost of War
CLARENCE DARROW
Along with the many other regrets over the ravages of war is the sorrow
for the destruction of property. As usual, those who have nothing to
lose join in the general lamentation. There is enough to mourn about in
the great European Holocaust without conjuring up imaginary woes. So far
as the vast majority of people is concerned, the destruction of property
is not an evil but a good.
The lands and houses, the goods and merchandise and money of the world
are owned by a very few. All the rest in some way serve that few for so
much as the law of life and trade permit them to exact. At the best,
this is but a small share of the whole. All the property destroyed by
war belongs to the owners of the earth; it is for them that wars are
fought, and it is they who pay the bills. When the war is over, the
property must be re-created. This, the working men will do. In this
re-building, they will work for wages. Then, as now, the rate of wages
will be fixed by the law of demand and supply—the demand and supply of
those who toil. The war will create more work and less workmen.
Therefore labor can and will get a greater share of its production than
it could command if there was less work and more workmen. The wages must
be paid from the land and money and other property left when the war is
done. This will still be in the hands of the few, and these few will be
compelled to give up a greater share. The destruction of property,
together with its re-creation means only a re-distribution of wealth—a
re-distribution in which the poor get a greater share. It is one way to
bring about something like equality of property—a cruel, wasteful, and
imperfect way, but still a way. That the equality will not last does not
matter, for in the period of re-construction the workman will get a
larger share and will live a larger life.
As the war goes on, the funds for paying bills will be met in the old
way by selling bonds. These too will be paid by the owners of the earth.
True, the property from which the payment comes must be produced by
toil, but if the bonds that must be paid from the fruits of labor had
never been issued this surplus would not have gone to labor, but would
have been absorbed by capital. This is true for the simple reason that
the return to labor is not fixed by the amount of production, the rate
of taxation, the price of interest and rents, but by the supply and
demand of labor, and nothing else.
If labor shall sometime be wise enough, or rather instinctive enough to
claim all that it produces, it will at the same time have the instinct
or wisdom to leave the rulers’ bonds unpaid.
But all of this is far, far away; in determining immediate effects we
must consider what is, not what should be. And the jobless and
propertyless can only look upon the destruction of property as giving
them more work and a larger share of the product of their labor. Chicago
was never so prosperous, or wages so high, as when her people were
re-building it from the ashes of a general conflagration. San Francisco
found the same distribution of property amongst its workmen after the
earthquake and the fire had laid it waste, and her people were called
upon to build it up anew.
Carlyle records that during the long days of destruction in the French
Revolution the people were more prosperous and happy than they had ever
been before. True, the Guilotin was doing its deadly work day after day,
but its victims were very few. The people got used to the guilotin, and
heeded it no more than does the crowd heed a hanging in our county jail,
when they gayly pass in their machines.
After the first shock was over, during the four years of our Civil War,
wages were higher, men were better employed, production greater, and
distribution more equal than it had been at any time excepting in the
extreme youth of the Republic. Then land was free.
Then again, this world has little to destroy. After centuries of
so-called civilization, the human race has not accumulated enough to
last a year should all stop work. The world lives, and always has lived,
from hand to mouth. This is not because of any trouble in producing
wealth, but because things are made not to use, but to sell. And the
wages of the great mass of men does not permit them to buy or own more
than they consume from day to day.
It is for this reason that half the people do not really work; that the
market for labor is fitful and uncertain, and never great enough; and
that all are poor. After a devastation like a great war, the need of
re-creating will turn the idle and the shirkers into workmen, because
the rewards will be greater. This will easily and rapidly produce more
than ever before. From this activity, invention will contrive new
machines to compete with men, going once more around the same old
circle, until the world finds out that machines should be used to
satisfy human wants and not to build up profits for the favored few.
One may often regret the impulses that bring destruction of property,
but before any one mourns over the destruction of property, purely
because of its destruction, he should ask whose property it is.
Wedded:
A Social Comedy
LAWRENCE LANGNER
CHARACTERS
MRS. RANSOME.
JANET RANSOME: Her daughter.
REV. MR. TANNER: A Clergyman.
SCENE
(The “best” parlor of the Ransomes’ house, in a cheap district of
Brooklyn. There is a profusion of pictures, ornaments, and miscellaneous
furniture. A gilded radiator stands in front of the fireplace. Table,
center, on which are some boxes and silver-plated articles arranged for
display. Over the door hangs a horseshoe. White flowers and festoons
indicate that the room has been prepared for a wedding. To the left is a
sofa, upon which lies the body of a dead man, his face covered with a
handkerchief. There is a small packing-case at his side, upon which
stand two lighted candles, a medicine bottle, and a tumbler. The blinds
are drawn.)
AT RISE
(Janet, dressed in a white semi-bridal costume, is on her knees at the
side of the couch, quietly weeping. After a few moments the door opens,
admitting a pale flood of sunshine. The murmur of conversation in the
passage without is heard. Mrs. Ransome enters. She is an intelligent,
comfortable-looking middle-aged woman. She wears an elaborate dress of
light gray, of a fashion of some years previous, evidently kept for
special occasions. She is somewhat hysterical in manner and punctuates
her conversation with sniffles.)
MRS. RANSOME. My dear child, now do stop cryin’. Won’t you stop cryin’?
Your Aunt Maud’s just come, and wants to know if she can see you.
JANET. I don’t want to see her. I don’t want to see nobody.
MRS. RANSOME. But your aunt, my dear—
JANET. No, mother, not nobody.
(_Mrs. Ransome goes to door and holds a whispered conversation with
somebody outside. She then returns, closing the door behind her, and
sits on chair close to Janet._)
MRS. RANSOME. She’s goin’ to wait for your father. He’s almost crazy
with worry. All I can say is—thank God it was to have bin a private
wedding. If we’d had a lot of people here, I don’t know what I should
have done. Now, quit yer cryin’, Janet. I’m sure we’re doin’ all we can
for you, dear. (_Janet continues to weep softly._) Come, dear, try and
bear up. Try and stop cryin’. Your eyes are all red, dear, and the
minister’ll be here in a minute.
JANET. I don’t want to see him, mother. Can’t you see I don’t want to
see nobody?
MRS. RANSOME. I know, my dear. We tried to stop him comin’, but he says
to your father, he says, “If I can’t come to her weddin’, it’s my duty
to try to comfort your daughter”; and that certainly is a fine thing for
him to do, for a man in his position, too. And yer father—he feels it as
much as you do, what with the trouble he’s been to in buying all that
furniture for you and him, and one thing and another. He says that Bob
must have had a weak heart, an’ it’s some consolation he was took before
the weddin’ and not after, when you might have had a lot of children to
look after. An’ he’s right, too.
JANET (_Talks to body_). Oh, Bob! Bob! Why did you go when I want you
so?
MRS. RANSOME. Now, now! My poor girl. It makes my heart bleed to hear
you.
JANET. Oh, Bob! I want you so. Won’t you wake up, Bob?
MRS. RANSOME (_Puts her arms around Janet and bursts into sobs_).
There—you’re cryin’ yer eyes out. There—there—you’ve still got your old
mother—there—there—just like when you was a baby—there—
JANET. Mother—I want to tell you something—
MRS. RANSOME. Well, tell me, dear, what is it?
JANET. You don’t know why me and Bob was goin’ to get married.
MRS. RANSOME. Why you and Bob was goin’ to get married?
JANET. Didn’t you never guess why we was goin’ to get married—sort of
_all of a sudden_?
MRS. RANSOME. All of a sudden? Why, I never thought of it. (_Alarmed._)
There wasn’t nuthin’ wrong between you and him, was there? (_Janet weeps
afresh._) Answer me. There wasn’t nuthin’ wrong between you and him, was
there?
JANET. Nuthin’ _wrong_.
MRS. RANSOME. What do you mean, then?
JANET. We was goin’ to get married—because we _had_ to.
MRS. RANSOME. You mean yer goin’ to have a baby?
JANET. Yes.
MRS. RANSOME. Are you sure? D’ye know how to tell fer certain?
JANET. Yes.
MRS. RANSOME. Oh, Lor’! Goodness gracious! How could it have happened?
JANET. I’m glad it happened—_now_.
MRS. RANSOME. D’ye understand what it means? What are we goin’ to do
about it?
JANET (_Through her tears_). I can’t help it. I’m glad it happened. An’
if I lived all over again, I’d want it to happen again.
MRS. RANSOME. You’d _want_ it to happen? Don’t you see what this means?
Don’t you see that if this gets out you’ll be disgraced ’till your dying
day?
JANET. I’m glad.
MRS. RANSOME. Don’t keep on sayin’ you’re glad. Glad, indeed! Have you
thought of the shame and disgrace this’ll bring on me an’ your father?
An’ after we’ve saved and scraped these long years to bring you up
respectable, an’ give you a good home. You’re glad, are you? You
certainly got a lot to be glad about.
JANET. Can’t you understand, mother? We wasn’t thinking of you when it
happened—and now it’s all I have.
MRS. RANSOME. Of course you wasn’t thinkin’ of us. Only of yourselves.
That’s the way it is, nowadays. But me and your father is the ones
that’s got to face it. We’re the ones that’s got to stand all the
scandal and talk there’ll be about it. Just think what the family’ll
say. Think what the neighbors’ll say. I don’t know what we done to have
such a thing happen to us. (_Mrs. Ransome breaks into a spell of
exaggerated weeping, which ceases as the door-bell rings._) There!
That’s the minister. God only knows what I’d better say to him. (_Mrs.
Ransome hurriedly attempts to tidy the room, knocking over a chair in
her haste, pulls up the blinds half-way and returns to her chair. There
is a knock at the door. Mrs. Ransome breaks into a prolonged howl._)
Come in.
(_Enter Rev. Mr. Tanner. He is a stout, pompous clergyman, with a rich,
middle-class congregation and a few poorer members, amongst which latter
he numbers the Ransomes. His general attitude is kind but patronizing;
he displays none of the effusive desire to please which is his correct
demeanor towards his richer congregants. The elder Ransomes regard him
as their spiritual leader, and worship him along with God at a
respectful distance._)
TANNER (_He speaks in a hushed voice, glancing towards the kneeling
figure of Janet_). Bear up, Mrs. Ransome. Bear up, I beg of you! (_Mrs.
Ransome howls more vigorously; Tanner is embarrassed._) This is very
distressing, Mrs. Ransome.
MRS. RANSOME (_Between her sobs_). It certainly is kind of you to come,
Mr. Tanner, I’m sure. We didn’t expect to see you when my husband
’phoned you.
TANNER. Where is your husband now?
MRS. RANSOME. He’s gone to send some telegrams to Bob’s family,
sir—_his_ family. We’d planned to have a quiet wedding, sir, with only
me and her father and aunt, and then we was goin’ to have the rest of
the family in, this afternoon.
TANNER. It’s a very sad thing, Mrs. Ransome.
MRS. RANSOME. It’s fairly dazed us, Mr. Tanner. Comin’ on top of all the
preparation we’ve bin makin’ for the past two weeks, too. An’ her
father’s spent a pile o’ money on their new furniture an’ things.
TANNER (_Speaking in an undertone_). Was he insured?
MRS. RANSOME. No, sir, not a penny. That’s why it comes so hard on us
just now, havin’ the expense of a funeral on top of what we’ve just
spent for the weddin’.
TANNER. Well, Mrs. Ransome, I’ll try to help you in any way I can.
MRS. RANSOME. Thank you, Mr. Tanner. It certainly is fine of you to say
so. Everybody’s bin good to us, sir. She had all them presents given
her—most of them was from _my_ side of the family.
TANNER. Did he have any relatives here?
MRS. RANSOME. Not a soul, poor fellow. He came from up-state. That’s why
my husband’s gone to send a telegram askin’ his father to come to the
funeral.
TANNER. How long will your husband be? (_He glanced at his watch._)
MRS. RANSOME. I don’t think he’ll be more than half an hour. He’d like
to see you, if you could wait that long, I know.
TANNER. Very well. I have an engagement later, but I can let that go if
necessary.
(_Tanner and Mrs. Ransome sit down in front of the table._)
MRS. RANSOME. It certainly is a great comfort havin’ you here, Mr.
Tanner. I feel so upset I don’t know what to say.
TANNER. Bear up, Mrs. Ransome. You are not the greatest sufferer. Let me
say a few words to your daughter. (_He rises, goes to Janet, and places
his hand on her shoulder, but she takes no notice of him._) Miss
Ransome, you must try to bear up, too. I know how hard it is, but you
must remember it’s something that must come to all of us.
MRS. RANSOME. She takes it so bad, Mr. Tanner, that the Lord should have
took him on their weddin’ mornin’.
TANNER (_Returning to his chair_). We must not question, Mrs. Ransome,
we must not question. The Almighty has thought fit to gather him back to
the fold, and we must submit to His will. In such moments as these we
feel helpless. We feel the need of a Higher Being to cling to—to find
consolation. Time is the great healer.
MRS. RANSOME. But to expect a weddin’ (_Sobs_) and find it’s a
funeral—it’s awful; (_Sobs_) and besides—Mr. Tanner, you’ve always been
good to us. We’re in other trouble, too. Worse—worse even than this.
TANNER. In other trouble?
MRS. RANSOME. Yes, much worse. I just can’t bear to think about it.
TANNER. Your husband’s business?
MRS. RANSOME. No, sir. It’s—I don’t know how to say it. It’s her and
him.
TANNER. Her and him?
MRS. RANSOME. Yes, sir—I’m almost ashamed to tell you. She’s goin’ to
have a baby.
TANNER (_Astounded_). She’s going to be a mother?
MRS. RANSOME. Yes. (_Sobs._) Oh, you don’t know how hard this is on us,
Mr. Tanner. We’ve always bin respectable people, sir, as you well know.
We’ve bin livin’ right here on this block these last ten years, an’
everybody knows us in the neighborhood. Her father don’t know about it
yet. What he’ll say—God only knows.
TANNER. I’m terribly sorry to hear this, Mrs. Ransome.
MRS. RANSOME. I can forgive her, sir, but not him. They say we shouldn’t
speak ill of the dead—but I always was opposed to her marryin’ him. I
wanted her to marry a steady young fellow of her own religion, but I
might as well have talked to the wall, for all the notice she took of
me.
TANNER. It’s what we have to expect of the younger generation, Mrs.
Ransome. Let me see—how long were they engaged?
MRS. RANSOME. Well, sir, I suppose on and off it’s bin about three
years. He never could hold a job long, an’ me and her father said he
couldn’t marry her—not with our consent—until he was earnin’ at least
twenty dollars a week—an’ that was only right, considerin’ he’d have to
support her.
TANNER. I quite agree with you. I’m sorry to see a thing of this sort
happen—and right in my own congregation, too. I’ve expressed my views
from the pulpit from time to time very strongly upon the subject, but
nevertheless it doesn’t seem to make much difference in this
neighborhood.
MRS. RANSOME. I know it’s a bad neighborhood in some ways, sir. But you
got to remember they was going to get married, sir. If you’d bin here
only an hour earlier, Mr. Tanner, there wouldn’t have bin no disgrace.
(_Points to official-looking book lying on table._) Why, sir—there’s the
marriage register—Mr. Smith brought it down from church this morning—all
waiting for you to fix it. If you’d only come earlier, sir, they’d have
bin properly married, an’ there wouldn’t have bin a word said.
TANNER. That’s true. They might have avoided the immediate disgrace,
perhaps. But you know as well as I do that _that_ isn’t the way to get
married. It isn’t so much a matter of disgrace. That means nothing. It’s
the principle of the thing.
MRS. RANSOME (_Eagerly_). Oh, Mr. Tanner, do you mean it? Do you mean
that the disgrace of it means nothin’?
TANNER. Well—not exactly nothing—but nothing to the principle of the
thing.
MRS. RANSOME. An’ would you save her from the disgrace of it, if you
could, Mr. Tanner, if it don’t mean nothin’?
TANNER. I’ll do anything I can to help you, within reason, Mrs. Ransome,
but how can I save her?
MRS. RANSOME (_Eagerly pleading_). Mr. Tanner, if she has a child, as
she expects, you know that respectable people won’t look at us any more.
We’ll have to move away from here. We’ll be the laughing stock of the
place. It’ll break her father’s heart, as sure as can be. But if you
could fill in the marriage register as though they’d bin married, Mr.
Tanner, why, nobody’s to know that it isn’t all respectable and proper.
They had their license, and ring, and everything else, sir, as you know.
TANNER (_Astounded_). _Me_ fill in the marriage register? Do you mean
that you want _me_ to make a fictitious entry in the marriage register?
MRS. RANSOME. It wouldn’t be so very fictitious, Mr. Tanner. They’d have
bin married regular if you’d only come half an hour earlier. Couldn’t
you fill it in that they was married before he died, sir?
TANNER. But that would be forgery.
MRS. RANSOME. It would be a good action, Mr. Tanner—indeed, it would.
Her father an’ me haven’t done nothing to deserve it, but we’ll be
blamed for it just the same. It wouldn’t take you a minute to write it
in the register, Mr. Tanner. Look at all the years we’ve bin goin’ to
your church, and never asked you a favor before.
TANNER. My good woman, I’m sorry; I’d like to help you, but I don’t see
how I can. In the first place, don’t you see that you’re asking me to
commit forgery? But what’s more important, you’re asking me to act
against my own principles. I’ve been preaching sermons for years, and
making a public stand too, against these hasty marriages that break up
homes and lead to the divorce court—or worse. The church is trying to
make marriage a thing sacred and apart, instead of the mockery it is in
this country today. I sympathize with you. I know how hard it is. But
for all I know, you may be asking me to help you thwart the will of God.
MRS. RANSOME. The will of God?
TANNER. Mind you, I don’t say that it is, Mrs. Ransome, but it may very
well be the Hand of the Almighty. Your daughter and her young man, as
she has confessed herself, have tried to use the marriage ceremony—a
_holy_ ceremony, mind you—to cover up what they’ve done.
MRS. RANSOME. Oh, don’t talk like that before her, Mr. Tanner.
TANNER. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt her feelings. I’m sorry I can’t
help you. It wouldn’t be _right_.
MRS. RANSOME. But they was goin’ to get married, sir. You got to take
that into consideration. My girl ain’t naturally bad. It isn’t as though
she’d pick up any feller that happened to come along. Hundreds and
thousands do it, sir, indeed they do, and most of them much worse than
she and him, poor fellow.
TANNER. Yes, there you are right. Thousands _do_ do it, and I’ve been
making a stand against it in this neighborhood for years. I may seem
hard, Mrs. Ransome, but I’m trying my best to be fair. I sincerely
believe that no minister of the Gospel should ever legalize or
condone—er—misconduct—that is, before marriage.
MRS. RANSOME (_Pleading hard_). You can’t know what this means to us,
sir—or you’d pity us, indeed you would. Her father’ll take on somethin’
dreadful when he hears about it. He’ll turn her out of the house, sir,
as sure as can be. You know him, sir. You know he’s too good a Christian
to let her stay here after she’s disgraced us all. And then, what’s to
become of her? She’ll lose her job, and who’ll give her another—without
a reference—an’ a baby to support? That’s how they get started on the
streets, sir (_Sobs_), an’ you know it as well as I do.
TANNER. Yes, I know. I wish I could help you. It’s very distressing—but
we all have to do our duty as we see it. But I do pity you, indeed I do.
From the bottom of my heart. I’ll do anything I can for you—within
reason.
MRS. RANSOME (_Almost hysterical, dragging Janet from the side of the
body_). Janet, Janet! Ask him yourself. Ask him on your bended knees.
Ask him to save us! (_Janet attempts to return to side of the body._)
Janet, do you want to ruin us? Can’t you speak to him? Can’t you ask
him? (_Mrs. Ransome breaks into sobs._)
TANNER. It is as I feared, Mrs. Ransome. Her heart is hardened.
JANET (_Rises and turns fiercely on him_). Whose heart’s hardened?
TANNER. Come, come. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I can’t tell
you how sorry I am for you, and your parents, too.
JANET. Well, I’ll tell you flat, I don’t want none of your pity.
MRS. RANSOME. Janet, don’t speak like that to him. You’re excited. (_To
Tanner_). She don’t mean it, sir—she’s all worked up.
JANET (_Her excitement increasing, and speaking in loud tones_). All
right, mother—I’ll tell him again—I don’t want none of his pity. I c’n
get along without it. An’ if you and him think that writin’ a few words
in his marriage register—or whatever he calls it—is going to make any
difference, well—you’re welcome to.
TANNER. My dear girl. Don’t you understand, if it was merely a question
of writing a few words, I’d do it in a minute. But it’s the principle of
the thing.
JANET (_Bitingly_). Huh! Principle of the thing! I heard it all. You
preached against it, didn’t yer? It’s a pity you never preached a sermon
on how me and him could have gotten married two years ago, instead of
waiting till now, when it’s too late.
TANNER. Others have to wait.
JANET. We did wait. Isn’t three years long enough? D’ye think we was
made of stone? How much longer d’ye think we could wait? We waited until
we couldn’t hold out no longer. I only wish to God we hadn’t waited at
all, instead of wastin’ all them years.
MRS. RANSOME (_Shocked_). Janet, you don’t know what you’re sayin’.
JANET. I do, an’ I mean it. We waited, an’ waited, an’ waited. Didn’t he
try all he could to get a better job? ’Twasn’t his fault he couldn’t. We
was planning to go West, or somewhere—where he’d have more of a
chance—we was savin’ up for it on the quiet. An’ while we was waiting,
we wanted one another—all day an’ all night. An’ what use was it? We
held out till we couldn’t hold out no longer—an’ when we knew what was
goin’ to happen, well—we had to get married—an’ that all there’s to it!
TANNER (_Making a remarkable discovery, supporting all his personal
theories on the subject_). Ah! Then your idea was to marry _simply_
because you were going to have a baby!
JANET. Of course it was. D’ye think we wanted to marry an’ live here on
the fifteen a week he was getting? We’d have bin starvin’ in a month.
But when this happened—we had to get married—starve or not. What else
could we do?
TANNER. Well, I don’t know what to say. It seems to me that you should
have thought of all this before. You knew what it would mean to have a
baby.
JANET. D’ye think I wanted a baby? I didn’t want one. I didn’t know how
to stop it. If you don’t like it—it’s a pity you don’t preach sermons on
how to stop havin’ babies when they’re not wanted. There’d be some sense
in that. That’d be more sense than talkin’ about waitin’—an’ waitin’—an’
waitin’. There’s hundreds of women round here—starvin’ and sufferin’—an’
havin’ one baby after another, and don’t know the first thing about how
to stop it. ’Tisn’t my fault I’m going to have one. I didn’t want it.
TANNER. Miss Ransome, your views simply astound me.
JANET. I can’t help it. People may think it wrong, an’ all that, but it
ain’t his fault and it ain’t mine. Don’t you think we used to get sick
of goin’ to movies, an’ vaudeville shows, an’ all them other places—time
after time? I wanted him to love me, an’ I ain’t ashamed of it, neither.
MRS. RANSOME. Janet, how dare you talk like that in front of Mr. Tanner?
(_To Tanner._) She don’t mean it, Mr. Tanner. She don’t know what she’s
saying. I’ve always brought her up to be innercent about things. She
must have got all this from the other girls at the store where she
works. She didn’t get it in her home, that’s sure.
JANET. No, that I didn’t. Nor nothing else, neither. You was always
ashamed to tell me about anything, so I found out about things from
other girls, like the rest of ’em do. I’ve known it for years and years,
an’ all the while I suppose you’ve bin thinkin’ I didn’t know anything,
I’ve known everything—all except what’d be useful to me. If I’m going to
have a baby it’s your fault, mother, as much as anybody. You only had
one yourself—but you never told _me_ nothin’.
MRS. RANSOME. Janet!
TANNER. Miss Ransome, this is not a subject I ordinarily discuss, but
since you know what you do know, let me tell you that there is nothing
worse than trying to interfere with the workings of nature, or—if I may
say so—of God.
JANET. Well, Bob said the rich people do it. He said they must know how
to do it, because they never have more’n two or three children in a
family; but you’ve only got to walk on the next block—where it’s all
tenements—to see ten and twelve in every family, because the workin’
people don’t know any better. But I don’t want no pity from anybody. I
can take a chance on it. I got a pair of hands, an’ I c’n take care of
myself.
TANNER. Mrs. Ransome, it’s no good my talking to your daughter while
she’s in this frame of mind. She appears to have most extraordinary
views. Mind you, I don’t blame you for it. She _seems_ to be an
intelligent girl. There’d be some hope for her if she’d show a little
penitence—a little regret for what’s been done and can’t be undone. You
know I don’t like preaching out of church, but you’ve often heard me say
in the pulpit that God is always willing to forgive the humble and the
penitent.
JANET (_With fine scorn_). “God” indeed. Don’t make me laugh. (_Points
to body of Bob._) Look at him lyin’ there. God? What’s God got to do
with it? (_She kneels again at the side of the couch, rigid and silent.
After an uncomfortable interval, Tanner rises._)
TANNER. Well, I’m afraid I must be going. I feel very pained by what
your daughter has said, Mrs. Ransome. You know I have a deep regard for
you and your husband. I’m frank to say that if your daughter had shown
some signs of penitence—some remorse for what has happened—I might even
have gone so far as to have made the entry in the register—seeing the
punishment she’s already had. But as she is now, I don’t see what good
it would do. Really I don’t, so I think I’d better go.
MRS. RANSOME (_Appealingly_). Oh, don’t go, Mr. Tanner. Wait just a
minute while I talk to her, please. Janet, can’t you say you’re sorry
for what you done? Can’t you see that Mr. Tanner only wants to be fair
with you? Come, do it for our sakes—your father and me. You know how
hard he’s worked, how he’s keep teetotal an’ everything. You don’t want
to ruin us, do you? Can’t you see it isn’t only yourself that’s got to
be considered? Think of what we’ve done for you. Tell him you’re sorry
for it, _do_!
TANNER (_Rising_). It’s no use, Mrs. Ransome. I can see it’s of no use.
I really must go.
MRS. RANSOME. Just one minute more. Please wait one minute more. Janet,
what’s the matter with you? Can’t you see the disgrace it’ll be to all
of us? Can’t you see it will ruin us to our dying days? They’ll all
laugh at us—an’ jeer at us. It’ll follow us around wherever we go. You
know how the folk round here make fun of your father—because he keeps
himself respectable—an’ saves his money. Do you want them to laugh at
him? Do you want them to be laughin’ at you an’ talkin’ about you? Do
you want them to be making fun of your baby—an’ calling it a bastard—an’
asking who it’s father was?
JANET (_Nervously_). They wouldn’t.
MRS. RANSOME. Yes, they would. An’ all the time he’s growin’ up, the
other children in school’ll be tormentin’ him, and callin’ him names.
Didn’t the same thing happen with Susan Bradley’s boy? Didn’t they have
to go an’ live out in Jersey, cos she couldn’t stand it no longer? You
know it as well as I do.
JANET (_Defiantly_). They went away ’cos he was always gettin’ sick.
MRS. RANSOME. Of course he was always gettin’ sick—with all them devils
makin’ fun of him—an’ makin’ his life a misery. Didn’t we used to see
him goin’ down the block—with the tears runnin’ down his cheeks—an’ all
of ’em yellin’ names after him. Just think of the baby you’re goin’ to
have. D’ye want that to happen to _your_ baby? D’ye want them to make
_its_ life a misery—same as the other one?
JANET (_Lifelessly_). They wouldn’t.
MRS. RANSOME. Of course they would. They’ll tease an’ torment it, just
like the other—an’ when he’s old enough to understand—who’ll he blame
for it? He’ll blame _you_ for it. (_Inspired_) He’ll blame Bob for
it—he’ll hate him for it. D’ye want your boy—Bob’s boy—to be hatin’ his
own father? What’d Bob say? What’d _he_ think of you—ruinin’ his baby’s
life—an’ all just because you’re obstinate an’ won’t listen to reason.
Can’t you see it? Just think—if you’d only say you was in the wrong—an’
do what Mr. Tanner asks you—he’d forgive you an’ make everything all
right. Oh, Janet—can’t you see it? Ask him—beg him!
JANET. Oh, dear. Well—how c’n Mr. Tanner make it all right?
MRS. RANSOME. You know what I mean. Oh, Janet, it won’t take him a
minute to write it. If he don’t, can’t you see it’ll ruin us all our
lives?
JANET. Only a minute to write it—or it’ll ruin us all our lives.
MRS. RANSOME. Oh, Janet, this is your last chance. Tell him you’re
sorry. (_To Tanner, who has edged towards the door, and is about to
leave._) Oh, Mr. Tanner, please don’t go. Just wait another minute.
TANNER. Really, I must go.
MRS. RANSOME. Oh, sir! I can see she’s sorry. You won’t go back on your
word, sir?
JANET (_Unwillingly feigning remorse_). Let me think a bit. Oh, Mr.
Tanner, I suppose I’m in the wrong—if you say so. It didn’t seem to me
to be wrong—that’s all I got to say. I hope you’ll forgive me. I’m sorry
for the way I spoke—and what I done.
TANNER (_Returning_). My child, it’s not for me to forgive you. I knew I
could appeal to something higher in you, if you’d only listen to me. Are
you truly repentant—from the bottom of your heart?
JANET. Yes, sir.
TANNER. As I said to your mother just now, I don’t like preaching
sermons, but I hope this has taught you that there can be no
justification for our moments of passion and wilfulness. We must all try
to humble our pride and our spirit. I won’t go back on my word, but when
you start out afresh you must try to wipe out the past by living for the
future.
JANET. I’ll try to, sir.
TANNER. And now, Mrs. Ransome, I suppose I’ll have to make the entry as
though it had happened an hour or so ago. I know I may seem soft-hearted
about it. But I feel I am doing my duty. This may save your daughter
from a life of degradation. I think the end justifies the means. But
first, let me ask you, who knows that the ceremony wasn’t performed
before he died?
MRS. RANSOME. Only me—an’ her father—an’ my sister outside.
TANNER. Can she be relied upon to hold her tongue?
MRS. RANSOME. She surely can, sir.
TANNER. Well, you understand this is a very serious thing for me to do.
If it becomes public I shall be faced with a very unpleasant situation.
MRS. RANSOME. Oh, I promise you, Mr. Tanner, not a soul will know of it.
We’ll take our dyin’ oaths, sir, all of us.
TANNER. All right. But first let me lend your daughter this prayer-book.
(_Takes prayer-book out of pocket; addressing Janet._) Here’s a
prayer-book, Miss Ransome. I’ll go with your mother now into the
back-parlor, and meanwhile I want you to read over this prayer. Try to
seek its inner meeting. Come, Mrs. Ransome, you can carry the register,
and we’ll come back later and discuss the funeral arrangements.
MRS. RANSOME (_Takes the marriage register_). Oh, Mr. Tanner, I don’t
know how to thank you.
TANNER. Well, Mrs. Ransome—I shall expect your husband to send us
something for our new mission to spread Christianity amongst the
Chinese.
(_Exit Tanner and Mrs. Ransome. Janet closes the door. She walks towards
the couch, looks at the prayer-book, then at the couch. She flings the
prayer-book to the other end of the room, smashing some of the ornaments
on the mantle-shelf, and throws herself upon the side of the couch,
sobbing wildly._)
SLOW CURTAIN.
“The Immutable”
MARGARET C. ANDERSON
In a world where flippancies arrange an effective concealment of beauty
there are still major adventures in beauty to be had beneath the
grinning surface. One of them is the discovery of those rare persons to
whom flippancies are impossible—those splendid persons who take life
simply and greatly. Several months ago I tried to write an impression of
Emma Goldman, from an inadequate background of having merely heard two
of her lectures. Since then I have met her. One realizes dimly that such
spirits live somewhere in the world: history and legend and poetry have
proclaimed them, and at times we hear of their passing; but to meet one
on its valiant journey is like being whirled to some far planet and
discovering strange new glories.
Emma Goldman is one of the world’s great people; therefore, it is not
surprising to find her among the despised and rejected. Of course she is
as different from the popular conception of her as anyone could be. The
first thing you feel in meeting her is that indefinable something which
all great and true people have in common—a quality which seems to
proceed on some a priori principle that anything one feels deeply is
sublime. Then a sense of her great humanity sweeps upon you, and the
nobility of the idealist who wrenches her integrity from the grimest
depths. A terrible sadness is in her face—as though the suffering of
centuries had concentrated there in some deep personal struggle; and
through it shines that capacity for joy which becomes colossal in its
intensity and tragic in its disappointments. But the thing which takes
your heart in a grip, and thrusts you quickly into the position of the
small boy who longs to die for the object of his worship, is that
imperative gift of motherhood which is hers and which spends itself with
such utter prodigality upon all those who come to her for inspiration.
Emma Goldman has ministered to every kind of human being from convicts
to society women. She has no more idea of conservation than a lavish
springtime; and where she draws courage and endurance and inspiration
for it all will remain one of those mysteries which only the artist can
explain. A mountain-top figure, calm, vast, dynamic, awful in its
loneliness, exalted in its tragedy—this is Emma Goldman, “the daughter
of the dream,” as William Marion Reedy called her in an appreciation
written several years ago. “A dream, you say?” he asked, after sketching
her gospel. “Yes; but life is death without the dream.” In that rich
book of Alexander Berkman’s, _Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist_, she is
given a better name. “I have always called you the Immutable,” is the
way the author closes one of his letters to her. And this is the quality
which distinguishes Emma Goldman—a kind of eternal staunchness in which
one may put his fundamental trust.
This is the woman America has hated and persecuted, thrown into jail,
deprived of her citizenship, and held up as an example of all that is
ignorant, coarse, and base. America will recognize its failure some day,
after the brave spirit has done its work—after the spasm of the new war
has ushered in quite simply some of the changes which Emma Goldman has
been pleading for during her years of fighting. But it takes education
to produce such awakenings, and there is no immediate hope of such a
general enlightenment. The stupidity of the situation regarding Emma
Goldman is that other prophets have raised their spears to the same
heights and have been misunderstood or ignored but not outraged by the
peculiar ignorance which Americans alone seem capable of. Had Ibsen
appeared among us to lecture on the rightness of Nora’s rebellion or to
denounce the pillars of society as he did in his writing, he, too, would
have been thrown into prison for free speech or accused of a president’s
assassination. The cruelty of the situation regarding Emma Goldman is
that she has so much work to do which so many people need, and that she
cannot break through the prejudice and the superstition surrounding her
to get at those dulled ones who need it most. Ten years ago she was
preaching, under the most absurd persecution, ideas which thinking
people accept as a matter of course today. Now the ignorant public still
shudders at her name; the “intellectuals”—especially those of the
Greenwich Village radical type—dismiss her casually as a sort of good
Christian—one not to be taken too seriously: there are so many more
daring revolutionists among their own ranks that they can’t understand
why Emma Goldman should make such a stir and get all the credit; the
Socialists concede her a personality and condone her failure to attach
herself to that line of evolutionary progress which is sure to establish
itself. “Unscientific” is their damning judgment of her; her Anarchism
is a metaphysical hodge-podge, the outburst of an artistic rather than a
scientific temperament. And so they all miss the real issue, namely,
that the chief business of the prophet is to usher in those new times
which often appear in direct opposition to scientific prediction,
and—this above all!—that life in her has a great grandeur.
How do such grotesque misconceptions arise? Why should it have happened
that all this misapprehension and ignorance should have grown up about a
personality whose mere presence is a benediction and whose friendship
compels you toward high goals you had thought unattainable? There is no
use asking how or why it happened; it is a perfectly consistent thing to
have happened, for it happens to everyone, in greater or less degree,
who strives for a new ideal. But if I could only get hold of all the
people who are unwilling to understand Emma Goldman and _force_ them to
listen to her for an hour:—what a sweet triumph comes with their “Oh,
but she’s wonderful!”
And now about her ideas. If you have read Wilde’s _Soul of Man Under
Socialism_ you know the essence of Emma Goldman’s Anarchism. What is
there about it to cause an epidemic of terror? It is merely the highest
ideal of human conduct that has ever been evolved. Well, it is possible
to get even the prejudiced to admit this much. Nearly everyone can see
that government in its essence is tyranny; that one human being’s
authority over another is a degrading thing; that no man should have the
power to force his neighbor into a dungeon on the flimsy pretext that
punishment is a prevention and a protection; that no man should dare to
take the life of another man, on any basis whatever; that crime is
really misdirected energy and “criminal types” usually sick people who
should be treated as such; that “abnormal” people are those who have not
found their work; that people who work should have some share of their
production; that the holding of property is a source of many evils; that
possessiveness and “bargaining” are mean qualities; that co-operation
and sharing are splendid ones; that there should be an equality between
giving and taking; that nothing worth while was ever born outside of
freedom; and that men _might_ live together on this basis more
effectively than on the present one. Even your “reasonable” man will
grant you this premise; but then he plays his trump card: It may all be
very beautiful—of course it is; _but it can never happen_! Oscar Wilde
answered him in this way: “Is this Utopian? A map of the world that does
not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the
one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands
there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress
is the realization of Utopias.”
Emma Goldman believes this. She does not belong with the rank and file
of Anarchists. Cults and “isms” are too restrictive for her. “But you
are an extreme Individualist,” the Socialists tell her. “No, I am not,”
she answers them. “I hate your rigid Anglo-Saxon individualism. It is
just because I am so deeply social that I put my hope in the
individual.” It is because she hates injustice of any sort so
passionately that she adopted Anarchism as the soundest method of
combating it. If you have laws you must accept the abuses of law. Why
not be more completely simple—why keep on pretending that we need a
machinery which fosters tyrannies instead of giving freedom an
unhandicapped path to begin upon its great responsibilities? This was
the idealism upon which the American founders built—a minimum of
government, at least, when that evil seemed to become a necessity. In
her remarkable book that has just been published, Voltarine de Cleyre
discusses this phase of the matter brilliantly in a chapter called
“Anarchism and American Traditions.” There is no possibility of going
into it minutely here, except to ask those who insist upon regarding
Anarchism as an unconstructive force to read it.
These are the things Emma Goldman is trying to preach. She does not
expect to see a new order spring up in response to her vision; so the
facetious ones who poke their stale jokes at the unspeakable humor of a
communistic society might save their wit for more legitimate
provocations. All she hopes is to quicken the consciousness of those
through whom such changes will come—to improve the individual quality.
It reminds you of Comte’s suggestion, at the time when he fell
deliriously in love, that all the problems of society could be solved on
that divine principle. It is like Tolstoy’s dream prophecy—his
prediction of the time when there will be neither monogamy nor polygamy,
but simply a poetogamy under which people may live freely and
beautifully.
And so Emma Goldman continues her work, talking passionately to crowds
of people, sickened by audiences who listen merely out of curiosity,
disheartened by the vapid applause of those who make their own
incapacities the burden of their rebellion, heartbroken by the masses
who cannot respond to any ideal, cheered by the few who understand,
dedicated to an eternal hope of new values. This is the real Emma
Goldman—a visionist, if you will, but at the same time a woman with a
deep faith in the superiority of reality to imagination. How she has
lived life! How gallantly she makes the big out of the little and
accepts without complaining the perverted role which has been thrust at
her. To have seen her in her home with its hundreds of books and its
charming old pictures of Ibsen and Tolstoy and Nietzsche and Kropotkin;
to have seen her friends, her nephews and nieces offering her their high
adoration; to have watched her gigantic tenderness, her gorgeous
flinging away of self on every possible pretext; to have listened with
her to great music in a kind of cosmic hush that music is made by and
for such spirits; to have heard her, “the crucified,” talk of the ideal
she cherishes and how her expression of it has been so far below her
dream; to have compared her, an artist in life, as incapable of
spiritual vulgarity as a Rodin or a Beethoven, with a sensitiveness
which makes her almost fear beauty, with a sweetness that is
overwhelming—to compare her with the vulgarians who denounce her is to
fall into a mad rage and long to insult them desperately. I said before
that Emma Goldman was the most challenging spirit in America. But she is
so much more than that: she is many wonderful things which this article
merely touches upon, because it is impossible to express them all.
Science is after all but a reassuring and conciliatory expression
of our ignorance.—_Maeterlinck._
Poems
MAXWELL BODENHEIM
Expressions of a Child’s Face
Dawn?—no, the stunted transparency of dawn—
Color taken from the birth of a white throat
And shaken in a still cup till it gradually reaches strength
A sudden scattering of strained light—
The smile has lived and seemed to die.
Thought?—no, the invisible shudder of a perfume
Trying to leave the shadowy pain of a flesh-flower
A whisp of it whips itself away,
And leaves the rest—a cool, colorless struggle.
Sadness?—no, the growth of a pale inclination
Which knows not what it is;
Which tries to form the beginning of a swift question,
But has not yet developed trim lips.
And then what seems a smile
But is the sleeping body of a laugh.
It almost awakes, and throws out
Long breaths, in a green and yellow din.
Emotions
I
His anger was a strained yellow wire.
You leapt into it thinking to snap it,
But it flung you off silently.
II
Her happiness was too apparent—
Pleasant flesh in which you sensed heavy blood-clots.
III
Veering, weary birds were her hatreds.
They rested on you for years,
Then circled away, still weary.
IV
Her sorrows were clumsy, black bandages
Which seemed to hide wide wounds,
But only covered scratches.
To ——
You are a broad, growing sieve.
Men and women come to loosen your supple frame,
And weave another slim square into you—
Or perhaps a blue oblong, a saffron circle.
People fling their powdered souls at you:
You seem to loose them, but retain
The shifting shadow of a stain on your rigid lines.
To Handpainted Chinaware
Distorted ducks, smirking women and potshaped blossoms
Fastened to pale plates, you are dreary symbols of those who painted
you.
O ducks, you were made by women
Who sway in and out of the waters of life,
Content to catch morsels of food from birds flying overhead.
And you smirking women, were painted by men
Who unrolled little souls on plates,
Gave them faces which could not quite hide their ugliness ...
You alone almost baffle me, potshaped blossoms—
Were you fashioned by childless women, who made you the infants
Denied them by life?
Study of a Face
Her forehead is the wind-colored, sun-stilled wall of a country
church.
Trailing cloud-shudders overhead narrow it to a thin band of vague
light:
Two tarnished, exultant cerements of earth—cheeks—meet it,
And the three speak clearly, languidly.
An Old Man Humming a Song
Life was a frayed, pampered lily to him—
A lily which still clung to his gray coat,
Like an unbidden word whitening the death of a smile.
The half-smooth perfume of it touched the slanting, cambric curtain of
his soul,
And stirred it to low song.
The Spiritual Dangers of Writing Vers Libre
EUNICE TIETJENS
The spiritual dangers that beset a struggling poet are almost as
numerous as his creditors, and quite as rampant. And woe unto him who
falls a prey to any one of them! For poetry, being the immediate
reflection of the spiritual life of its author, degenerates more quickly
than almost any other form of human expression when this inner life goes
astray.
There is first of all the danger of sentimentality, an ever-present,
sticky danger that awaits patiently and imperturbably and has to be met
afresh every day. True, if the poet yields to this danger and embraces
it skillfully enough, the creditors aforementioned may sometimes be paid
and much adulation acquired into the bargain—witness Ella Wheeler
Wilcox—but it is at the price of artistic death.
There is the danger of giving the emotions too free rein, of producing,
as Arthur Davison Ficke has said in a former number of THE LITTLE
REVIEW, merely “an inarticulate cry of emotion” which moves us like “the
crying of a child.” Much of our sex poetry is of this type. On the
other hand, there is the equally present danger of becoming
over-intellectualized—of drying up and blowing away before the wind of
human vitality. Edmund Clarence Stedman went that way. Then there is the
danger of determined modernity, of resolutely setting out to be “vital”
at all costs and crystallizing into mere frozen impetuosity, as Louis
Untermeyer has done—and the other danger of dwelling professorially in
the past with John Myers O’Hara. There is too the new danger of
“cosmicality,” of which John Alford amusingly accuses our American poets
of to-day. And there are many, many other pitfalls that the unsuspecting
poet must meet and bridge before he can hope to win to the heights of
immortality.
But there seems to be a whole new set of dangers, especially virulent,
that attend the writing of _vers libre_, free verse, polyrhythmics, or
whatever else one may choose to call the free form so prevalent to-day.
These dangers are inherent in the form itself and are directly traceable
to it. For contrary to the general notion on the subject, it takes a
better balanced intellect to write good _vers libre_ than to write in
the old verse forms. It is essentially an art for the sophisticated, and
the tyro will do well to avoid it.
The first of these dangers, and the one in which all the others take
root, is a very insidious peril, and few there be who escape it. It is
the danger of being obvious.
In writing rhymed or even rhymeless poetry of a conventional rhythmical
pattern the mind is constantly obliged to sift and sort the various
images which present themselves—to test them, and turn them this way and
that, as one does pieces in a mosaic, till they at last fit more or less
perfectly into the pattern. This process, although it sometimes, owing
to the physical formation of the language, distorts the poet’s meaning a
little, has the great artistic advantage of eliminating many casual
first associations, which on careful thought are found not worth saying.
It is precisely this winnowing, weighing process which the form of free
verse lacks. Anything that comes to mind can be said at once, and with a
little instinct for rhythm, is said. The result of this mental laziness
is that the ideas expressed are often obvious.
But here a curious phenomenon of the human mind comes into play. Just as
a physically lazy man will often perform great mental exertions to avoid
moving, so the mind will frequently go to quite as great lengths to find
unusual methods of expression to conceal, even from itself, this
laziness of first thinking. The result is the attempt to cover with
words the fundamental paucity of the ideas.
There are several principal effects which may result from this. One is
brutality. A conception which, if spoken simply, is at once recognized
as trite, may if said brutally enough pass muster as surprising and
“strong.” A crude illustration of this is to be found in the recent war
poetry of “mangled forms” and “gushing entrails.” Ezra Pound furnishes
the most perfect example. Another effect is the tendency to the
grotesque. This device is more successful in deceiving the poet himself
than the other, though it has less general appeal. For it is possible,
by making a thing grotesque enough, to cover almost completely the
underlying conception. Skipwith Cannéll runs this danger, along with
lesser men. A third peril is that which besets some of the Imagistes—the
danger of reducing the idea to a minimum and relying entirely on the
sound and color of the words to carry the poem.
Still another result of the complete loosening of the reins possible in
_vers libre_ is the immediate enlargement of the ego. It is not so easy
to see why this should result, but it almost invariably does, and has
since the days of Whitman. It usually goes to-day with the effect of
brutality. The universe divides itself at once into two portions, of
which the poet is by far the greater half. “I”—“I”—“I” they say, and
again “I”—“I”—“I.” And having said it they appear to be vastly relieved.
The next step is to lay about them gallantly at every person or tendency
that has ever annoyed them. “I have been abused” they say, “I have been
neglected! You intolerable Philistines, I will get back at you!” It is
odd that it never seems to occur to these young men that they can only
hit those persons who read them, and that every person who reads them is
at least a prospective friend. Those who neglect them they can never
reach—and slapping one’s friends is an unprofitable amusement.
Examples of these unfortunate spiritual results of abandoning oneself
too recklessly to the free verse form are numerous. James Oppenheim’s
latest volume, _Songs for the New Age_—although it is in many ways an
excellent work and deserves endorsement by all who really belong to the
new age and are not merely accidentally alive to-day—nevertheless shows
in places the tendency to obviousness and slack work.
More flagrant examples are to be found elsewhere. Take for instance
Orrick Johns. Here are some stanzas from his long poem, _Second Avenue_,
which took the prize in Mitchell Kennerley’s _Lyric Year_:
“How often does the wild-bloom smell
Over the mountained city reach
To hold the tawny boys in spell
Or wake the aching girls to speech?
The clouds that drift across the sea
And drift across the jagged line
Of mist-enshrouded masonry—
Hast thou forgotten these are thine?
That drift across the jagged line
Which you, my people, reared and built
To be a temple and a shrine
For gods of iron and of gilt—
Aye, these are thine to heal thy heart,
To give thee back the thrill of Youth,
To seek therein the gold of Art,
And seek the broken shapes of Truth.”
The same Orrick Johns wrote this blatant bit of free verse in _Poetry_ a
few months later. Both the paucity of ideas and the enlarged ego are
very well shown here:
No man shall ever read me,
For I bring about in a gesture what they cannot fathom in a life;
Yet I tell Bob and Harry and Bill—
It costs me nothing to be kind;
If I am a generous adversary, be not deceived, neither be devoted—
It is because I despise you.
Yet if any man claim to be my peer I shall meet him,
For that man has an insolence that I like;
I am beholden to him.
I know the lightning when I see it,
And the toad when I see it ...
I warn all pretenders.
But to see the tendencies of which we have spoken in their most
exaggerated form it is necessary to go to Ezra Pound, the young
self-expatriated American who wails because “that ass, my country, has
not employed me.” His earlier work was clean-cut, sensitive poetry, some
of it very beautiful. This for example:
PICCADILLY
Beautiful, tragical faces,
Ye that were whole, and are so sunken;
And, O ye vile, ye that might have been loved,
That are so sodden and drunken,
Who hath forgotten you?
O wistful, fragile faces, few out of many!
The gross, the coarse, the brazen,
God knows I cannot pity them, perhaps, as I should do,
But, oh, ye delicate, wistful faces,
Who hath forgotten you?
This, from _Blast_, the new English quarterly, is the latest from the
same hand. The capitals are his own. The contrast needs no comment:
SALUTATION THE THIRD
Let us deride the smugness of “The Times”:
GUFFAW!
So much the gagged reviewers,
It will pay them when the worms are wriggling in their vitals;
These were they who objected to newness,
HERE are their TOMB-STONES.
They supported the gag and the ring:
A little black BOX contains them.
SO shall you be also,
You slut-bellied obstructionist,
You sworn foe to free speech and good letters,
You fungus, you continuous gangrene.
* * * * *
I have seen many who go about with supplications,
Afraid to say how they hate you
HERE is the taste of my BOOT,
CARESS it, lick off the BLACKING.
To attempt to lay the entire onus of so flagrant a spiritual and
cerebral degeneration to the writing of _vers libre_ alone is of course
impossible. But the tendency is clear. Fortunately, however, we are not
all Ezra Pounds and there are still poets balanced enough to appreciate
these dangers and to make of free verse the wonderful vehicle it can be
in the hands of a genius.
Union
RABINDRANATH TAGORE
(_Translated from the original Bengali by Basanta Koomar Roy, author
of “Rabindranath Tagore: The Poet and His Personality.”_)
Beloved, every part of my being craves for the corresponding part of
yours. My heart is heavy with its own restlessness, and it yearns to
fall senseless on yours.
My eyes linger on your eyes, and my lips long to attain salvation by
losing their existence on your lips.
* * * * *
My thirsty heart is crying bitterly for the unveilment of your celestial
form.
* * * * *
The heart is deep in the ocean of being, and I sit by the forbidding
shore and moan for ever.
But to-night, beloved, I shall enter the mysteries of existence with a
bosom heaving with love supreme, and my entire being shall find its
eternal union in thine.
War, the Only Hygiene of the World
F. T. MARINETTI
(_Translated from the French by Anne Simon_)
I want to explain to you the difference between Futurism and Anarchism.
Anarchism, denying the infinite principle of human evolution, suspends
its impulse at the ideal threshold of universal peace, and before the
stupid paradise of interlocked embraces in the open fields and midst the
waving of palms.
We, the Futurists, on the contrary, affirm as one of our absolute
principles the continuous growth and the unlimited physiological and
intellectual progress of Man.
We aim beyond the hypothesis of the amicable fusion of the different
races, and we admit the only possible hygiene of the World: War.
The distant goal of the anarchistic conception (a kind of sweet
tenderness, sister to baseness) appears to us as an impure gangrene
preluding the agony of the races.
The anarchists are satisfied in attacking the political, judicial, and
economical branches of the social tree. We strive to do much more than
that. We want to uproot and burn its very deepest roots; those that are
planted in the brain of man, and are called:
Mania for order.
The desire for the least effort.
The fanatical adoration of the family.
The undue stress laid on sleep, and the repast at a fixed hour.
Cowardly acquiescence or quietism.
Love for the antique and the old.
The unwise preservation of everything that is wicked and sick.
The horror of the new.
Contempt for youth.
Contempt for rebellious minorities.
The veneration for time, for accumulated years, for the dead, and for
the dying.
The instinctive need of laws, chains, and impediments.
Horror of violence.
Horror of the unknown and the new.
Fear of a total liberty.
Have you never seen an assemblage of young revolutionaries or
anarchists?... _Eh bien_: there is no more discouraging spectacle.
You would observe that the urgent, immediate mania, in these red souls,
is to deprive themselves quickly of their vehement independence, to give
the government of their party to the oldest of their number; that is to
say, to the greatest opportunist, to the most prudent, in a word, to the
one who having already acquired a little force, and a little authority,
will be fatally interested in conserving the present state of things, in
calming violence, in opposing all desire for adventure, for risk, and
heroism.
This new president, while guiding them in the general discussion with
apparent equity, shall lead them like sheep to the fold of his personal
interest.
Do you still believe seriously in the usefulness or desirability of
conventions of revolutionary spirits?
Content yourself then, with choosing a director, or, better still, a
leader of discussion. Choose for that post the youngest amongst you, the
least known, the least important; only his role must never supersede the
simple distribution of the word, with an absolute equality of time that
he shall control, the watch in his hand.
But that which digs the deepest ditch between the futuristic and
anarchistic conception, is the great problem of love, with its great
tyranny of sentiment and lust, from which we want to extricate humanity.
Genius-worship is the infallible sign of an uncreative
age.—_Clive Bell._
The least that the state can do is to protect people who have
something to say that may cause a riot. What will not cause a
riot is probably not worth saying.—_Clive Bell._
Noise
GEORGE BURMAN FOSTER
There is a discovery, by no means pleasing or edifying, that the student
makes as he broadly surveys the history of humanity. All the great
turning-points of that history seem to be inwardly associated with
violent upheavals and fearful revolutions. And of all these revolutions,
it may be doubted whether history records any one on so large a scale as
that which confronts us under the name of Christianity, in the
transition from ancient to mediæval ecclesiastical culture. It was not a
single Crucified One that gave Christianity the sacred symbol of its
religion; unnumbered thousands—mostly slaves—breathed out their poor
lives on martyrs’ crosses. The old culture went down in rivers of
blood—not too figuratively meant—and a new arose, or, better, was
created. Now, what is true of this most important revolution of our
antecedent cultural life is true also, in corresponding measure, of
every new “becoming” in the history of peoples. No state, no church, no
social form, has ever arisen but that the path of the new life has
passed over ruins and graves.
Must this be so? Must it be eternally so? Is it a thing of historical
inevitability, is it even a law of the very order of the world itself?
The answer—first answer, at all events—is, Yes! To affirm itself, to
persist as life,—this belongs as nothing else does to life’s very
nature. What newly arises negates what has already arisen. All that is
living pronounces a sentence of death upon all that has been alive and
that now sets itself against the new life. Accordingly, we are wont to
call life a struggle for existence. Old Greeks coined a phrase, _Polemos
pater panton_: war is the father of all things. The right to life is the
right of the strong.
In view of these things, may we fairly raise the question as to whether
there are exceptions to so universal a rule? Were we to set up a
different right, would it not be the right of the weak? Would it not be
to make the sick and the infirm masters over the well and the strong?
Would it not be to preach a decadent morality as do all the
pusillanimous and the hirelings who beg for the protection of their
weakness because they do not have the strength to drive and force their
way through life?
The man who, for a generation, has been called the prophet of a new
culture, this _Friedrich Nietzsche_, is he not, then, precisely the
apostle of this man of might and mastery, of ill-famed _Herrnmoral_,
master’s morality, especially? Napoleon, his Messiah—do you think? Did
he not gloat and glory over the time when the wild roving _blonde
Bestie_ was still alive in the old Germans? Did he not worship the beast
of prey, memorialize the murderer, stigmatize the morality of
Christianity as a crime against life, because of its saying, Blessed are
the poor and the sick, the peaceable and the meek? If, now, the word of
this new prophet should make disciples, should even revolutionize the
times, should we close our churches and stop our preaching, as the first
thing to be done? For the churches preach goodness and love, not might
and dominion; see in man child of God, not beast of prey.
If all this were a partisan matter—for or against Nietzsche—I would have
nothing to do with it. To join in the damnatory fulminations against
this man, or to advertise mitigating circumstances for his thought, and
to re-interpret the whole from such a standpoint, until the whole should
seem less brutal and less dangerous—to do either the one or the other is
not for me, but for those polemicists and irenicists who are adding to
the gayety of nations in these otherwise heartbreaking times, by the
high debate as to whether Nietzsche be both the efficient and the final
cause of our present world war. Not to defend Nietzsche, not to condemn
him, but to wrestle for a firm, clear, moral view of life in our
seething times, this alone is most worth while, and this too is my task.
But for all that, I do believe we must penetrate much, much deeper into
this new prophet’s spirit than either friend or foe has yet done, if we
are to win from Nietzsche a deepening of our own and our time’s moral
view of life.
Would that we might forget, for a moment at least, all that partisan
praise and blame have scraped together respecting this most modern of
all philosophers; would that we might accompany him into the most hidden
workshop of his own thoughts and hearken to the personal confessions of
his wonderful soul! And what would we hear there? This preacher of crash
and catastrophe and cataclysm, temporal and eternal, speaking of
“thoughts which come with dove’s feet and steer and pilot the world”; of
“the stillest hours which bring the storm.” Zarathustra-Nietzsche hears
the _Höllenlärm_, the hellish alarum, that men make in life, that life
itself makes; he observes how men lend their ears to this noise, how
they are frightened by it, or exult over it, how they think that the
truth is the truer where the noise is the louder, how the howling of the
storm signifies to men that something good and great must be taking
place, some great event of history must be under way. Then Nietzsche
sets himself like a flint against this evaluation of things: “The
greatest experiences, these are not our noisiest, but our stillest
hours. It is not around the inventor of new noise, it is around the
inventor of new values that the world revolves, inaudibly revolves.” I
speak for myself alone, but these are words, Nietzsche words, for which
I would gladly sacrifice whole volumes of moral and theological works.
These words sharpen the eye and the ear for life-values which the
majority of men today pass by—pass by more heedlessly perhaps than ever.
These great words supply us with a criterion for the evaluation of
questions of the moral life, a criterion that no one will cast aside who
once comes to see what it means. It is a criterion without which we do
not yet comprehend life in its depths, because we so constantly
contemplate things from a false angle of vision. Something of the men
who are carried away by “hellish alarum” lives in all of us. Let there
be stillness without, and we think that there is nothing going on. Let
nature peal and groan outside there, so that all gigantic forces seem to
be released; then we have respect for her, we discern in such over-power
even a divine creative force or a divine destructive will. Let people
collide, the earth quake from thunder of cannon, and we signalize such a
day in our history, pass it down from child to child, and we call such
and such a battle a world-historical event.
But we forget the best. A blustering and brewing pervades nature when
Spring comes over the land to conquer Winter. When we hear the conflict
we cry: “Spring has come!” Not so. The true, genuine Spring-life,
nascent underneath the fury, makes no noise at all, weaves away
inaudibly, invisibly, in tiny seeds, and conceals in itself the
noiseless new germs of life.
Thomas Carlyle, though a trifle noisy himself at times, could finely
write: “Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves
together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into
the daylight of Life, which they are thenceforth to rule.” Wordsworth,
not unmindful of
“The silence that is in the starry sky”
yet, gazing on the earth about him, sang
“No sound is uttered,—but a deep
And solemn harmony pervades
The hollow vale from steep to steep
And penetrates the glades.”
And for Longfellow there is
“Hoeder, the blind old god
Whose feet are shod with silence.”
But the chief study of mankind is still man, not nature and the gods.
Man’s silences! Yes, amid the smoke of powder and clink of swords,
peoples slash each other; and the men who make such uproar the people
call great. But the might and work of a people are to be found in that
quiet heroism, of which no one can discern anything outwardly—that quiet
heroism to which no one can unveil monuments in our cities. It is the
inaudible battles of the heart that this heroism fights; and the quieter
it is, the more gloriously it shines. Men with big voices and mighty
lungs we hear. Their words excite, move to tears, arouse boisterous and
voluble antagonisms. These who assemble about them such billowy mobs, we
are tempted to think that they are the leading spirits, that a vast
power must live in them, since they are so able to move inert men. But
another prophet, modern also, has said to these bawlers in market
places: “Do you think that he who stirs up scandal moves the world?”
Nothing easier than to start a scandal! Also, nothing jollier for
numerous men, to say nothing of women. But scandal is a roaring in the
ears. It does not reach the heart. It irritates, over-irritates the
nerves. It creates no blessings, no life. A tiny word that sinks down
into the deep of the soul, and quietly does its work there of
germinating and sprouting—this means infinitely more for the world than
the “alarum” of all the professional and unprofessional bawlers. Deep
rivers make least din. Light cares speak; mighty griefs are dumb. A
heart must be profane indeed, in which there is nothing sacred to
silence and the solemn sea. Once more, to quote Carlyle: “Under all
speech that is good for anything lies a silence that is better. Silence
is deep as eternity; speech is shallow as time.”
It were well to begin at home, and learn to evaluate experience aright
in our own being. There are moments in our lives when everything that we
encounter disconcerts us; nay, when our whole being seems to be off the
hinges, out of joint. Pain plows up our innermost selves. We could
shriek from heartbreak and woe. We stand there undone. And men who see
us and hear us moaning so piteously, groaning so painfully, have the
feeling: “No pain like this!” But how mistaken they are! For there is a
cry of the soul, heard of no one, more painful than all that can be
pitied or lamented. There are labors and battles of the soul wherein
nothing is hammered and driven, and yet _something new_ is formed. It is
never so still in a man as when he makes up his mind to have done
inwardly with some experience. As long as there is foaming and
blustering within, we accomplish nothing. True work tolerates no
tempest. We must be still. And when old values are broken, when we must
lead life to new goals, the quiet hour must come in which a divine child
of the spirit is conceived by the holy spirit; and the brightest light
which we can kindle within will burn so quietly and clearly that no
cloud of smoke shall ascend therefrom, and there shall be no flickering
to bear witness of contact with the restless world. “There the true
Silence is, self-conscious and alone.”
Behold, then, this Nietzsche, who flees all “alarum” and execrates all
din as a falsification of the moral values of life; who lives preferably
thousands of feet above the world there below, who lingers on the
loftiest lands of life whither no whirring rattle of the day could rise!
Could this Nietzsche find joy in men mauling and making a mess of each
other? Could this Nietzsche preach a culture in which battalions in
uniform should line up against those in blouse to see who knew best how
to deal the deadly blow? Could he gloat over the field where the thunder
of battle thundered the loudest? “Inventor” Krupp’s “new noise”—would
that appeal to Nietzsche who wanted all silent save the dripping rain,
and who worshipped sunshine alone? One might answer these questions in
the light of one’s own experience. Let us suppose that we comprehend the
meaning of the _stillsten Stunden_, the quietest hours, and the worth of
those great happenings of which nothing reaches the newspapers, and
which no _avant-coureur_ trumpets. Tell me, could we then detect even
the slightest inclination to be our own heralds, and to sacrifice our
quietest hours to the gaping and squabbling of men? Men—so the old
gospels say—ought not to cast their pearls before swine, or give that
which is holy to the dogs. But what is pearl, what is holy, if not what
the Nietzschean still hour contains and produces? There is something so
tender and beautiful in that hour that we shrink from expressing it,
from translating it into thought, lest word and thought tincture its
best perfume. Silence is sweeter than speech, more musical than song.
Whoever has a deep in himself into which he alone descends and
penetrates, a _plus_ of his life that remains after we have known and
weighed all his words and deeds, protects this deep and this _plus_ from
everything that could make a noise, from all mere words, from all
intrusive and obtrusive tittle-tattle. _Sich eine Oberfläche
anheucheln_, to feign a surface, to wear a mask, this is the original
and fine insight into such psychology. Man envelops himself in
unneighborliness, not to hold haughtily other men away from him, but to
save himself from them, so that they may not clumsily finger some pearl
which could not stand so rude a touch. Why speak in parables? Because it
is not given unto them to know the mystery of the kingdom, said the
Nazarene. Parables were a protecting shell encasing the most intimate
kernel, which ignorance or awkwardness might otherwise corrupt or
destroy. Nietzsche and the Nazarene held a deep and a _plus_ so uniquely
their own that they intentionally sought, not to be understood, but to
be misunderstood, with reference thereto.
Yes, there is a “surface” which only the man knows and uses who bears
about a deep in his own being. There, hypocrisy becomes a protection of
truthfulness; surface a protection of depth. Whoever “feigns such
surface,” wears such mask, is infinitely more honest and veracious than
he who has no silence in his deep which cannot be speech on his tongue—a
speech which is often only motions and noises of the tongue of him who
pries curiously into what he is inwardly incompetent to understand, or
offers a superficial and voluble sympathy for griefs of which he is as
innocent as a babe unborn, or a jaunty appreciation of values and
verities and virtues for which he has never sweat even a drop of blood.
To wear a mask, to lie, lie, lie,—that is the _truth_ of the soul as it
hides its treasures and its sanctities from vulgarity and volubility!
‘The suitor of _truth_? Thou?’ Thus they mocked.
‘Nay! Merely a poet!
An animal, a cunning, preying, stealing one,
Which must lie,
Which must lie, consciously, voluntarily,
Longing for prey,
_Disguised in many colours,_
_A mask unto itself,_
_A prey unto itself._
_That_—the suitor of truth?
Only a fool! a poet!
Only a speaker in many colours
Speaking in many colours out of fools’ masks,
Stalking about on deceitful word bridges,
On deceitful rain-bows,
Between false heavens
Wandering, stealing about—
_Only_ a fool! a poet!
(_Italics_ mine.)
Thus, it is the Deep, the Unique, the Abyss within, that is the great
Isolator. Nietzsche was indeed “the eagle that long, long gazeth
benumbed into abysses, into _its own_ abysses!”
And he spoke in parables. Give heed—so Zarathustra counsels his
disciples—to the times when your spirits speak in parables, for in these
times is the origin of your virtue.
I said I would not vindicate Nietzsche. But what if his deification of
force-humanity, of master-humanity, were _Oberfläche_, “surface,” mask,
which he “feigned” or wore, in order to protect his pearls from sows,
his holy of holies from hounds? What if _this_—scandalizing the
scandalous!—were but picture and parable which Nietzsche flaunted to the
people that they might wreak their vengeance thereupon? And the parable
is so pertinently chosen that it says everything to men of sense and
seriousness, hides everything from fools; that the pearls can be
recognized if right eyes behold, but protectingly concealed from rude
eyes and awkward hands.
Of course, Nietzsche was a homicide! So must we be! If thy right eye
offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee; if thy right hand
offend thee, hew it off, and cast it from thee. And there are things
more offensive than an eye or a hand! These are the weaknesses which we
pamper and grow in ourselves: thought-lessness which we wink at; old pet
habits which have come to be just too dear for anything, especially for
us to knife; above all, sickly sentiments, self-pity, from which even
all our joys cannot rescue us—so that we do not have the courage to join
those warriors who turn their weapons against their own selves, and to
swear an “_I will_,” that is hard as steel, against all these softnesses
and humors and self-commiserations. Surely, it were well to be
force-men, master-men, so that we would not coddle our impotency or
carry on a pleasure-pain play with our weakness.
Yes, in these “stillest hours” there is also a “still” homicide and
interment, a plucking out and a hacking off, and the warrior-hero does
not betray the least pathos as he does this—there is no plaintive note
in his voice. The greatest thing about the dying Socrates, sipping away
at his cup of hemlock, was the total absence of pathos and self-pity.
Ah, if we but took half the pains to marshal forces of will in
ourselves, that we now devote to conserving our weak wills, and to
adducing all sorts of plausible reasons for their impuissance! If we but
actually learned _Herrenmoral_, master-morality, that were indeed
masterful and understood mastership! We are called to be masters by our
creator, not only masters of the earth, but also masters of the spirit.
And mastership is a great sacred thing, which we ought to learn from
world-masters. We ought to be hammers in life and not anvils. The great
calamity among men is that they shrink from being hammers, and call the
virtue of the anvil that lets itself be struck by the name of
“patience.”
It is just not true that Christianity abhors master-morality and
preaches a _Sclavenmoral_, a slave-morality. Yes it _is_ true of the
cowardly and inert thing that men call Christianity, this religion of
the study-chair and the barracks which can make use of no master,
because it summons just those powers to rule whose whole strength
consists only in the weakness of others. But there _is_ a Christianity
which has been outright mighty force, outright master-instinct, this
kingly Christianity, in whose presence a Pilate, and a Herod, with the
entire host of their war-slaves, were feeble folk indeed; a Christianity
of love and gentleness and meekness,—aye, aye, sir! But one can have
gentleness in the heart,—and yet lay on with a club! That was indeed
master-morality when the Son of Man made himself master of the Sabbath;
when he with a whip of cords scourged the money-changers and mammonists
out of the Temple! That was a force-man and a master-man who hurled his,
“Get thee behind me, Satan!” against the weak heart of Peter.
How would it do for our churches to have a new festival, a festival of
“the stillest hour,” memorializing the “invention of new values, around
which the world revolves, noiselessly revolves”? Noises enough, often
enough _Höllenlärm_, have there been in our churches, are yet, God
knows! But it is not noise that rules the world. It is stillness which
ultimately is the spiritual and moral might of the men who will possess
the kingdom of earth. What if even the history of peoples “feigns a
surface,” wears a mask, for those who having eyes see not, having ears
hear not? What if men mistake _Höllenlärm_ for messages of great
occurrences in history, and on this account hold themselves aloof from
those phenomena and experiences in which _something new_, a life of the
heart, presses on to its birth-hour? Yet the human race will not always
need or require noise and masks as its history rolls on. The more men
kill what is really worthy of death, the less will they set out to kill
each other. The more powerfully the will becomes conscious of its
calling to master, the more strenuously men strive after greatness,
human greatness, the more ridiculous will it come to seem to them in the
course of time that the force of man should be sought in the force of
his muscles, the mastership of man in the hoarded prerogative of powder
and lead. The day will yet come—as come it shall—when we will estimate
our life, not according to its noisiest, but according to its stillest
hours. And then a great and pure life will be created by what is done in
the heart of man.
The Birth of a Poem
(_Translated from the Russian of Maximilian Voloshin by A. S. K._)
In my soul is a fragrant dusk of coming thunder...
Heat-lightnings coil there like blue-birds...
Lighted windows burn...
And fibres, long,
Slow-singing,
Grow in the gloom...
O the odor of flowers that reaches a scream!
Lo! lightning in a white zig-zag...
And at once all became bright and great...
How radiant is the night!
Words dance, then flash in couples
In an enamored harmony.
Out of the womb of consciousness, from the bottom of the labyrinth—
Visions crowd in a quailing host...
And the verse blossoms into a hyacinth-flower,
Cold, fragrant, white.
Editorials
_Why Socialists Went to War_
We have listened with much interest to the excuses for the German
Socialists who went to war, as well as to the attacks on them for doing
so. Now, though hesitating to obtrude our ignorance into the muddle of a
complicated discussion, we can’t refrain from offering a suggestion.
The bottom reason for sudden activity under the stress of unusual
circumstances is to be found, not in a conscious mental decision, but in
the previously-formed habits of the individual mind. We are referring
partly to the mob-emotion which has swept away so many even of the
greatest souls of Europe. We are thinking more of the essence of
Socialism, and the sort of emotional method which has been produced
among its adherents—the material upon which mob-psychology had to work.
There is no essential difference between the method of German
Imperialism and the method of German Socialism; the only difference lies
in the objectives. Both insist on the supreme importance of the state,
both work through cohesive organization and the almost unquestioning
following of leaders. The habit of obedience, the instinct for
organization, the gregarious mode of action—these are the very qualities
of the individual German which have made it possible for the German
Social Democratic Party to grow to such size and strength. What more
inevitable, when the mobilization order went up, when flags flew and
drums beat, than that the individual German Socialist should in his
excitement shoulder his gun and march to war?
Of course, we don’t really know anything about it, and we haven’t the
resources to make anything like a scientific investigation. But we
strongly suspect that the morals of organized humanity will remain
inferior to the morals of the individual until the individual habit of
mind becomes one which denies to organized humanity supreme authority
over the will.
G. H. S.
_Even Galsworthy!_
In _Scribner’s Magazine_ for November, Mr. Galsworthy has a stunning
article on the War. And then at its close:—“Your Prussian supermen of
Nietzsche’s cult...!”
_Another New Poet_
Mr. Scharmel Iris is a young Italian poet, born in Florence, who at the
tender age of ten, and later, was praised by Ruskin, Swinburne, Francis
Thompson, Edmund Gosse, and other men who may be assumed to know what
good poetry is. Ruskin wrote: “He is a youth of genius and his poems are
marvelously beautiful. His heart has felt the pathos of life and he has
set this pathos to music.” Swinburne said: “He writes with imaginative
ardor, and impassioned is the word which best illustrates his utterance.
He is genuine and sincere, and his lovely poems display energy of
emotion and a true sense of poetic restraint.” Thompson was more
superlative: “I believe Scharmel Iris to be a poet of the first rank,”
he stated. “His poems are sublime in conception, rich in splendid
imagery, full of remarkable metaphors and new figures, and musical in
expression.” Of course it has been difficult for a young man of such
talent to find a publisher or a public; but at last a volume of his work
is to be brought out by the Ralph Fletcher Seymour Company. The book
will be called _Lyrics of a Lad_, and will be ready about Christmas
time. Beside a preface by Maurice Francis Egan and an interesting
title-page decoration by Michele Greco, it will have a frontispiece
portrait by Eugene R. Hutchinson, the photographer who should never be
referred to by any noun except “artist.” Personally, we love Mr. Iris’s
work; we use the verb thoughtfully, because his poetry is not merely the
sort which interests or attracts; it remains in your mind as part of
that art treasure-house which is your religion and your life.
_Prizes for Poetry_
An interesting announcement comes from _Poetry_ in regard to two prize
offers. One—the Helen Haire Levinson prize of two hundred dollars for
the best poetry by a citizen of the United States published in the
magazine during its second year—has been awarded to Mr. Carl Sandburg
for his _Chicago Poems_. This is a particularly gratifying decision, for
Mr. Sandburg’s is a new voice which must be reckoned with in American
poetic production. The second is a one hundred dollar offer for the best
war or peace poem on the present European situation, and has been given
to Miss Louise Driscoll of Catskill, New York, for a poem called _Metal
Checks_, which appears in the November issue.
My Friend, the Incurable
At dusk I pass an ugly red building with shrieking fat black letters on
its façade—Home for Incurables. Shrill grass, narcotic carnations, hazy
figures in rocking chairs and on the balconies, melting in the liquid
gold of autumn twilight—a harmony of discord that screams for the
spiritual brush of Kandinsky. There are no signs of pain or grief on the
faces of the doomed: a profound calmness they bear, a resolute
quiescence, reminding us of Dante after he had seen hell or of
Andreyev’s resurrected Lazarus. “To be sure, they are quite happy,”
explained the obliging Doctor. “These men and women have come to be free
of struggles, of doubts, and of the anguish of hopes. The knowledge of
their fate, the ultimate, irrevocable truth, is a relieving balm for the
tired spirits—nay, even for the hopeless bodies, for as soon as they
cease fighting their disease they learn to adapt themselves to that
disease, to consider it an inseparable part of their existence. I can
show you a number of patients who are actually in love with their
affliction, who would resent the idea of being turned normal. Look at
the hilarious face of that fellow yonder at the fountain; he is
intoxicated with sunset, and appears to be the happiest of mortals,
despite his terrible disease. A queer case, an un-American case.”
The doctor uttered a fearful Latin term and told me the history of that
patient. A European, he has been for many years afflicted with something
like “sentimentalomania,” a peculiarly Continental ailment. Skilful
physicians had tried in vain to cure him; change of climate and
environment had been of no avail: even in Siberian tundras and in foggy
London his disposition remained unaltered. In despair he went to Berlin,
where, he was advised, the gravest case of sentimentality would be
annihilated; the reaction proved almost fatal, for the Spree and the
_Sieges Allee_ made such a nauseating impression upon the poor fellow
that his illness was complicated by a severe outbreak of Germanophobia.
As a last resort, the famous specialist, Herr Dr. Von Bierueberalles,
bade him taste the influence of the sanest atmosphere on earth, that of
the States. When even the harshest and most practical American treatment
had failed to knock out the unfortunate’s folly, he was pronounced
hopeless and offered a place among the incurables, which offer he
willingly accepted, and acquiesced. He has since become accustomed to
his disease and bears it rather with defiant joy.
At times, when I seek relief from practical values and sane standards, I
come to have a chat with my friend, the Incurable. Henceforth he will
have the floor.
* * * * *
With whom do I side in the War? Why, of course, with Germany! Perhaps my
attitude shows that I have not been completely cured from the
Prussophobia that I had contracted in Berlin; as it is, I sincerely wish
to see the German boot victorious on the whole continent and over the
mouldy Britons, a rude, dreamless, wingless Napoleon brooding over old
napping Europe. Picture the ruined cathedrals of Belgium and France
“restored” into comfortable barracks for the braves of the Fatherland;
picture the boulevards of Paris and Brusselles, the quays of the Neva
and the Thames, ornated with the statues of the most Christian Wilhelm
and of his illustrious ancestors down to the Great Elector of
Brandenburg; picture the excellent _Schutzman_ reigning supreme,
physically and spiritually, from Vladivostock to Glasgow,—think what an
abyss of hatred, of stirring electrifying hatred will arise among the
rotting nations, and out of hatred self consciousness, endeavors,
cravings, to be crystallized in torrents of new art creations! As for
Germany, I have no fear for the duration of her hegemony; she will
undoubtedly choke from indigestion. But oh, how I dread the reverse
outcome! The victory of the Allies will push Progress a century
backward; it will strengthen the tottering absolutism in Russia; it will
swell the piggish arrogance of the French bourgeois; it will augment the
insular hypocricity of the English Philistine; it will still more, if it
is possible, vulgarize international diplomacy and greed, arousing the
appetites of the so-called Democracies.
Democracy—who was it that recently stated with charming aplomb that
“Individualism and democracy are synonymous terms?” Yes, I recall: it
came from the pen of the author of _Incense and Splendor_ and _To the
Innermost_. I confess this statement, especially when considering its
authorship, came to me as a revelation. To me the word “democracy,” as
many another beautiful word, has lost its original lofty meaning and has
come to rhyme with mediocrity, with the strangling of the Few of the
Mountain by the Many of the Valley. Could you name many great things
that the most democratized countries, like America and Switzerland, have
produced outside of Schweitzer-cheese and Victrolas? Has there ever been
a great individualist who appeared as a child of his age, as an
outgrowth and a reflection of a democracy? I do not know of such
instances. Of course, I grant that the writer of that statement put into
the word “Democracy” a higher, a more idealistic meaning. Words, like
music, like practically every medium of art, express the author’s
personality, and, provided he is an artist, he binds us to share his
interpretation. Take, for example, that popular song, “_Oh, You
Beautiful Doll_”; apparently there is nothing tragic in it, yet my
emotions were stirred when I heard its French interpretation by Olga
Petrova (it was before the kind American entrepreneurs had forced her to
perform stunts in Panthea). She had managed to put so much sorrow and
tenderness into “_O Ma Grande Belle Poupée!_” that one forgot the
triteness of the words and felt gripping sadness. Or take a less vulgar
illustration—Gertrude Stein’s _Tender Buttons_.[1] It is an exquisite
little thing in cream covers, with a green moon in the center, implying
the yolk of an egg with which “something is the matter,” and it gave me
rare pleasure to witness the first attempt to revolutionize the most
obsolete and inflexible medium of Art—words. The author has endeavored
to use language in the same way as Kandinsky uses his colors: to discard
conventional structure, to eliminate understandable figures and forms,
and to create a “spiritual harmony,” leaving to the layman the task of
discovering the “_innerer Klang_.” Both iconoclasts have admirably
succeeded; both the “Improvisations” and the little “essays” on
roast-beef and seltzer-bottles have given me the great joy of
cocreating, allowing me to interpret them in my own autonomous way. Says
the Painter:[2]
The apt use of a word, repetition of this word, twice, three
times or even more frequently, will not only tend to intensify
the inner harmony but also to bring to light unsuspected
spiritual properties of the word itself. Further than that,
frequent repetition of a word deprives the word of its original
external meaning.
Gertrude Stein has beautifully followed this recipe. Words, plain
everyday words, have lost their “external meaning” under her skilful
manipulation, and in their grotesque arrangement, frequent repetition,
and intentional incoherence they have come to serve as quaint ephemeral
sounds of a suggestive symphony, or, if you please, cacophony. The
_Tender Buttons_ arouse in the sympathetic reader a limitless amount of
moods, from scherzo to maestoso. I shall recall for you a few lines of
one peculiar motive:
(From _A Substance in a Cushion_.)
What is the use of a violent kind of delightfulness if there is
no pleasure in not getting tired of it.
(From _Red Roses_.)
A cool red rose and a pink cut pink, a collapse and a sole hole,
a little less hot.
Aider, why aider why whow, whow stop touch, aider whow, aider
stop the muncher, muncher munchers.
(From _Breakfast_.)
What is a loving tongue and pepper and more fish than there is
when tears many tears are necessary.
Why is there more craving than there is in a mountain.... Why is
there so much useless suffering. Why is there.
Do you not feel the deep melancholy underlying these incongruities? I
could quote places that would bring you into a totally different mood,
most hilarious at times. These “exaggerated cranberries,” to paraphrase
an expression of one of my incurable colleagues, should be chanted to
the music of another great iconoclast, Schoenberg. But I observe an
indulgent sneer on your face. Of course, I am an Incurable—_Adieu_!
IBN GABIROL.
[1] _Tender Buttons_, by Gertrude Stein [Claire Marie, New York].
[2] _The Art of Spiritual Harmony_, by W. Kandinsky [Houghton
Mifflin, Boston].
London Letter
E. BUXTON SHANKS
_London, Sept. 11, 1914._
We are all soldiers now and literature, for the time, has disappeared.
The publishing business is at a standstill, reviews are cutting down
their size, and all the best poets are sedulously learning to form fours
in the squares of London. It is, by itself, a remarkable thing, which
will have an effect on all of us when the war stops and we begin to
write again. To leave your pens and paper, to know that you have before
you in the day, not an endless struggle with rhythm, rhyme, and editors,
but a few hours’ drilling that is laborious and terminable—it is a
rousing experience for a poet, mentally as well as physically.
Meanwhile the literary result of the war is nothing but disastrous. All
our more or less “official” poets—Mr. Bridges, Mr. Newbolt, Mr. Binyon,
Mr. Watson, Mr. Phillips, and so on—have come forward with amazing
arrays of abstract nouns. Mr. Bridges, who is almost the worst as well
as almost the best of living poets, printed a copy of verses in _The
Times_ which rhymed far less often than is proper in a ceremonial piece
and ended thus:
Up, careless, awake!
Ye peacemakers, fight!
ENGLAND STANDS FOR HONOUR:
GOD DEFEND THE RIGHT.
Mr. William Watson has been prodigal of poetry and has reached his
highest level in a poem which contains the following singular lines:—
We bit them in the Bight,
The Bight of Heligoland.
It is a very sad business. These gentlemen have retired to their
studies, determined to feel what is proper, and they come out having
done their best; but they will be heartily ashamed of it—I hope—in a few
months. Unfortunately, Mr. John Lane has collected their verses in a
volume and is selling their shame for charity. Three good poems have
come out of the welter, one by Mr. G. K. Chesterton—_The Wife of
Flanders_, a very fine composition—and two by Mr. De La Mare.
The trouble is that a poet does not feel war fever very acutely in a
general sense. Patriotic poetry is nearly always bad. If there is a
worthy reference to the Armada in Elizabethan poetry, it has escaped me;
and the English resistance to Napoleon has never been a very happy
subject for English writers. The good poetry that is provoked by war is
of a different character: it is personal, visual, and concrete. It never
expresses any general aspect of war, but only such subjects as have been
personally observed and felt by the poet. I would give as instances
Rudyard Kipling and the German poet Liliencron, both of whom have
written well about soldiers and fighting, but foolishly about War and
Patriotism.
Yet any poet going about the streets today must see and feel a quantity
of poetical things. A week or so ago, I saw an endless baggage-train
belonging to the artillery, as it passed through Barnet. It had come
from Worcester, commandeering horses and wagons on the way; it was going
to Brentwood and thence—God knows! It was very long and uneven—the carts
had bakers’ and butchers’ names on them—the horses were ridden with
halters and sacks for saddles—the men were tired and dishevelled. I
spoke to one of them who was watering his horse at a trough, offered to
bring him beer from a public-house close by; but someone had given him
tea farther back on the road and he would rot. He thanked me and rode
away, drooping very much over his horse’s neck. It was all a poem in
itself or it gave me the emotions of a poem, because it had none of the
conventional glitter of war. It was poetical because it was
business-like, just as our khaki service uniforms are more beautiful
than the bright clothes the troops wear in peace.
If the war-poets would confine themselves to real and tangible things
like this, they might well express the experience through which we are
now passing. But they seem unhappily obsessed with the idea of
expressing an obstreperous valour and self-confidence and bluster which
the nation is very far from feeling. The nation, so far as I can gauge
it, is showing an obstinate, workmanlike silence and does not either
make light of, or grumble at, the hardships it has to suffer: the
baggage-train of which I have spoken was a very adequate symbol of this.
But no one is ever so greatly out of touch with the people as a popular
poet.
At the beginning of the war, the musical in London were shocked by an
announcement that no German or Austrian music would be played at the
famous Queen’s Hall Promenade Concerts. We were naturally a little
upset, as we depend on these performances for solid and regular
entertainment: and it seemed hard and unnecessary to renounce Bach,
Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, and even Schönberg. Luckily good sense and
humour killed the absurd idea, but not before a French and Russian
programme had been substituted for the first Wagner night. Now, much as
I shrink from the thought of having to hear Tschaikowsky instead of
Wagner, I do believe that we have a cause for national resentment
against the second of these composers. His ridiculous and windy
prose-works have been among the writings which have provoked the war.
With Nietzsche, and with the renegade Englishman, Houston Stewart
Chamberlain, he has encouraged the notion that there is a special
Teutonic culture which is superior to any other and which deserves to be
spread at any cost. Such an idea has never appealed to the true Germans
(e. g., Goethe, who knew what he owed to France and England), but it has
been useful to the Prussian soldiers, who have debased and vulgarized
true German culture. Perhaps I am exceeding the duties of a London
letter-writer and becoming an advocate; but I think I am giving you an
accurate account of the feelings of those here who admire German poetry
and music. I am not a Chauvinist in art—few people are. I read Goethe
impenitently in the public trains and trams, to the disgust of my
neighbours, and I continue to sing German songs, a little out of tune:
unless my Territorial uniform is served out to me very soon, I shall
probably be arrested as a spy.
New York Letter
GEORGE SOULE
Some years ago a good woman, who would like to be foster-mother to all
struggling heroes, was sitting at midnight in her down-town flat.
Suddenly there was a noise at the front door, someone leapt up the
staircases two steps at a time, and rushed into her room shouting “I’ve
got it! I’ve got it!” She turned around and saw the dark face of a young
actor, shining with excitement. He immediately burst into a superb
interpretation of a passage from _Hamlet_. He had been working over it
for two weeks without being able to satisfy himself, but it had come to
him that evening. He could not wait to let his good friend know, had
jumped on an elevated train, and after being carried two stations too
far in his elation, was there with his prize.
No, this is not the beginning of a magazine story, nor is it a passage
from the biography of a deceased European celebrity. It is the simple
truth about a young American dramatist who is known only to a few;—and
he is of New England stock!
Later the young Hamlet, having completed his acting apprenticeship,
began to write, and went into the real estate business to support
himself. Nobody wanted his plays; they were too “highbrow.” So he began
to build a theatre of his own. The managers’ trust put every difficulty
in his way, and finally, when the building was nearly done and the
company was engaged, succeeded in crushing him. The next attempt was a
repertory company on the East side, but this wiped out what little was
left of his resources before it got fairly started. One play was
produced on Broadway;—it ran two weeks. Last year another was rehearsed
for nine weeks, but it was withdrawn on the day of the dress rehearsal,
because the author refused to make a change insisted on by the manager.
Now the writer has retired to his farm in the Connecticut hills, where
he and a companion have with their own hands built a little theatre. In
this, on Sunday afternoons during the summer, he reads from his fifteen
manuscript plays to such few people as can get there to hear him. And as
he reads, there is on his face much the same enthusiasm as on the night
years ago when he got his passage from _Hamlet_.
I visited Butler Davenport for the third time last Sunday. The main
house is a rambling mid-Victorian affair, with queer crannies and cupola
rooms from which one can look far across the hills to the Sound. On its
left is an old farmhouse of the eighteenth century, furnished as Mr.
Butler’s grandfather left it, and with a musty smell which no
old-furniture shop could counterfeit. Between the two is an
old-fashioned garden, in midsummer filled with larkspur, cosmos, and a
hundred other flowers which few but our grandmothers could name. At the
intersection of walks at its center is a crab-apple tree, surrounded by
a bench. A formal garden with high, thick cedar hedges, bird-houses,
unsuspected grass walks and an avenue of woodbine arches lies on the
other side of the main house. In the rear, stretching out towards the
wide valley, is a long, hedged walk ending in an arch, between fields of
wild flowers. Down it one could go to any kind of distant mystery.
The theatre is a simple, strong little building behind the old
farmhouse. Its most expert bit of carpentry is the balcony, but that is,
of course, unpretentious. The seats are ordinary kitchen chairs, and
there is nothing on the stage but a reading desk. But the luxury of
sitting between wide-open doors in the hill-breeze, full of grass odors
and wing sounds, is better than the comfort of plush seats and much
gilded fresco.
This time, however, as there were only four of us, we sat out under an
apple tree. Except for a moment when a tragic passage was interrupted to
shoo away a loud-voiced and ill-mannered hen, it was the most nearly
perfect theatre I have known.
And the play? It is impossible to do more than hint at the nature of
unpublished plays. This one dealt with the “white slave” question, but
in a way infinitely superior to the melodrama of _The Lure_ or _The
Fight_. There was another, of subtler treatment, called _Deferred
Payment_, showing the natural retribution seeking out a man who looked
for everything in a woman except companionship. _Keeping Up
Appearances_—the one actually produced—pictures a middle-class family
engaged in a tragic struggle with the pocket book on account of the
false ideals of the community. _Justice_, written before Galsworthy’s
play of the same name, draws a parallel between society’s persecution of
a woman who is consecrated to a fine love without marriage, and
society’s punishment of the unfortunate victims of prostitution. Mr.
Davenport’s best work is in _The Importance of Coming and Going_, a
satirical tragi-comedy which contrasts the exaggerated emphasis we lay
on death with the casual way we regard birth. When a person who never
should have come into the world leaves it, perhaps gladly, we weep
copiously and buy showy funerals; but mothers let their daughters marry
any kind of man of wealth or position, without giving them any insight
into the mysteries of birth.
Mr. Davenport’s plays do not rank with Ibsen’s or even with
Galsworthy’s. But thousands of worse plays have been produced and have
succeeded—simply because they contained no ideas. Mr. Davenport is
master of a technique which would make it easy for him to write a
popular success if he did not insist on saying something. One manager
has told him that he is ten years ahead of his time, but that if he were
only European his work could be produced. A publisher wrote him that his
plays could be issued in book form if he were only well-known. Mr.
Davenport’s question, “My dear Mr. ——, how am I to become well known?”
has not elicited a reply.
This man’s spirit will remain just as eager and strong as when he began;
he may get before the public eventually. Even this year hopeful new
plans are under way. But whether he ever succeeds or not, he will have
found in life a thousand times more than the obtuse millions who are
deaf to him. It would be an insult to offer him sympathy.
And it would be stupid to place final blame on the managers or the
publishers, or to think that such things as drama leagues can furnish a
fundamental remedy for the apathy of the public. The whole structure of
society must be altered, and the quality of the individual human spirit
must be quickened, before our leaders can find any adequate reaction in
the crowds. We have denied ourselves the artistic stimulus of a cohesive
aristocracy. How shall we vitalize our democracy?
If they (men) were books, I would not read them.—_Goethe._
Some people term a book poor and unreal because it happens to be
outside the reality with which they themselves happen to be
acquainted—a reality which is to actual reality what a duck-pond
is to the ocean.—_George Brandes._
The Theatre
Forbes-Robertson’s Hamlet
(_Blackstone Theatre_)
One of the noblest things I have ever seen on the stage—or ever expect
to see—is the Hamlet of Forbes-Robertson. The poet, the scholar, the
philosopher, the great gentleman, the lover, the brilliant talker, the
anguished boy—they are all there in the tall man in black with the
graven face and the wonderful hands and the voice of surpassing
richnesses—the tall, graceful, impetuous, humorous, agonized man in
black who reads Shakespeare as if he were improvising and makes a true
and charming human being out of a character that has had the misfortune
to become a problem. “And please observe,” writes Bernard Shaw, “that
this is not a cold Hamlet. He is none of your logicians who reason their
way through the world because they cannot feel their way through it; his
intellect is the organ of his passion; his eternal self-criticism is as
alive and thrilling as it can possibly be.” His moment of expiation,
alone at the back of the stage, with his arms raised to the vaulted
heavens; and his gallant last moment on the throne with its single
silver sentence, “The rest is silence”—these things are too moving to be
articulate about. Richard Le Gallienne has expressed it all as well as
it can be done: “All my life I seem to have been asking my friends,
those I loved best, those who valued the dearest, the kindest, the
greatest, and the strongest, in our strange human life, to come with me
and see Forbes-Robertson die in _Hamlet_. I asked them because, as that
strange young dead king sat upon his throne, there was something,
whatever it meant—death, life, immortality, what you will—of a
surpassing loneliness, something transfiguring the poor passing moment
of trivial, brutal murder into a beauty to which it was quite natural
that that stern Northern warrior, with his winged helmet, should bend
the knee. I would not exchange anything I have ever read or seen for
Forbes-Robertson as he sits there so still and starlit upon the throne
of Denmark.”
M. C. A.
“The Yellow Ticket”
(_Powers’ Theatre_)
A bleeding chunk of reality is not art, but it is a bleeding chunk of
reality; your aesthetic emotions may sleep at the sight of a tortured
animal, but your humane emotions will roll up to your throat when you
witness the simple tragedy of a Jewish girl in St. Petersburg, presented
in Michael Morton’s play, _The Yellow Ticket_. To me such a realistic
play in such a realistic presentation has as little to do with dramatic
art as a reporter’s story has to do with literature; but I brushed aside
my memories of Rheinhardt and Komissarzhevskaya when I went to see a
piece of Russian life at Powers’. And I saw it indeed—real, nude,
appalling.
Some of my acquaintances have asked me whether the tragedy could be
true, whether a Jewish girl has no right to live in St. Petersburg,
unless she has bought her protection from the police by selling her
reputation—that is by procuring a yellow ticket, the trade-licence of a
prostitute. Yes, it is true. A Jew is forbidden to abide outside the
Pale of Settlement, with the exception of certain merchants and persons
of a university education, and prostitutes. The latter form the most
desirable element in the eyes of government officials, since their
occupation does not generally presuppose any predilections for
revolutionary ideas or free thought. I have known instances where women
involved in the Revolution, gentiles as well as Jewesses, obtained
yellow tickets which served them the rôle of a _carte blanche_ from the
molestations of the police. There are many anecdotic facts in Russian
life that seem incredible to the outsider, and Mr. Morton has produced
in his play a mass of such facts with photographic verisimilitude. It
must be said to the credit of the actors that they have escaped the
slippery path of melodramatic overdoing.
K.
“Jael”
(_The Little Theatre_)
“Hosanna!” I felt like shouting, when the curtains slowly concealed the
mysterious stage. I am still under the spell of the oriental atmosphere,
not yet cooled off for objective criticism. What Florence Kiper Frank
has done with the biblical subject may terrify the orthodox student of
the Bible, but I greeted her daring heresy and free manipulation of
epochs and styles. She has skilfully blended the bloodthirsty, gloating
outcries of Deborah’s Song with the idyllic lyrics of Solomon’s Songs,
and has presented in _Jael_ a composite type, a mixture of the savage
tent-woman, of the passionate yet gentle Shulamite, and of the eternal
jealous female. The result, as far as the creation of an atmosphere
goes, is a positive success.
A word about the staging. Maurice Browne, on the privilege of a pioneer,
may be congratulated on the progress he has made in leaving behind
mouldy conventions and approaching the state where he can produce pure
aesthetic emotions. The three one-act plays on the present bill,
regardless of their merits or demerits, demonstrate the great
possibilities of an artistic stage manager, who can do away with
elaborate accessories and produce suggestive illusions with the aid of
an ultramarine background and calico apple blossoms. Yet, as in all
pioneering, there are signs of hesitation and of half-measures. I am
sure that the effect of _Jael_ would not in the least diminish (it would
rather be intensified), if we were spared the inevitable
storm-pyrotechnics. The verses in themselves imply the idea of battle
and tempest, and Miss Kiper in the title rôle has the voice and diction
to serve the purpose.
K.
Harold Bauer in Chicago
HERMAN SCHUCHERT
There yet remain certain pianists and other opinionated craftsmen in
music who will say, when approached on the subject of Harold Bauer’s
piano playing: “Oh, yes; but you know Bauer is—well, shall we say?—a
monotonist. His playing is all of one style—beautiful tone, to be sure;
but, oh, such a sameness! He shades beautifully—yes, surely, but it’s
all too colorless.” And it probably never occurs to these critics that a
pianist who uses an entirely beautiful tone, who shades delicately, and
who is definitely individual in his playing, might not seem monotonous
to the admirers of true piano-artistry. And it is quite certain that
these carpers failed to attend Bauer’s last Sunday afternoon recital in
Orchestra Hall, when and where the above composite quotation was put to
shame.
The program was headed by that most unequal set of little
pieces—interesting, dull, graceful, and often clumsy:—Brahm’s Waltzes.
The Brahms faddists may sacrifice all the credit to their idol, but he
deserves only a part of it; for Bauer made these waltzes float as
lightly and pleasantly as the material permitted, and invested them with
all possible contrast and pulse. There was no lack of what pianists call
“point,” either in this opening number or in the remainder of the
program; and it is this quality of “point,” which is the season more in
evidence in Bauer’s work than ever before, which makes the carpers
appear rather uninformed. “Point” is nothing mysterious; it means
definite and crisp rhythm, brightness of tone designed to contrast with
richness and warmth of tone, sharp shadings artistically brought out,
and a deeply satisfying precision in tempi. This man’s work deserves
this inclusive term. Whatever lack there might have been in seasons past
(there has been a fragile foundation for the criticism mentioned at the
beginning of this appreciation, when, as late as three years ago, his
tonal ideals apparently did not include great brilliance), this Sunday
recital went far to establish the fact that Bauer has a happy variety of
tone-colors at his command, which variety includes no little brilliance.
Sheer facility and digital expertness have never seemed to occupy the
attention of this master-pianist, except insofar as such facility and
expertness would give expression to purely musical content; and now if
the carpers continue to shrug their shoulders at the praise of Bauer, it
will be because they miss the usual bombast and key-swatting of esteemed
mediocrity, and certainly not because of any inadequacy of technic for
musical purposes, or lack of pianistic lustre. No mediocrity of a
technic-worshipper or piano-eater ever gave a performance of Beethoven’s
Opus 3 that could compare with that of Bauer on Sunday afternoon; for he
then projected a deeply significant art, particularly in the first
movement of the sonata, which must be inexplicable in words. Schumann’s
_Scenes from Childhood_ were given a highly imaginative treatment—a
treatment which penetrated even the academics. And Schumann’s
Toccata—that battered veteran of many an ivory struggle—ceased for once
to be an endurance stunt, and hummed forth (as the composer hoped and
indicated) as a strangely beautiful bit of music. Bauer’s playing of
this will remain long in the awakened music-receptacles. So will his
interpretation of his own arrangement of César Franck’s Prelude, Choral,
and Fugue—which are three movements vieing with each other for supreme
religious solidity—and his nonchalant handling of the tricky D-flat
Study of Liszt. The Chopin Scherzo in C-sharp minor closed a program
which would surely have been sombre and sleepy under the fingers of any
less than a pianistic musician. In certain splendid moments Bauer seems
like a high priest performing a tonal miracle, or like a potent magician
weaving curious and impossible dream-fabrics. And, with all pleasant
fancies put aside, he is an exponent of modern pianism at its best.
In music a light blue is like a flute, a darker blue a ’cello, a
still darker a thunderous double bass; and the darkest blue of
all—an organ.—_Kandinsky._
Color is a power which directly influences the soul. Color is the
key-board, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with
many strings. The artist is the hand which plays, touching one
key or another, to cause vibrations of the soul.—_Kandinsky._
A Ferrer School in Chicago
DR. RUDOLF VON LIEBICH
The Havasupai Indian mother says: “I must not beat my boy. If I do, I
will break his will.” Unlike her pale-faced friends, she is not obsessed
with the mania for governing. We, in our insane subservience to
traditions, continue to train our children to obey. Slaves they shall
be; that is the slogan. We no longer whip men; we whip children only
because they are weaker than we are. So, a child is the slave in
successive stages of home, church, school, government, and either boss
or “superior officer.” Could Europe be at war unless its men were made
molluscous by discipline and their mental paralysis completed through
_respectability_?
Children are born materialists, poets, and joy-worshippers. We tame them
and they grow up philistines, supernaturalists, and respectable
believers in the disinterested love of dullness. Instead of teaching
them theories and superstitions, we should tell them that they are parts
of the universe; that the carbon, iron, sulphur, phosphorus, oxygen,
hydrogen, nitrogen, the zero-gases, and the dozen other elements of
which our bodies are made are also the main elements of sun, moon, and
stars,—of the whole material universe. The next step might be to show
the child, through actual experiments, the known physical and chemical
properties of these elements, thus preparing its mind for the greatest
of all poetries—the poetry of evolution. These things need but be shown,
not laboriously learned by rote; they need only to be told, not to be
taught; and if the child’s healthy inquisitiveness has not been ruined
by repression, it will delight in feeling the pull of the magnet; in
watching the electric spark that unites oxygen and hydrogen into water;
in drawing the marvelous beauties of snow flakes and other crystal
formations; in watching and aiding the growth of birds, beasts, flowers,
or fruits; in the thrill of blended voices or in other forms of
voluntary co-operation. All these things, all the realities need but be
shown to delight the untainted mind of childhood; while daily free
association with other children will soon give to each child a practical
working knowledge of ethics (quite impossible to attain under the
boss-system of the government schoolmistress) from which, as a basis,
the errors of our economic and social systems can be pointed out and
discussed. In the minds and hearts of these free children, ideals can
then be formulated which will tend toward their development into the
free society of the future, whose coming their own efforts will hasten.
For it is only through the successive enslavement of each succeeding
generation that governments can retain their powers.
Such should be some of the activities of a Ferrer or Modern School, free
from the noxious taint of authority, superstition, or respectability. If
we cannot do better let us begin, at least, with a Sunday school.
However that may be, and whatever the future of such a school, all those
interested in establishing it are cordially invited to communicate with
the editor of THE LITTLE REVIEW, with William Thurston Brown, 1125 N.
Hoyne Ave., with Anthony Udell, 817½ N. Clark St., or with the writer,
1240 Morse Ave.
The Old Spirit and the New Ways in Art
WILLIAM SAPHIER
Full of visions and ideals and eager to express them in their own way, a
group of striving young painters and sculptors in this city is working
industriously without regard for applause from either the crowd or the
few. Just as there are religious and social rebels—people who refuse to
accept the old dogmas and habits merely because they were successful at
a certain time and fit for a certain period in human history—these young
artists refuse to adopt methods and views of the past for the purpose of
expressing their views on modern subjects.
In striving to realize the new idea in form and color they are of
necessity passing through that period in which the intellect discerns
and style is chosen—the period of experiment. And if they do not achieve
as great a success as the old masters, they certainly work in the spirit
of a Monet or a Rembrandt. We print this month reproductions of work
done by four of these artists. They have nothing in common except that
they are all trying to express themselves in their own way.
Jerome S. Blum, the oldest and best known of the group, is an
extraordinary painter of the usual. He does not rely on a dramatic
subject, or on a sensational technic, to arouse interest in his work. It
is his unusual way of looking at people and nature, and his vigorous and
interesting color schemes, that have made his paintings notable. Mr.
Blum is far too imaginative to be natural, far too poetic to be “real.”
All his work strikes one as a spontaneous expression of almost childish
delight in color.
_The Orator_ is the work of Stanislaw Szukalski, a boy of nineteen, who
comes from Russian Poland. He studied at the Krakau Academy, where he
received two gold medals and five other prizes. On entering his studio
your amazement grows as you wander from one thought or emotion to
another in plaster. Each one grips and holds you vigorously.
_Impressions of Praying_, _Sleeping_, _Hurling_, and _Bondage_, a few
very interesting portraits of Max Krammer and Professor Chiio, and also
a full figure of Victor Hugo tell of the spiritual insight of this young
sculptor—the unexpected in every one. His works are full of life and
imagination. The fact that some of our able nonentities have
characterized them as caricatures proves how narrow-minded some of our
sculptors are today.
C. Raymond Johnson is only twenty-three years old, and in all the work
he has done so far purity, brilliance of color and spaciousness
predominate. It is the suggestion in his present work of great
possibilities in the near future that makes them interesting. The one in
this issue shows the highly decorative effects of his ideas. Besides
painting Mr. Johnson finds time to experiment with colored lighting and
the making of most original posters for the Chicago Little Theatre.
Christian Abrahamsen, the young and independent portrait painter, has
done some very remarkable work. His portraits are the result of
penetrating study of his subject and adaptation on the part of the
painter to the moods of the sitter. He varies his style with his
subject. His portrait of Michael Murphy sparkles with life and vigor and
holds your attention as few of the portraits of older painters can.
Beside portraits Mr. Abrahamsen paints sunny landscapes in the open air
and under clear skies. The large canvas filled with the freshness,
strength, and beauty of a clearing in northern Wisconsin, reproduced in
this issue of THE LITTLE REVIEW, represents some of the work done last
summer.
[Illustration: JEROME S. BLUM, _The Trickster_.]
[Illustration: STANISLAW SZUKALSKI, _The Orator._]
[Illustration: C. RAYMOND JOHNSON.]
[Illustration: CHRISTIAN ABRAHAMSEN, _A Clearing in Northern
Wisconsin._]
To name is to destroy. To suggest is to create.—_Stéphane
Mallarmé._
Art is a form of exaggeration, and selection, which is the very
spirit of art, is nothing more than an intensified ode of
over-emphasis.—_Oscar Wilde._
Book Discussion
Vachel Lindsay’s Books
_The Congo and Other Poems_, by Vachel Lindsay. [The Macmillan
Company, New York.]
It is not too much to say that many of us are watching Vachel Lindsay
with the undisguised hope in our hearts that he may yet prove to be the
“Great American Poet.” He has come so fast and far on the road to art
and sanity since the early days when he drew minute, and seemingly
pathological, maps of the territories of heaven, and grinning grotesques
of the Demon Rum! He has carved his own way with so huge and careless a
hand! And his work, in spite of its strangeness, is so deeply rooted in
the crude but stirring consciousness that is America to-day! Surely
there is ground for hope.
Like every artist who creates a new form, Mr. Lindsay has had to educate
his public. And the task is not by any means accomplished yet. We have
had to overcome an instinctive feeling that poetry should be dignified,
and to look the fact in the face that it must first of all be telling,
and that in cases where these two elements conflict, dignity is a
secondary consideration. We have been rudely jostled out of our academic
position that poetry must be condensed, poignant, and literary, and we
have been shown that by going back to the primitive conception—which
included as the principal element the half-chant of the bard—true poetry
may be diffuse, full of endless iterations and strangely impassioned
over crude and even external objects. So much we have learned, and after
the first shock of surprise, learned gladly. It has opened to us whole
new reaches of enjoyment. We hope sincerely that we are not yet done
with Mr. Lindsay’s educative process.
_The Congo_ is the title poem of his new volume. To describe the poem
adequately would require almost as much space as the nine pages it
occupies. So it must suffice to say that it is perilously near great
poetry, broad in sweep, imaginative, full of fire and color,
psychological—and very strange. Much in the same vein are _The Firemen’s
Ball_ and _The Santa Fe Trail_, which appeared originally in _Poetry_.
Several of the poems in this volume, among them _Darling Daughter of
Babylon_ and _I Went Down Into the Desert_, are already familiar to
readers of THE LITTLE REVIEW, as they were first published in the June
number. The volume contains also a delightful section of poems for
children, and a group dealing with the present European war.
Both _The Congo_ and Mr. Lindsay’s earlier volume, _General Booth Enters
Heaven_, are extraordinarily interesting books. Every mind which is
truly alive to-day should know at least one of them.
_Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty_, by Nicholas
Vachel Lindsay.
[Mitchell Kennerley, New York.]
Almost simultaneously with _The Congo_ has appeared a prose volume by
Mr. Lindsay, _Adventures while Preaching the Gospel of Beauty_. It is an
account, in the form of a diary, of a walk through Missouri and Kansas,
and into Colorado. Its value is almost purely personal. To anyone who is
interested in Mr. Lindsay’s striking personality, this book will serve
as a spiritual Baedeker. As literature its value is comparatively
slight. It contains, however, one of his most striking poems, _The
Kallyope Yell_, which appeared originally in _The Forum_. This alone is
worth the price of the volume.
EUNICE TIETJENS.
Pumpernickel Philosophy
_The Man of Genius_, by Herman Tuerck. [The Macmillan Company, New
York.]
Professor Tuerck, a very normal German, has been writing critical essays
since the end of the eighties, and he has not changed a bit—the same
good old idealist of the sissy category. In this book he makes a study
of Genius, and comes to the magnificent conclusion that the chief
characteristics of a genius must be goodliness, loving kindness,
respect, and loyalty to existing institutions, obedience to the law,
objectivity, and truth. Naturally, those who do not possess these
delicacies are villains. The professor demonstrates two groups of
thinkers, one in angelic white, the other in devilish black. Among the
first, the real geniuses, we find beside Christ, Buddha, Shakespeare,
Goethe, Byron, also Alexander, Cæsar, and Napoleon. But oh, Mr. Wilson,
what German atrocities! Mr. Tuerck mercilessly disfigures his victims
and pastes upon them with his saliva accurate, uniform labels. In
_Hamlet_, in _Faust_, in _Manfred_, in the mentioned law-givers and
warriors, the author manages to discover goody-goody traits of exemplary
burghers. In the Black Gallery we face the lugubrious sinners—Stirner,
Nietzsche, and Ibsen. “Woe to him who follows these modern antisophers!”
cries Mr. Tuerck, for they are enemies of humanity, of the state, of
society, of reality, of truth, for they are selfish and subjective. “The
Devil, the Father of Lies, is great and Friedrich Nietzsche is his
prophet.”
A word of reassurance for Mr. Thomas Hardy. This Sauerkraut-gem, _The
Man of Genius_, has had _seven_ editions in Germany, and has aroused
wide enthusiasm there, as witnessed by the numerous press-notices
exaltingly praising the great idealist Tuerck, written by professors,
Geheimraths, Hofraths, catholics, protestants, and even by socialists!
Now, pray, ought there be any fear for the Nietzscheanization of the
Fatherland?
K.
Kilmer’s Confession
_Trees, and Other Poems_, by Joyce Kilmer. [George H. Doran Company,
New York.]
Mr. Kilmer furnishes the following prose account of his convictions: “I
am catholic in my tastes and Catholic in religion, am socially a
democrat and politically a Democrat. I am a special writer on the staff
of the _New York Times Sunday Magazine_, the _Times Review of Books_ and
the _Literary Digest_. I am bored by Feminism, Futurism, Free Love.”
This is perhaps a more succinct expression of his facility of faith than
can be found in his verse. Readers should thank him for it, because it
renders unnecessary any further attempt to discover what he believes.
At the opening of the volume, Mr. Kilmer quotes the following stanza
from Coventry Patmore:
Mine is no horse with wings, to gain
The region of the Spheral chime
He does but drag a rumbling wain,
Cheered by the coupled bells of rhyme.
This, too, is useful, because it frankly warns us against looking in his
verse for anything which is not there.
Within his self-imposed limitations, Mr. Kilmer has done good work. The
amusing couplets about _Servant Girl and Grocer’s Boy_ have pleased
countless newspaper readers, _The Twelve-Forty-Five_ is a graphic
description of the feeling produced by a late suburban train, _To a
Young Poet Who Killed Himself_ is an obvious rebuke to the small-hearted
versifier, and _Old Poets_ is a comfortable exposition of the philosophy
of comfort. The religious poems will probably not be moving to anyone
who does not share Mr. Kilmer’s creed.
Mr. Kilmer’s work is glossy with a simplicity more easy-going than
profound. Though he is young himself, he obviously does not sympathize
with young poets, of whom he writes:
There is no peace to be taken
With poets who are young,
For they worry about the wars to be fought
And the songs that must be sung.
His ideal is that of the “old poet”:—
But the old man knows that he’s in his chair
And that God’s on His throne in the sky.
So he sits by his fire in comfort
And he lets the world spin by.
G. S.
Hilarious Iconoclasm
_Art_, by Clive Bell. [Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York.]
It is an exquisite pleasure to disagree with Clive Bell! Like a fierce
Hun he whirls through the art galleries of Europe, and smashes all
venerated masterpieces into a heap of rubbish, sparing but the Byzantine
Primitives and some of the Post-Impressionists. Between these two epochs
he sees a hideous gap; not more than one in a hundred of the works
produced between 1450 and 1850 is he willing to accept as a work of art.
It naturally hurts to witness the slaughter of your old friends, such as
Michelangelo, Velasquez, Whistler; but our Attila performs his massacre
so beautifully, with such a charming sense of humor, that you cannot
help admiring the paradoxical feats. What but a good-humored smile will
provoke in you such a prank, e. g.: “Nietzsche’s preposterous nonsense
knocked the bottom out of nonsense more preposterous and far more vile”?
The best part of it is the fact that the author does not attempt to
convince you in anything, for neither is he convinced in the
infallibility of his hypotheses. The book is a relucent gem among the
recent dull and heavy works of art.
Comments of an Idler on Three New Books
_Eris: A Dramatic Allegory_, by Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff (Moffatt,
Yard), is, we are told on the cover, “full of vigorous enthusiasm, and
embodies the philosophy of Henri Bergson,” to whom on a flyleaf the book
is duly dedicated. It is in careful rhythmic blank verse; a dialogue,
principally, between “Man” and “Thought,” with “Past” and “Future” now
and then interrupting. The allegory is prefaced by a portrait of the
author by Helleu; we trust an unfair one. A strangely bovine expression
greets us from under a plumed black hat and from over shoulders and arms
drawn like a Goops. Helleu made lovely things once; why this?
In _Eris_ we find Man hurling defiance at Thought, who taunts him, “You
cannot vanquish me while Life endures.” Discussion between them on this
point covers some forty pages of melodious argument. Six of these (and
they are consecutive) form a fairly comprehensive guide-book to a trip
around the world, as Man, distracted, stops off at many well-known
points seeking to escape pursuing Thought.
In Venice I spread sail with Capulet
And plied an oar across the green lagoons
The soft air vibrant with the minstrels’ song:
I dreamed in Pisa’s woodland and the gulf
Of Lerici, where once again I heard
The lyrich echo of pure Shelley’s voice.
On Pæstum’s glory and on Dougga’s mount
I studied metope and fluted frieze—
And so on. “Man” finally reaches Mount Parnassus—
The mighty throne of Zeus
Hides like a cloud-veiled mist within the heavens;
I am so near divinity it seems
That I could tread the pathway of the stars;
but “Thought” comes hurrying along, two pages later. Man cries to him
desperately:
Envelope me within the cosmic heart
Freed of my separate hideous entity,
Blown with the wingéd dust from whence I came!
They struggle together, and Man plunges over the cliff. Thought,
“assuming a sudden intenser magnitude, rises out of the dust of Man”
(the stage directions seem a little confused here) and shouts:
At last to conquer after æons of strife—
The reeling stars man’s silent sepulchre.
There are graceful lines and pictures, occasionally a good simile.
Technically the lines are too smooth, too neatly finished, each in its
little five-iambic jacket. The lyrics lack singing quality. There is a
tedious list, two pages, of famous ladies—Helen, Sappho, Salammbo, from
Eve to the Virgin Mary—as Man cries to Past, “What woman are you in
disguise?” Swinburne did this gorgeously somewhere, making each speak;
but these do not—they do not even live.
Totally different is my second volume of verse—_The Sea is Kind_, by T.
Sturge Moore (Houghton Mifflin). A letter from the publishers suggests
that “like Noyes and Masefield, T. Sturge Moore may have a message to
American lovers of poetry.” I am an American lover of poetry and an
eager one; therefore, I was hopeful; but I am oppressed by the
obligation of doing justice to the initial poem in the book, viz.: _The
Sea is Kind_, because I cannot tell at all what it is about. Several
people, by name Evarne and Plexaura, females, and Menaleas and Eucritos,
males, seem to be talking high talk by the edge of the sea—about ships
and storms and nymphs and kindred things. Evarne speaks at great length
in rough pentameters, quoting others more obscure, if possible, than
herself.
The handsome scowler smiled.
Then with a royal gesture of content
Addressed our wonder.
* * * * *
“But devastation from mine inroads stretches
“Across Euphrates further than they dare.
“The industrious Ninevite, the huckster grey
“With watching scored tale lengthen down his wall
“Beneath his hatred Median debtor’s name,
“Dread me, and hang near casement, over door,
“To guard each southward-facing aperture,
“Rude effigies smaller than this of me.—
“Charm bootless ’gainst my veering pillared dust
“Which chokes each sluice in vainly watered gardens,
“Dessicates the velvet prudency of roses,
“And leaves green gummy tendrils like to naught
“But ravelled dry and dusty ends of cord”;
and so on for a long, long while. It may be wonderful; I dare say it is.
The last two-thirds of the volume is taken up with short poems arranged
in groups addressed to various persons—Tagore, Yeats, and Moore, among
them. There is more clarity here. One discerns an autobiographic
wistfulness in these stanzas entitled: _A Poet in the Spring Regrets
Having Wed So Late in Life_.
Some things, that we shall never know,
Are eloquent today,
Belittling our experience, though
We loved and were gay:
For those, whose younger hands are free
With a body not their own,
Taste delicacies of intimacy
Which we have not known.
Primrose, narcissus, daffodil,
In sudden April plenty,
Flourish as tender fancies thrill
Spouses at twenty!
There seems something strangely improper about this, considering the
strict propriety of the theme.
One group of two is addressed to Charles Ricketts. _The Serpent_ begins
Hail Pytho; thou lithe length of gleaming plates!
and _The Panther_ thus:
Consider now the Panther, such a beast.
One question addressed to the Panther is:
Dost, cloyed by rich meats spicy as the south,
Expose thy fevered palate to the cool,
Which, like snow melting in an emperor’s mouth,
Helps make excess thy life’s ironic rule?
Consider now Sturge Moore, our bewilderment in trying to ascertain what
you wish us to think about such things as these, and consider too a
transposition of the first line of a well-known poem about a Tiger, to
read, “Consider now the Tiger.”
The group to Yeats has one called _The Phantom of a Rose_. An
explanatory footnote tells us that a girl returning from a ball drops a
rose from her bosom and dreams that a youth, the perfect emanation of
the flower, rises and invites her to dance.
She ached to rise, she yearned to speak,
She strove to smile, but proved too weak;
As one in quicksand neck-deep,
Wild with the will, has no power to leap;
Her limbs like a sunken ferry-boat
Lay logged with sleep, and could not float.
She had danced too often at the ball,
She had fluttered, nodded, and smiled too much.
Tears formed in her heart: they did not fall.
* * * * *
He rose, and danced a visible song;
With rhythmic gesture he contended
Against her trance; and proved so strong
That the grapes of his thought wore the bloom of his mood,
While her soul tasted and understood.
“Her limbs like a sunken ferry-boat.” A happy simile! We recognize the
sensation.
In _Judith_, one of the group to Moore, a vigorous note is sounded. This
is good, and maybe the rest is too; I do not know. It rolls above my
head.
_The Spirit of Life_, a series of nine essays by Mowry Saben (Mitchell
Kennerley), is the kind of book that makes me savagely controversial and
then cross for heeding it at all. Its platitudinous optimism meanders
along through some two hundred and fifty pages under various chapter
headings: Nature, Morals, Sex, Heroes, etc. The first sentence is:
“There are many great Truths that can be expressed only by means of
paradox”; and the last, “If life means nothing, if the universe means
nothing, then reform is only an illusory word, which has come to confuse
us upon the highway of Despair; but if in our highest ideals we may find
the real meaning of our personal lines, because they are the
quintessence of the spiritual universe, whose avatars we should be,
there is nothing too glorious for the heart of man to conceive.” All in
between is just like that.
All persons, and there are many, who are determined willy nilly to
believe the world a nice place; who, confronted with the unlovely, the
stark, gaping and horrid, cast down their eyes exclaiming “It is not
there,” will take solid comfort in _The Spirit of Life_. It is like the
millions of sermons droned out one day in seven all over the land to
patient folk who no longer know why they come nor why they stay to hear.
But this is a review, not a diatribe—so “consider now” the Spirit.
The first essay is called _Nature_. It quotes freely from Peter Bell,
and also reprints something about tongues in trees and sermons in
stones. Turning the leaves we catch the names of Burroughs, Whitman, and
Thoreau. Toward the end is this:
Everything exists for him who is great enough to envisage it. The
life that now is reveals man as the crowning glory of Nature, the
goal of evolution. In the end the earth does but shelter our
bones, not our thoughts and aspirations.
Skipping the rest, we turn quickly to _Sex_, hoping something from the
vitality of the theme, and come to this:
To attack Sex as one of the joys of life would be foolish and
deservedly futile.... I am certain that sex is a sweetener of the
cup of life, but one must not therefore infer that there can
never be too much sweetening, for there can be, even to the point
of danger from spiritual diabetes.
Immortal phrase, “Spiritual diabetes.” Several pages of this essay are
devoted to episodes in the life of insects, all pointing a painful
lesson to man:
... and there are spiders doomed to be eaten by the female as
soon as they have demonstrated their masculinity. Thus are we
taught how little permanence is possessed by an organization
which yields only the instinct of passionate desire for sex.
Here is boldness,—
I cannot indorse the ascetic ideal that holds the love of man for
woman to be but a snare for the spirit. The great poetry of Dante
alone is sufficient to refute so baseless a claim.
Why quote further? There are indubitably certain good things in the
book, but they are by Goethe, Carlyle, Emerson, Dante, Shakespeare,
Whitman, et al.
A. M.
An Unacademic Literary Survey
_Modern English Literature_: From Chaucer to the Present Day, by G.
H. Mair. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]
Good histories of English literature are rare, and Mr. Mair’s book
should accordingly be given a warm welcome, for it combines brevity with
comprehensiveness of treatment in a very unusual manner. Mr. Mair not
only writes well and knows his subject, but he seems instinctively to
know what his readers will want—and he supplies it.
For instance, we do not remember that popular histories of English
literature bother to tell such a detail as how the chronological order
of Shakespeare’s plays is determined, but Mr. Mair’s telling of that
will show the layman just what literary scholarship means, and in
conjunction with his other remarks on our knowledge of Shakespeare it
will rescue the uninformed from the chance of falling into such errors
as the Baconian theory.
The book, however, is not one of higher and textual criticism and
chronology. It is a work of appreciation, and the appreciation is that
of a modern man. It is obvious that Chaucer might be treated in a manner
quite alien to the interests of the man of today who is not a scholar,
but the treatment of his work which ends in joining his hands to those
of Charles Dickens as workers in a kindred quest is one that is well
calculated to persuade even the philistine that Chaucer is a figure of
passable interest to him.
It is the mark of the live man to recognize genius, and the manner in
which Mr. Mair treats the genius of that great poet, John Donne, is in
vivid contrast to the way in which it is usually treated in histories of
English literature. For example:
Very different ... is the closely packed style of Donne, who,
Milton apart, is the greatest English writer of the century,
though his obscurity has kept him out of general reading. No
poetry in English, not even Browning’s, is more difficult to
understand. The obscurity of Donne and Browning proceed from such
similar causes that they are worth examining together. In both,
as in the obscure passages in Shakespeare’s later plays,
obscurity arises not because the poet says too little, but
because he attempts to say too much. He huddles a new thought on
the one before it, before the first has had time to express
itself; he sees things or analyzes emotions so swiftly and subtly
himself that he forgets the slower comprehension of his readers;
he is for analyzing things far deeper than the ordinary mind
commonly can. His wide and curious knowledge finds terms and
likenesses to express his meaning unknown to us; he sees things
from a dozen points of view at once and tumbles a hint of each
separate vision in a heap out on to the page; his restless
intellect finds new and subtler shades of emotion and thought
invisible to other pairs of eyes, and cannot, because speech is
modeled on the average of our intelligences, find words to
express them; he is always trembling on the brink of the
inarticulate. All this applies to both Donne and Browning, and
the comparison could be pushed farther still. Both draw the
knowledge which is the main cause of their obscurity from the
bypaths of mediævalism. Browning’s _Sordello_ is obscure because
he knows too much about mediæval Italian history: Donne’s
_Anniversary_ because he is too deeply read in mediæval
scholasticism and speculation. Both make themselves more
difficult to the reader who is familiar with the poetry of their
contemporaries by the disconcerting freshness of their point of
view. Seventeenth-century love poetry was idyllic and idealist;
Donne’s is passionate and realistic to the point of cynicism. To
read him after reading Browne and Johnson is to have the same
shock as reading Browning after Tennyson. Both poets are salutary
in the strong and biting antidote they bring to sentimentalism in
thought and melodious facility in writing. They are corrective of
lazy thinking and lazy composition.
Another feature in which this book differs from others of its kind is
that the author is not afraid to bring the record down to the work of
his contemporaries, and the struggles of Mr. Shaw with the bourgeois
world, and the era opened by M. J. Synge and the Irish literary
renascence, are here sympathetically dealt with.
L. J.
Overemphasized Purity
_Love’s Legend_, by Fielding Hall. [Henry Holt and Company, New
York.]
With a somewhat overemphasized regard for purity, Fielding Hall
approaches the narration of this honeymoon trip down a Burmese river.
The novel—if such a dissertation on the early marriage state could be
called a novel—is told in rather peculiar fashion, by the man and woman
alternately, at first, and later on with the help of two more people.
The man is prone to burst forth into fairy tales to explain every point
of argument to Lesbia. He tells her of a beautiful princess who was
blindfolded and kept within an enclosed garden that she might never know
the ways of man.
“They told her that the bandage made her see more clearly than if
her eyes were free. For they had painted images upon the inside
of her bandage and told her they were real.”
Silence.
“And she believed it. Then came a Prince. He wooed the Princess
and he won her. So he took her with him out of her garden. They
came into the world and passed into a forest. There they were
quite alone.
“Take off your bandage,” said the Prince. “Look at the world and
me.”
“I am afraid,” she sighed; “the world is evil.”
“It is God’s world,” the Prince replied. “He lives in it.”
“They told me that God lived in Heaven, far off, not here,” she
answered.
“They told you wrong; open and you will see.”
“I will not look,” she said, “I fear the devil.”
“Your beauty is all cold,” he said, “your heart beats not!”
“What is a heart?” she asked.
“That which gives life,” he answered; “my heart beats strongly
and it longs for an answer. You have a heart as strong maybe as
mine. But it is sealed. Will you not let me loose it?”
“I am afraid,” she answered.
“Then I will tell you what he did. He held the Princess in his
arms all despite herself and tore the bandage from her eyes.”
... “Did she let him do it?”
“She heard his voice and all despite herself she let him do his
will.”
Mr. Hall voices these inanities with the appalling conceit of one who
rushes in where even the best of writers tread with circumspection. And
the worst of it is, that his rash feet have carried him nowhere, except,
perhaps, into a limelight that is likely to prove embarrassing.
W. T. HOLLINGSWORTH.
Sentence Reviews
_Russia: The Country of Extremes_, by N. Jarintzoff. [Henry Holt & Co.,
New York.] A mosaic of essays on various aspects of Russian life, some
of them of tremendous interest. Of particular importance are the
chapters on “Studentchestvo” and on “Agents Provocateurs,” which deal
with the political movements of the country. Although the book lacks
unity, the English reader will find in it a wealth of information and a
helpful interpretation of Russian misty reality. Reproductions from
several great Russian paintings are excellent.
_New Songs of Zion_; a Zionist Anthology, edited by S. Roth, New York.
If this anthology was intended to serve as an echo of the Zionist
movement, it will appear as a _testimonia pauperitatis_. The lofty ideal
of forming a cultural center in Palestine for the Wandering Jew is very
pallidly reflected in the naive verses of American boys and girls.
Israel Zangwill is also represented with a few shallow effusions to the
astonishment of those who admire his sense of humor. The translations
from _Byalik_ are tolerable, and I heartily recommend the English reader
to get acquainted through them with one of the greatest living poets who
is known only to readers of Hebrew.
_The Two Great Art Epochs_, by Emma Louise Parry. [A. C. McClurg &
Company, Chicago.] Complete and instructive as a text-book for the
history of art from earliest Egypt down to the decline of Renaissance—if
there is still need for such text-books. The wretchedness of the
reproductions is irritating.
_Changing Russia_, by Stephen Graham. [John Lane Company, New York.]
Sentimental observations of a poetic tramp who bewails the inevitable
transformation of patriarchal, agricultural Russia into a capitalistic
state. Excellent descriptions of the picturesque shore of the Black Sea;
interesting, though often erroneous, notes on the “Intelligentzia.” Mr.
Graham has been religiously tramping the globe for many years, and his
love for nature and primitive life is manifest in every book of his.
_Bellamy_, by Elinor Mordaunt. [John Lane Company, New York.] Cleverly
written, this chronicle of Walter Bellamy, a dynamic English obviosity,
exploiter of silk pajamas, exhibits a man who is sufficiently honest to
devote his life to himself.
_Hebrew and Babylonian Traditions_, by Morris Jastron. [Charles
Scribner’s Sons, New York.] An exhaustive, cool, cautious treatment of
the much-polemised question as to the primacy of one or the other of the
two ancient civilizations. Of great value to the student of comparative
religion.
_The Rise of the Working Class_, by Algernon Sidney Crapsey. [The
Century Company, New York.] An optimistic book by an ex-clergyman. Many
things are cited as working class gains and benefits which that class
would willingly reject. As appendix, there is a long panegyric of that
mountebank, Lloyd George, in which he is hailed as a social and economic
savior of the “People.”
_American Labor Unions_, by a Member. By Helen Marot. [Henry Holt &
Company, New York.] The first book on the American labor movement which
takes tolerant and detailed notice of its later developments. The new
Syndicalist tendency in the American Federation of Labor and the rise
and growth of the Industrial Workers of the World are both discussed, as
are also the much disputed questions of political action, violence, and
sabotage. A book that merits the study of those who believe there is no
other way of remedying economic conditions except through the periodical
dropping of a paper ballot through a slit.
_Life’s Lure_, by John G. Niehardt. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.] A
novel of Western mining life which has the same note of virile realism
as has the very worthy verse of the same author. A healthy contrast to
the usual Western compound of Deadwood Dick and puling sentimentality.
One of the best pieces of red-blooded stuff that has recently been
written. Jack London had better look to his laurels.
_Change_, by J. O. Francis. [Doubleday, Page & Company, New York.] A
play to be read. Life here without affection states itself in its own
terms. The timid and the frivolous may read this and have their eyes
opened. Labor’s struggle for freedom is forcefully depicted. The scene
is laid in a little Welsh mining town, and the characters are drawn with
simple charm and beauty. A play that breaths life and truth.
_Everybody’s Birthright_, by Clara E. Laughlin. [Fleming H. Revell
Company, New York.] Miss Laughlin has both sympathy and understanding
for the ideals of young girls. In this little book she makes clever use
of the Jeanne d’Arc story as a means toward helping another Jean to bear
the loss of a twin sister.
_Myths and Legends of the Mississippi Valley and the Great Lakes_, by
Katharine B. Judson. [A. C. McClurg & Co., Chicago.] Here are some old
friends: Hiawatha, Nokomis, and Minnehaha—also Bre’r Rabbit and the Tar
Baby; and some myths of fire, wild rice, and Mondamin the Corn Woman,
which furnish a fascinating comparison with Prometheus and Demeter over
in the Aegean. A careful arrangement of material overcomes in part the
misfortune of fragmentariness.
_The Twenty-Fourth of June_, by Grace S. Richmond. [Doubleday, Page &
Co., New York.] A study of love at first sight—or just before. Rich
Kendrick came into the house by the back door and saw a rose-colored
scarf on the hatrack; but the poor young millionaire had to wait weeks
before meeting its owner, and then months until _Midsummer’s Day_ for
his answer. Incidentally he discovered the charms of work, home and good
women.
_Tansy_, by Tickner Edwardes. [E. P. Dutton & Co., New York.] A charming
story of the Sussex downs, by a man who lives among them. The background
of village characters, of rural incidents, and of the Sussex countryside
is exquisitely done. Tansy Firle is not a Watteau shepherdess—quite the
contrary; she has a compelling personality and a beauty of the sturdy
upland variety.
_La Vie des Lettres_: Collection anthologique et critique de poèmes et
de proven Neuilly, Paris.
The July issue of this important quarterly is both breezy and
instructive. Two exotic poems by the Roumanian, Alexander Macedonski; a
cycle of poems by Nicolas Beaudrien (who was introduced to English
readers by Richard Aldington in the June _Egotist_); a few
dainty-grotesque _Images de la Capitale_, by Carlos Larronde,—they form
what I called the breezy part. Of great charm also are the “ponderous”
features. Among others there is an article by William Berteval on
_Tolstoi et L’Art pour L’Art_; an attempt of a modernist to justify the
Russian’s point of view on art. In its international review the
Quarterly mentions THE LITTLE REVIEW, with a “memento” for the poems of
Nicolas Vachel Lindsay and Arthur Davison Ficke.
The Reader Critic
_Rev. A. D. R., Chicago_:
I earnestly request you to discontinue sending your impertinent
publication to my daughter who had the folly of undiscriminating youth
to fall in the diabolical snare by joining the ungodly family of your
subscribers. As for you, haughty young woman, may the Lord have mercy
upon your sinful soul! Have you thought of the tremendous evil that your
organ brings into American homes, breaking family ties, killing respect
for authorities, sowing venomous seeds of Antichrist-Nietzsche-Foster,
lauding such inhuman villains as Wilde and Verlaine, crowning with
laurels that bloodthirsty Daughter of Babylon, Emma Goldman, and
committing similar atrocities? God hear my prayer and turn your wicked
heart to repentance.
_A. Faun, Paris_:
In one of your issues I read with delight Wilde’s paradox: “There is
nothing sane about the worship of beauty. It is entirely too splendid to
be sane.” I fear you are getting too sane—you, who some time ago invited
us “to watch, in the early morning, a bird with great white wings fly
from the edge of the sea straight up into the rose-colored sun.” In my
illusion I pictured you enthroned in a tower, high above the street and
the crowd, perceiving reality through dim stained glass walls. Alas,
there is evidently an accommodating lift that connects your tower with
the sidewalk. You have become so sane, so logical, so militant in
attacking the obvious.... Oh, Pan and Apollo!
_A Proletarian_:
Glad to see your magazine getting more and more revolutionary and
courageously attacking the rotten capitalistic order. But why not dot
the i’s? Why shrink from discussing economic problems? Why not give us
the real dope? Go ahead, we are with you!
_David Rudin, New York_:
Permit me to voice a different opinion from that expressed by Charles
Ashleigh in his review of Galsworthy’s _The Mob_. It is my contention
that Mr. Galsworthy has sympathetically and powerfully portrayed the
uncompromising idealist, the champion of an unpopular idea in this
virile disrobing of the spangled strumpet Patriotism.
In these stirring times of destruction to appease insatiable kaisers,
czars, kings and the uncrowned masters of despotism _The Mob_ comes as
an opportune declaration of the minority against war, against invasion,
and against “Love of country.”
Stephen More, the type of man whose conscience and sense of justice
cannot realize that “idealism can be out of place,” makes a brave,
aggressive stand against the allied forces of position, friends, love,
and the blind hatred of the despicable mob, armed only with an
unprejudiced, faithful ideal. Such passion and sincerity of purpose
surely should presage victory. The real victory is won at the moment
when More dies for his idea at the hands of the very mob that many years
later erects a monument to him—and worships. They await the next victim
of the crucifix—and it begins again: inflammatory patriotism,
destruction, and a chaotic, purposeless Hell on earth.
_D. G. King, Chicago_:
Your article _To The Innermost_ in the October number is a manly poke
at the snug, smug, dead-alive ones, the mollycoddles, the
got-in-a-rut-can’t-get-out-without-considerable-effort ones, and others
of the won’t-do-and-dare class that this farcical world of ours is
plentifully sprinkled with! It’s the best thing I’ve seen yet from your
militant pen.
“THE RAFT”
BY CONINGSBY DAWSON
Author of “The Garden Without Walls,” “Florence on a
Certain Night,” etc.
“Life at its beginning and its end is bounded by a haunted wood.
When no one is watching, children creep back to it to play with
the fairies and to listen to the angels’ footsteps. As the road
of their journey lengthens, they return more rarely. Remembering
less and less, they build themselves cities of imperative
endeavor. But at night the wood comes marching to their walls,
tall trees moving silently as clouds and little trees treading
softly. The green host halts and calls—in the voice of memory,
poetry, religion, legend or, as the Greeks put it, in the faint
pipes and stampeding feet of Pan.”
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incidentally, a narrative of the most remarkable journey ever
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On Acting
BY BRANDER MATTHEWS
The result of the author’s observation is that there is no art
the principles of which are so little understood (even by
hardened playgoers) as that of acting. And he has tried to
declare some of the elements of the art, illustrating by “apt
anecdote and unhackneyed stories.”
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The Grand Canyon and Other Poems
BY HENRY VAN DYKE
This collection of Dr. van Dyke’s recent verse takes its title
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A FOUNDATION OF USEFUL KNOWLEDGE OF THE HIGHER ANIMALS OF
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_Entirely reset in Four Crown Octavo Volumes; with 16 full-page
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Lovers of Stevenson and his work will discover a new inspiration
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through the South Seas. This material has never been given to the
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husband’s memory where his own diary had fallen in arrears.”
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Notes on Novelists With Some Other Notes
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contemporary novelists. This chapter gives in a short space, as
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The Man Behind the Bars
BY
WINIFRED LOUISE TAYLOR
Miss Taylor has for many years devoted her life to the study of
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Artist and Public and Other Essays on Art Subjects
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and the essential interest of every comment and suggestion,
account for an altogether exceptional success that his book on
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will be repeated with this volume.
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MEMORIES
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and remained with him through life.
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In Dickens’s London
BY F. HOPKINSON SMITH
_With 24 full-page illustrations from the author’s drawings
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Charles Dickens himself, but also those used by him as scenes in
his novels and familiar through them in connection with Alfred
Jingle, Nancy, Bob Sawyer, Sam Weller, Quilp, The Marchioness,
Mr. Pickwick, Mr. and Mrs. Micawber, and so on, in the company of
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A Diary of James Gallatin in Europe
FROM THE AMERICAN PEACE THROUGH THE Downfall of Napoleon
and the Following YEARS.
This journal of the son and secretary of Albert Gallatin, who
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to England, 1826-27, is at least _one_ of the most entertaining
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CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Fifth Avenue at 48th Street, New York
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SWORD BLADES _and_ POPPY SEED
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Author of “A DOME OF MANY-COLOURED GLASS,” Etc.
_In “The Boston Herald” Josephine Preston Peabody writes of
this unusual book_:
“First, last and all inclusive in Miss Amy Lowell’s poetic
equipment is vitality enough to float the work of half a score of
minor poets.... Against the multitudinous array of daily verse
our times produce ... this volume utters itself with a range and
brilliancy wholly remarkable.... A wealth of subtleties and
sympathies, gorgeously wrought, full of macabre effects (as many
of the poems are) and brilliantly worked out ... personally I
cannot see that Miss Lowell’s use of unrhymed vers libre has been
surpassed in English. This breadth and ardor run through the
whole fabric of the subject matter.... Here is the fairly
Dionysiac revelry of a tireless workman. With an honesty as whole
as anything in literature she hails any and all experience as
stuff for poetry. The things of splendor she has made she will
hardly outdo in their kind.”
_Price $1.25 net. At all bookstores._
PUBLISHED
BY
64-66 5th Avenue
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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
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THE EAST I KNOW
_Translated into English by_ TERESEA FRANCES _and_ WILLIAM
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Press
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NEW HAVEN,
CONN.
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NEW YORK
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Paul Claudel was for many years in the French Government Service
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of his “La Connaissance de l’Est.” It is a series of word
pictures of life in the Far East written by a poet whose
individuality and originality are bound to make a profound
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readers. The translators have captured with complete success the
author’s exquisitely delicate feeling for words which give the
color and soul of the East with poetic modulation yet
unmistakable truthfulness.
This is the first of M. Claudel’s work to appear in English and
is expressly authorized by him.
_8vo. Cloth binding. 199 pages. Price $1.50 net postpaid._
By William Rose Benét
THE FALCONER OF GOD
AND OTHER POEMS
Mr. Benét’s sensitive appreciation of human interest, and his
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of the Century, Scribner’s, Harper’s, The Outlook, The
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his poetry.
The present volume is a collection of virile and impressive poems
enhanced by the fantastic color and charm which Mr. Benét has
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especial interest in the present European crisis, reflecting as
they do the spirit of the Franco-German War of 1870.
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These may be had from booksellers or from the publisher upon
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Essays Political and Historical
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The True Ulysses S. Grant
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Heroes and Heroines of Fiction
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Shakspere and Sir Walter Ralegh
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Buffalo Bill and the Overland Trail
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The Cuckoo Clock
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LONDON
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Publishers J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY Philadelphia
HAROLD
BAUER
Recognized throughout the world as one of the greatest pianists
of all times, writes of the
Mason &
Hamlin
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(Signed) Harold Bauer
Mason & Hamlin Pianos for sale only at the warerooms of the
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_READERS of The Little Review will, we think, be interested in
the following selected list of new books._
The House of the Dawn
By MARAH ELLIS RYAN
Exquisite beauty of style, rich descriptive passages, so filled
with melody that they read like wonderful prose poems, mark this
brilliant tale of Spanish Mexico by Marah Ellis Ryan.
Essentially, however, is it a romance—a romance of unusual
quality—of young love and courage. The love of one noble mind for
another. The courage, born of high principle that dares all for
freedom and righteousness. _Illustrated by Hanson Booth. Crown
8vo._
Net $1.35
Indian Blankets and Their Makers
By GEORGE WHARTON JAMES
One of the most interesting artistic expressions of native
American life is the Indian blanket. The present volume, written
by an expert on Indian life and art, and beautifully and
faithfully illustrated, is a full and adequate guide to the whole
of this little known field. Mr. James’ volume should give the
Indian blanket a status among art collectors similar to that of
the Oriental rug. _With color and half-tone illustrations. Large
Crown 8vo. Boxed._
Net $5.00
Golden Poems (India Paper Edition)
By FRANCIS F. BROWNE
It is more than thirty years since the first edition of “Golden
Poems” appeared. Immediate success was at once accorded it, and
every passing year has found this favorite collection of “What is
good in poetry” more firmly established in popular favor.
It has been found worthy of the dignity of a special India paper
edition, suitable alike for a traveling companion, and a
beautiful gift.
_Flexible cloth_ Net $2.75
_Morocco. Red-under-gold edges_ Net $4.00
Playing With Love and The Prologue to Anatol
By ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
“Anatol” has been spoken of as the comedy of Light Love, but
“Liebelei” is its tragedy. If it is not Schnitzler’s ripest
achievement, it is so far his finest play. Had he written nothing
else, his fame would be secure, for there is among modern plays
none with a deeper human note, none with less of false
emotionalism. _12mo._
Net $1.00
Masters of English Literature
By E. W. CHUBB
Professor Chubb’s studies of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton,
Dryden, Swift, Pope, Johnson, Burns, Byron, Shelley, Keats,
Wordsworth, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Carlyle,
Ruskin, Tennyson, and Browning, are marked by the understanding
that comes of deep interest and long study, by independence of
judgment, and vigorous expression. He has chosen his subjects to
illustrate the eight great movements in English Literature, and
the plan of the work, as well as the manner in which it has been
carried out, will commend the volume to all students. The
definite purpose, comprehensive view, searching analysis, and
attractive exposition of the studies will impress all readers.
_12mo._
Net $1.50
Myths and Legends of the Mississippi Valley and the Great
Lakes
By KATHARINE B. JUDSON
The collection includes records made from recitals by members of
the Winnebago, Chitimacha, Wyandot, Biloxi, Ojibwa, Mandan,
Menomini, Ottawa, Cherokee, Choctaw and Knisteneaux Indian
tribes, all well worthy of preservation. It gives in the original
form many of the legends used by Longfellow in “Hiawatha,” and
others as strikingly curious, quaint and poetical. _Small
quarto._
Net $1.50
_A. C. McClurg & Co., PUBLISHERS Chicago_
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For a Lift on the Road to Happiness
_read_
Nancy the Joyous
A Novel of pure Delight
Second Large Edition
Nancy the Joyous
By Edith Stow
“For those who enjoy bright, wholesome fiction,” says The Denver
News, “is recommended ‘Nancy the Joyous.’” Readers are saying the
same. Nancy the Joyous is the object of an unsolicited
reader-campaign of friend-to-friend commendation. Here is a book
whose genuine human heart-appeal—its very simplicity and lack of
artificial climax—touches the reader who likes to _know_ his
fiction people.
_Extra cloth, stamped in gold and blind. Jacket to match. Special
decorations. Frontispiece in full color. 12mo. $1.00 net._
A Fresh, Clean, Worth-While Addition to Current Fiction
Diane of the Green Van
By Leona Dalrymple
An outdoor love story, refreshing in atmosphere and sentiment,
bright and original in theme and style. A captivating romance of
love, laughter, adventure, mystery. The $10,000 prize novel, the
“sort of story no one willingly lays down till the last page is
turned,” says the Philadelphia North American.
_12mo. Four illustrations in colortone by Reginald Birch. Jacket
in color. Cover in gold and blind. $1.35 net._
A Big Book—A Strong Book
The New Mr. Howerson
By Opie Read
Even ardent admirers of Opie Read in the past were hardly
prepared for a work of the force and virility of “The New Mr.
Howerson.” Without a doubt it is his best work. It is a book
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climax and suspense, of vital action and forceful personalities,
linked with those inimitable Read characteristics, whimsicality
and humor. The book will live.
_Standard novel size; cover stamped in gold. Jacket in full
color. 460 pages. $1.35 net._
Will Delight the Children
Tik-Tok of Oz
By L. Frank Baum
In picture and in story an Oz Book to carry on the fame of L.
Frank Baum’s popular series. Tik-Tok of Oz has unique features of
adventure, humor, quaint characters, queer countries, odd
situations. Many new characters in Mr. Baum’s best vein, but
carrying nearly all the old favorites.
Pictures by John R. Neill—46 full-page, 12 of them in full color.
Many special decorations, etc., in black-and-white. The
end-sheets are Maps of the Land of Oz in great detail and real
map colors.
_Other Oz Books:_ _The Land of Oz_, _The Road to Oz_, _Dorothy
and the Wizard in Oz_, _Ozma of Oz_, _The Emerald City of Oz_,
_The Patchwork Girl of Oz_. _All wonderfully illustrated in
color; handsome bindings. Each, $1.25._
Publishers Reilly & Britton Chicago
TWO NOTABLE NEW BOOKS
THE GREAT WAR
_The First Phase_
[FROM THE ASSASSINATION OF THE ARCHDUKE TO THE FALL OF
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AT ALL
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$1.25 net
By FRANK H. SIMONDS
of The New York Evening Sun
This is the first real history of what has actually happened
since the great War began. There have been books a-plenty dealing
with the underlying causes and ambitions, and with the Europe of
July, 1914.
This book is not one of them; it deals specifically with the
first phase of the War—from the murder of the Austrian Archduke
to the fall of Antwerp. It traces the course of the different
armies—English, German, French, Austrian, and Belgian—in language
at once simple, clear, and vigorous; shows you what moves they
have made and why they have made them; by what plan of campaign
each hoped to achieve success and what the measure of that
success has been. There are numerous simple maps specially
prepared to make clearer the military operations.
Frank H. Simonds’ editorial comments on the War, as they have
appeared in The New York Evening Sun, have attracted nation-wide
attention. No one has better succeeded in showing people what the
fighting is all about. Here is his book. The publisher hopes to
follow it later with other volumes dealing with succeeding phases
of the War.
DRIFT AND MASTERY
AN ATTEMPT TO DIAGNOSE THE CURRENT UNREST
AT ALL
BOOKSHOPS
$1.50 net
By WALTER LIPPMANN
Author of “A Preface to Politics”
This is a book at once comprehensive, shrewd, vigorous,
searching, and interesting—with always a saving humor. In the
course of sixteen chapters, Mr. Lippmann discusses practically
all the more important problems of our political, social, and
economic life, and the factors that have brought about that
curious unrest everywhere so noticeable.
In one paper he shows that we are accustomed to methods in
business that we would not for a moment tolerate in politics. In
another he submits Woodrow Wilson to an analysis that seems to
get under the man’s very skin. He analyzes proposed panaceas for
our ills (as well as the ills themselves) and show why they won’t
work. In “A Note on the Woman’s Movement” he explains with
crystal clearness what it is all about.
But Mr. Lippmann is a great deal more than a brilliant
iconoclast—he deals not only with the signs and cause of the
present unrest, but with the order which is emerging from it.
Send for full list of new books
MITCHELL KENNERLEY PUBLISHER NEW YORK
Transcriber’s Notes
Advertisements were collected at the end of the text.
The table of contents on the title page was adjusted in order to reflect
correctly the headings in this issue of THE LITTLE REVIEW.
The four plates belonging to The Old Spirit and the New Ways in Art on
page 55 have been moved directly after the article. They were originally
included pairwise after page 32 and page 48, respectively;
The original spelling was mostly preserved. A few obvious typographical
errors were silently corrected. All other changes are shown here
(before/after):
[p. 33]: (multiple cases)
... the Höllenlarm, the hellish alarum, that men make in life,
that life itself ...
... the Höllenlärm, the hellish alarum, that men make in life,
that life itself ...
[p. 38]:
... impuissance! If we but actually learned Herrenmoral,
master-mortality, that ...
... impuissance! If we but actually learned Herrenmoral,
master-morality, that ...
[p. 38]:
... a Schlavenmoral, a slave-morality. Yes it is true of the
cowardly and inert ...
... a Sclavenmoral, a slave-morality. Yes it is true of the
cowardly and inert ...
[p. 56]:
... CHRISTIAN ABRAHAMSEN, A Clearing in Northern Wiscon ...
... CHRISTIAN ABRAHAMSEN, A Clearing in Northern Wisconsin. ...
[p. 60]:
... paradoxical feats. What but a good-humorer smile will provoke
in you ...
... paradoxical feats. What but a good-humored smile will provoke
in you ...
[p. 60]:
... from under a plued black hat and from over shoulders and arms
drawn ...
... from under a plumed black hat and from over shoulders and
arms drawn ...
[p. 60]:
... like a Goops. Hellen made lovely things once; why this? ...
... like a Goops. Helleu made lovely things once; why this? ...
[p. 61]:
... directions seem a little confused here) and shoutes: ...
... directions seem a little confused here) and shouts: ...
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LITTLE REVIEW, NOVEMBER 1914
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