The Little Review, April 1914 (Vol. 1, No. 2)

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Title: The Little Review, April 1914 (Vol. 1, No. 2)
Author: Various
Language: English
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THE LITTLE REVIEW

_Literature Drama Music Art_

MARGARET C. ANDERSON
EDITOR

APRIL, 1914

"The Germ" 1
Rebellion George Soule 3
Man and Superman George Burman Foster 3
Lines for Two Futurists Arthur Davison Ficke 8
A New Winged Victory Margaret C. Anderson 9
Correspondence:
Two Views of H. G. Wells 12
Rupert Brooke and Whitman 15
More About "The New Note" 16
Sonnet Sara Teasdale 17
Sonnet Eunice Tietjens 18
The Critics' Critic M. H. P. 18
Women and the Life Struggle Clara E. Laughlin 20
"Change" 24
The Poetry of Alice Meynell Llewellyn Jones 25
An Ancient Radical William L. Chenery 28
Equal Suffrage: The First Real Test Henry Blackman Sell 30
Education of Yesterday and Today William Saphier 31
Some Book Reviews 33
New York Letter George Soule 46
William Butler Yeats to American Poets 47
Letters to the Little Review 49
The Best Sellers 55

25 cents a copy

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$2.50 a year

THE LITTLE REVIEW

Vol. I

APRIL, 1914

No. 2

"The Germ"

In 1850 an astounding thing happened in England. A little group of
artists and poets, known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, began the
publication of a magazine. It was to be given over to "thoughts towards
nature in poetry, literature, and art"; and it was called _The Germ_.

The idea was Dante Gabriel Rossetti's, who was then just twenty-two
years old. Thomas Woolner, of the same age, and Holman Hunt and Millais,
both somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty, were dragged willingly
into the plan. William Michael Rossetti, aged nineteen, was made editor;
James Collinson and Frederick George Stephens were added to the four
original P. R. B.'s; John Lucas Tupper, Ford Madox Brown, Walter Howell
Deverell, William Cave Thomas, John Hancock, and Coventry Patmore were
intimately connected with the project; and Christina, then eighteen,
offered her poems for publication therein.

_The Germ_ was published for four months, and then it died. Like all
serious things it could find no immediate audience; like all
revolutionary things it was called juvenile and regarded with shyness;
and like all original and beautiful things it has managed to stay very
much alive. For, in 1899, a limited edition of _The Germ_ in facsimile
was brought out, and William Michael Rossetti wrote an extensive
introduction for it in which he described minutely the whole glorious
undertaking. It is these facsimiles that we have been looking through
with such awe, and which tell such an interesting story.

Here was a league of "unquiet and ambitious young spirits, bent upon
making a fresh start of their own, and a clean sweep of some effete
respectabilities." On the night of December 19, 1849, when the first
issue of the magazine was impending, they met in Dante Rossetti's studio
at 72 Newman Street to discuss a change of title. _The P. R. B. Journal
and Thoughts Towards Nature_ (the "extra-peculiar" suggestion of Dante,
according to his brother) had been discarded, and Mr. Cave Thomas had
drawn up a list of sixty-five possibilities, among them _The Seed_, _The
Scroll_, _The Harbinger_, _First Thoughts_, _The Sower_, _The
Truth-Seeker_, _The Acorn_, and _The Germ_. The last was decided upon
and the first issue came out about the first of January. Seven hundred
copies were printed and about two hundred sold. This wasn't encouraging,
so the second issue was limited to five hundred; but it sold even less
well than the first, and the P. R. B.'s were at the end of their
resources. Then the printing-firm came to the rescue and undertook the
responsibility of two more numbers. The title was changed to _Art and
Poetry, being Thoughts towards Nature, conducted principally by
Artists_; but "all efforts proved useless.... People would not buy _The
Germ_, and would scarcely consent to know of its existence. So the
magazine breathed its last, and its obsequies were conducted in the
strictest privacy."

It did attract some critical attention, however. _The Critic_ wrote: "We
cannot contemplate this young and rising school in art and literature
without the most ardent anticipation of something great to grow from it,
something new and worthy of our age, and we bid them godspeed upon the
path they have adventured." Others remarked that the poetry in _The
Germ_ was all beautiful, "marred by not a few affectations--the genuine
metal, but wanting to be purified from its dross"; "much of it of
extraordinary merit, and equal to anything that any of our known poets
could write, save Tennyson...."

Well--the situation demands a philosopher. We might undertake the rôle
ourselves, except that we're too near the situation, having just started
a magazine with certain high hopes of our own.

On the cover of each issue of _The Germ_ appeared this poem by William
Rossetti, the mastery of which, some one said, would require a Browning
Society's united intellects:

When whoso merely hath a little thought
Will plainly think the thought which is in him--
Not imaging another's bright or dim,
Not mangling with new words what others taught;
When whoso speaks, from having either sought
Or only found,--will speak, not just to skim
A shallow surface with words made and trim,
But in that very speech the matter brought:
Be not too keen to cry--"So this is all!--
A thing I might myself have thought as well,
But would not say it, for it was not worth!"
Ask: "Is this truth?" For is it still to tell
That be the theme a point or the whole earth,
Truth is a circle, perfect, great or small?

Patmore's _The Seasons_, Christina Rossetti's _Dream Land_, Dante's _My
Sister's Sleep_ and _Hand and Soul_, Woolner's _My Beautiful Lady_ and
_Of My Lady in Death_, Tupper's _The Subject in Art_, William Rossetti's
_Her First Season_, and a long review of Clough's _Bothic of
Toper-na-fuosich_ make up the first number. In the others are _The
Blessed Damozel_, Christina's _An End_ and _A Pause of Thought_,
Patmore's _Stars and Moon_, John Orchard's _Dialogue on Art_, and many
other things of value, concluding with a review of Browning's _Christmas
Eve and Easter Day_, in which William Rossetti establishes with
elaborate seriousness, through six pages of solemn and awesome
sentences, that "Browning's style is copious and certainly not other
than appropriate"; that if you _will_ understand him, you shall.

All this came to our mind the other day when some one accused us of
being "juvenile." What hideous stigma was thereby put upon us? The only
grievous thing about juvenility is its unwillingness to be frank; it
usually tries to appear very, very old and very, very wise. _The Germ_
was quite frankly young; otherwise it could not have been so full of
death poetry, for it is youth's most natural affectation to steep itself
in death. But _The Germ_ might have been even more "juvenile" and so
avoided some of the heavy, sumptuous sentences in that Browning review.
It would have gained in readableness without any possible sacrifice of
beauty or truth. In their poetry the Pre-Raphaelites were as simple and
spontaneous as children; in their criticism they were rhetorical. Our
sympathy is somehow very strongly with the spontaneity--whatever dark
juvenile crimes it may be guilty of--in the eyes of those who merely
look but do not see.

Rebellion

GEORGE SOULE

Sing me no song of the wind and rain--
The wind and the rain are better.
I'll swing to the road on the gusty plain
Without any load,
And shatter your fetter.

And when you sing of the strange, bright sea,
I'll leave your dark little singing
For the plunging shore where foam leaps free
And long waves roar
And gulls go winging.

Sorrow-dark ladies you've dreamed afar;
I stay not to hear their praises.
But here is a woman you cannot mar,
In life arrayed;
Her spirit blazes.

I shall not stiffen and die in your songs,
Flatten between your pages,
But trample the earth and jostle the throngs,
Try out life's worth--
And burst all cages!

Man and Superman

GEORGE BURMAN FOSTER

In his voluptuous vagabondage Rousseau at length halted at Paris, where
he managed to worry through some inconstant years. The thing that saved
the day for him was the fragment of a pamphlet that blew across his path
in one of his rambles, announcing a prize to be awarded by the Academy
of Dijon for the best answer to an extraordinary question. Had the
renascence of the arts and sciences ennobled morals? That was a flash of
lightning which lit up a murky night and helped this bewildered and
lonely wanderer to get his bearings. Thoughts came to him demoniacally
which shaped his entire future and won him no small place in the history
of humanity.

Answer is "No!" said Rousseau. And his answer was awarded the academic
prize.

It seems strange that the history of his times sided with Rousseau's
"No." Certainly it was the first fiery meteor of the French revolution.
It pronounced the first damnatory sentence upon a culture that had
already reached the point of collapse. In his own body and soul Rousseau
had bitterly experienced the curse of this culture. It was largely
responsible for his heart's abnormal yearning whose glow was consuming
him. Instead of ennobling morals this culture had inwardly barbarized
man. Then it galvanized and painted the outside of life. And then life
became a glittering lie.

Thus Rousseau became prophet in this desert of culture, and called men
to repentance. "Back from culture to nature," was his radical cry; back
from what man has made out of himself to what nature meant him to be.
Nature gave man free use of his limbs; culture has bound them with all
sorts of bindings, until he is stiff, and short-winded, and crippled.
According to nature man lives his own life; man is what he seems and
seems what he is; according to culture he is cunning, and crafty, and
mendacious.

The eighteenth-century man of culture hearkened with attentive soul to
the dirge in which one of its noblest sons vented his tortured heart.
The melancholy music bruised from this prophet's heart silenced the wit
and ridicule of even a Voltaire, who wanted to know, however, whether
"the idea was that man was to go on all fours again." In a few decades
the feet of revolutionary Frenchmen were at the door ready, with few and
short prayers, to bear to its last abode that culture whose moral worth
even a French Academy had called in question, and for whose moral
condemnation had awarded the first prize.

Now it is our turn! What is the good of our culture? Such is the query
of a host of people who know nothing thereof save the wounds it has
inflicted upon them--a host of people who face our culture with the
bitter feeling that they have created it with the sweat of their brows,
but have not been permitted to taste its joys. Such, too, is the query
of others who, satiated with its beneficence, have been its pioneers,--a
John Stuart Mill, political economist, who doubts whether all our
cultural progress has mitigated the sufferings of a single human being;
a Huxley, naturalist, who finds the present condition of the larger part
of humanity so intolerable today that, were no way of improvement to be
found, he would welcome the collision of a kindly comet that would smash
our petty planet into smithereens.

Also, there is your proletariat. And there is your culture on summits
far out of his reach. The more inaccessible it is, shining there with a
radiance that never falls upon him, the less does he reflect that all is
not gold that glitters. Then there is your philanthropist, foremost in
culture of mind and heart, surveying the masses far beneath him, in the
slime and grime of life, and doubting at last whether any labor of love
can lift men up to where he thinks men ought to be; whether, after all,
it can bring joy to men who are sick and sore with the load of life.

Not to be partial, one may magnanimously cite your philistine also--the
man of "the golden mean," the "man of sanity," as mediocrity has ever
brand-marked itself, who "hates _ultra_." For the life of him your
philistine cannot understand how a "reasonable" man can have any doubt
about our culture. Does he not read in his favorite newspaper how
gloriously we have progressed? Does he not encore the prodigious
achievements of our technique? Has he not heard his crack spellbinder
orate on the cultural felicity that follows our flag? Down with the
disloyalty of highbrow doubters!

Now it was from an entirely different side, indeed it was from an
entirely different standpoint, that Friedrich Nietzsche contemplated
modern culture, particularly the national culture of the German
Fatherland. What horrified him was not simply the _content_, but the
_criterion_, of our culture. He sharply scrutinized the _ideals_ which
we set ourselves in our culture. He found not simply our achievements
but our ideals, _ourselves_ even, so inferior, so vulgar, so
contemptible, that he began to doubt whether even the Germans could be
recognized as a culture people or not. Hence Nietzsche became the most
ruthless iconoclast of our culture. Unlike the majority, unlike the
scholars, the philanthropists, the philistines, Nietzsche was not moved
by the misery of the masses, by the great social need of our time. He
did not regret that the boon of our culture was shared by so few,
inasmuch as, in his opinion, this boon was of very doubtful value. He
found our life so barbarous, so culture-hostile, that he still missed
the first elements of a true culture among us.

Hence Nietzsche lunged against _status quo_. He did what he himself
called "_unzeitmässig_," untimely. He flung a question, more burning
than any other, into our time--more burning than even the social
question, constituting indeed the main part of that question. It was the
question as to how _man_ fared in this culture--the question as to what
_man_ got out of it and as to what it got out of man.

Never before had this question been put as Nietzsche put it. We should
recall that Nietzsche was not one of those who had experienced the
extremes of either plenty or want, nor was he one of those who filled
the wide space between the two. To him, the pessimism of the
discontented and the optimism of the fortunate and the satisfied were
alike superficial, if not impertinent. It was not a question of
"happiness" at all. In bitter, biting sarcasm he says, with reference to
the English utilitarian "happiness morality": "I do not seek my
happiness; only an Englishman seeks his happiness; I seek my _work_."

No; his was a question which his conscience put to culture. Was it a
"culture of the _earth_, or of _man_?" Here Nietzsche probes home. And
he alone did it. The most diverse censors of our time had not seen and
said that no matter how desirable, no matter how gloriously conceived
the new order of things might be, _man_ must be the decisive thing;
_man_ must tip the scales. It was this that went against the grain.
Mightier machines, larger cities, better apartments, bigger schools,
what was the good of it all, _et id omne genus_, if new and greater men
did not arise? So said Nietzsche. And he said it with high scorn to a
generation which had forgotten that man is not for "culture," but
culture for man; of man, by man, for man.

Every people seems to pass through a period in which it is obsessed with
the idea that the causes of popular prosperity are at once motive and
criterion of culture; that the natural laws of economics are the
universally valid norms of the ebb and flow of human values; that a
balance on the balance sheet to the good, the satisfactoriness of the
statistics of exports and imports to the wishes of the interested
parties, are an occasion for jubilation over the ascent which life has
compassed. Harbor some scruple as to whether the jubilation be warranted
or not, and you are at once pilloried as a pessimist and a malcontent.
And yet had there been no Nietzsche there would still remain Cicero's
warning: "Woe to a people whose wealth grows but whose men decay." But
there was a Nietzsche, and he dared to call even his Fatherland Europe's
"flat country"--flat was a hard word for a land that could once boast of
so many poets and thinkers. But now the flatter the better! But now no
peaks to scale, no yawning abysses on whose edges one grows dizzy!
Nothing a single step removed from the ordinary, the conventional! Now
heights and depths, distinctions and distances, these are valid in the
world of quantity, not of quality; of possession, not of being; of tax
tables, not of human essence and human power! Now all men are equal! But
Nietzsche knew that if men are equal they are not free; if free they are
not equal. With a fury and a fire that literally consumed him, he
dedicated himself to the task of leading men up out of this flatness,
away from this leveling--up to an appreciation of the potential--not the
actual--greatness of man's life. Greatness is not yet man's verity but
his vocation, his true and idiomatic destiny. Greatness? This is a man's
strength of will; the unfolding of a free personality. To say _I will_
is to be a man. All human values are embraced in this _I will_. To
produce men who can say _I will_ is at once the task and the test of
culture. This _I will_ is the climax and goal of man. In this _I will_
vanishes every fearsome and disquieting _I must_, every compulsion of
outer necessity. Not the passive adjustment of man to nature, but the
active adjustment of nature to man; nature outside of him and nature
inside of him--that is human calling and human culture. Vanishes, also,
every _I ought_. Man refuses to be ridden by a duty spook, but
subordinates even duty to himself. Duty, too, is for the sake of man,
not man for the sake of duty. In the depths of his own being, man
reserves the sovereign right to speak his _yes_ and his _no_ to duty. To
his own will he subjects all good and all evil taught him by others,
past or present, and thus occupies a standpoint "beyond good and evil."
Lord of the Sabbath? Yes, but lord also of standards sanctified by their
antiquity; lord of all the standards of life; lord of all that has been
written or thought or done. "And thou, O lord, art more than they!"
Thou--thou alone--art central and supreme and sacred and inviolable.
"Bring forth the royal diadem and crown him lord of all!"

But not yet! Alas, there are no such lords, no such will-men,
personality-men! Such men are not _Gegenwartsmenschen_, present day men,
but _Zukunftsmenschen_, future day men; not reality but task--our task.
That future man will surpass present man as much as present man
surpasses the monkey which he in his development has left behind. We are
bridges from monkey to superman. Superman! In him at last, at last, all
that is unliving, unfree, withered and weak, all that is sickly in man,
shall be obliterated; and all the forces that are great and creative
shall be unfolded and molded into cultural values.

This is the meaning of the superman of Friedrich Nietzsche. Malice and
ignorance have vied--vainly we may now hope--in caricaturing it. The way
to superman is the rugged, steep mountain path up to conscious deed and
mighty achievement; not the gentle incline down to stupid indulgence,
indolent disposition, enervating or bestial impulsive life. Not that!
Superman is precisely the man who overcomes the man of today aweary of
life and athirst for death.

This preaching of Superman might be called Messianic. It is the bold
faith that we are not the last word of the Word of life; it is the glad
hope that the best treasures, the greatest deeds, the supreme goals of
humankind are still in the future. Nietzsche's message is a breath of
spring blowing over the land proclaiming the advent of an issue from the
womb of time of something greater, better than anything we have been,
than anything we have called good or great; the advent of a new day when
our best songs now will be our worst then; our noblest thoughts now our
basest then; our highest achievements now, our poorest by-products then.

We shall usher in that day; superman shall be our will, our deed!
Superman gives our life worth. Ours is the new, exhilarating
responsibility, swallowing up and nullifying all the petty
responsibilities which fret us today. We have to justify our lives to
that great future, to that coming one, to our children. They, through
us, must be greater, better, freer, than all of us put together. We are
worth our contribution to the achievement of future man. Nay, only
superman can justify the history of the cosmos! Consider pre-human and
sub-human life, red in tooth and claw; consider human life, often not
much better and sometimes much worse; consider ourselves, our meanness
and our mediocrity. Is this all? Is this warrant for the long human and
pre-human story? Can you escape the conviction that but for superman the
eternal gestation and agony of cosmic maternity admits of no rational
vindication?

Breed, then, with a view of breeding supermen. Marriage? Let this be not
for ease, not for the propagation of yourselves; the pushing of
yourselves into your children, parents, but for the creation of
something new, of superman! Education? Not to assimilate the children to
us, to the past, but to free them from us; not _Vaterland_, but
_Kinderland_, must be our concern. Children shall not "sit at our feet"
but stand upon our shoulders, that they may have a freer and broader
sweep of the horizon. And in our children we shall love the Coming One,
prepare the way for Superman, that free, great man who shall have
conquered present petty man with all his slave instincts! Such, at all
events, are the dreams of the great poetic and prophetic philosopher of
the German Fatherland of today.

All great things have first to wander about the earth as enormous
and awe-inspiring caricatures.--Nietzsche in _Beyond Good and
Evil_.

Plato will always be an object of admiration and reverence to men
who would rather see vast images of uncertain objects reflected
from illuminated clouds, than representations of things in their
just proportions, measurable, tangible, and convertible to
household use.--Walter Savage Landor in _Imaginary
Conversations_, Vol. 2.

Cultivation will breed in any man a certainty of the uncertainty
of his most assured convictions.--Samuel Butler in _Life and
Habit_.

Knowledge is in an inchoate state as long as it is capable of
logical treatment; it must be transmitted into that sense or
instinct which rises altogether above the sphere in which words
can have being at all, otherwise it is not yet vital.--Samuel
Butler in _Life and Habit_.

Lines for Two Futurists

ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE

Why does all of sharp and new
That our modern days can brew
Culminate in you?

This chaotic age's wine
You have drunk--and now decline
Any anodyne.

On the broken walls you stand,
Peering toward some stony land
With eye-shading hand.

Is it lonely as you peer?
Do you never miss, in fear,
Simple things and dear,

Half-remembered, left behind?
Or are backward glances blind
Here where the wind

Round the outposts sweeps and cries--
And each distant hearthlight dies
To your peering eyes?...

I too stand where you have stood;
And the fever fills my blood
With your cruel mood.

Yet some backward longings press
On my heart: yea, I confess
My soul's heaviness.

Me a homesick tremor thrills
As I dream how sunlight fills
My familiar hills.

Me the yesterdays still hold--
Liegeman still unto the old
Stories sweetly told.

Into that profound unknown
Where the earthquake forces strown
Shake each pilèd stone

Look; and exultance smites
Me with joy; the splintered heights
Call me with fierce lights.

But a piety still dwells
In my bones; my spirit knells
Solemnly farewells

To safe halls where I was born--
To old haunts I leave forlorn
For this perilous morn.

Yet I come! I cannot stay!
Be it bitter night, or day
Glorious,--your way

I must tread; and on the walls,
Where this flame-swept future calls
To fierce miracles,

Lo, I greet you here! But me
Mock not lightly. I come free--
But with agony.

A New Winged Victory

_Angel Island_, by Inez Haynes Gillmore. [Henry Holt and Company,
New York.]

_Angel Island_ is several rare things: original, profound, flaming. It
leaves you with a gasping sense of having been swept through the skies;
and also with that feeling of new life which comes with a plunge into
cold, deep seas. _Angel Island_ is a new kind of Winged Victory!

Innumerable books have been written about the conflict of the sexes,
about the emergence of the new woman. Most of them are dull books. But
Mrs. Gillmore's is beautiful and exciting. I kept thinking as I read it:
here is something absolutely new, absolutely authentic; something so
full of vision and truth that it's like getting to the top of a mountain
for the sunrise. Its freshness and its clearness are like cool morning
mists that the sun has shot through.

But to discard vague phrases and get to the story--for it is not a
tract, but a novel--or rather a poetic allegory--that that Mrs. Gillmore
has written. Five men of representative modern types--a professor, a
libertine, a soldier of fortune, a "mere mutt-man," and an artist--are
shipwrecked on a tropical island. After a few days their attention is
caught by what appears to be huge birds flying through the heavens. The
birds come nearer and prove to be winged women! Then comes the story of
their wooing, their capture, their ultimate evolution into what modern
women have decided they want to be: humanists.

However, this is going too fast. The only way to appreciate _Angel
Island_ is to be conscious of the art of it as you read. Beginning with
the shipwreck, Mrs. Gillmore creates a series of brilliant pictures that
culminate in the flying orgies of the bird-women.

... All this was intensified by the anarchy of sea and sky, by
the incessant explosion of the waves, by the wind which seemed to
sweep from end to end of a liquefying universe, by a downpour
which threatened to beat their sodden bodies to pulp, by all the
connotation of terror that lay in the darkness and in their
unguarded condition on a barbarous, semi-tropical coast....

The storm, which had seemed to worry the whole universe in its
grip, had died finally but it had died hard. On a quieted earth,
the sea alone showed signs of revolution. The waves, monstrous,
towering, swollen, were still marching on to the beach with a
machine-like regularity that was swift and ponderous at the same
time.... Beyond the wave-line, under a cover of foam, the jaded
sea lay feebly palpitant like an old man asleep....

They had watched the sun come up over the trees at their back.
And it was as if they had seen a sunrise for the first time in
their lives. To them it was neither beautiful nor familiar; it
was sinister and strange. A chill, that was not of the dawn but
of death itself, lay over everything. The morning wind was the
breath of the tomb, the smells that came to them from the island
bore the taint of mortality, the very sun seemed icy. They
suffered--the five survivors of the night's tragedy--with a
scarifying sense of disillusion with Nature....

The sun was racing up a sky smooth and clear as gray glass. It
dropped on the torn green sea a shimmer that was almost dazzling;
but there was something incongruous about that--as though Nature
had covered her victim with a spangled scarf. It brought out
millions of sparkles in the white sand; and there seemed
something calculating about that--as though she were bribing them
with jewels to forget....

Dozens of waves flashed and crashed their way up the beach; but
now they trailed an iridescent network of foam over the
lilac-gray sand. The sun raced high; but now it poured a flood of
light on the green-gray water. The air grew bright and brighter.
The earth grew warm and warmer. Blue came into the sky,
deepened--and the sea reflected it. Suddenly the world was one
huge glittering bubble, half of which was the brilliant azure sky
and half the burnished azure sea.

All this is gorgeous enough--this clear, vivid painting of nature. But
when Mrs. Gillmore turns her hand to the supernatural, she is simply
ravishing. For instance:

The semi-tropical moon was at its full. Huge, white, embossed,
cut out, it did not shine--it glared from the sky. It made a
melted moonstone of the atmosphere. It faded the few clouds to a
sapphire-gray, just touched here and there with the chalky dot of
a star. It slashed a silver trail across a sea jet-black except
where the waves rimmed it with snow. Up in the white enchantment,
but not far above them, the strange air-creatures were flying.
They were not birds; they were winged women!

Darting, diving, glancing, curving, wheeling, they interwove in
what seemed the premeditated figures of an aerial dance.... Their
wings, like enormous scimitars, caught the moonlight, flashed it
back. For an interval, they played close in a group inextricably
intertwined, a revolving ball of vivid color. Then, as if seized
by a common impulse, they stretched, hand in hand, in a line
across the sky--drifted. The moonlight flooded them full, caught
glitter and gleam from wing-sockets, shot shimmer and sheen from
wing-tips, sent cataracts of iridescent color pulsing between.
Snow-silver one, brilliant green and gold another, dazzling blue
the next, luminous orange a fourth, flaming flamingo scarlet the
last, their colors seemed half liquid, half light. One moment the
whole figure would flare into a splendid blaze, as if an inner
mechanism had suddenly turned on all the electricity; the next,
the blaze died down to the fairy glisten given by the moonlight.

As if by one impulse, they began finally to fly upward. Higher
and higher they rose, still hand in hand.... One instant,
relaxed, they seemed tiny galleons, all sails set, that floated
lazily, the sport of an aerial sea; another, supple and sinuous,
they seemed monstrous fish whose fins triumphantly clove the air,
monarchs of that aerial sea.

A little of this and there came another impulse. The great wings
furled close like blades leaping back to scabbard; the
flying-girls dropped sheer in a dizzying fall. Half-way to the
ground, they stopped simultaneously as if caught by some
invisible air plateau. The great feathery fans opened--and this
time the men got the whipping whirr of them--spread high,
palpitated with color. From this lower level, the girls began to
fall again, but gently, like dropping clouds.... They paused an
instant and fluttered like a swarm of butterflies undecided where
to go.... Then they turned out to sea, streaming through the air
in line still, but one behind the other. And for the first time,
sound came from them; they threw off peals of girl-laughter that
fell like handfuls of diamonds. Their mirth ended in a long,
eerie cry.

To me, that is wonderful work--one jeweled word after another. And it's
sustained through the whole book. But of course, after this first sense
of ravishment with her pictures, you touch upon the deeper wonder of
Mrs. Gillmore--her ideas. There are enough ideas in _Angel Island_ to
equip the women who are fighting for selfhood with armour that is
absolutely hole proof.

The winged women differ in type as widely as the men; and each man
chooses very quickly the type that appeals to him most. The libertine
wants the big blond one, whom they've named "Peachy"; the professor
likes Chiquita, the very feminine, unintellectual one; Billy, the mere
man, falls violently and reverently in love with the radiant Julia, the
leader of the group and the one your interest centers in immediately.
Julia has a personality: she appears to be "pushed on by some
intellectual or artistic impulse, to express by the symbols of her
complicated flight some theory, some philosophy of life." She seems
always to shine. She is a creator. In short, Julia thinks.

The men plan capture and finally accomplish it by a time-honored method:
that of arousing the women's curiosity. Then follows a tragic episode
when they cut the captives' wings, making flight impossible. Of course,
marriage is the next step, and later, children are born on Angel
Island--little girl children with wings, and boys without them. But all
this time Julia has refused to marry Billy, though she's in love with
him. Her only reason is that something tells her to wait.

Inevitably the women mourn the loss of their wings; and just as they
become reconciled to a second-hand joy in their daughters' flights,
Peachy's husband informs her that flying is unwomanly--that woman's
place is in the home, not in the air (!)--and that their daughter must
be shorn of her wings as soon as she's eighteen.

What next? Rebellion, with Julia shining gloriously as leader. She had
been waiting for this. And in ten pages of profound, simple, magnificent
talk--if only every woman in the world would read it!--she explains to
the others that they must learn to walk. Peachy objects, because she
dislikes the earth. "There are stars in the air," she argues. "But we
never reached them," answers Julia. The earth is a good place, and they
must learn to live in it. Besides, their children will fly better for
learning to walk, and walk better for knowing how to fly; and she
prophesies that _then_ will be born to one of them a boy child with
wings.

The women hide and master the art of walking. While they're doing this
their poor wings have a chance to grow a little, and by the time the men
are ready to capture and subdue them a second time they have achieved a
combination of walking and flying that puts them beyond reach. Then the
men submit ... and Julia asks Billy to marry her.

That's all, except one short chapter about Julia. She has a son with
wings! And then she dies--radiant, white, goddess-woman, whose life had
been so fine a thing. The beauty of it all simply overwhelmed me.

All of which points to several important conclusions. First, that Mrs.
Gillmore is a poet and prophet of golden values. Second, that prejudice
is the most foolish thing in the world. A general prejudice against that
obvious form of comedy called farce might cause you to miss _The Legend
of Leonore_. And a stubborn caution in regard to allegories--which, I
concede, generally _are_ unsubtle--might keep you from _Angel Island_.

Correspondence

Two Views of H. G. Wells

I am just reading _The Passionate Friends_, and every time I read
anything of Wells's I wonder why it is I don't like him better. _The
World Set Free_ that has been running in _The Century_ was intensely
worth while, I thought--really prophetic. One tasted something almost
divine; human nature is capable of such wonderful undreamed of things!
It was like Tennyson prophesying the Federation of the World, airships,
etc. Wells does seem inspired in some ways. But every time I read any of
his novels--well, you remember I have a distinct mid-Victorian flavor
that has to be reckoned with. I wasn't brought up in a minister's family
for nothing! I suppose it's what we used to call our conscience. Mine
isn't much good, alas; I sometimes think of it as a little old Victorian
lady. She sits in the background of my consciousness and knits and knits
and nods her head. Meanwhile I go blithely about, espousing all sorts of
causes and thinking out all sorts of theories--imagining, you know, that
I'm perfectly free. Suddenly she wakes up--she lays aside her knitting
with a determined air and says, "Mary Martha, _what_ are you thinking
about! Stop that right now; I'm ashamed of you." And she has authority,
too, you know. I stop. Ridiculous, isn't it?--but so it is.

And every time I read a Wells novel my little old lady folds her hands
and sits up very primly and says, "Aha, you're reading something of that
man's again. Well, I'm not asleep--I'm right on the job and I know just
what I think of _him_." So you see! And the worst--or the best--of it is
that I agree with her. I can't like him. I read along and it's all so
reasonable--he's so clever and he _thinks_; but his conclusions are all
so weak--if he comes to any. One passage in _The Passionate Friends_ has
made me furious. How can a man who's at all worth while be so really
wicked--(another word gone out of style). I mean this:

It is manifestly true that for the most of us free talk, intimate
association, and any real fellowship between men and women turns
with extreme readiness to love. And that being so, it follows
that under existing conditions the unrestricted meeting and
companionship of men and women in society is a notorious sham, a
merely dangerous pretence of encounters. The safe reality beneath
those liberal appearances is that a woman must be content with
the easy friendship of other women and of one man only, letting a
superficial friendship towards all other men veil impassable
abysses of separation, and a man must in the same way have one
sole woman intimate.... To me that is an intolerable state of
affairs, but is reality.

Now can you suppose that is Wells's own reasoning that he puts into the
mouth of his unfortunate hero? Talk about Edith Wharton being
thin-lipped in the pursuit of her heroines--that's a great deal better
than being loose-lipped; don't you agree with me? It may be true, and I
rather think to some extent it is true, that a man cannot have an
absorbing friendship with a woman and not run the risk of falling in
love. But what does that prove? That he should be allowed free rein and
carry on as many _liaisons_ veiled under the name of friendship as he
chooses? Or unveiled, rather, for Wells seems to want everything in the
open. He's like a child who says: Here's a very dangerous beast in a
flimsy, inadequate cage. Frequently he escapes from it and has to be put
back in. Let's abolish the cage and let the beast run about openly,
doing what it wants. And the good old-fashioned word for that beast is
lust, and it should be caged; if the cage is getting more and more
inadequate it's only a piece with what Agnes Repplier calls our loss of
nerve. How I liked that article of hers! What in the name of sense are
we in this world for if not to build up a character? That's all that
amounts to anything, and it comes from countless denials and countless
responses to duty. And what Goethe said, some time ago, is still
everlastingly true: "_Entbehren sollst Du, sollst entbehren!_" (Deny
yourself, deny, deny.) He ought to know, too, because he tried
indulgence, goodness knows, and knew the dregs at the bottom of that
cup. And I can't forgive Wells. He knows better than to let people make
all manner of experiment with such things. They wouldn't even be happy;
for happiness is built of stability, loyalty, character, and again
character. My husband said, after reading that passage in _The
Passionate Friends_, "The trouble with him and the class he writes of is
that they aren't busy enough. Let 'em work for a living, be interested
in something vitally for ten hours out of the twenty-four, and they'll
forget all about their neighbors' wives and be content with good men
friends and casual women friends."

The trouble lies with poor old human nature, I guess, and the way it
wants what it cannot and ought not to have. But Wells says all unreality
is hateful to him. Let's tear down the barriers, let's show up for what
we are. Poor Smith wants something his neighbor has--well, let's give it
to him, whether it's his neighbor's success or his wife or his
happiness. Nature is still unbearably ugly in lots of ways. When we can
train it to be unselfish and disinterested then it will be time to tear
down barriers.

Lady Mary in _The Passionate Friends_ is an unconvincing character, too.
I can conceive of a woman who will take all of a man's possessions,
giving him nothing in return, not even fidelity, but I cannot conceive
of her justifying herself unless she is an utter moral degenerate. The
danger of such writers as Wells is that they are plausible enough till
you look below the surface. He tries to represent Lady Mary as charming,
but she, it seems to me, even more than modern society which he
arraigns, is "honeycombed and rotten with evil."

"M. M."

The description of a "little old Victorian lady" who sits in the
background of our consciousness and plays conscience for us is charming;
but.... She's a sweet-faced little lady to whom the universe is as clear
as crystal and as simple as plane geometry. She is always knitting, and
what she knits is a fine web of sentimentality with which to cover the
nakedness of truth--"for it is not seemly, my dear, that anything, even
truth, should be naked."

This web of hers is as fine as soft silk and as strong as chain mail.
It's sticky, too. And it clothes truth so thoroughly that she grows
unrecognizable to any but the most penetrating searcher--to H. G. Wells,
for instance. It's natural enough that the old lady should dislike
Wells, for he's found her out; he's made the astonishing discovery that
underneath the web life is not sentimentally simple. He discloses to her
scandalized eyes various unfortunate facts which she has done her best
to conceal, as for instance the fact that there is such a thing as sex.

"Sex," says Wells in effect in every one of his novels, "is a disturbing
element, _the_ disturbing element, in life. So long as sex exists it is
a physical impossibility that life should be the sweetly pretty parlor
game our little Victorian lady would have it."

Right here the husband of the little lady has something to say: "The
trouble with him and the class he writes of," he announces, "is that
they aren't busy enough. Let 'em work for a living, be interested in
something vitally for ten hours out of the twenty-four, and they'll
forget all about their neighbors' wives and be content with good men
friends and casual women friends." This is an excellent example
of what Wells finds the next most disturbing element in
life--"muddle-headedness," the lack of ability to think straight, to
think things through. "Let Wells be vitally interested in something for
ten hours of the twenty-four!" Doesn't he see that if Wells had ever
limited himself to ten hours of interest he would be making shirts
today? It is because Wells works twenty-five hours of the twenty-four at
being "vitally interested in something" that he is one of the major
prophets of our time. And the thing in which he is interested is life
itself, the great unsolvable mystery, life which extends below the
simple, polished surface that is all the Victorian lady knows as the sea
extends below its glassy smoothness on a summer day.

One of the greatest things that Wells has done for some of us who came
on him young enough so that our minds did not close automatically at his
first startling revelation, is this: he taught us to look at life
squarely, without moral cant, and with a scientific disregard as to
whether it pleased us personally or not. We may not always agree with
him--very likely we don't--but at least we must face the issue squarely
and not take refuge in the vague sentimentality and slushy hopefulness
of the Victorian lady.

Wells states facts and very frequently lets it go at that. Witness the
shock this method is to our little old lady. She asks how anyone at all
worth while can be so "really wicked" as to write about sex and society
as he does.

She admits that what he says is a fact, _but_--it sticks out like a
jagged, untidy rock from the smooth surface of things; therefore it is
wicked. As a matter of fact that statement of his has no more to do with
morality, is no more wicked, or virtuous, than the statement of a
physical fact--to say, for instance, that glass breaks when hurled
against a stone wall. It is unfortunate, but it is not "wicked."

No, the day of Victorianism is past. We are slashing away the web, we
are learning to _think_. It is a slow and painful process and we know
not yet where the struggle will end. But at least we shall be nearer to
the divine nakedness of truth. If Wells has done nothing else than to
prove to us how much of our thinking is dictated not by our own souls
but by the artificially-imposed sentimentality of the "little old
Victorian lady" he has done a full man's work. And we who owe our
emancipation largely to his vision can never be too thankful to him.

FRANCES TREVOR.

Rupert Brooke and Whitman

You treated Brooke in a masterly way in the last issue. I saw many
things I hadn't seen before, and understood the _Wagner_ better. But I
disagree with you in one way.

The _Wagner_ and the _Channel Passage_ are merely clever realistic
satire--that's always worth while. But it's the thought behind the
_Menelaus and Helen_ sort of thing that I don't like. Of course there's
no doubt that Helen grew wrinkled and peevish. But to say that therefore
Paris in his grave was better off than Menelaus living is just a bit
decadent, isn't it? I'm forced to picture Brooke as the sort of chap who
couldn't enjoy a good dinner if he had to wash the dishes
afterward:--instead of regarding dishwashing as a natural variety of
living that could be thoroughly enjoyable with shirtsleeves and a pipe.
I'm afraid he wouldn't play American football for fear of getting his
face dirty. He's just a bit finicky about life. He's afraid to commit
himself for fear he'll have to endure something about which he can't
weave golden syllables. That's the reason I don't agree with you about
Whitman liking all of him. Whitman was frank about the whole world, dirt
and all, and he accepted it enthusiastically. Brooke writes about dirt
in such a way as to make it seem horrible.

This poem of Whitman's will prove my point:

Afoot and light hearted, I take to the open road;
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good fortune--I myself am good fortune;
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, heed nothing;
Strong and content I travel the open road.

The earth--that is sufficient;
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are;
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

Still, here I carry my old delicious burdens;
I carry them, men and women--I carry them with me wherever I go.
I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them;
I am filled with them and I will fill them in return.

You road I enter upon and look around! I believe that you are
not all that is here;
I believe that much unseen is also here.

Here the profound lesson of reception, neither preference nor
denial;
The black and his woolly head, the felon, the diseased, the
illiterate person, are not denied;
The birth, the hasting after the physician; the beggar's tramp, the
drunkard's stagger, the laughing party of mechanics,
The escaped youth, the rich person's carriage, the fop, the eloping
couple,
The early marketman, the hearse, the moving of furniture into town,
the return back from town,
They pass--I also pass--anything passes--none may be interdicted;
None but are accepted--none but are dear to me.
_Mon enfant!_ I give you my hand!
I give you my love more precious than money;
I give you myself before preaching or law;
Will you give me yourself? Will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?

Beside this, doesn't the _Menelaus and Helen_ seem like an orchid?--a
very beautiful, rich orchid, to be sure, but not of the Whitman family.

GEORGE SOULE.

More About the "New Note"

The idea of "the new note" might be worked out more fully, but after all
little or nothing would be gained by elaboration. Given this note of
craft love all the rest must follow, as the spirit of self-revelation,
which is also a part of the new note, will follow any true present-day
love of craft. You will remember we once discussed Coningsby Dawson's
_The Garden Without Walls_. What I quarreled with in that book was that
the writer looked outside of himself for his material. Even realists
have done this--as, for example, Howells; and to that extent have
failed. The master Zola failed here. Why do we so prize the work of
Whitman, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Twain, and Fielding? Is it not because as
we read we are constantly saying to ourselves, "This book is true. A man
of flesh and blood like myself has lived the substance of it. In the
love of his craft he has done the most difficult of all things: revealed
the workings of his own soul and mind"?

To get near to the social advance for which all moderns hunger, is it
not necessary to have first of all understanding? How can I love my
neighbor if I do not understand him? And it is just in the wider
diffusion of this understanding that the work of a great writer helps
the advance of mankind. I would like to have you think much of this in
your attitude toward all present-day writers. It is so easy for them to
bluff us from our position, and I know from my own experience how
baffling it is constantly to be coming upon good, well-done work that is
false.

In this connection I am tempted to give you the substance of a formula I
have just worked out. It lies here before me, and if you will accept it
in the comradely spirit in which it is offered I shall be glad. It is
the most delicate and the most unbelievably difficult task to catch,
understand, and record your own mood. The thing must be done simply and
without pretense or windiness, for the moment these creep in your record
is no longer a record, but a mere mass of words meaning nothing. The
value of such a record is not in the facts caught and recorded but in
the fact of your having been able truthfully to make the
record--something within yourself will tell you when you have not done
it truthfully. I myself believe that when a man can thus stand aside
from himself, recording simply and truthfully the inner workings of his
own mind, he will be prepared to record truthfully the workings of other
minds. In every man or woman dwell dozens of men and women, and the
highly imaginative individual will lead fifty lives. Surely this can be
said if it can be said that the unimaginative individual has led one
life.

The practice of constantly and persistently making such a record as this
will prove invaluable to the person who wishes to become a true critic
of writing in the new spirit. Whenever he finds himself baffled in
drawing a character or in judging one drawn by another, let him turn
thus in upon himself, trusting with child-like simplicity and honesty
the truth that lives in his own mind. Indeed, one of the great rewards
of living with small children is to watch their faith in themselves and
to try to emulate them in this art.

If the practice spoken of above is followed diligently, a kind of
partnership will in time spring up between the hand and the brain of the
writer. He will find himself becoming in truth a cattle herder, a drug
clerk, a murderer, for the benefit of the hand that is writing of these,
or the brain that is judging the work of another who has written of
these.

To be sure this result will not always follow, and even after long and
patient following of the system one will run into barren periods when
the brain and the hand do not co-ordinate. In such a period it seems to
me the part of wisdom to drop your work and begin again patiently making
a record of the workings of your own mind, trying to put down truthfully
those workings during the period of failure. I would like to scold every
one who writes, or who has to do with writing, into adopting this
practice, which has been such a help and such a delight to me.

SHERWOOD ANDERSON.

To E

SARA TEASDALE

The door was opened and I saw you there
And for the first time heard you speak my name,
Then like the sun your sweetness overcame
My shy and shadowy mood; I was aware
That joy was hidden in your happy hair,
And that for you love held no hint of shame;
My eyes caught light from yours, within whose flame
Humor and passion have an equal share.

How many times since then have I not seen
Your great eyes widen when you talk of love,
And darken slowly with a far desire;
How many times since then your soul has been
Clear to my gaze as curving skies above,
Wearing like them a raiment made of fire.

To S

EUNICE TIETJENS

From my life's outer orbit, where the night
That bounds my knowledge still is pierced through
By far-off singing planets such as you,
Whose faint, sweet voices come to me like light
In disembodied beauty, keen and bright,--
From this far orbit to my nearer view
You came one day, grown tangible and true
And warm with sympathy and fair with sight.

Then I who still had loved your distant voice,
Your songs, shot through with beauty and with tears
And woven magic of the wistful years,
I felt the listless heart of me rejoice
And stir again, that had lain stunned so long,
Since I had you, yourself a living song.

The Critics' Critic

AGNES REPPLIER ON POPULAR EDUCATION

Through all of Miss Repplier's latest essays in _The Atlantic_ runs a
note of appeal for the sterner virtues, which she thinks are in danger
of dying out under modern conditions. So persistently is this note,
admirable in itself, sounded, that we wonder if it doesn't hark back a
bit to Sparta, and the casting away of the unfit. When it comes to the
question of an education broad enough to fit the needs of every child,
we may all pause and take a deep breath. We may not approve of a school
of moving pictures, advocated by Judge Lindsey, and yet we may not wish
to go to the other extreme of severe discipline advocated by Miss
Repplier. If only all children were of exactly the same type, so that
the same kind of schooling would suffice for all their needs! Or even if
they could come from the same kind of homes with more or less similar
ideals!

Let us hear what she and Mr. Lindsey have to say about Tony--(Tony is a
boy who does not like school as it is at present organized). "Mr. Edison
is coming to the rescue of Tony," says Judge Lindsey. "He will take him
away from me and put him in a school that is not a school at all but
just one big game.... There will be something moving, something doing at
that school all the time. When I tell him about it Tony shouts 'Hooray
for Mr. Edison!' right in front of the battery, just as he used to say
'To hell wid de cop!'" On the other hand:--"The old time teacher," says
Miss Repplier, "sought to spur the pupil to keen and combative effort,
rather than beguile him into knowledge with cunning games and lantern
slides.... The old time parent set a high value on self discipline and
self control."

But can she believe for one moment that Tony's parents ever dreamed of
"setting a high value on self discipline and self control?" Or that
Tony's sister was taught to "read aloud with correctness and expression,
to write notes with propriety and grace, and to play backgammon and
whist?" ...

_Figurez-vous!_ And so, if we can reach little Tony's darkened vision by
the simple method of moving pictures, keep him off the streets until he
learns at least not to become a hardened criminal--are we not that much
to the good? Tony will never, never be ambassador to the court of St.
James (or if he is going to be, he'll be it in spite of movies!) but he
may be a fairly honest, happy fruit vendor some day, instead of No. 207
in a cell. Useless to cite the dull boys in school, who
absolutely refused pedagogic training and later blazed their
way--luminaries--through the world, when once they had found the work
that interested them. To interest, stimulate, and arouse is the prelude
to work; and precious few kiddies, except those who don't really need
it, do enough work that they dislike to strengthen their little
characters. But even if they do, are those who will not to have nothing?

Of course, education is a thing that can't be disposed of in a few well
meaning phrases. Miss Repplier may be right, too, in what she says of
the education of Montaigne. You remember he learned to talk Latin under
a tutor, at an early age, in much the same way that our modern young
ones learn French and German.

"All the boy gained by the most elaborate system ever devised for the
saving of labor," she says, "was that he over-skipped the lower forms in
school. What he lost was the habit of mastering his prescript lessons,
which he seems to have disliked heartily." But how does any one know
that that was all he gained? I should hardly select Montaigne as my
model, if I were trying to point out the ill effects of any particular
type of education. Besides, whatever its effect may have been on him, I
should hate to lose the mental picture of the little lad Latinizing with
the "simple folk of Perigord." Charming little lad, and wonderful old
father, doing his best to elevate and help his boy. No, decidedly;
whatever Miss Repplier may do to dispose of Tony and his ilk, I am glad
she had nothing whatever to do with the education of Montaigne!

THE LITTLE REVIEW

Since it appears to be my duty to read all the critical journals and
dissect their contents for these columns, I can't in good faith neglect
THE LITTLE REVIEW. I have just devoured the first issue. What can I say
about the superb "announcement"? I agree ardently with it. It needed to
be said; the magazine needed to be born. There's no quarrel between art
and life except where one or the other is kept back of the door. Anyone
with a keen appreciation of art can't help appreciating life too, and
Mrs. Jones who runs away from her husband can't fairly stand for "life."
Besides, why should anybody object to a thing because it's transitorial?
Everything is transitorial. It must either grow or perish.

Mr. Wing's criticism of _Mr. Faust_ is admirable--direct, unpretentious,
sound. But you must let me register a slight objection to Dr. Foster's
Nietzsche article. It seems to me there's just too much enthusiasm to be
borne by what he actually says. When I came to the end of that third
paragraph on page fifteen I sneaked back to Galsworthy's letter and
found an answering twinkle in its eye. I felt like going up to Dr.
Foster with a grin, putting my hand on his shoulder and saying, "My dear
man, a candidate for major prophet doesn't need political speeches. It
is really not half so important that we unregenerate should give three
cheers for him as that we should live his truth. Won't you forget a
little of this sound and fury and tell us as simply as you can just what
it is that you want us to do?"

I went from his article with the impression that here was a man who was
very enthusiastic about Mr. Nietzsche. I'm sure that's not the
impression Dr. Foster intended to make. But I have a feeling that pure
enthusiasm wasting itself in little geysers is intrinsically ridiculous.
Enthusiasm should grow trees and put magic in violets--and that can't be
done with undue quickness, or in any but the most simple way. Nobody
cares about the sap except for what it does. And, anyhow, it always
makes me savage to be orated at, or told that my soul will be damned if
I don't admit the particular authority of Mr. Jehovah or Mr. Nietzsche
or Mr. anybody else.

That's all by the way, however, and the impression of the magazine as a
whole is clear, true, swift. Its impact can't be forgotten. You haven't
attained your ideal--which is right; but you've done so well you'll have
to scratch to keep up the speed,--which is right, too.

M. H. P.

Women and the Life Struggle

CLARA E. LAUGHLIN.

_The Truth About Women_, by C. Gasquoine Hartley (Mrs. Walter M.
Gallichan). [Dodd, Mead & Company, New York.]

Mrs. Gallichan has not told the whole truth about woman; but she has
told as much of it as has been told by any one writer except Olive
Schreiner; and although she has made no important discovery, educed no
brilliant new conclusion, she has summarized the best of all that has
been said in a book which can scarcely fail to render notable service.

It is interesting to recall how the truth about women has been
disclosed. The voice of Mary Wollstonecraft, crying in the wilderness,
in 1792, pleaded that "if woman be not prepared by education to become
the companion of man, she will stop the progress of knowledge; for truth
must be common to all." Yet it was nearly sixty years before Frederick
Denison Maurice was able to open Queen's College, and give a few English
women the opportunity of an education. (In America, Mary Lyon had
already broken ground for the higher education of her countrywomen.)

Here and there, in those days, an intrepid female declared herself a
believer in woman's rights; but her pretensions were scarcely honored to
the point even of ridicule. Women were inferior creatures, designed and
ordered by God to be subordinate to men. Didn't everything go to prove
it? And, indeed, nearly everything seemed to!

In 1861, several scholarly gentlemen in Europe were delving in fields of
research where they were destined to upturn facts of great interest to
the inferior sex. One of these was John Stuart Mill, whose impassioned
protest against the subjection of women was then being written, although
it was not published until eight years later. Another was Henry Maine,
who was disclosing some significant things about the ancient law on
which our modern laws are founded. Another was Lecky, who was gathering
material for his _History of European Morals, from Augustus to
Charlemagne_, and--incidentally--discovering that "natural history of
morals" wherewith he was to shock the world in 1869. But two of the
others were searching back of Augustus--"back" of him both in point of
time and also in degree of civilization. One of these was Bachofen, a
German, who published, in 1861, _Das Mutterrecht_, in which he made it
clear that women had not always been subordinate, dependent, but among
primitive peoples had been the rulers of their race. McLennan's
_Primitive Marriage_, published in 1865, brought prominently to British
thinkers this quite-new contention of woman as a creature born to rule,
but defrauded and degraded.

Then, in 1871, Darwin startled the world with _The Descent of Man, and
Selection in Relation to Sex_; and those who accepted his theory of
evolution had to revise all their previous notions about the relations
of the sexes.

During the next quarter-century many minds were busy with this wholesale
revision of ideas, but nothing signal was set forth until Charlotte
Stetson--working with the historical data of Maine and Mill and Lecky
and their followers, with the ethnological data of Bachofen and
McLennan, and many more, and with the natural history of morals as
Darwin and Wallace and Huxley and their school disclosed it--declared
that the enslavement of women was economic in its origin and in its
final analysis. This was not the whole truth, but it was so important a
part of the whole that the book _Women and Economics_ may be said to
have given the most productive stimulus the feminist movement had had
since _The Descent of Man_.

Scores, almost hundreds, of books dealing with some phase or other of
woman's history, appeared in the next few years. But while many of them
were valuable, and some were all but invaluable, none of them was
epoch-marking until Olive Schreiner put forth her magnificent fragment
on _Woman and Labor_, the chapter on Parasitism being the noblest and
most pregnant thing that any student of woman has given to the world.
Olive Schreiner saw much further into the question of women and
economics than Charlotte Stetson knew how to see. She has a greater
vision. She perceives that women are ennobled by what they do--just as
men are--and that they are degraded by being denied creative, productive
labor--not by being denied the full reward of their toil.

Mrs. Gallichan does not advance upon the contribution of Mrs. Schreiner,
as Mrs. Schreiner did upon that of Mrs. Stetson; but she had less
opportunity to do so: Mrs. Schreiner did not leave so much for some one
else to say. But Mrs. Gallichan has summarized all that has been said
more fully than any other writer has done; and she has done it so
interestingly, so ably, that she deserves grateful praise.

Her book has three sections: the biological, the historical, and the
modern.

Let no one resent or think useless an analogy between animal
love-matings and our own. In tracing the evolution of our
love-passions from the sexual relations of other mammals, and
back to those of their ancestors, and to the humbler, though
scarcely less beautiful, ancestors of these, we shall discover
what must be considered as essential and should be lasting, and
what is false in the conditions and character of the sexes today;
and thereby we shall gain at once warning in what directions to
pause, and new hope to send us forward. We shall learn that there
are factors in our sex-impulses that require to be lived down as
out-of-date and no longer beneficial to the social needs of life.
But encouragement will come as, looking backwards, we learn how
the mighty dynamic of sex-love has evolved in fineness, without
losing in intensity, how it is tending to become more mutual,
more beautiful, more lasting.

Two suggestions which Mrs. Gallichan makes in the biological section are
especially striking. One is derived from the bee, and one from the
spider. The bee, she reminds us, belongs

to a highly evolved and complex society, which may be said to
represent a very perfected and extreme socialism. In this society
the vast majority of the population--the workers--are sterile
females, and of the drones, or males, only a very few at the most
are ever functional. Reproduction is carried on by the
queen-mother ... specialized for maternity and incapable of any
other function.... I have little doubt that something which is at
least analogous to the sterilization of the female bees is
present among ourselves. The complexity of our social conditions,
resulting in the great disproportion between the number of the
sexes, has tended to set aside a great number of women from the
normal expression of their sex functions.

The danger to society, when maternity shall be left to the stupid
parasitic women who are unable to exist as workers, is pointed out by
Mrs. Gallichan; as is also that exaggerated form of matriarchy which is
realized among the ants and bees. And she reminds women who are workers,
not mothers, that in the bee-workers the ovipositor becomes a poisoned
sting. She warns women not to become like the sterile bees; but she
warns them also against state endowment of motherhood. And she does not
suggest how the great excess of women are to become mothers without
reorganizing society.

The second example she cites in warning, the common spider, whose
courtship customs Darwin described in _The Descent of Man_, is "a case
of female superiority carried to a savage conclusion." And from this
female who ruthlessly devours her lover, Mrs. Gallichan deduces a theory
for "many of those wrongs which women have suffered at the hands of men.
Man, acting instinctively, has rebelled, not so much, I think, against
woman as against this driving hunger within himself, which forces him
helpless into her power."

The stages by which parasitism was transferred from the male to the
female still need some elucidation--like the stages by which marriage
passed from endogamy to exogamy. But Mrs. Gallichan's suggestion about
the male preserving himself by appearing as self-sufficient and as
dominant as he can, is highly interesting. It will probably not be long
before we know a great deal more of this.

In the historical section of her book, Mrs. Gallichan devotes four
admirable chapters to the mother-age civilization, and four others to
the position of women in Egypt, Babylon, Greece, and Rome.

Of immense significance is the relation between the enviable status of
women in Egypt and that love of peace and of peaceful pursuits which
characterized the Egyptian people. War, patriarchy, and the subjection
of women, have gone hand in hand. Social organizations in which might
was right have minimized the worth of women; those in which ingenuity,
resourcefulness, and ideality were set above brute force have given
women most justice.

Mrs. Gallichan's chapter on the women of Athens and of Sparta is most
suggestive. So is that on the women of Rome.

In her modern section she discusses women and labor:

The old way of looking at the patriarchal family was, from one
point of thought, perfectly right and reasonable as long as every
woman was ensured the protection of, and maintenance by, some
man. Nor do I think there was any unhappiness or degradation
involved to women in this co-operation of the old days, where the
man went out to work and the woman stayed to do work at least
equally valuable in the home. It was, as a rule, a co-operation
of love, and in any case it was an equal partnership in work. But
what was true once is not true now. We are living in a
continually changing development and modification of the old
tradition of the relationship of woman and man.... The women of
one class have been forced into labor by the sharp driving of
hunger. Among the women of the other class have arisen a great
number who have turned to seek occupation from an entirely
different cause, the no less bitter driving of an unstimulating
and ineffective existence, a kind of boiling-over of women's
energy wasted, causing a revolt of the woman-soul against a life
of confused purposes, achieving by accident what is achieved at
all. Between the women who have the finest opportunities and the
women who have none there is this common kinship--the wastage not
so much of woman as of womanhood.

She considers "the women who have been forced into the cheating, damning
struggle for life," and urges that "the life-blood of women, that should
be given to the race, is being stitched into our ready-made clothes;
washed and ironed into our linen; poured into our adulterated foods";
and so on. But her reasoning in this chapter is not very clear. Women,
to avoid parasitism, must work, and only a relatively small proportion
of them can now find in their homes work enough to keep them
self-sustaining. Protest against the sweating of women is not only
philanthropic--it is perfectly sound political economy. Women workers
not only should be protected against long hours, unnecessary risks,
insanitary surroundings, merciless nerve tension, and the computation of
their wages on a basis of their assured ability to live partly by their
labor and partly by the legitimatized or unlegitimatized sale of their
sex; but this _can_, and _must_, be done. Yet, when all this has been
accomplished, will Mrs. Gallichan feel satisfied that the struggle for
life is not "cheating, damning," if owing to conditions we cannot
regulate that struggle fails also to comprehend the struggle to give
life, to reproduce?

It is because we are the mothers of men that we claim to be free.

This is the keynote of her book. But she is by no means clear in her
mind as to how the mothers of men are to maintain themselves in a
freedom which shall be real, not merely conceded; nor as to how the
millions of women who, under our monogamous societies, cannot be
permanently mated, are to justify their struggle for existence by
becoming "mothers of men."

The something that Mrs. Gallichan lacks, not in her retrospect so much
as in her previsioning, has been lacked by many of the great
investigators and writers who have built up the magnificent literature
of evolution and evolutionary philosophy: she has an admirable survey of
the "whenceness" of life and love and labor, but a short-sighted,
astigmatic vision of its "whereuntoness."

If the sole purpose of life and love and labor, among humans as among
lower animals, is to continue life, to transmit the life-force, then
indeed are those frustrated, futile creatures who are cheated, or who
cheat themselves, out of rendering this one service to the world which
can justify them for having lived in it.

But if, as most of us believe, we are more than just links in the human
chain; if we have a relation to eternity as well as to history and to
posterity, there are splendid interpretations of our struggles that Mrs.
Gallichan does not apprehend. If souls are immortal, life is more than
the perpetuation of species, or even than the improvement of the race;
it is the place allotted to us for the development of that imperishable
part which we are to carry hence, and through eternity. And any effort
of ours which helps other souls to realize the best that life can give,
to seek the best that immortality can perpetuate, may splendidly justify
our existence.

Mrs. Gallichan's conclusion about religion is that it is an "opium" to
which women resort when they have no proper outlet for their
sex-impulses. "I am certain," she says, "that in us the religious
impulse and the sex impulse are one." And when she was able to satisfy
the sex impulse, she no longer had any need of or interest in religion.

The limitations this puts upon her interpretation of life are too
obvious to need cataloging. And this is the reason she signally fails to
tell the whole of the truth about woman. This is the reason why the
latter chapters of her book, in which she writes of marriage and divorce
and prostitution, are of less worth to the generality of readers than
the earlier ones; though this is not to say that these chapters do not
contain a very great deal of vigorous thinking and excellent suggestion.
But to anyone who holds that the continuance of life is the principal
justification for having lived, yet deplores free love and state
endowment of mothers, there is inevitably an appalling waste, for the
elimination of which she may well be staggered to suggest a remedy.

Mrs. Gallichan's book is not constructive in effect. But it is so
excellently analytical, as far as it goes, that it can scarcely fail to
provoke a great deal of thought.

"Change"

There is coming soon, to the Fine Arts Theatre--that charming Chicago
home of the Irish Players and of "the new note" in drama--a play with an
interesting title. It is called _Change_. It is to be given by the Welsh
Players--which fact alone has a thrill in it. But the theme is even more
compelling.

Two old God-fearing Welsh people have denied themselves of comforts and
pleasures to give their sons an education. Then, when they expect to
reap the benefits of the sacrifice, three unexpected and awful things
happen: the student son has so fallen under the influence of modern
skepticism as to be forced to abandon his father's Calvinistic creed.
The second one has become soaked with socialism and syndicalism. The
third, a chronic invalid, is a Christian and a comfort; but he is
killed, quite unnecessarily, in a labor conflict instigated by his
brother. Then--the two old people again, alone. What can a playwright do
with such a situation? Nothing, certainly, to attract a "capacity
house." But we shall be among the first of that small minority who likes
thinking in the theatre to hear what Mr. Francis has to say. His theme
is tremendous.

The Poetry of Alice Meynell

LLEWELLYN JONES

Not least among the stirring events of our present poetical renaissance
are the publication of the collected editions of the works of Alice
Meynell and Francis Thompson (Scribner). Spiritually akin, mutually
influencing one another in material as in more subtle ways, their poetry
stands in vivid contrast to the muse of our younger singers, the makers
of what English critics hail as a new Georgian Age. That this difference
gives them an added significance, and not as some critics have said, a
lessened one, is the burden of the present appreciation of the poems of
Alice Meynell. For there is a tendency for the reader who is intoxicated
with poetic modernity to reason somewhat after this fashion. Here, he
will say,--as indeed Mr. Austin Harrison has said of Francis
Thompson--is a "reed pipe of neo-mediaevalism ... a poet of the
gargoyle," not of this modern world, and so neither in sympathy of
thought or melody with us of the twentieth century, its free life and
_vers libre_. All this, of course, because, Francis Thompson was--as is
Mrs. Meynell--a child of the Catholic Church. Our supposititious reader
will continue to the effect that there is no spiritual profit to be had
in reading these poets when the modern attitude is to be found in such
writers as W. W. Gibson, Masefield, and Hardy. But in so arguing, our
reader will be entirely wrong as to the facts, and mistaken in his whole
manner of approach to the realm of poetic values.

Mr. Max Eastman, in his charming book, _The Enjoyment of Poetry_, lays
stress on the fact that poetry is not primarily the registering of
emotions but the expression of keen realizations. A mathematical concept
may arouse an emotion, but the poet makes the actual emotion
transmissible by his selective power in picking out the focal point of
the experience by which it is aroused. If poetry is essentially
realization of life, then we have no longer any excuse for asking our
poets to share our doctrinal views before we consent to read them. On
the contrary, we should be more anxious to read Mrs. Meynell than Mr.
Gibson, if we are modernists, for Mr. Gibson may, conceivably, not be
able to tell us anything we have not already felt. Mrs. Meynell, on the
other hand, can inform our feelings with fresh aspects of experience,
and she does so abundantly. Her Catholicism is not mediaevalism, but, in
so far as it is translatable into her poetry it is simply a vocabulary
for the expression of certain emotional realizations of life which we
modernists find it very hard to express because we do not have the
necessary vocabulary. What can be more modern than the doctrine of the
immanence of God and his abode in man, that much-discussed "social
gospel?" Yet the following poem, not in spite of but through its
Catholic terminology, heightens our realization of brotherhood and
dependence one upon another. It is entitled _The Unknown God_:

One of the crowd went up,
And knelt before the Paten and the Cup,
Received the Lord, returned in peace, and prayed
Close to my side; then in my heart I said:

"O Christ, in this man's life--
This stranger who is Thine--in all his strife,
All his felicity, his good and ill,
In the assaulted stronghold of his will,

"I do confess Thee here,
Alive within this life; I know Thee near
Within this lonely conscience, closed away
Within this brother's solitary day.

"Christ in his unknown heart,
His intellect unknown--this love, this art,
This battle and this peace, this destiny
That I shall never know, look upon me!

"Christ in his numbered breath,
Christ in his beating heart and in his death,
Christ in his mystery! From that secret place
And from that separate dwelling, give me grace."

The spectacle of a general communion again gives Mrs. Meynell
inspiration for a poem whose last two stanzas apply equally as well to
the secular, evolutionary view of salvation as they do to the
ecclesiastical view, and whose last stanza is most suggestive in the
light it throws upon the puzzling discrepancy between the littleness of
man and the unlimited material vast in which he finds himself a floating
speck:

I saw this people as a field of flowers,
Each grown at such a price
The sum of unimaginable powers
Did no more than suffice.

A thousand single central daisies they,
A thousand of the one;
For each, the entire monopoly of day;
For each, the whole of the devoted sun.

Even so typically modern a philosopher as Henri Bergson would find one
of his leading and rather baffling ideas beautifully realized in one of
Mrs. Meynell's sonnets. Matter, Bergson tells us, in all its
manifestations is moulded by a spiritual push from behind it, so that
the sensible world is not a mosaic of atoms obeying fixed laws but
rather a cosmic compromise between matter and spirit, a _modus vivendi_
the operation of which would seem very different to us were our
viewpoint that of pure spirit. Says Mrs. Meynell in _To a Daisy_:

Slight as thou art, thou art enough to hide
Like all created things, secrets from me,
And stand, a barrier to eternity.
And I, how can I praise thee well and wide

From where I dwell--upon the hither side?
Thou little veil for so great mystery,
When shall I penetrate all things and thee,
And then look back? For this I must abide,

Till thou shalt grow and fold and be unfurled
Literally between me and the world.
Then I shall drink from in beneath a spring,

And from a poet's side shall read his book.
O daisy mine, what shall it be to look
From God's side even of such a simple thing?

The sense of what might, perhaps, be called restrained paradox in that
sonnet, is frequently met with in Mrs. Meynell's writings, and it
corresponds to aspects of reality which the old religious phraseology
she has so freshly minted for us is alone fitted to convey. _The Young
Neophyte_ is a beautiful sonnet enshrining the fatefulness of every
human action, the gift of the full flower which is implicit in the gift
of the smallest bud, the preparation we are constantly making for crises
which are yet hidden in the future. _Thoughts in Separation_ also deals
with the paradoxical overcoming of the handicaps of personal absence of
our friends through community of thought and feeling. Not only are these
paradoxes in human psychology delicately set forth by the poet, but
those darker ones of human work and destiny are consolingly illuminated
in such a poem as _Builders of Ruins_--which does not depend for its
quality of consolation upon anything foreign to its poetic truth.

One poem in the book is, perhaps, most remarkable for the light it
throws upon the sense in which the term poetic truth may be used, and as
showing the difference between the poetic, the realizable, and,
therefore, the true side of a religion--the side Matthew Arnold was so
anxious to keep--and the mere theological framework, always smelling of
unreality and always in need of renovation. The poem may stand as a
warning against confusing real poetry--in whose truth we need not be
afraid to trust because its author does not inhabit our own thought
world--with versified theology. If all of Mrs. Meynell's work were like
her _Messina, 1908_, then the critic and reader who now mistakenly shun
her would be right. And the poem is a curious commentary upon Mr.
Eastman's insistence that poetry is realization. For in her other poems
the author has presented those aspects of her religion which are
verifiable in experience. Perhaps the quotations given above bear out
that point. But one aspect of religious thought has now been pretty
generally abandoned, not because it has ever been proven false, but
because we have never succeeded in realizing it for ourselves. The God
of orthodox church theodicy never did "make good"; Christ, the Saints,
and even the very material form of the cross itself had to mediate
between man and the divine. And it is precisely in the one case in this
book where Mrs. Meynell tries to present the governing rather than the
immanent God to us that she fails--as, if poetry be realization, we
should expect her to fail. The first stanza of the poem addressed to the
Deity describes in a few bold strokes the wreck of Messina, and ends
with the lines:

Destroyer, we have cowered beneath Thine own
Immediate unintelligible hand.

The second stanza describes the missions of mercy to the stricken city,
and ends:

... our shattered fingers feel
Thy mediate and intelligible hand.

The essential weakness of this dependence for poetic effect upon the two
adjectives and their negatives is no less obvious than the weakness of
the poet's attribution of such apparently impulsive and then
retractatory conduct to a God whose ways must either be explicable in
terms of a human sense of order or not made the subject of human
discourse at all.

Mrs. Meynell describes herself in one of these poems as a singer of a
single mood. Some of her critics have taken her at her word and saved
themselves some trouble thereby in their task of appreciation. But as a
matter of fact, she should not be taken at her own modest estimate, for
her one mood is such a pervasive one, such a large and sane mood, that
it pays to look at more than one aspect of life through its coloring.
And in truth, besides her better-known poems which need no further
mention here, _The Lady Poverty_ and _Renouncement_, for example, there
will be found within the small compass of her beautifully-housed
collection of verse many aspects of nature, all of them instinct with a
mystic shimmer of life, as well as aspects of the innermost life of man
which it is given to few spirits to sing in words--only, in fact, to
those spirits whose effort it is to make their poetry

Plain, behind oracles ... and past
All symbols, simple; perfect, heavenly-wild,
The song some loaded poets reach at last--
The kings that found a Child.

To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and
the great proof of being alive, and it is not denied to criticism
to have it; but then criticism must be sincere, simple, flexible,
ardent, ever widening its knowledge.--Matthew Arnold in _Essays
in Criticism_ (First Series).

An Ancient Radical

WILLIAM L. CHENERY

_Euripides and His Age_, by Gilbert Murray. [Henry Holt and Company,
New York.]

The "conspiracy of silence" which oppressed the youth of those of us who
were born in the late Victorian era never seems more hateful than when
some master hand connects the present labors of liberty with the
strivings of the infinite past. In some fashion the dominating spirits
of a generation ago contrived to make the struggles for human freedom
appear as ugly isolated episodes without precursors or ancestry. They
forgot the Shelleys and the Godwins and they even denied the
significance of the classic forerunners of today's ardent prophets.

There were happy exceptions. Some of us cherish the teachings of a
Virginia professor who, as far as the adolescent capacities of his
students permitted, bridged the gap between Socrates's free questionings
and the contemporary yearnings for a world of uncompromising justice and
beauty. What that Southern student did for his small band of followers
Gilbert Murray has long been doing for the great world. His present
contribution belongs to that satisfying series, _The Home University
Library_. Incidentally, one reflects that this _Home University_ is one
of the few institutions of learning which has completely avoided the
blinders so many are complacently wearing. The Euripides of Murray
suggests to the author--and to the reader, one may claim--both Tolstoi
and Ibsen. But, one hastens to state, Professor Murray is too learned
and thoughtful a man to paint a revolutionary Euripides such as _The
Masses_--much as one loves that exuberant Don Quixote--would delight to
honor and to portray. His onset, however, catches us:

"Every man who possesses real vitality can be seen as the
resultant of two forces," says Murray. "He is first the child of
a particular age, society, convention; of what we may call in one
word a tradition. He is secondly, in one degree or another, a
rebel against that tradition. And the best traditions make the
best rebels. Euripides is the child of a strong and splendid
tradition and is, together with Plato, the fiercest of all rebels
against it.... Euripides, like ourselves, comes in an age of
criticism, following upon an age of movement and action. And for
the most part, like ourselves, he accepts the general standards
on which the movement and action were based. He accepts the
Athenian ideals of free thought, free speech, democracy,
'virtue,' and patriotism. He arraigns his country because she is
false to them."

The suffragist and the feminist movements have recently brought the
great dramatist to his proper appreciation in respect to women. Some of
the passages in the _Medea_ are quoted as often in suffragist campaigns
as the words of Bernard Shaw or of Olive Schreiner. This Greek is
sometimes said to be the first literary man who understood women. For
that reason, as Professor Murray so charmingly emphasizes, Euripides was
ever accounted a woman hater, despite even the implications of his great
chorus which sings so nobly woman's destined rise as a power in the
world. His statement of the cause of barbarian woman against a civilized
man who has wronged her is incomparably more contemporary than _Madam
Butterfly_, and with Murray we may doubt "if ever the deserted one has
found such words of fire as Medea speaks." And, as the author continues,
"Medea is not only a barbarian; she is also a woman, and fights the
horrible war that lies, an eternally latent possibility, between woman
and man. Some of the most profound and wounding things said both by
Medea and Jason might almost be labelled in a book of extracts 'Any Wife
to Any Husband' or 'Any Husband to Any Wife.'"

The change which came over the spirit of Euripides's vision, as Athens
itself was transformed by empire lust from the first glories of
Pericles, suggest again the purifying satire of our ablest moderns. War
is hateful and the picture which the Attic dramatist drew of the horrors
of dying Troy leave little to the present imagination. Euripides
accordingly became as popular in imperialistic Athens as was Bebel among
the Kaiser's ministers. Murray interprets this phase magnificently. He
concludes: "This scene, with the parting between Andromache and the
child which follows, seems to me perhaps the most heartrending in all
the tragic literature of the world. After rising from it one understands
Aristotle's judgment of Euripides as the 'most tragic of the poets.'"
One has only to recall the brave gentleness of Hector's wife, described
first in Homeric words, to agree with the present author.

On the purely critical side Professor Murray's words are vastly
important. Especially valuable is his discussion of the chorus and the
_deus ex machina_ concerning which so much error has been taught since
Horace wrote on the art of poetry. But this small book is not designed
for those whose interest in Greek drama is technical. It is Euripides,
the philosopher; Euripides, the satirist of his times; Euripides, the
preacher of lofty virtues, the apostle of new men and more righteous
gods, who concerns the great awakening world of 1914. The intellectual
battles which Euripides fought on behalf of Athens have been waged again
and often for the millions who slumber and are content. They are being
fought now with an intensity unprecedented. So it brings courage and it
brings calm to realize the continuity of the conflict, and to recall the
signal victories of the olden days. Gilbert Murray's achievements are
too numerous to permit praise. One may only say now that the present
book is in line with the fine things of his past; that by virtue of his
labors the world agony for liberty and justice and beauty reveals new
phases of the intrinsic dignity and honor which have been its possession
since men desired better things.

For those whose lives are chaotic personal loves must also be
chaotic; this or that passion, malice, a jesting humor, some
physical lust, gratified vanity, egotistical pride, will rule and
limit the relationship and color its ultimate futility.--H. G.
Wells in _First and Last Things_.

Isn't it possible to be pedantic in the demand for simplicity?
It's a cry which, if I notice aright, nature has a jaunty way of
disregarding. Command a rosebush in the stress of June to purge
itself; coerce a convolvulus out of the paths of catachresis.
Amen!--_Some Letters of William Vaughn Moody._

Equal Suffrage: The First Real Test

HENRY BLACKMAN SELL

The query of the anti-suffragist--"Will the women really use suffrage if
they have it"--was rather conclusively answered in the affirmative at
Chicago aldermanic elections on April 7, when equal suffrage was given
its first real test in an American city of first rank. This election
brought out many interesting incidents which might be considered as
having "laboratory" value.

It has been contended by the "antis" that the women would be bad losers;
that they would not support the non-partisan ideals which are becoming a
definite part of our "new patriotism"; that the result of equal suffrage
would simply be one of double vote, wives voting as their husbands
decided; that the women coming out in the first enthusiasm of
registration would not take the same interest in the prosaic work at the
polls; that the fights against bad nominees would result either in a
duplication of man-run campaigns, or in ineffective and lady-like
campaigns.

The first of these contentions was proved untrue to even the most casual
observer at the polls on election day. The women were fighting uphill
all the way, and where the so-termed "suffrage men" were slightly
unpleasant in their attitude towards the "antis," the women were all
cheerfulness and all refreshing encouragement. As one explained: "It has
been the most wonderful feeling, working shoulder to shoulder with the
men in something that has really been our duty all along."

Nine women candidates were up for election and not one was chosen; and
yet, after talking with five defeated women candidates and three
defeated men candidates, I concluded that the women knew more about the
philosophy of politics and its sad uncertainties than men who had been
contesting for years.

True, election to office is but a by-product of political experience; it
is a most coveted by-product, nevertheless, and when a woman like Marion
Drake, who ran a close race against Chicago's "bad" alderman, says, at
the closing of the polls, "I have not been elected, but every minute of
the time I have expended has been worth while and I shall try again at
the next election,"--it shows the right spirit and the fundamental error
in the assertion that women cannot lose gracefully.

Non-partisanism could be given no real test, for these ideals seemed
necessary of application in only two or three wards. In one--the
twenty-first--an alderman with a bad record was up for re-election in
opposition to a Republican of no particular merit. The women got
together, with the aid of some of the better men, and selected a
non-partisan candidate. This man was elected directly through the
efforts of the women who, Republican, Democratic, and Progressive,
rallied in true non-partisan spirit to his aid.

As to the control of the women's votes by the men: it is interesting to
note that in the more intelligent wards there was considerable variance
between the men and the women, while in the wards of the poorer and less
intellectually-inclined portions of the city the votes ran a great deal
alike.

The women came out in good numbers and, as a matter of fact, the
masculine vote was considerably higher than usual; but even with this
advantage, the registered women outvoted the registered men by a small
per cent.

The campaigns conducted by the various women were distinctly different
from the ordinary political campaigns. They were dignified,
straightforward, strong, and effective. Miss Drake, in her campaign
against John Coughlin, colloquially and delicately known as "Bathhouse
John,"--the name originating from the fact that the gentleman in
question received his political training as a mopper and rubber in one
of Chicago's most infamous bath houses,--made a direct appeal, in a
house to house, voter to voter, canvass of her ward. In this way she
told over two-thirds of the people of the "Bathhouse's" territory all
about the gentleman, his ambitions, his desires, and his insidious
motives. And while she was defeated, it must be remembered that though
Coughlin received a sufficient plurality, he by no means attained his
boast:--"I'll beat that skirt by 8,000 votes." In fact, where his
plurality at the last elections was approximately eight to one, this
year it was less than two-and-a-half to one, making an obvious deduction
that Miss Drake's campaign was decidedly successful even though she did
not win.

The Education of Yesterday and Today

WILLIAM SAPHIER

_The Education of Karl Witte_, translated by Leo Wiener and edited
by H. Addington Bruce. [Thomas Y. Crowell Company, New York.]

Mr. Saphier is a Roumanian who came to this country only a few
years ago and learned English. The following review is his first
attempt at writing, and we print it just as it came to us, hoping
our readers will find it as interesting as we did.

French, Italian, English, Greek, and German at the age of nine, a Ph.D.
degree at fourteen, a doctor of laws and an appointment to the teaching
staff of the Berlin University at sixteen--these were some of the
achievements of Karl Witte. Or shall I say of pastor Witte, the father?
For the boy had very little to do with it: he was merely a piece of
putty in the able hands of a strong-willed man who knew what he wanted
and how to get it. A child of ordinary abilities, according to pastor
Witte and others, Karl absorbed an enormous amount of knowledge in a
comparatively short time, as a result of a method of education which
began almost as soon as he showed intelligence.

The book, originally written about one hundred years ago when scientific
advice on the subject was lacking, is a remarkable document. It is full
of useful information and practical hints to parents and people
interested in the education of children, even in this day of scientific
methods and conflicting authorities. But as we might have expected, the
discipline reminds us a little of the German "Kaserne." The spilling of
a little milk on the tablecloth was punished by enforced abstinence from
all foods except bread and salt. Punishment as a remedy for an offense
is always wrong, because it does not prove the responsibility of the act
to the child.

The spirit in which pastor Witte went about his task is shown in the
following passage:

The firmness in executing my purpose went so far that even our
house dog knew the emphasis of the words: "I must work," and
calmed down the moment we spoke these words softly into his ears.
Almost from the outset this made an enormous impression on Karl.
He soon became accustomed to look upon his work time as something
sacred.

The development of intellectual and moral courage, the most important
qualities any man or woman may possess, were neglected, at least were
not given the attention they deserve. To inculcate in the child a desire
for liberty and social equality, he overlooks entirely.

The father is really the more remarkable of the two. A product of the
method of education prevailing at the time, he stands as a refutation of
his own theories. Pastor Witte conceived and carried out an idea
successfully. He did something, at least theoretically, worth while. The
son died at eighty-three. Now what difference would it have made either
to the boy or to the world if his appointment to the teaching staff of
Berlin had come at a later date? Most methods of education aim at the
training of the senses and the accumulation of facts. While these are
necessary, I think the speed at which this is done is immaterial to the
child.

Some of the finest men and women, who made this a better world to live
in, had no scientific training in their childhood or later. We need not
go back to history to find them. Maxime Gorky, for instance, lost his
parents before he was four years old, and began to read under the
supervision of a cook at sixteen. Jack London is another instance that
suggests itself readily to one's mind.

Of course these are exceptional people, but take the thousands of able
and brainy men and women in labor organizations and idealists in all
walks of life. Usually they had very little attention from their
parents, either because they had no time or did not know enough. These
men and women who had to rub up against the rough edges of our
money-making machinery and to stand squarely on their feet facing this
world and its problems,--willing to lend a hand, yes, even to give their
lives for the betterment of social and economic conditions--these
persons are worthy of the name.

Now I don't want to say anything against the early training of children.
The kindergarten and all the methods of early training in schools have
come into existence because there is a real need for them. Parents, for
many reasons, no longer have the time to train their own children; but
we expect results from education in general that cannot be accomplished.

What good are all the learning and scientific facts that we have
accumulated up to now, if we don't use them to make our life richer and
more beautiful? Knowledge and ability are worthless if there is no moral
and intellectual courage to back them up. Pastor Witte thought the
education of his son finished when he reached the age of sixteen. We
today do things in the same spirit. We get things done. Nothing slow
about us. The result, of course, is very poor; nobody is satisfied. Our
experts, always ready with advice on any and everything, tell us that
what we need is technical training to provide industry with efficient
help. These educators do not see that the difficulty is not with the
child but with industrial conditions. They are going to fit the child to
this misery called modern industry. But remove the possibility of the
unscrupulous taking advantage of the inexperienced and simple-minded,
and many of the so-called educational problems will disappear.

Some Book Reviews

A New-Old Tagore Play

_Chitra: A Play in One Act_, by Rabindranath Tagore. [The
Macmillan Company, New York.]

Nothing is more irritating to a really modern critic than to have to
join in a chorus of universal praise. It is particularly irritating when
the person acclaimed is a Nobel prize winner, for surely those of us who
sit in private judgment in secluded places ought to be able to discern
values subtler than the ones open to the eyes of some mysterious
frock-coated and silk-hatted jury of professors in Stockholm, or
wherever it may be. The very marrow in the bones of criticism curdles at
the thought of agreeing with a popular award.

But a certain native honesty and a distinct desire to spread good news
obliges one, in the case of _Chitra_, to withhold the amiable dissecting
knife. The play is far too beautiful to serve as a cadaver for the
illustration of either the anatomist's skill or the facts of anatomy.
Let it be confessed that this reviewer, who was about to send the book
back with a refusal to review any work of Tagore, found, after reading a
few lines, that he was forced to go on; and that having once gone on, he
preferred to write the review rather than to give up the book.

This play was written twenty-five years ago, and belongs, therefore, to
that earlier strata of Tagore's life which is to the normal mind so much
more alluring than the latter detritus that seems to have accumulated
over him. His later work appears to be old with the old age of Asia and
with the old age of himself. Its fundamental feeling is the only too
familiar impulse to recline on the bosom of a remote God. We who regard
this attitude as a perversion of manhood will turn from it with relief
to the earlier writing, in which the very life-blood of our own hearts
seems quivering with the intimations of a better-than-godlike beauty.

As I have suggested, there is very little that can rationally be said
about this play _Chitra_. To indicate something of the nature of so
perfect a work is the sole office that I can profitably perform.

Chitra, daughter of a King who had no sons, was brought up to live the
life and perform the activities of a man, with a man's hardness of frame
and a man's directness of will. One day while hunting in the forest, she
found sleeping in her path Arjuna, the great warrior of the Kuru Clan.
"Then for the first time in my life I felt myself a woman, and knew that
a man was before me...." Going to the gods of love, Chitra obtained from
them the gift of a perfect and world-vanquishing beauty to last for one
year only; and returning to Arjuna she overcame by this invincible
weapon the monastic vows which he had taken upon himself, and swept him
away into the wild and glorious current of her year of beauty. Thus the
year begins:

_Chitra_

At evening I lay down on a grassy bed strewn with the petals of
spring flowers, and recollected the wonderful praise of my beauty
I had heard from Arjuna;--drinking drop by drop the honey that I
had stored during the long day. The history of my past life, like
that of my former existences, was forgotten. I felt like a
flower, which has but a few fleeting hours to listen to all the
humming of the woodlands and then must lower its eyes from the
sky, bend its head, and at a breath give itself up to the dust
without a cry, thus ending the short story of a perfect moment
that has neither past nor future.

_Vasanta_ (The God of Love)

A limitless life of glory can bloom and spend itself in a
morning.

_Madana_ (The God of the Seasons)

Like an endless meaning in the narrow span of a song.

_Chitra_

The southern breeze caressed me to sleep. From the flowering
_malati_ bower overhead silent kisses dropped over my body. On my
hair, my breast, my feet, each flower chose a bed to die on. I
slept. And suddenly, in the depth of my sleep, I felt as if some
intense eager look, like tapering fingers of flame, touched my
slumbering body. I started up and saw the Hermit standing before
me. The moon had moved to the west, peering through the leaves to
espy this wonder of divine art wrought in a fragile human frame.
The air was heavy with perfume; the silence of the night was
vocal with the chirping of crickets; the reflections of the trees
hung motionless in the lake; and with his staff in his hand he
stood, tall and straight and still, like a forest tree. It seemed
to me that I had, on opening my eyes, died to all realities of
life and undergone a dream birth into a shadow land. Shame
slipped to my feet like loosened clothes. I heard his
call--"Beloved, my most beloved!" And all my forgotten lives
united as one and responded to it. I said, "Take me, take all I
am!" And I stretched out my arms to him. The moon set behind the
trees. Heaven and earth, time and space, pleasure and pain, death
and life merged together in an unbearable ecstasy.... With the
first gleam of light, the first twitter of birds, I rose up and
sat leaning on my left arm. He lay asleep with a vague smile
about his lips like the crescent moon in the morning. The
rosy-red glow of the dawn fell upon his noble forehead. I sighed
and stood up. I drew together the leafy lianas to screen the
streaming sun from his face. I looked about me and saw the same
old earth. I remembered what I used to be, and ran and ran like a
deer afraid of her own shadow, through the forest path strewn
with _shephali_ flowers. I found a lonely nook, and sitting down
covered my face with both hands, and tried to weep and cry. But
no tears came to my eyes.

_Madana_

Alas, thou daughter of mortals! I stole from the divine
storehouse the fragrant wine of heaven, filled with it one
earthly night to the brim, and placed it in thy hand to
drink--yet still I hear this cry of anguish!...

A few words, a half dozen pages of prose modulated to perform an office
as subtle as that of blank verse, give us the exquisite essence of the
year that follows; and toward the end there steal into it notes of the
inadequacy which the great warrior feels in this perfection, and his
desire for the old and harsher round of human life. Thus the year ends:

_Madana_

Tonight is thy last night.

_Vasanta_

The loveliness of your body will return tomorrow to the
inexhaustible stores of the spring. The ruddy tint of thy lips,
freed from the memory of Arjuna's kisses, will bud anew as a pair
of fresh asoka leaves, and the soft, white glow of thy skin will
be born again in a hundred fragrant jasmine flowers.

_Chitra_

O gods, grant me this my prayer! Tonight, in its last hour, let
my beauty flash its brightest, like the final flicker of a dying
flame.

_Madana_

Thou shalt have thy wish.

And as it ends, and as Chitra realizes that there is to fall from her
that radiance which has been, for a year, the sole bond between her and
her lover, and also the sole barrier between the real her and him, she
finds that his profounder longing has changed into a desire for the
companionship of that strong and eager boy-woman that she was before her
transformation.

_Chitra_ (_cloaked_)

My lord, has the cup been drained to the last drop? Is this
indeed the end? No; when all is done something still remains, and
that is my last sacrifice at your feet.

I brought from the garden of heaven flowers of incomparable
beauty with which to worship you, god of my heart. If the rites
are over, if the flowers have faded, let me throw them out of the
temple (_unveiling in her original male attire_). Now, look at
your worshipper with gracious eyes.

I am not beautifully perfect as the flowers with which I
worshipped. I have many flaws and blemishes. I am a traveller in
the great world-path, my garments are dirty, and my feet are
bleeding with thorns. Where should I achieve flower-beauty, the
unsullied loveliness of a moment's life? The gift that I proudly
bring you is the heart of a woman. Here have all pains and joys
gathered, the hopes and fears and shames of a daughter of the
dust; here love springs up struggling toward immortal life.
Herein lies an imperfection which yet is noble and grand. If the
flower-service is finished, my master, accept this as your
servant for the days to come!

I am Chitra, the king's daughter. Perhaps you will remember the
day when a woman came to you in the temple of Shiva, her body
loaded with ornaments and finery. That shameless woman came to
court you as though she were a man. You rejected her; you did
well. My lord, I am that woman. She was my disguise. Then by the
boon of gods I obtained for a year the most radiant form that a
mortal ever wore, and wearied my hero's heart with the burden of
that deceit. Most surely I am not that woman.

I am Chitra. No goddess to be worshipped, nor yet the object of
common pity to be brushed aside like a moth with indifference. If
you deign to keep me by your side in the path of danger and
daring, if you allow me to share the great duties of your life,
then you will know my true self. If your babe, whom I am
nourishing in my womb, be born a son, I shall myself teach him to
be a second Arjuna, and send him to you when the time comes, and
then at last you will truly know me. Today I can only offer you
Chitra, the daughter of a king.

_Arjuna_

Beloved, my life is full.

ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE.

An Unorthodox View of Burroughs

_Our Friend John Burroughs_, by Clara Barrus. [Houghton Mifflin
Company, Boston.]

That title engenders a resentment in me, a sense of unfitness. It is an
epitome of a popular approval which has cheapened the word "friendship."
If Walt Whitman, John Muir, and Francis F. Browne had jointly written of
Burroughs, the words "our friend" in the title of their collaboration
would have been inevitable and nice. The common disregard of so
unimportant a matter as this seems to be in the author's opinion
exhibits the crass liberties which the public is wont to take with
personalities. The result is that a great man may become popular and
useful before he is understood.

Burroughs happily is both read and understood. His popularity therefore
is wholesome. But the mild and consistent protest which his life has
been and is against the necessary artificialities in which most of his
"friends" live has never drawn them into a comprehending, practicing
sympathy with it. He is read, applauded, and envied--but not followed.
His softness and gentle unconcern with affairs are the antitheses of
those dynamic qualities which confer leadership and vitalize men's
impulses and deeds. His urban admirers go to the country to rusticate
and picnic but not to live a life like his. He does too much speculative
thinking to give his attitude toward the world an opportunity to go home
to his readers.

Whitman, with a similar indifference to a following, drives men into the
open road; Thoreau lures them to Walden Ponds to repeat his experiment;
Ik Marvel persuades them to farm; David Grayson charms city folk back to
the land, to anchor and live. Burroughs attracts visitors to Slabsides.
He is on the verge of becoming an institution, a curiosity. His life has
been a personal success. He is young in spirit and surprisingly robust
at nearly eighty years of age--he is seventy-seven this month--and I
daresay that his obvious failure to lead his readers towards country
homes of their own or seriously to interest them in the art of simple
living has never given him the slightest pain. He has assumed no
responsibility for the ways of the world. Nature is capable of working
out her own salvation during a future eternity. A leaf on a tree does
not quarrel with or attempt to reform its personal kin. It functions
alone; the life of which it is a part must take care of horticultural
sociology. Burroughs to me acknowledges himself to be a leaf on the
great tree. That is exceedingly interesting; but endow leaves with
reason, give them an expanding consciousness, and their functions must
change. Burroughs would require to be more than a predestinated leaf if
his fellows were leaves.

By virtue of society's struggle and industry, in which Burroughs is not
interested, he has made of the world, so far as he is concerned, a
quiet, beautiful outdoor cathedral, domed by the sky, its chief priest
being fed and clothed by the slaves of productive industry in your world
and mine. With great respect and admiration I pronounce him a sagacious
man, a clever leaf that has employed its reason with remarkable personal
advantage. In Burroughs' world the tragedies, strife, and noise that we
experience do not exist; his cathedral is a by-product and he is a
modest beneficiary of humanity's work. In relation to the masses of
people it is as unreal as it is unproductive of racial fitness to
persist in the world as most men know it. He loves to dream, think, and
write in his cathedral; what is going on outside does not disturb him.
He revels in the leisure, order, and security which the outsiders have
provided. He assures us that it is pleasant and satisfying, and we honor
and reward him for the information, but I should like to ask him whether
the largest freedom and selfhood that are achievable apart from working,
conflicting, warring men are not themselves fundamentally artificial.

Burroughs does not seem to be sufficiently alive to suspect that he has
missed something greater than personal contentment. A reader of
everything that he has published, I never, until I read the
autobiographical sketches in this work, felt the pity and unsocial
contempt--not for the man but for the type--which I have here tried to
express.

D. C. W.

Another Masefield Tragedy

_The Tragedy of Pompey the Great_, by John Masefield. [The
Macmillan Company, New York.]

Creative artist that he is, Masefield moves forward into amazing
clearness, heightened by flashes of poetic light, the scenes of nearly
two thousand years ago in Rome. The fidelity of this tragedy to the
facts of history, and the remarkable extent to which it reproduces the
overwhelming glory of a great struggle, are new proofs of the author's
special affinity with the sanguinary deeds of heroic men. Masefield's
plays and narrative poems give the element of tragedy something of its
old vividness and nobility in art. Some of his phrases sound like the
fall of a guillotine. He is a master of the magic of objectifying
tremendous unrealities. He hates feeble passions; wanton courage and
oaken physical power in action are the big things that he likes to
ennoble with poetic treatment. And his success is incomparable, so far
as his contemporaries are concerned.

Masefield's great characters, true to the glossed facts of life, in
crises exhibit indwelling cave-men. His frankness and honesty are
themselves tragical. Life _is_ full of and inseparable from tragedy.
Pompey "saw a madman in Egypt. He was eyeless with staring at the sun.
He said that ideas come out of the East, like locusts. They settle on
the nations and give them life; and then pass on, dying, to the wilds,
to end in some scratch on a bone, by a cave-man's fire." The old warrior
lies awake, thinking. "What are we?" he asks Lucceius, and that actor in
a great play replies, "Who knows? Dust with a tragic purpose. Then an
end." Masefield surveys the recorded history of the past, sees into the
heart of the present and exclaims, "Tragedy!" And of course that is in
his own life; otherwise he could not see it apart from himself. In sheer
desperation he endues dust with a "tragic purpose," but he does not
believe so much as he hopes that a "purpose" inheres in that resultant
of life, for in the big poem with which he summarizes the record of
Pompey he says:

And all their passionate hearts are dust,
And dust the great idea that burned
In various flames of love and lust
Till the world's brain was turned.

God, moving darkly in men's brains,
Using their passions as his tool,
Brings freedom with a tyrant's chains
And wisdom with the fool.

Blindly and bloodily we drift,
Our interests clog our hearts with dreams,
God make my brooding soul a rift
Through which a meaning gleams.

_The Tragedy of Pompey the Great_, unlike any Shaw play or even _The
Tragedy of Nan_, is not good reading; its short sentences, tragic with
import, are mere outlines. But they drive incarnate reality into one's
soul.

What was the tragedy of Pompey? Well, it began hundreds of years before
he was born; he was the accidental embodiment of it. He had earned
security and peace. He had aided Caesar in conquering Gaul. "Caesar
would never have been anybody if Pompey hadn't backed him." But that
tyrant's lust for power provoked a civil war, and the end was "a blind,
turbulent heaving towards freedom." Pompey's dream of freedom--his
conviction that power was in too few hands--cost him his life. To him
Rome was inwardly "a great democratic power struggling with obsolete
laws." He declared that "Rome must be settled. The crowd must have more
power." But Pompey's dream was shallow and human, even if great, for,
regarding the "thought of the world" as of transcendent importance, he
asks, "For what else are we fighting but to control the thought of the
world? What else matters?"

History seems to try to repeat itself. Lentulus, fearing that they were
losing Rome, said to Pompey, "You have done nothing." The
reply--"Wait"--has a modern sound. Pompey was preparing to fight Caesar,
but public opinion, voiced by Metellus, excitedly demanded, "but at
once. Give him no time to win recruits by success. Give them no time
here. The rabble don't hesitate. They don't understand a man who
hesitates."

That too might have been said by a modern American newspaper, affecting
to speak for the crowd.

Philip, beloved of the maiden Antistia, is fanatically true to his
master, whom he would follow "To the desert. To the night without stars.
To the wastes of the seas. To the two-forked flame." To him this blind
devotion meant more than Antistia's love. "We shall have to put off our
marriage," he said to her, and she, speaking from the deep heart of the
mother, unachieved, answered:

Why, thus it is. We put off and put off till youth's gone, and
strength's gone, and beauty's gone. Till we two dry sticks mumble
by the fire together, wondering what there was in life, when the
sap ran.... When you kiss the dry old hag, Philip, you'll
remember these arms that lay wide on the bed, waiting, empty.
Years. You'll remember this beauty. All this beauty. That would
have borne you sons but for your master.

Whatever the fate of Pompey, Antistia's was the supreme tragedy.

DEWITT C. WING.

A Net to Snare the Sun

_The World Set Free_, by H. G. Wells. [E. P. Dutton and Company,
New York.]

Do you remember the little verse of Kipling's in the _Just So Stories_
about the small person who kept so many serving men

"One million Hows, two million Wheres,
And seven million Whys?"

There's something very much like that small person in a decidedly larger
person called H. G. Wells. For all the great sweep and astonishing
convincingness of his later novels he still keeps the child-like quality
of asking startling questions about everything in the universe. He still
wants to know: "Why can't I catch the sun, and what would happen if I
did?"

In his last half dozen novels he has been asking about various phases of
our modern society, politics, and the sex question. But in this latest
book, _The World Set Free_, he goes back to a type of question that
interested him some years ago, the type half fanciful and half
sociological that produced _In the Days of the Comet_, _The Time
Machine_, and _When the Sleeper Wakes_. But this book is not entirely
like the earlier ones. For one thing the science is for the first time
so nearly possible that it is almost probable, and for another this book
is the work of an older, quieter soul with less regard for externals and
with more faith in the ultimate high hope for mankind.

What Wells has asked himself this time is: "What would happen if man
were suddenly given command over an unlimited amount of physical power?"
He brings this about by modern chemistry. A scientist discovers a new
theory of matter which enables him to break down metals by
radio-activity and so generate practically limitless power. The first
use the world makes of this power is to go to war. We can hardly quarrel
with Wells for the improbability of this because it sweeps the board so
clear for his reconstruction period, which is the heart of the story.

A strange story it is; one whose hero is mankind--mankind in the bulk,
groping, struggling, trying half blindly to adapt himself to the new
conditions, and at last, after a desperate period of reconstruction,
coming out into the sunlight, triumphant, clean, and at peace. Now and
then an individual is caught up for an instant into the story,
transfigured for the moment by circumstances into a mouthpiece for the
mass of mankind,--a scientist, a middle-class Englishman who wrote his
memoirs, the Slavic Fox, a dying prophet of the later age,--but for the
most part it is just mankind who speaks. Wells, by the great sweep and
vision of his ideas and the almost super-human handling of the technical
difficulties of such an impersonal story, succeeds in raising us for a
moment out of our personal selves so that we are completely identified
with the race, and view its later successes with a serene and personal
pride.

Each of us becomes a link in the great chain of humanity that reaches
from the cave man through the "chuckle-headed youth" to the dying
professor, the men who dreamed of snaring the sun in a net and taming it
to their hand. "Ye auld red thing ..." we say with the chuckle-headed
youth, "We'll have you _yet_!" And the dying prophet cries for each of
us to the setting orb:

"Old Sun, I gather myself together out of the pools of the
individual that have held me dispersed so long. I gather my
billion thoughts into science and my million wills into a common
purpose. Well may you slink down behind the mountain from me,
well may you cower...."

EUNICE TIETJENS.

A $10,000 Novel

_Diane of the Green Van_, by Leona Dalrymple. [The Reilly and
Britton Company, Chicago.]

About the middle of last December Mr. F. K. Reilly sent a telegram to a
Miss Leona Dalrymple of Passaic, New Jersey, in which he asked: "May I
call upon you Thursday afternoon?" The telegram was the result of the
$10,000 prize contest which the Reilly and Britton Company had planned
early in the year; and Miss Dalrymple had just been announced as the
winner by the three judges--S. S. McClure, Ida Tarbell, and George N.
Madison. She knew nothing of this, however, though she thought Mr.
Reilly's telegram must mean an interest in her work; so she replied
calmly that she would be pleased to see him on Thursday. Then Mr.
Reilly's eyes begin to twinkle, as he tells the story, for it is rather
a joke to set out on a journey with a $10,000 check in your pocket for
an unsuspecting young woman. Even when he explained to her and presented
the check she remained calm--though she is only twenty-eight years old
and this was her first taste of real fame. She told Mr. Reilly that she
had another novel which she hoped might interest him--but he took the
words out of her mouth by saying that he had come prepared to make a
contract for it!

So much for the latest of modern fairy tales. _Diane of the Green Van_
is the prize-winning novel, and, despite our first suspicion of it
because of that very fact, it proves to be a good one. Miss Dalrymple
loves the outdoors, and her present story of an American girl who goes
jaunting in a van in the Florida Everglades was suggested by a newspaper
clipping about an adventurous young Englishwoman who managed to break
away from conventions once a year and roam the country in a gipsy wagon.
Not all "best sellers" have as much real charm as this one. Perhaps its
freshness and spontaneity are due to the fact that it had to be written
in six weeks for the contest.

Miss Dalrymple has stated that her purpose in writing novels is to
"entertain wholesomely through optimism and romance." Usually that type
of purpose is linked up with a sentimentality which means being sweet at
the expense of truth. But this author is not that sort: in expressing
her dislike of sex stories, for instance, she attributes their
shortcomings to treatment, not to material--"since there is absolutely
no subject under the sun which may not be treated with perfect good
taste in a novel." She has also stated that in her opinion the modern
woman is over-sexed--a popular though altogether wrong-headed view which
we mean some time to argue with her in these columns.

Slime and the Breath of Life

_The Russian Novel_, translated from the French of Le Vicomte E. M.
de Vogüe by Colonel H. A. Sawyer. [George H. Doran Company,
New York.]

Although this book was written in 1886, its treatments of Pushkin,
Gogol, Turgeneff, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy are now first made accessible
to the English reader, and will still be worth his attention. In fact
one reads them with a growing regret that the author, who died in 1910,
did not continue his interpretation of the Russian spirit as the
religious and mystic tone of its nihilism gradually faded and left us
the bleaker outlook of such men as Gorky. With Tolstoy,
however--"probably the greatest demonstrator of life which has arisen
since Goethe"--the book closes.

The author treats his subject from the standpoint of a certain formula
which he finds to hold throughout the range of that realism which
succeeded the romanticism of Pushkin--a romanticism which disappeared in
1840. Thereafter there grew up the great realistic school which gives
Russia the leadership of the world in the field of realistic fiction--a
leadership due partly to the temperamental standpoint of the Russian,
adapted for just the kind of work which the great realistic novel
involves, and partly to the importance of the novel as the vehicle of
those ideas which the censor barred from every other channel of
expression.

In the bible we are told that God made man out of the slime of the earth
and breathed into him the breath of life. In those words is the secret
of the Russian realistic novel. For the realism of his own country the
author of this work has little praise. Because, he says, it lacked that
human sympathy which saw in man not only the slime of the earth but the
breath of life, it is barren.

Dickens, on the other hand, and George Eliot gave to English realism a
standpoint which was moulded, nay, impregnated through and through, with
the religion of that book to which Mary Evans had renounced formal
allegiance--the Protestant bible. In fact, De Vogüe goes so far as to
say that some of her writing, for instance "the meeting between Dinah
and Lisbeth," is biblical in the quality of its appeal, and might have
been written by the hand that gave us _Ruth_.

This spirit, but without the Anglo-Saxon hardness, is the spirit of
Russian realism. It has all the photographic accuracy, the preocupation
with all types of life that distinguishes French realism; but the
preoccupation with the divine, the mystical turning away from the things
of this world, is also present. The sympathy of Gogol is intensified to
painfulness in Dostoevsky and is apotheosized into a new religion of
renunciation in Tolstoy.

And because (in contrast to the French) the Russians "disentangled
themselves from these excesses, and like the English gave realism a
superior beauty moved by the same moral spirit of a compassion cleansed
of all impurities and glorified by the spirit of the gospels"--because
of this De Vogüe regards Russian realistic literature as the one force
that can rejuvenate the literary art of the European nations.

The author writes with the authority of long study and gives us a
sufficient basis for what we must now do ourselves--namely, read
comtemporary Russian literature and ask ourselves what it tells us;
whether or not it tells us that Christian realism is a contradiction in
terms.

LLEWELLYN JONES.

A Drama of the Two Generations

_Nowadays: A Contemporaneous Comedy in Three Acts_, by George
Middleton. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]

Some little theatre company ought to send eight of its members on tour
through all the smaller cities of the country in _Nowadays_. It would be
the most effective way in the world to awaken the people of those
slumbering places to the really amazing revolutions in contemporary
life--and incidentally in the contemporary theatre. For one thing, it
shows how parents and children are gradually bridging the foolish gulf
between the generations--the gulf that Shaw has called the degrading
objection of youth to age; for another, it reflects the extraordinary
renaissance that has come to our theatre since the first visit of the
Irish Players.

Mr. Middleton takes a typical small-town family--a father, mother, son,
and daughter--and leads them through a domestic crisis that has probably
been the sad lot of most modern families. The daughter, like all proper
young women, has an ambition: she wants to be a sculptor. The mother
understands, having had similar longings before she married a man who
made it his business to suppress them. The father refuses to listen to
the daughter's idea, and tells her that if she goes to New York it will
be without his help. But she goes; and the play opens with her first
visit home. The son, a weakling without ability of any sort except to
spend money and sow wild oats, has also left home; but he has managed to
live very comfortably because of a monthly allowance from his father.
The justice of the situation harks back to the antique theory that even
a weak boy has more right to the splendors of the world than a girl of
any type.

Diana's father refuses to think about woman suffrage. "I don't have to
think about something I _feel_. I tell you, if we had woman suffrage,
women would all vote like their husbands."

"They say it would double the ignorant vote," answers Diana's friend,
Peter, the journalist, who has encouraged her in rebelling.

"He's a good-natured old fossil," Peter says later to Diana. And when
the girl insists that she loves her father anyhow, Peter says, "I love
radishes, but they don't agree with me. If he had a new idea he'd die of
dropsy."

The result of Diana's visit is to produce certain rebellions in her
mother, who goes back to New York with her to help make a home of that
lonely little flat, and to revive her own early ambitions as a painter.
Later the father succumbs to the new order. It is all good "comedy";
also it's tremendously good thinking. If only it could be read by all
the people who misunderstand the surging modern spirit that is riding so
bravely through traditions and inheritances.

But _Nowadays_ has another value besides that of its story. It is made
of the stuff of the new drama; it fulfills our demand that the theatre
shall give us the truth about life in a simple way. However, we shall
talk more about this in another issue.

Our Mr. Wrenn and Us

_Our Mr. Wrenn_, by Sinclair Lewis. [Harper and Brothers, New
York.]

The poverty of American workaday criticism has rarely shown more
threadbare than in the fact that of all the reviews of _Our Mr. Wrenn_,
a first novel by Sinclair Lewis, a new author, not one has mentioned the
idea under the book.

They have been good reviews, too, as reviews go. Many have praised the
book, have talked around it, described its characters, attempted to
classify it--under names so various as Locke, Wells, and Dickens. Yet so
expected is the novel that means nothing, and so dead is critical
vision, that no one has thought to say "Here is a new American writer.
What is in his soul?"

Let me prove the point. "Our Mr. Wrenn" is a mouse-like little clerk in
the office of a New York novelty company. He is called "Our Mr. Wrenn"
in business correspondence by the manager of the firm. He is
overshadowed by "the job." He lives uncomfortably in Mrs. Zapp's
downtown boarding house. Because the author can see, various figures
from the drab stream one meets in the street are made human. Because the
author has whimsicality and scorn and sympathy, the book has humor and
satire and pathos. All these things have been noted by the critics.

Mr. Wrenn is not always "Our." He becomes his own in the gorgeously
illustrated travel leaflets sent out by steamship companies. Eventually
he does go to England on a cattle steamer. He is "Bill Wrenn" and licks
a tough. He meets adventures--Istra, an over-fine artist girl who likes
him because he's real. In the end he pathetically sees her soar above
him and sails back to America, where he goes into the office again,
falls in love with a sweet little lingerie-counter clerk, marries, and
"settles down." All these things the critics have told us.

But Mr. Wrenn is at once glorious and pathetic, not only because he says
"Gee!" when he has the emotions of a poet. It isn't only the little
things of the book that twist our smiles.

There is an epic conflict between Mr. Wrenn of the job and Bill Wrenn of
the sunsets and the sea. Our Mr. Wrenn, oppressed and bullied, scuttling
out of the way, not quite daring to think his own thoughts or dream his
own dreams, not knowing quite enough to understand the great things of
the world--this man is everywhere in New York, in America; he is in our
own souls. And when he musters courage to become Bill Wrenn, when he
sets out on dangerous quests and loves strange beauty, he becomes a
conqueror who rallies with him the great of history, and stands on the
high places of our own spirits.

Pitifully inadequate Bill Wrenn is, of course. The lonely tragedy of
that conventionally "happy ending" has escaped the critics. The drab,
the commonplace, creep over Bill again without his knowing it. That's
the frightful part of it. It's very like what appears to happen to
everybody. Our Mr. Wrenn he is at the end, sunk in comfort and
forgetting his flags in sunsets.

It is a poignant, bitterly human novel. After reading it in sympathy one
cannot lean back in satisfaction and write commonplaces. It leads to
understandings and resolutions. When we learn to demand such things of
American writers, their primary purpose will then cease to be either to
entertain or to "teach a lesson."

GILBERT ALDEN.

Lantern Gleams

_Little Essays in Literature and Life_, by Richard Burton. [The
Century Company, New York.]

Readers of _The Bellman_ will welcome in this permanent form many little
lantern gleams of thought that have been shed athwart their path by this
unacademically-minded incumbent of a Minnesota chair.

Mr. Burton flashes his lamp fitfully over a large area, and shows us
loitering spots as well as boggy ground it were well to avoid. Opening
his book at random, we find here a hint on reading and here a warning
gleam over some political or social morass.

When the morass is a deep one, however, we must not expect to sound its
depths with a lantern gleam, and so sometimes Mr. Burton disappoints us.
Thus in discussing the individual and society he merely tells us what we
all know: that we pay for the advantage of sociality, of mutual comfort,
and support by the loss of individuality, by the growth of a fear to do
the thing that commends itself to our best judgment. But what must we
do? Must we fill in this particular morass by throwing in all the
individuals? Or will the individuals be able to jump it? Mr. Burton is
discreet on such points.

More satisfactory than that essay and others like it are those on
literature. Under "Books and Men" the author deplores the tendency which
characterized Chaucer ("Farewell my books and my devotion") of drawing
an antithesis between men and books, between literature and life.
Literature has its origin in life and its apparent separation from it is
an accidental result of the printed book method of spreading what used
to be spread by the human voice alone or in chorus.

ILLIAM DHONE.

About Nietzsche

_Nietzsche and Other Exponents of Individualism_, by Paul Carus.
[The Open Court Publishing Company, Chicago.]

Expositions of Nietzsche are usually written by uncritical disciples
with little knowledge of formal philosophy. In so far as Nietzsche was a
poet, some of these productions may be of value in spots, but in so far
as Nietzsche was an intellectual critic of life they are worthless.

Dr. Carus writes from the standpoint of a philosopher in the most formal
sense of that word. To him Nietzsche the thundering voice of protest
named _Zarathustra_ is of less importance than Nietzsche the extreme
nominalist. The chief value of his work therefore is purely informative.
He will certainly not send the philosophic debutante further into the
matter.

Even from the purely informative side, however, Dr. Carus's work is
delimited by his own attitude, which is that of the old time believer in
the validity of universals. Recurrence, uniformity, eternal norms of
things behind the changing phenomena are the foundations of Dr. Carus's
stated or implied world view.

He therefore treats Nietzsche as simply a forerunner of such, to him,
mischievous people as William James and Henri Bergson. He takes great
pains, indeed, to show that there are many Nietzsches, and among them he
classes George Moore, on the strength of extracts from his _Confessions
of a Young Man_. Of more value than that is his consideration of the
philosophy of Stirner--mainly because Stirner is not so well known as
Nietzsche, nor so well as he deserves to be on his merits.

One undoubted merit the book has, and that is the industrious collection
of personal recollections of Nietzsche and of Nietzsche portraits which
Dr. Carus has brought together in its pages. These will give the book a
positive value to the Nietzsche enthusiast, while the sight of Dr.
Carus's cool, scholastic temperament trying to drench the burning bush
of Nietzsche will at least interest him.

ILLIAM DHONE.

Feminism and New Music

_Anthony the Absolute_, by Samuel Merwin. [The Century Company,
New York.]

It is interesting to watch the struggles of an essentially chivalrous
masculine soul caught in the whirlpool of modern feminism. Samuel
Merwin, ever since the old days of _A Short Line War_ and _Calumet K._,
written in collaboration with Henry Kitchell Webster, has held towards
women the attitude of the knight errant. Recently, as shown in _The
Citadel_, _The Charmed Life of Miss Austin_, and even more strongly in
this latest book, _Anthony the Absolute_, he has become a determined
feminist. But the attitude has not changed. Formerly his hero laid at
the feet of the lady of his choice as much wealth, fame, and position as
he could acquire; this latest hero gives her in the same spirit a career
and the chance to develop her own personality. Mr. Merwin says: "The man
who deliberately stops a woman's growth--no matter what his traditions;
no matter what his fears for her--is doing a monstrous thing, a thing
for which he must some day answer to the God of all life." He is still
the knight errant. It is still man who permits woman to develop.

None the less it is a very readable tale. The male characters are all
clearly and convincingly drawn, not without humor. The lady is a little
nebulous, but very charming. Illustrating the absoluteness of Anthony
and serving as an introduction to the charming Heloise is an interesting
musical theme. The scene is laid in China, where Anthony is studying
primitive music, and Heloise is able to sing for him a perfect
close-interval scale, in eighth tones instead of the "barbarous" half
and whole tones of the piano scale.

Unfortunately Mr. Merwin has permitted himself to be led by the
exigencies of a popular magazine, in which the story appeared in serial
form, into giving the tale a certain meretricious air of sex allurement
which it fundamentally does not possess. On the whole, except in a
certain technical facility in handling the situations and sustaining the
tension of the plot, _Anthony the Absolute_ is a decided falling below
the really splendid standard of excellence which Mr. Merwin set for
himself in _The Citadel_.

EUNICE TIETJENS.

Of all our funny little Pantheon the absurd little god who gets
the least of my service is the one labeled "Personal
Dignity."--_Some Letters of William Vaughn Moody._

New York Letter

GEORGE SOULE

Is it true that a Chicago woman's club recently declared any book to be
immoral which contains a character whom you wouldn't invite into your
home to meet your daughter? If so, the world is to be congratulated,
because all novels except the ROLLO BOOKS are labeled immoral, and we
needn't worry any more about the word. Provided, of course, that the
daughters of this particular woman's club are sheltered as carefully as
they should be, having been brought up by such mothers.

I'm afraid only authors and publishers know just how threatening this
fear of "immoral" books is getting to be. The most significant American
novelist has just written a masterful book which has been declined by
two at least of the oldest and best publishing houses because it is "too
frank." The men in charge want to publish it; they think the world ought
to have a chance at it. But they are afraid. And the author, unlike most
authors under similar circumstances, won't modify the book. He says
he'll wait twenty-five years, if necessary, but he won't change a word.
And yet, if the book were published, some people would accuse him of
"pandering to commercialism."

Don't blame the publisher. Mitchell Kennerley came near being fined
hundreds of dollars and sent to jail recently for issuing _Hagar
Revelly_--a serious though by no means a great novel. Anthony Comstock,
who earns his living by attempting to suppress anything which he happens
to consider immoral, is likely at any time to pick out a good piece of
work for his thunderbolts--and he is a government official in the post
office department. You can't tell what he is going to do next. Everybody
remembers his ill-advised censorship of Paul Chabas's delicate and
inoffensive little _September Morn_; yet in every cheap picture-store
window in New York there is now displayed without protest a photograph
of a nude woman which makes no pretense to art or beauty.

Not many people know that six men decide what Boston may or may not
read. _The Watch and Ward Society_, a group of puritans backed up by the
blue laws of the state, have long been active in this pharisaical
undertaking and from time to time have arrested booksellers. The
booksellers in self-defense have recently formed a committee of three to
act with three members of this society. When a new book comes along
which anybody "suspects," it is put before the joint committee, and if
that decides against it, Boston cannot buy it except by mail. _The
Devil's Garden_ only barely escaped, because somebody had read to the
end of the book and labeled it "religious." In other words, it teaches a
lesson. But the same argument did not save Witter Bynner's _Tiger_.

Magazine editors will tell you similar facts by the hour. The
_Metropolitan_ was recently held up by the post office because it
contained photographs of nude statuary--from the winter exhibition of
the National Academy!

We shall not rid ourselves of this vicious situation by simply getting
enraged at the censors. The truth is, they are too well entrenched in
public opinion. The people who enforce the law are ignorant postal
clerks, clergymen of archaic convictions, and lower court judges of the
tobacco-chewing, corner-saloon type to whom any thought of sex is
necessarily nasty. But behind them is the man who is always saying that
such and such a book or play "oughtn't to be allowed." He is always
wanting to protect "the young," or somebody else, although he rarely
reads books himself, and probably would resent interference with his own
often vicious pleasures. His mind is essentially rotten. He is incapable
of understanding the pure beauty of the human body, because he has seen
so many "musical comedies." He would be shocked by the statement that
passion is a beautiful element of nature toward which we should be
reverent. He has a sense of propriety, not so much about what should be
done as about what should be said. And then there is the vast Florence
Barclay contingent, largely women, who, because they don't know what the
world is like, don't want to know, and don't think anybody should be
allowed to know.

The trouble with censorship is that we always want it to apply to other
people, never to ourselves. It is our national weakness that we try to
prescribe conduct by law, instead of seeing that the individual is
strong and truth-seeing, and leaving conduct to take care of itself,
allowing ideas to fight their own battles. If we must have a censorship,
let it be in the hands of the strong and intelligent. Let us forbid all
books which are not true. Mental and moral fibre is really vitiated by
the Florence Barclay sort of thing. People brought up on that are
enemies of light and progress. Their world is an exercise-place for
impossible ethics. Their emotion is washed-out sentiment. Courage and
vigor are unknown to them. And the worst of it is that their soft and
clinging hands are wrapped about the rest of us, as they try to drag us
down from the rain-washed skies of the morning to their stuffy
hair-cloth religion and pink-candy pleasures.

The fight between the writers and the censors is sure to grow bitter in
the next few years; both sides are getting more determined every day.
But such crises are welcomed by the adventurous. We shall end not only
by riding over our small opponents, but by carrying with us an army
awakened to the true issues of art and life.

William Butler Yeats to American Poets

The current number of _Poetry_ prints a speech that William Butler Yeats
made during his recent visit to Chicago, in which he took occasion to
warn his confreres in America against a number of besetting sins. He
said, in part:

Twenty-five years ago a celebrated writer from South Africa said
she lived in the East End of London because only there could she
see the faces of people without a mask. To this Oscar Wilde
replied that he lived in the West End because nothing interested
him but the mask. After a week of lecturing I am too tired to
assume a mask, so I will address my remarks especially to a
fellow craftsman. For since coming to Chicago I have read several
times a poem by Mr. Lindsay, one which will be in the
anthologies, _General Booth Enters Into Heaven_. This poem is
stripped bare of ornament; it has an earnest simplicity, a
strange beauty, and you know Bacon said, "There is no excellent
beauty without strangeness." ...

I have lived a good many years and have read many writers. When I
was younger than Mr. Lindsay, and was beginning to write in
Ireland, there was all around me the rhetorical poetry of the
Irish politicians. We young writers rebelled against that
rhetoric; there was too much of it and to a great extent it was
meaningless. When I went to London I found a group of young lyric
writers who were also against rhetoric. We formed the Rhymers'
Club; we used to meet and read our poems to one another, and we
tried to rid them of rhetoric.

But now, when I open the ordinary American magazine, I find that
all we rebelled against in those early days--the sentimentality,
the rhetoric, the "moral uplift"--still exists here. Not because
you are too far from England, but because you are too far from
Paris.

It is from Paris that nearly all the great influences in art and
literature have come, from the time of Chaucer until now. Today
the metrical experiments of French poets are overwhelming in
their variety and delicacy. The best English writing is dominated
by French criticism; in France is the great critical mind.

The Victorians forgot this; also, they forgot the austerity of
art and began to preach. When I saw Paul Verlaine in Paris, he
told me that he could not translate Tennyson because he was "too
_Anglais_, too noble"--"when he should be broken-hearted he has
too many reminiscences."

We in England, our little group of rhymers, were weary of all
this. We wanted to get rid not only of rhetoric but of poetic
diction. We tried to strip away everything that was artificial,
to get a style like speech, as simple as the simplest prose, like
a cry of the heart....

Real enjoyment of a beautiful thing is not achieved when a poet
tries to teach. It is not the business of a poet to instruct his
age. He should be too humble to instruct his age. His business is
merely to express himself, whatever that self may be. I would
have all American poets keep in mind the example of François
Villon.

So you who are readers should encourage American poets to strive
to become very simple, very humble. Your poet must put the fervor
of his life into his work, giving you his emotions before the
world, the evil with the good, not thinking whether he is a good
man or a bad man, or whether he is teaching you. A poet does not
know whether he is a good man. If he is a good man, he probably
thinks he is a bad man.

Poetry that is naturally simple, that might exist as the simplest
prose, should have instantaneousness of effect, provided it finds
the right audience. You may have to wait years for that audience,
but when it is found that instantaneousness of effect is
produced....

We rebelled against rhetoric, and now there is a group of younger
poets who dare to call us rhetorical. When I returned to London
from Ireland, I had a young man go over all my work with me to
eliminate the abstract. This was an American poet, Ezra Pound.
Much of his work is experimental; his work will come slowly, he
will make many an experiment before he comes into his own. I
should like to read to you two poems of permanent value, _The
Ballad of the Goodly Fere_ and _The Return_. This last is, I
think, the most beautiful poem that has been written in the free
form, one of the few in which I find real organic rhythm. A great
many poets use _vers libre_ because they think it is easier to
write than rhymed verse, but it is much more difficult.

The whole movement of poetry is toward pictures, sensuous images,
away from rhetoric, from the abstract, toward humility. But I
fear I am now becoming rhetorical. I have been driven into Irish
public life--how can I avoid rhetoric?

Letters to The Little Review

What an insouciant little pagan paper you flourish before our bewildered
eyes! Please accept the congratulations of a stranger.

But you must not scoff at age, little bright eyes, for some day you,
too, will know age; and you should not jeer at robustness of form, slim
one, for the time may come when you, too, will find the burdens of flesh
upon you. Above all, do not proclaim too loudly the substitution of
Nietzsche for Jesus of the Little Town in the niche of your invisible
temple, for when you are broken and forgotten there is no comfort in the
Overman.

One thing more: Restraint is sometimes better than expression. One who
has learned this lesson cannot refrain from saying this apropos of the
first paragraphs in the criticism of _The Dark Flower_. Do not give folk
a chance to misunderstand you. Being a woman, you have to pay too high a
price for moments of high intellectual orgy.

Forgive all this and go on valiantly.

SADE IVERSON.
Chicago.

I am greatly indebted for a copy of THE LITTLE REVIEW. I take this
opportunity of stating that the publication is one of the cleverest and
best things I have seen. It deserves success, for it contains stuff
which will compare very favorably with the best that is being written.

G. FRANK LYDSTON.
Chicago.

Will you allow me to congratulate you on your magnificent effort in
bringing out THE LITTLE REVIEW?

I have found it very refreshing after having suffered for so long by
reading the so-called book review magazines that have no right to more
than passing notice.

You have accomplished wonders, and if your efforts of the future come up
to those put into the first number of THE LITTLE REVIEW, your success is
assured.

The best wish I can offer is that its path may be covered with roses and
bordered with the trees of prosperity.

Again congratulating you, I am, with every good wish, very truly yours,

LEE A. STONE, M. D.
Chicago.

THE LITTLE REVIEW came this morning! And I have read it all! And I love
it! Much more than I expected, to be perfectly honest! I feared
something too radical--too modern--if that is possible. If it had been
like _The Masses_--well, I can never express my contempt for that
sheet. But you're perfectly sane, intelligent, readable, and
enthusiastic--gloriously so!

Your description of Kreisler is worth much to me. It is precisely what I
have always felt about him. Paderewski, too. But I think the Mason and
Hamlin reference a little too commercial. I realize you want THE LITTLE
REVIEW to be straightforward, honest, intimate, etc., but I fear that
kind of thing will be taken as advertisement and not as a personal
belief and enthusiasm.

If I should never know anything more of Mr. George Soule than his sonnet
and New York letter I should have to like him. The man who could feel
and write that last paragraph is a splendid type.

But the whole thing is beautiful, and worth while, whether you agree
with it all or not. A thousand congratulations!

AGNES DARROW.
Dayton, Ohio.

[Of course our remarks about the Mason and Hamlin violated all
journalistic traditions. But traditions are so likely to need
violation, and diplomacy and caution are such uninteresting
qualities! What we feel and tried to say about that piano is that
it's as definitely a work of art as good poetry or good music.
Why not say so, quite naturally? We know something of the man who
is responsible for its quality of tone; he's as authentic an
artist as those musicians who create on his foundations. Is there
any reason why such an achievement is not to be mentioned in a
journal that means to devote itself to beauty? Is anything vital
ever gained by a cautious regard for "_on dit_"? Above all, if
one can discover no importance in journalistic tradition of that
type, why defer to it?--THE EDITOR.]

I haven't got over your beautiful magazine yet. Don't let anybody keep
you from making it a truthful expression of yourself--but you won't.

First of all, it's beautifully made. You couldn't have done better
typographically. It's the most _inviting_ magazine published. I like the
color and the paper label.

Second, its spirit blows keen and with a pure fragrance. If you can
continue to show such freshness you will have gone far toward achieving
the goal Mr. Galsworthy urges--that "sleeping out under the stars" which
cleans our hearts of all things artificial.

With sincerest congratulations,

HENRY S.
New York.

I am very much pleased with the first issue of THE LITTLE REVIEW. I am
very glad to know that such a thing should be started, and it should be
both a cause and an effect of better times in literature. I shall do
everything I can to make it better known.

WILLIAM LYON PHELPS.
Yale University.

When I found that the local bookstores had sold out their first orders
of THE LITTLE REVIEW I was delighted; for it meant folks were interested
in the fledgeling. The first number deserves the praise and
congratulations of everybody interested in literature; everything in it
is fine, even unto the composition of the "ad" pages. With its fresh,
cheerful note THE LITTLE REVIEW very fittingly comes forth on the first
day of Spring. Long may it spread sweetness and light.

W. W. G.
Chicago.

There are so many things that I admire in the first issue of THE LITTLE
REVIEW that I find it difficult to decide just where to begin. It was
like taking up a copy of the Preludes of Debussy for the first time;
after playing them over and over again I found it difficult to know
whether it was what he said or the way he said it which held the greater
charm for me. I congratulate you most sincerely on the distinct personal
quality which is so evident in your magazine and you may count upon me
to rejoice with you if it meets with anything like the great success
which it so distinctly merits.

F. L. R.
Chicago.

Your new publication has just fallen into my hands. The vital thing!

I cannot begin to tell you what its pulsating, teeming import means to
me. I know nothing today in magazine form that will mean so much to
busy, thinking people.

NANNIE C. LOVE.
Indianapolis.

Please let me offer my sincerest congratulations and my warmest wishes
for the continued success of THE LITTLE REVIEW. There are numerous
points in the first issue that I should like to discuss with you; I must
warn you that you are tempting your readers and must not be surprised if
you are overwhelmed with letters, questioning, approving, and
criticising.

The foreword strikes such a splendid note! I hope no criticism will
influence you to change it.

You agree, evidently, with the point that _The Dark Flower_ suggests a
Greek classic; so do I. But, conceding that, how could you have been
surprised that countless people care nothing for it? Don't you know that
the majority of people in the world do not really "possess" the Greek
classics? Without the background of the world's thought, ages ago, and
its progress--unless we agree with Alfred Russell Wallace that we have
made no progress--can't you see that _The Dark Flower_ could genuinely
startle many people? So I beg for less sharpness toward those who do not
feel the wonder of it. The tragedy is in their lives.

For just the same reason _Jean Christophe_ belongs to a few,
comparatively. If you had never before felt the power of a great epic,
could you really grasp this one? Modern as we claim to be--and
independent--must there not be some foundation? Oh dear!--I do want to
tell you why I think _Vanity Fair_ is greater than _Succession_ and why
Ysaye's music is inspired--when I listen, at least. But one can't go on
forever.

Since the "Critics' Critic" expressed a doubt about that quotation from
Euripides and since you insisted that it sounded like a Gilbert Murray
translation, you may be glad to know that it is both. But you quoted it
wrong. It is from _Aeolus_, a lost play, and this is the correct
version:

This Cyprian,
She is a thousand, thousand changing things;
She brings more pain than any god; she brings
More joy. I cannot judge her. May it be
An hour of mercy when she looks on me.

I do agree that "a million, million changing things" is somehow more
perfect; I even agree now, though not at first, with the order of
attributes: "She brings more joy than any god, she brings more pain." On
a re-reading of _Aeolus_ I am taken with the way you misquoted it. Joy
was surely first in the Greek's life. And of course the human beauty of
the thing made me think immediately of the way Mrs. Browning "struck
off" Euripides:

Our Euripides, the human,
With his droppings of warm tears
And his touches of things common
Till they rose to touch the spheres!

KATHERINE TAPPERT.
Davenport, Iowa.

... I don't know when I've read anything so inspiring as that letter
from Galsworthy. Can't all of you who are helping to make the magazine
arrange to march up to it mentally and present your "copy" for approval
before you decide to print it?

I like the article on Paderewski and the one about _The Dark Flower_.
But do be careful of "beauty" and "passion." It's easy to make them
commonplace. Also spare your adjectives a bit; you don't need an
adjective for everything. I realize that your abbreviations are made in
the interest of readableness, but however informal you want to make it
you only succeed in sounding hideously colloquial. It doesn't read well,
and it makes me feel that you're trying to achieve through the style
what ought to be achieved quite simply through the material itself. Not
that I approve of anything stilted, but you can easily overdo the other
side of it. And wouldn't it be better to leave some of the things
unsigned? People who don't know that the various Anderson contributors
are unrelated will think it's rather a family monopoly.

The Ficke poems are exquisite; and how I love Nicholas Vachel Lindsay's!
Also I like the New York letter very much, but George Soule's _Major
Symphony_ could just as well be unwritten. Poetry has to be so much
better than that to be real poetry. Another thing: I think your
quotations from _Succession_ weren't as efficient as you hoped. It's a
book that can't well be quoted except to one who knows it.

You wanted frankness, so here it is. Otherwise, I have nothing but
praise for the whole glorious undertaking!

LOIS ALLEN PETERS.
Philadelphia.

[Being a sister of the editor, Mrs. Peters speaks her mind with a
freedom that enchants us. It also helps us--though we want to
shake her for one or two of those remarks. However--may her
letter serve as a model to timid but opinionated readers!--THE
EDITOR.]

If you will allow me to be perfectly frank about your first issue, I
should like to tell you that THE LITTLE REVIEW seems rather too esthetic
in tone and spirit to avoid being "restrictive"--a wish you expressed in
your editorial. There is not enough variety in it, for one thing. For
another, some of its critical judgments are too personal--are too
largely temperamental judgments--to be of any permanent value. You seem
to have set out to exploit personalities; and there's a juvenility in
many of the articles that I'm afraid you'll all blush for in ten years.

A WELL-MEANING CRITIC.

The first number of THE LITTLE REVIEW came as a delightful surprise and
I have enjoyed reading it. I particularly appreciate the spirit of
appreciation running through the pages, which I believe will be of
inestimable service to young writers, if you are able to keep it up.

M. K.
New York.

The Little Review looks very interesting. I hope to have the pleasure of
reading it through very soon, but at the moment my small sister is
devouring it and refuses absolutely to give it up. If you are as
successful in pleasing women generally as you have been in pleasing her
you need have no fear for the success of the magazine.

J. C. P.
New York.

Professor Foster's essay on _The Prophet of a New Culture_ is
magnificent--a soul-searching, heart-breaking bit of writing, fiery and
tragic. Nicholas Vachel Lindsay's _How a Little Girl Danced_ is a
delightful thing--airy, high-minded, and full of his burning spirit. In
fact, THE LITTLE REVIEW is full of things that one reads with a keen
zest.

W. L. C.
Denver.

THE LITTLE REVIEW came to hand promptly, but I was unable to read it
until last night. That is where I made my first mistake, as I had been
denying myself a very pleasant two hours. My second mistake was in
having read it at all, as it has now become one of those eight or ten
journals which are always welcome and more or less necessary. Ten
journals each month (and some weeklies), quietly yet insistently urging
me to take them up, are like those good friends who tempt me with an
outing in Spring when work is crowding. So with THE LITTLE REVIEW. It
has with one reading become a distinctly individual friend.

W. M. L.
Philadelphia.

Your LITTLE REVIEW has just reached me. I took it home for leisurely
examination on Sunday. I congratulate you upon launching and hope that
you'll meet no adverse trade winds in your voyage. Its atmosphere is
certainly anything but editorial, and you've put plenty of your own
personality into it. And what a delightfully charming letter is that
from Galsworthy!

I should take sharp issue with you on one or two slight points could I
face you across a lunch table, but as it is, I tuck my differences away,
with a sigh of envy at your enthusiasm, and the sincere wish that you
may always keep it.

With best wishes for your good luck.

BEATRICE L. MILLER.
Boston.

I think your first number very interesting indeed, and congratulate you
on your fine start. I am always delighted with every new manifestation
of the life and enthusiasm in Chicago!

With best wishes for your future.

ALICE C. HENDERSON.
Chicago.

... I've fallen in love with M. H. P., "The Critics' Critic." She's just
the sort of person I'd like to go and talk with this afternoon. Please
ask her to write a letter properly sitting on Agnes Repplier for her
_Atlantic_ essays. A very delicate, cultured, polite little woman
sitting behind a tea-table in her aloof apartment, and given over to
well-bred sneering at things she doesn't know anything about--that's how
I picture Miss Repplier.

A CONTRIBUTOR.

THE LITTLE REVIEW is here, and I have so enjoyed going over it.

It is a great first number and sets a pace that would have made most of
us breathless before we started; but anyone can know it isn't so with
you, from that last paragraph of your announcement. It was lovely!

I loved the Paderewski, too. Was there anything more wonderful than the
glory of the Funeral March as he played it the afternoon of his first
recital here this winter? I know you heard it from the way you write of
it. An emotion that brings the tears and makes the sobs struggle in the
back of your throat is always worth living through, and I wouldn't have
missed it for worlds.

With the best of good wishes.

MABEL REBER.
Chicago.

I want to tell you how very good the first issue of THE LITTLE REVIEW
is. I don't know what the succeeding numbers will be like, but you have
set a pace in this one that will demand some vigorous effort to keep up.
After that "gripping" announcement no one will doubt the real purpose of
the REVIEW and the fine optimism that is behind it. I don't have to
believe everything you are going to print, but if those who write it do,
by all means keep them together. And _don't_ let George Soule get away.

It's too early to make suggestions, but I should say that Number One is
well balanced and very readable, and I like the trick of throwing the
light on from different angles--like the Galsworthy and Nietzsche
discussions. The tone is high, and I am quite sure I never read more
intelligent reviews anywhere.

Good luck to THE LITTLE REVIEW!

J. D. MARNEY.
Springfield, Ill.

Will you let me thank you for giving me a very pleasant experience in
reading the first copy of THE LITTLE REVIEW? There are many things in
the first number which arouse one's interest, though I am not sure that
I would at all agree in all the critical judgments which are there
pronounced. Anyway, you will let me wish you all success, and wave you
my hand with the hope that THE LITTLE REVIEW shall be the biggest review
in the country.

D. W. WYLIE.
Iowa City, Iowa.

Congratulations must be pouring in on you from all sides, but I want,
just the same, to add my voice to the chorus of "Bravos" that surrounds
you.

THE LITTLE REVIEW is a triumph. It even outdoes my picture of it; and
that is saying much, for I have known it was to be something
exceptionally nice.

It is a delight to look at, showing somebody's good personal taste; and
the contents--well, I like them _lots_ more than I could say adequately
or put in this space.

Blessings on you and the heartiest congratulations to all concerned in
the making of THE LITTLE REVIEW.

MARGARET T. CORWIN.
New Haven, Conn.

I am pleased with its general appearance, and the contents are
inspiring--full of the spirit of youth. I wish THE LITTLE REVIEW every
success.

GEORGIA M. WESTON.
Geneva, Ill.

The initial number of THE LITTLE REVIEW has impressed me so favorably
that I want some of my friends also to share in its appreciation.

You surely have made a fine beginning and, in my judgment, cannot do
better than to adopt as the creed of THE LITTLE REVIEW the sound and
encouraging advice given in Mr. Galsworthy's inspiring letter.

ALBERT H. LOEB.
Chicago.

From the first page to the last book announcement I have read THE LITTLE
REVIEW with pride and delight.

Its sincerity attracts me even more than its obvious literary merit, and
its comprehensiveness and quality will appeal to all who read at
all--especially to those who go below the surface.

ALETHEA F. GRIMSLEY.
Springfield, Ill.

Thank you so much for THE LITTLE REVIEW! I liked it from the moment I
saw it, both outside and in. I like particularly the personal note you
put into your writing. It's as though you were really talking to me and
telling me how you feel about _The Dark Flower_ and Paderewski and dear
Little Antoine with his bad room that was "pretty but stupid for the
sound."

With best wishes to you in your beautiful, big undertaking.

ZETTA GAY WHITSON.
Chicago.

The "Best Sellers"

The following books, arranged in order of popularity, have been
"bestsellers" in Chicago during March:

The Inside of the Cup Winston Churchill Macmillan
Diane of the Green Van Leona Dalrymple Reilly and Britton
Pollyanna Eleanor Porter L. C. Page
Laddie Gene Stratton-Porter Doubleday, Page
T. Tembarom Frances Hodgson Burnett Century
Sunshine Jane Anne Warner Little, Brown
The Woman Thou Gavest Me Hall Caine Lippincott
Cap'n Dan's Daughter Joseph C. Lincoln Appleton
Passionate Friends H. G. Wells Harper
Old Valentines S. H. Havens Houghton Mifflin
The Devil's Garden W. B. Maxwell Bobbs-Merrill
The White Linen Nurse Eleanor Abbott Century
When Ghost Meets Ghost William DeMorgan Henry Holt
The After House Mary Roberts Rinehart Houghton Mifflin
The Iron Trail Rex Beach Harper
The Dark Hollow Anne Katherine Green Dodd, Mead
The Rocks of Valpre E. H. Dell Putnam
The Light of Western Zane Gray Harper
Stars
Peg o' My Heart Hartley Manners Dodd, Mead
The Dark Flower John Galsworthy Scribner
Daddy Long Legs Jean Webster Century
It Happened in Egypt C. N. and A. M. Doubleday, Page
Williamson
Darkness and Dawn George Allan England Small, Maynard
The Forester's Daughter Hamlin Garland Harper
Westways S. Weir Mitchell Century
My Wife's Hidden Life Anonymous Rand, McNally
Home Anonymous Century
The Valley of the Moon Jack London Macmillan
The Harvester Gene Stratton-Porter Doubleday, Page
Gold Stewart Edward White Doubleday, Page
A People's Man E. Phillips Oppenheim Little, Brown
The Way Home Basil King Harper
Martha by the Day Julie M. Lippman Holt
The Rosary Florence Barclay Putnam
Making Over Martha Julie M. Lippman Holt

NON-FICTION
Crowds Gerald Stanley Lee Doubleday, Page
Alone in the Wilderness Joseph Knowles Small, Maynard
Autobiography Theodore Roosevelt Macmillan
What Men Live By Richard C. Cabot Houghton Mifflin
The Gardener Rabindranath Tagore Macmillan
The Modern Dances Ellen Walker Saul

THE LITTLE REVIEW is now on sale in the following bookstores:

New York:
Brentano's.
Vaughn and Gamme.
M. J. Whaley.

Chicago:
The Little Theatre.
McClurg's.
Morris's Book Shop.
Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company.
A. Kroch and Company.
Chandler's Bookstore, Evanston.
W. S. Lord, Evanston.

Pittsburg:
Davis's Bookshop.

Springfield, Mass.:
Johnson's Bookstore.

Cleveland:
Burrows Brothers Company.

Detroit:
Macauley Brothers.

Minneapolis:
Nathaniel McCarthy's.

Los Angeles:
C. C. Parker's.

Omaha:
Henry F. Keiser.

Columbus, O.
A. H. Smythe's.

By John Galsworthy

The Dark Flower

_$1.35 net; postage extra._

This splendid story of love which has drawn more attention than
anything else Mr. Galsworthy ever wrote, is now in its fourth
large edition.

The editor of the new _Little Review_ says of it: "Everything
John Galsworthy has done has had its special function in making
'The Dark Flower' possible. The sociology of 'Fraternity,' the
passionate pleading of 'Justice' and 'Strife,' the incomparable
emotional experiments of 'A Commentary,' the intellectuality of
'The Patrician'--all these have contributed to the noble
simplicity of 'The Dark Flower.'"

John Galsworthy's Plays

The Fugitive

_60 cents net; postage extra._

"Mr. Galsworthy deals with the problem of woman's economic
independence, her opportunity and preparation for self-support
outside the refuge of marriage....

"'The Fugitive' is an admirable piece of dramatic writing. The
undeviating exposition of the situation in the first act is
certainly the best thing Mr. Galsworthy has yet done in the
dramatic field."

--_New York Tribune._

The Pigeon

A Fantasy in Three Acts

_60 cents net._

The Eldest Son

A Domestic Drama in Three Acts.

_60 cents net._

Justice

A Tragedy in Four Acts.

_60 cents net._

The Little Dream

An Allegory in Six Scenes

_50 cents net._

Three of these plays--"Justice," "The Little Dream," and "The
Eldest Son"--have been published in the more convenient form of
one volume, entitled "Plays by John Galsworthy, Second Series."

_$1.50 net._

My First Years as a Frenchwoman 1876-1879

BY MARY KING WADDINGTON, author of "Letters of a Diplomat's
Wife," "Italian Letters of a Diplomat's Wife," etc.

_$2.50 net; postage extra._

The years this volume embraces were three of the most critical in
the life of the French Republic. Their principal events and
conspicuous characters are vividly described by an expert writer
who was within the inmost circles of society and diplomacy--she
was the daughter of President King of Columbia, and had just
married M. William Waddington, one of the leading French
diplomats and statesmen of the time.

Notes of a Son and Brother

BY HENRY JAMES.

_Illustrated. With drawings by_ WILLIAM JAMES. _$2.50 net;
postage extra._

Harvard, as it was in the days when, first William, and then
Henry, James were undergraduates, is pictured and commented upon
by these two famous brothers--by William James through a series
of letters written at the time. The book carries forward the
early lives of William and Henry, which was begun in "A Small Boy
and Others," published a year ago. Among the distinguished men
pictured in its pages are John LaFarge, Hunt, Professor Norton,
Professor Childs, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was a close friend
of Henry James, Senior.

North Africa and the Desert

BY GEORGE E. WOODBERRY. _$2.00 net; postage extra._

This is one of that very small group of books in which a man of
genuine poetic vision has permanently registered the color and
spirit of a region and a race. It is as full of atmosphere and
sympathetic interpretation as any that have been written.
Chapters like that on "Figuig," "Tougourt," "Tripoli," and "On
the Mat"--a thoughtful study of Islam--have a rare value and
beauty.

By HUDSON STUCK, D.D. Archdeacon of the Yukon.

The Ascent of Denali (Mt. McKinley)

_With illustrations and maps_ _$1.75 net; postage extra._

The fact that this narrative describes the only successful
attempt to climb this continent's highest mountain peak, and that
the writer led the successful expedition, is enough to give it an
intense interest. But when the writer happens to be as sensitive
as an artist to all the sights and sounds and incidents of his
great adventure, and to be so skilful a writer to convey
everything to the reader, the value and interest of the book are
irresistible.

Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled

_With 48 illustrations, 4 in color._ _$3.50 net; postage
extra._

If you would see the vast snow-fields, frozen rivers, and rugged,
barren mountains of the Yukon country but cannot visit them you
will do the next best thing by reading this often beautiful
account of a missionary's ten thousand miles of travel in
following his hard and dangerous work. It is the story of a brave
life amid harsh, grand, and sometimes awful surroundings.

Charles Scribner's Sons
Fifth Avenue, New York

SPRING PUBLICATIONS

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

4 Park Street, Boston
1914
16 E. 40th St., New York

George Borrow and His Circle

By CLEMENT K. SHORTER

"A treasure and a delight to admirers of Borrow."--_London
Athenæum._ "A sane book about a sane and magnificently wholesome
man."--_London Daily Express._

With frontispiece. $3.00 net. Postage extra.

What Men Live By

By RICHARD C. CABOT, M.D.

A physician's contribution to the conduct of life. His
application of work, play, love, and worship to daily life and
his experience of their healing powers are set forth in this
volume in an inspiring and readable way.

$1.50 net. Postage extra.

Our Friend John Burroughs

By Dr. CLARA BARRUS

The increasing thousands of lovers of John Burroughs and his
writings will welcome this intimate book about the man, his life,
and his personality. A picturesque and vivid account of his
youth, written by Mr. Burroughs himself, is a prominent and
important feature.

Illustrated. $2.00 net. Postage extra.

Annals and Memoirs of the Court of Peking

By J. O. P. BLAND and EDMUND BACKHOUSE

"An extraordinarily vivid picture of life at the Court of Peking
from the middle of the sixteenth century down to our
day."--_London Truth._

"Of the importance to us today of understanding or endeavoring to
understand the Chinese, no one will entertain a doubt, and
therefore we heartily welcome a book like this in which the
attempt is made, and made, we believe, successfully, to trace
cause and effect back to the buried foundations of Chinese
philosophy and civilization and to look at things from the
Chinese point of view."--_London Globe._

Lavishly illustrated. $4.50 net. Postage extra.

In the Old Paths

By ARTHUR GRANT

A series of delightful essays, by a popular English writer, which
recreate with charm and delicacy some of the great scenes of
literature. Using as a starting-point some poet, Mr. Grant writes
of the country in which he lived, or which lives in his work, and
allows a sensitive fancy to draw pictures of the past.

Illustrated. $1.50 net. Postage extra.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson: The Story of His Life

By MARY THACHER HIGGINSON

This intimate biography tells for the first time the full story
of the life of one of the most interesting of American soldiers
and writers. Fully illustrated from portraits, views of Colonel
Higginson's homes, friends, etc., and with facsimiles of
interesting manuscripts.

Illustrated. $3.00 net. Postage extra.

The Ministry of Art

By RALPH ADAMS CRAM

Among the subjects discussed are: Art as an Expression of
Religion, the Place of Fine Arts in Public Education, the
Significance of the Gothic Revival in American Architecture,
American University Architecture.

These papers all embody and eloquently exploit that view of the
relation of mediæval ideals to modern life which has made the
author the most brilliant exponent of Gothic architecture in
America.

$1.50 net. Postage extra.

Elia W. Peattie's

THE PRECIPICE

"One of the most significant novels that have appeared this
season ... so absolutely true to life that it is hard to consider
it fiction."--_Boston Post._

"A book which men and women alike will be better for reading, of
which any true hearted author might be proud.... The author knows
life and human nature thoroughly, and she has written out of
ripened perceptions and a full heart."--_Chicago Record Herald._

"An intimate and sympathetic study of new-century womanhood ...
presents a profoundly interesting survey of the new social order
of things."--_Philadelphia North American._

With frontispiece. $1.35 net. Postage extra.

_The $10,000 Prize Novel_

_Diane of the Green Van_

_The Season's Great Success_

_By Leona Dalrymple_

Viewed even in the critical light of the high standard set for
the winner of a ten-thousand-dollar prize, "Diane of the Green
Van" fully measures up to the expectations of the novel-reading
public.

This is why it heads the list of best sellers in New York,
Chicago, Philadelphia. The advertising value of a big prize offer
may account in some degree for the heavy advance sale--although
the wholesale buyers ordered _after reading_. Nothing but sheer
merit can account for the extremely large retail sale.
Friend-to-friend commendation is steadily increasing
over-the-counter demand.

The judges--the readers--all gave "Diane" first place among five
hundred manuscripts, many of them by first-class authors. The
trade has applauded the choice. Reviewers have called "Diane of
the Green Van" well worth the big prize.

We should like to be able to publish the list of twenty or more
successful writers who entered stories. On reputation alone,
their work would have gone far; but we feel that the _story_ of
"Diane" will go farther.

"Here are expectation and enthusiasm justified alike. It is a
clear, clean, clever romance.... It combines the love and
intrigue of the 'Zenda' tale with the freedom of a Locke or
Farnol story of broad highways."--_New York World._

"Just what countless pleased readers will devour with avidity....
Gracefully written, vivid in style and suggestion.... Bright and
breezy and exciting."--_Chicago Record Herald._

"The tale has unusual dramatic grip, much brilliancy of
dialogue.... It is the sort of narrative that no one willingly
lays down until the last page has been turned."--_Philadelphia
North American._

"The novel throbs with the youthful joy of living and the
enchantments of summer hover over its pages. Everywhere is there
originality in the invention of the incidents and subtlety in the
delineation of characters."--_Chicago Tribune._

"A heroine whose fascination richly merits study. A hero who will
capture the heart of the reader from the moment of his first
appearance."--_Boston Globe._

"So good a thing, a thing so romantic and thrilling, we have not
seen in--lo, these many moons of story telling."--_Louisville
Post._

"Diane" is a tale with the freshness and spontaneity of youth,
with the rich personality of the author shining through its
diverting pages. In its imagination and clever dialogue and plot
it strikes the keynote of popular appeal. At the same time,
"Diane" has all the essentials of lasting popularity. The
publishers feel justified in predicting a long journey for the
Green Van and its charming young mistress. (_$1.35 net_)

*_Publishers The Reilly & Britton Co. Chicago_*

_A New "Frank Danby" and Other Spring Leaders_

FRANK DANBY'S
_Finest and Most Powerful Work_

FULL SWING

_Ready April 30th_

A book in whose rushing current glow two love stories of
heart-gripping interest, passion and tears are mingled in Frank
Danby's masterly work, "Full Swing." Vivid, forceful, rich in
character-drawing that challenges comparison with the best in
English fiction--the author has added a supreme touch to her
book--a new type of heroine, incredible as that may appear. A new
type that nevertheless is as credible as your oldest friend--who
wins and holds your heart through startling incidents that would
wreck a less powerful book with the doubt of their possibility.
With dramatic scenes in abundance throughout the book, the
interest increases steadily to the very end. No jaded reader,
seeking a new sensation in literature, will be able to lay down
the volume until the tale is finished. $1.35 net. Postage, extra.

The Full of the Moon

By *CAROLINE LOCKHART*, Illustrated in color, $1.25 net.
Postage extra.

_JEANNETTE L. GILDER_, in the _Chicago Tribune_:

"It would not surprise me if 'The Full of the Moon' proves to be
the most popular of Miss Lockhart's novels, and if it does not
ultimately find its way to the stage I will be very much
surprised, for it has all the elements of popular drama in it."

The Best Man

By *GRACE LIVINGSTON HILL LUTZ*, Illustrated in color. $1.25
net. Postage extra.

_NEW YORK TIMES_:

"A romance of startling adventure. The action is rapid,
everything moves in a breathless whirl."

The Red Emerald

By *JOHN REED SCOTT*, Illustrated in color. $1.25 net. Postage
extra.

_PHILADELPHIA RECORD_:

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BERL SEGAL
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Nov. 16, 1912.

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THE DRAMATIC WORKS OF GERHART HAUPTMANN

¶ Four volumes of this edition, epoch-making in dramatic
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VOLUME I

BEFORE DAWN
THE WEAVERS
THE BEAVER COAT
THE CONFLAGRATION

VOLUME II

DRAYMAN HENSCHEL
ROSE BERND
THE RATS

VOLUME III

THE RECONCILIATION
LONELY LIVES
COLLEAGUE CRAMPTON
MICHAEL KRAMER

VOLUME IV

HANNELE
THE SUNKEN BELL
HENRY OF AUE

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Transcriber's Notes

Advertisements were collected at the end of the text.

The original spelling was mostly preserved. A few obvious typographical
errors were silently corrected. Further corrections are listed here
(before/after):

[p. 13]:
... true: "Euch behren sollst ...
... true: "Entbehren sollst ...

[p. 13]:
... Du, sollst eutbehren!" (Deny yourself, ...
... Du, sollst entbehren!" (Deny yourself, ...

[p. 27]:
... To have the sense or creative activity is the ...
... To have the sense of creative activity is the ...

[p. 50]:
... up a copy of the Preludes of Debessy ...
... up a copy of the Preludes of Debussy ...

[p. 53]:
... will be like, but you have set a place in ...
... will be like, but you have set a pace in ...

*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Little Review, April 1914 (Vol. 1, No. 2)" ***

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