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Title: The Little Review, July 1914 (Vol. 1, No. 5)
Author: Various
Language: English
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THE LITTLE REVIEW
_Literature Drama Music Art_
MARGARET C. ANDERSON
EDITOR
JULY, 1914
Poems Charles Ashleigh
The Renaissance of Parenthood The Editor
"Des Imagistes" Charles Ashleigh
Of Rupert Brooke and Other Matters Arthur Davison Ficke
The New Loyalty George Burman Foster
The Milliner (Poem) Sade Iverson
"Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt" Margaret C. Anderson
Editorials
New York Letter George Soule
Dostoevsky's Novels Maurice Lazar
Book Discussion:
An Unreeling Realist De Witt C. Wing
The Revolt of the "Once Born" Eunice Tietjens
Verlaine and Tolstoy Alexander S. Kaun
Conrad's Quote Henry B. Sell
"Clark's Field" Marguerite Swawite
The "Savage" Painters A. S. K.
Sentence Reviews
Published Monthly
25 cents a copy
MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Publisher
CHICAGO
Fine Arts Building
$2.50 a year
THE LITTLE REVIEW
Vol. I
JULY, 1914
No. 5
POEMS
CHARLES ASHLEIGH
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL
(_A Mystery Rime for Little Children of All Ages_)
The rain comes down and veils the hills.
Ah, tender rain for aching fields!
The hills are clothed in a mist of rain.
(My heart is clothed in a mist of pain.)
Ah, mother rain, that laves the field,
If I to you my poor soul yield,
Will you not cleanse it, soothe it, tend it,
Weep upon it 'til 'tis mended?
'Twas sweet to sow, 'tis hard to reap.
Come, mother rain, and lull me to sleep.
Lull me to sleep and wash me away,
Out of the realm of Night and Day,
Back to the bourne from whence I came,
Seeming alike yet not the same....
Rain, you are more than rain to me.
And Lash of Pain may be a Key.
Ope, then, the door and tread within.
The double Door of Good and Sin
Is vanquished. Lo, with bread and wine,
The table's spread! The feast is Mine!
LOVE IN THE ABYSS
Amidst the buzz of bawdy tales
And the laughter of drinking men,
I sat and laughed and shouted also.
Yet was I not content.
My seared and restless eyes, turning here and there,--
Like my tired soul,--
Seeking new joys and finding them not,--
How oft swept you unseeing.
Until, suddenly,--
And now I know not how I could have missed it,--
My eyes saw into yours,
And plumbed the deep wells of newly born desire.
Ah, dear my heart, what things your eyes did speak!
Not God's own music of creation's dawn,
Revealed to mystic in a holy trance,
Could pleasure me more sweetly.
So dear were your lips--
Your lips so kind and regal red.
My memory of your lips I cherish
As a great possession ...
Ah, flying joy,
Caught on the wings of Time ...
Tender oasis,
Ingemmed in a wilderness of grey!
Kisses, kisses,--
Kisses upon your red lips in the black night ...
When, alone in the long, quiet street,
By the door of the tavern,
Shielded from sight of those within,
The soft rain falling on our heads like a mother's blessing,--
We bartered the clinging kisses of new desire.
And, as I held you to me,
The whole universe
Became informed of God,
And lay within my arms.
JEALOUSY
You are possessed by another.
How I hate him!
Hear the rational people say: "Jealousy is a primitive thing. A
thing of the emotions; not of reason."
Fools! You do not know scarlet desire, full-flooded!
Ah, my dearest, Graal of my heart's longing,
Your stolen kiss is fresh upon my neck.
My lips are full of my secret kiss upon your neck.
You are with another, whom I hate; whom I like well for himself, but
hate because he possesses you ...
Your possessor is old and ugly;
He can not love you as I can.
I can pour out for you the scented treasures of my young love.
Dear night of hope, when you gave me the whispered promise to come
to me ...
Stealthy was I and cunning.
Friendly and attentive was I to your old lover (if lover he may be
called, who is almost incapable of love).
And, all the time, I was scheming for you.
When the old man was away for an instant--
Oh, golden moment,--
I poured my whispered passion into your ears.
When he looked away, or, for a moment, was distracted, with swift
undertones I declared myself to you.
How dear was your welcoming glance and your quickly toned assent!
You had a face so proud.
So quiet and poised among the throng.
Yet, for once, you gave me your eyes and, in so doing, gave me your
priceless body and warm, comradely soul.
Ah, flash of answering love that transformed your face!
As a jewel of my memory's treasure-casket may it be preserved.
When the drinking-place was closed, we walked along the dark street.
Do you remember?
We were four, luckily, and the old man was kept busy in conversation,
half drunken as he was.
And we, with our secret between us, walked behind.
Our hands were tight clasped in the folds of our dress.
Tight clasped with the clinging hand caress; you and I trying to put
into our hands all the longing that was in us.
All the time we were apprehensive of a sudden turning of the old man or
the other ...
Then, the whispered troth, and the meeting-place appointed.
And, then, later, boldly, so openly and audaciously it brought no
suspicion,
Under seeming of wine-induced jollity, we kissed.
And they laughed; it seemed a trivial jest to them.
But to us it was a sacrament.
But, best of all, my beloved, was the hurried clasping and kissing
when we were alone in the dark.
Promise of joy to come.
Foretaste of the coming ecstasy.
And then we had to part.
I and my unaware friend.
You and the old man.
As I walked home that night,
How I hated him!
How I looked up at the pale-golden moon high-hung in the purple sky, and
sang in my heart your praise and cursed in my heart your
possessor ...
But we will out-wit him.
Young I am and young are you and the Law of Life bids us mate.
And a whole world standing between us would be melted and destroyed by
the fire of our youth's desire.
THE GLORIOUS ADVENTURE OF GLORIOUS ME
I swim with the tide of life towards the new;
I reach out hungered arms to flowing change.--
I smash the awesome totems of my kind;
My smarting vision bursts its cramping range.
A thousand voices yell within my soul;
A thousand hymns are chanting in my heart.--
I blast the mist of worlds and years apart;
I sense the blending glory of the whole.
The sap of flowers and trees, it mounts in me.
I feel the child within me cry and turn;
The crimson thoughts within me writhe and burn.--
I stand, with craving arms high-flung, before the rimless sea.
And every whirling, passionate star sings melodies to Me;
And every bud and every leaf has sought my private ear;
And to the quickening soul of Me has told its mystery,
As I sit in state in the heart of the world,
As I proudly hug the core of the world,
As I make me a boat of the whole, wide world ...
And then for new worlds steer.
THE RENAISSANCE OF PARENTHOOD
MARGARET C. ANDERSON
There seems to be a kind of renaissance of motherhood in the air. Ellen
Key has just done a book with that title which has come to us too late
to be reviewed adequately in this issue; Mrs. Gasquoine Hartley has
written _The Age of Mother Power_ which will be brought out in the fall;
and in Shaw's new volume of plays (_Misalliance_, _Fanny's First Play_
and _The Dark Lady of the Sonnets_) there is a preface of over a hundred
pages devoted to a discussion of parents and children which says some of
the most refreshing and important things about that relationship I have
ever read.
The home, as such, is rapidly losing its old functions--perhaps it is
more accurate to say that it is changing its standards of functioning,
and that the present distress merely heralds in a wonderful new
conception of family potentiality. But a generalization of this sort can
be disputed by any family egotist, so let's get down to particulars.
It's all right for the enlightened of the older generation to preach
violently that the family is a humbug, as Shaw does; that the child
should have all the rights of any other human being, and that there is
nothing so futile or so stupid as to try to "control" your children.
It's not only all right; it's glorious! But what I'm more interested in,
still being of the age that must classify as "daughter," is this:--what
are "the children" themselves doing about it? Have their rebellions been
anything more than complaints; have they made any real stand for
liberty; have they proved themselves worthy of the Shavian championship?
Well--I got hold recently of a human document which answered these
questions quite in the affirmative. It was a rather startling thing
because, while it offered nothing new on the theory side of the matter,
it showed the theory in thoughtful action--which, for all the talk on
the subject, is still rare. It was a letter of some twenty pages written
by a girl to her mother at the time of a domestic climax when all the
bonds of family affection, family idealism and obligation were tending
to smother the human truth of the situation, as the girl put it. She was
in her early twenties; she had a sister two or three years younger, and
both of them had reached at least a sort of economic independence. She
had come to the conclusion, after a good many years of rebellion, that
the whole fabric of their family life was wrong; and since it was
impossible to talk the thing out sensibly--because, as in all families
where the children grow up without being given the necessary
revaluations, real talk is no more possible than it is between
uncongenial strangers--she had decided to discuss it in a letter. That
medium does away with the patronage of the parents' refusal to listen
seriously:--that "Oh, come now, what do you know about these things?" If
the child has anything interesting to say, if he puts any of his
rebellion into his writing, the chances are that the parent will read
the letter through; and the result is that he'll know more about his
child than he has learned in all the years they've been trying to talk
with each other and not succeeding. I'm enthusiastic about this kind of
family correspondence; it's good training in expression and it clears
the air--jolts the "heads" of the family into realizing that the
thinking and planning are not all on one side. I once did it myself to
my father--put ten pages of closely-written argument on his office desk
(so that he'd open it with the same impersonality given to a business
communication), in which I explained why I wanted to go away from home
and learn to _work_, and why I thought such a course was an intelligent
one. The letter accomplished what no amount of talking would have done,
because in our talk we rarely got beyond the "Oh, now, you're just a
little excited, it will look different in the morning" stage. Father
said it was rather a shock to him because he didn't know I had ever
figured things out to that extent; but we always understood each other
better after that.
However--not to get lost in personalities--this is the letter the girl
showed me and which she allows me to quote from partially:
If we are to continue living together in any sort of happiness
and growth the entire basis of our present life will have to be
changed. We can do it if we're brave enough to do what people
usually do only in books:--face the fact squarely that our family
life is and has been a failure, and set about to remedy it. It
will mean an entire change of home conditions, and these are the
terms of the new arrangement:
When I said to you the other day that things would have to go
_my_ way now, you were horrified at the conceit of it. To get to
facts, there's no conceit in it--because my way is simply the
practise of not imposing one's will upon other people. I made the
remark merely as a common sense suggestion, and made it out of a
seriousness that is desperate. I say "desperate" because I mean
that literally: the situation isn't a question of a mere
temporary adjustment--just some sort of superficial arrangement
so that we can get on pleasantly for a while before the next
outbreak comes. The plans Betty and I have discussed have been
made in the interest of our whole future lives:--whether we're
going to submit (either by surrender or compromise or by just
drifting along and not doing anything) to an existence of
bickering, nagging, hours spent in the discussion of
non-essentials, hideous lack of harmony--the whole stupid
programme we've watched working for years and achieving nothing
but unhappiness, folly, and a terrible "human waste." You ask us
to continue in your way; but from at least three points of view
that way has been a failure. I ask you to adopt my way--which has
not yet failed. That's why I say it's not conceit, but common
sense.
My way is simply this: that we three can live together and work
in peace and harmony if this awful bugbear of Authority is
dropped out of the scheme. Each of us must go her own way; we're
all different, and there's no reason why one should impose her
authority on the lives of the others. You say that you should
because you're our mother. But that's the thing I want to
discuss.
Motherhood isn't infallibility. If a woman is a wise woman she's
a wise mother; if she's a foolish woman she's a foolish mother.
Because you're our mother doesn't mean that you must always be
right; before being a mother you're a human being, and any human
being is likely to be wrong. To get down to brutal facts, we
think you are _not_ right about the whole thing. We've thought so
for years, but now it's come to the time when our thinking must
be put into action. We're no longer children; but even as mere
infants we thought these things--without having the right to
express them. What I'm trying to do now is to express them not as
a daughter, but quite impersonally as a human being, as a mere
friend, a sister, or anyone who might come to you stating that
she believed with all her soul that you were wrong, and also
stating, just as impersonally, that she wouldn't think of
modeling her line of conduct after that pattern which appeared to
her so wrong. We _must_ face the facts; if you do that squarely
it doesn't seem so bad, and you stop flinching about it. You get
to the point where you're not afraid to face them boldly, and
then you begin to _construct_. And this is the only way to clear
up the kind of rottenness and decay that flourishes in our family
life.
It's in the interest of this achievement that I say the thing a
girl isn't supposed to say to her mother--namely, that Betty and
I will not any longer subscribe to the things you expect us to.
The fact to face just as quickly as possible is this: it's the
starting point. When you realize that we feel it's a question of
doing this or laying a foundation for lives that are just _half_
lives--hideous perverted things which miss all the beauty that
you can put into the short life given you--I think you'll see how
serious we are. We're at least two intelligent human beings, if
we're nothing else. And why should you ask or expect that we'll
submit to a system which to us means stupidity, misery,
pettiness--all those things which we've seen working out for
years and which, being at least intelligent, we want to keep away
from?
That much settled, we can continue to live together in just one
way--as three sisters or friends; the motherhood, in so far as it
means authority or an attempt to mould us to _your_ way, must be
eliminated. A complete new family idealism can be built on such a
basis. You will say that it's an abnormal basis for any mother to
accept. Of course it is; but the situation is abnormal, and the
orthodox remedies aren't applicable.
The reason I say the situation is abnormal is this: usually when
a mother objects to her daughters' behavior it is on some
definite basis of opposing the things they _do_--like going to
too many parties or falling in love with the wrong man. You have
very little fault to find with the things we do. Your objections
are on a basis of what we _are_--or, rather, of what we _are
not_: that we are not orthodox, that we are not hypocrites, that
we are not the kind of daughters the Victorians approved of.
"Hypocrites" will sound paradoxical; but you have confessed that
you would rather have us lie to you than to disagree with you;
that you would rather have us be sentimental about "the way a
girl should treat her mother" than to learn how we ought to treat
ourselves. You call that being "respectful" and think that
harmony is possible only under such conditions. We call it being
"insulting," and think that it's the one sure way of destroying
any chance of harmony. If we respect you it must be because we
think you worthy of the truth: anything else is degrading to both
sides.
You'll say you can't be satisfied to live with us and not give
advice and all the other things that are part of a mother's duty.
You may give all the advice you want to; the keynote of the new
situation will be that we'll take the advice if we believe it's
right; if not we'll ignore it, just as a man ignores his friend's
advice when he feels it to be wrong. Of course the wise person
doesn't give much advice; he simply lives his life the best way
he knows how. That's the only bid he can make for emulation. If
we tell you that we don't approve of the creed you have made you
mustn't be surprised if we try to formulate one of our own.
There's no reason for us to ask you to change just because we're
your daughters. You must do as you believe. But you must grant us
the same privilege.
We disagree about fundamentals. If our beliefs were merely the
vague, unformed ideas of children you might try to change them.
But it's too late now. So we can live together harmoniously only
if we give up the foolish attempts at "influencing."
We're not living three generations ago. We've had Shaw since
then, and parents and children aren't doing the insulting things
to each other they used to do. Among intelligent people some of
the old issues can never raise their heads again. And so, it's
for you to decide:--whether we shall build on the new foundation
together or separately.
It might be a play; it's certainly rather good for reality. And what
happened? The mother refused to "accept the terms"--which is not
surprising, perhaps; and the household broke up into two establishments
with results that will disappoint the conservative who thinks those
girls should have been soundly beaten. The first wrench of it, the
girl said, reminded her of George's parting with Marion in
_Tono-Bungay_:--that sense of belonging to each other immensely, that
"profound persuasion of irreparable error" in the midst of what seemed
profoundly right. "Nothing is simple," Wells wrote in that connection;
"every wrong done has a certain justice in it, and every good deed has
dregs of evil." But the girl and her mother have learned to be friends
as a result of that break, and the latter will tell you now that it was
the right thing to have done.
The preface to _Misalliance_ has such a wealth of quotable things in it
that the only way to get them appreciated is to quote. Shaw has said
much of this before, but it is all so valuable that it ought to be
shouted from the housetops:
The people against whom children are wholly unprotected are those
who devote themselves to the very mischievous and cruel sort of
abortion which is called bringing up a child in the way it should
go. Now nobody knows the way a child should go.
What is a child? An experiment. A fresh attempt to produce the
just man made perfect: that is, to make humanity divine. And you
will vitiate the experiment if you make the slightest attempt to
abort it into some fancy figure of your own: for example, your
notion of a good man or a womanly woman. If you treat it as a
little wild beast to be tamed, or as a pet to be played with, or
even as a means to save you trouble and to make money for you
(and these are our commonest ways), it may fight its way through
in spite of you and save its soul alive; for all its instincts
will resist you, and possibly be strengthened in the resistance;
but if you begin with its own holiest aspirations, and suborn
them for your own purposes, then there is hardly any limit to the
mischief you may do.
Francis Place tells us that his father always struck his children
when he found one within his reach.... Francis records the habit
with bitterness, having reason to thank his stars that his father
respected the inside of his head whilst cuffing the outside of
it; and this made it easy for Francis to do yeoman's service to
his country as that rare and admirable thing, a Free-thinker: the
only sort of thinker, I may remark, whose thoughts, and
consequently whose religious convictions, command any respect.
Now Mr. Place, senior, would be described by many as a bad
father; and I do not contend that he was a conspicuously good
one. But as compared with the conventionally good father who
deliberately imposes himself on his son as god; who takes
advantage of childish credulity and parent worship to persuade
his son that what he approves of is right and what he disapproves
of is wrong; who imposes a corresponding conduct on the child by
a system of prohibitions and penalties, rewards and eulogies, for
which he claims divine sanction; compared to this sort of
abortionist and monster maker, I say, Place appears almost as a
Providence.
A gentleman once wrote to me and said, with an obvious conviction
that he was being most reasonable and high minded, that the only
thing he beat his children for was failure in perfect obedience
and perfect truthfulness. On these attributes, he said, he must
insist. As one of them is not a virtue at all, and the other is
the attribute of a god, one can imagine what the lives of this
gentleman's children would have been if it had been possible for
him to live down to his monstrous and foolish pretensions.
The cruelty (of beating a child) must be whitewashed by a moral
excuse, and a pretense of reluctance. It must be for the child's
good. The assailant must say "This hurts me more than it hurts
you." There must be hypocrisy as well as cruelty.
The most excusable parents are those who try to correct their own
faults in their offspring. The parent who says to his child: "I
am one of the successes of the Almighty: therefore imitate me in
every particular or I will have the skin off your back" (a quite
common attitude) is a much more absurd figure than the man who,
with a pipe in his mouth, thrashes his boy for smoking.
If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson
(which is not at all necessary), hold yourself up as a warning
and not as an example. But you had much better let the child's
character alone. If you once allow yourself to regard a child as
so much material for you to manufacture into any shape that
happens to suit your fancy you are defeating the experiment of
the Life Force. You are assuming that the child does not know its
own business, and that you do. In this you are sure to be wrong.
The child feels the drive of the Life Force (often called the
Will of God); and you cannot feel it for him.
Most children can be, and many are, hopelessly warped and wasted
by parents who are ignorant and silly enough to suppose that they
know what a human being ought to be, and who stick at nothing in
their determination to force their children into their moulds.
Experienced parents, when children's rights are preached to them,
very naturally ask whether children are to be allowed to do what
they like. The best reply is to ask whether adults are to be
allowed to do what they like. The two cases are the same. The
adult who is nasty is not allowed to do what he likes: neither
can the child who likes to be nasty. There is no difference in
principle between the rights of a child and those of an adult:
the difference in their cases is one of circumstance.
Most working folk today either send their children to day schools
or turn them out of doors. This solves the problem for the
parents. It does not solve it for the children, any more than the
tethering of a goat in the field or the chasing of an unlicensed
dog in the streets solves it for the goat or the dog; but it
shows that in no class are people willing to endure the society
of their children, and consequently it is an error to believe
that the family provides children with edifying adult society, or
that the family is a social unit.
The family is in that, as in so many other respects, a humbug.
Old people and young people cannot walk at the same pace without
distress and final loss of health to one of the parties.... And
since our system is nevertheless to pack them all into the same
house and pretend that they are happy, and that this particular
sort of happiness is the foundation of virtue, it is found that
in discussing family life we never speak of actual adults or
actual children, or of realities of any sort, but always of
ideals such as The Home, a Mother's Influence, a Father's Care,
Filial Piety, Duty, Affection, Family Life, etc., etc., which are
no doubt very comforting phrases, but which beg the question of
what a home and a mother's influence and a father's care and so
forth really come to.... Women who cannot bear to be separated
from their pet dogs send their children to boarding school
cheerfully. They may say and even believe that in allowing their
children to leave home they are sacrificing themselves for their
children's good.... But to allege that children are better
continually away from home is to give up the whole popular
sentimental theory of the family....
If you compel an adult and a child to live in one another's
company either the adult or the child will be miserable. There is
nothing whatever unnatural or wrong or shocking in this fact, and
there is no harm in it if only it be sensibly faced and provided
for. The mischief that it does at present is produced by our
efforts to ignore it, or to smother it under a heap of
sentimental and false pretenses.
The child's rights, being clearly those of any other human being,
are summed up in the right to live.... And the rights of society
over it clearly extend to requiring it to qualify itself to live
in society without wasting other people's time....
We must reconcile education with liberty. We must find out some
means of making men workers and, if need be, warriors, without
making them slaves.
In dealing with children what is needed is not logic but sense.
A child should begin to assert itself early, and shift for itself
more and more not only in washing and dressing itself, but in
opinions and conduct.... And what is a tyrant? Quite simply a
person who says to another person, young or old, "You shall do as
I tell you."
Children are extremely cruel without intending it; and in
ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the reason is that they do not
conceive their elders as having any human feeling. Serve the
elders right, perhaps, for posing as superhuman! The penalty of
the imposter is not that he is found out (he very seldom is) but
that he is taken for what he pretends to be and treated as such.
The family ideal is a humbug and a nuisance: one might as
reasonably talk of the barrack ideal, or the forecastle ideal, or
any other substitution of the machinery of social for the end of
it, which must always be the fullest and most capable life: in
short, the most Godly life.
Even apart from its insufferable pretensions, the family needs
hearty discrediting; for there is hardly any vulnerable part of
it that could not be amputated with advantage.
Do not for a moment suppose that uncultivated people are merely
indifferent to high and noble qualities. They hate them
malignantly....
Whether the risks to which liberty exposes us are moral or
physical our right to liberty involves the right to run them. A
man who is not free to risk his neck as an aviator or his soul as
a heretic is not free at all; and the right to liberty begins,
not at the age of 21 years, but of 21 seconds.
You may have as much fun at Shaw's expense as you want on the grounds
that he has never had to train a child and therefore doesn't know the
difficulties. But if you want to laugh last don't read this preface or
the play that follows it, because he will make a laughing-stock or a
convert of you as surely as he will prove that he is far cleverer than
you can ever hope to be.
Shaw and Ellen Key preach practically the same doctrine about the home;
both are temperamentally incapable of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's
programme--education outside the home: Shaw because the school is as big
a humbug as the family, and Miss Key because "even if institutions can
thus rough-plane the material that is to become a member of society,
nevertheless they cannot--if they take in the major part of the child's
education--accomplish that which is needed first of all if we are to
lift ourselves to a higher spiritual plane in an economically just
society: they cannot deepen the emotional life." Her insistence is
strongly upon the education of the feelings as the most important factor
in the soul-life. In her vision of the renaissance of motherhood she
begins with Nietzsche's dictum that "a time will come when men will
think of nothing except education." Not that any one can be educated
_to_ motherliness; but that our sentimentalization of motherhood as the
ever holy, ever infallible power, must be abandoned, and a quality of
intelligent mother-power cultivated by definite courses of training
which she lays out in detail.
In view of the number of homes I know of that come legitimately under
the Shaw denunciation I feel sometimes that any socialization of home
life is more hopeful than an attempt to remodel the hopeless conditions
inside the home. Regard the parents you know--the great mass of them
outside the exceptions that encourage you to believe spasmodically in
the beauty and noble need of parenthood. If they are not cruel or stupid
or ignorant or smug or righteous or tyrannical or dishonest or
unimaginative or weak or quiet ineffectual, they are something else just
as bad. It has come to the point where a good parent is as hard to find
as an honest man.
Very seriously, however, there is hope in the situation--there is
renaissance in the air. And it has its foundation in the sensible and
healthy (though so far only tacit) admission that it doesn't matter so
much what your child becomes as that he shall _become something_! You
can't do much with him, anyhow, and you may as well face it. You can
give him, during his first few years, the kind of foundation you think
will help him; and for the rest of the time you can do only one thing
that he will really need from you: you can develop your own personality
as richly as you want him to develop his. You can refuse to worry about
him--since that does neither of you any good--and thereby save stores of
energy that he may draw upon for _your mutual benefit_. It becomes a
sort of game for two, instead of the uninteresting kind in which one
player is given all the advantages. Compared with it the old-fashioned
game in which the mother sacrificed everything, suffered everything,
wore herself out trying to help her child win, looks not only very
unfair and very unnecessary, but very _wasteful_. And have you ever
noticed how the man who sentimentalizes about the wonderful mothers we
used to have--his own in particular--is the one whose life is lived at
the opposite pole of the mother's wise direction?
If you disagree with all this, there is still one other method by which
you may produce a child who will be a credit to himself and to society.
You may be so utterly stupid and wrong-headed that he will rebel to the
point of becoming something different. If you prefer this course no one
need worry much about your child, because he'll probably found a system
of child education that will cause him to be famous; and if you have a
daughter, she'll probably become a Montessori.
The new home is a recognition that the child is not the only factor in
society that needs educating. It assumes that no one's education is
finished just because he's been made a parent. It means that we can all
go on being educated together. It means the elimination of all kinds of
domestic follies--for one, the ghastly embarrassment of growing up to
discover that you're different from the rest of your family, and for
that reason something of a criminal. It means the kind of understanding
that develops a child's feeling instead of suppressing it, so that he
won't be ashamed, for instance, of having such glorious things as dreams
and visions. It means artistic education: and Shaw says that we all grow
up stupid or mad to just the extent to which we have not been
artistically educated.
THE SWAN
Under the lily shadow
and the gold
and the blue and mauve
that the whin and the lilac
pour down on the water,
the fishes quiver.
Over the green cold leaves
and the rippled silver
and the tarnished copper
of its neck and beak,
toward the deep black water
beneath the arches,
the swan floats slowly.
Into the dark of the arch the swan floats
and into the black depth of my sorrow
it bears a white rose of flame.
_F. S. Flint._
"DES IMAGISTES"
CHARLES ASHLEIGH
A new and well born recruit has been added to the ranks of the
Insurgents. It is true he appeared before we did, but we welcome him
before he welcomes us, and thus are things evened. THE LITTLE REVIEW,
_The Masses_, _Poetry_, _The International_--all bearers of the sacred
fire,--and now cometh _The Glebe_, heralding his approach with the
chanting of many-colored strains. And, among the good things which _The
Glebe_ has put forth, is a book of portent: _Des Imagistes_.
The Imagistes form one of the latest schools, and it is meet that,
before we read their work, we get some idea of their doctrine. Therefore
I transcribe here some statements of representative Imagiste poets,
which I have culled from _Poetry_, _The Egotist_, and other sources.
Richard Aldington gives the following rules:
I. Direct treatment of subject. We convey an emotion by
presenting the object and circumstance of the emotion without
comment. For example, we do not say, "O how I admire that
exquisite, that beautiful, that--25 more adjectives--woman." But
we present that woman, we make an "Image" of her, we make the
scene convey the emotion....
II. As few adjectives as possible.
III. A hardness as of cut stone. No slop, no sentimentality. When
people say the Imagiste poems are "too hard" ... we know we have
done something good.
IV. Individuality of rhythm. We make new fashions instead of
cutting our clothes on the old models.
V. The exact word. We make quite a heavy stress on that. It is
most important. All great poetry is exact. All the dreariness of
nineteenth century poetry comes from their not quite knowing what
they wanted to say and filling up the gaps with portentous
adjectives and idiotic similes.
Here is a definition by Ezra Pound which helps us: "An Image is
that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an
instant of time."
The book, _Des Imagistes_, is an anthology, presumably of Imagist (let
us, once for all, Anglicize the French word and have done with it)
poetry. Yet, one of the foremost imagists, Richard Aldington, in a
critique of this book,--comparatively modest, owing to the fact that his
own poems formed a sumptuous fraction of the volume,--says that five of
those whose poems are there included are not true Imagists. These are
Cournos, Hueffer, Upward, Joyce, and Cannell. Mr. Aldington says he
doesn't mean that these poems are not beautiful--on the contrary, he
admires them immensely--but they are not, "strictly speaking," Imagist
poems.
I agree that the poems of these five men are beautiful, especially the
_I hear an army_ of James Joyce and the _Nocturnes_ of Skipwith Cannell;
and I also maintain that, all unconsciously, the publishers of _The
Glebe_ have dealt a deadly blow to sectarian Imagism by including these
non-Imagist poems in their anthology. Because, unless a school can prove
that it alone has that unnameable wonder which excites us to deepest
emotional turmoil, and which we call poetry, it has but little right to
isolate itself or to separate its adepts from the bulk of poets. This
may sound sententious, but is, nevertheless, true. Speak you in whatever
mode or meter you will, if you arouse me to exultation, or to horror, or
to the high pitch of any feeling,--if in me there is that responsive
vibration that only true art can produce--then are you a poet.
Whitman does it to me. Poe does it to me. Baudelaire and Henley do it.
To all of these there is in me a response. I'm awfully sorry, but that's
how it is. I think them all poets.
The Imagists believe in the direct presentation of emotion, preferably
in terms of objectivity. They abhor an excess of adjectives, and, after
a satiety of the pompous Victorian stuff, I am much inclined to
sympathize with that tenet of their faith.
I wish, however, to make clear my own position, which is the one that
most counts when I am writing. I am an anarchist in poetry: I recognize
no rules, no exclusions.
If the expression of a certain thought, vision, or what not, requires
twenty adjectives, then let us have them. If it be better expressed
without adjectives, then let us abjure them--temporarily.
I am myself a poet (whether performance equals desire is doubtful). My
object as a poet is to express the things which are closest to me. This
sounds banal, but is better than rhetoric; words exist not with which to
define with superclarity the poet's function, source, and performance.
In the true expression of myself I might write Images which would be
worshipped for their perfection by the Imagists. A moment after, I might
gloat and wallow in the joy of my cosmic oneness (anathema to Imagists!)
and, perhaps recall Whitman. The next minute, chronicling some shadowy
episode of my variegated past, I may out-decay the decadent Baudelaire.
But, this is always poetry if, by the magic of its words and the music
of its arrangement, it speaks directly and beautifully to you, giving
you that indescribable but unmistakeable sense of liberation and
soul-expansion which comes on the contemplation of true art.
I think I have made myself clear. There is no quarrel with the Imagists,
who have done some beautiful work, as such. But, if they claim monopoly
of inspiration or art, as some of them appear to do, then--! Therefore,
as a restricted and doctrinaire school, "a bas les Imagistes!" But, as
an envigored company of the grand army of poets, "Vivent les Imagistes!"
OF RUPERT BROOKE AND OTHER MATTERS
ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE
Since even to poets--and poets are erroneously supposed to sing their
hearts out--there remains a certain right of privacy, I am not sure that
we do well in writing so much of their personalities and their
individual views of life. When we read a poem, we feel a temperament
behind it; but the effort to catalogue and label that mind and its
"message" is a little impertinent, and very futile. Mr. Rupert Brooke is
an excellent illustration. His fondness for this or that--whether in
landscape, food, ideas, or morals--is hardly our concern. He deserves to
be treated not as a natural-history specimen,--a peculiar group of likes
and dislikes and convictions,--but as an artist.
Mr. Brooke has the distinction, rare for a young poet, of not having
written any bad verse, or of not having printed it. His sole volume,
_Poems_ (Sidgwick and Jackson, London, 1913), manifests in even its
least notable pieces a creative spirit not allowed to run riot, but
chastened and restrained by a keen sense of the obscure laws whose
workings turn passion into a decorative pattern, and the emotions of the
blood into intelligible designs.
Unless one is deeply concerned with such things, one is not likely to
recognize the fundamental difference between those poets whose work is
merely a more or less interesting emotional cry, and those nobler and
more mature poets in whose work the crude elements of emotion are
subordinated to the exigencies of an artistic conception. Only the
latter have written fine poetry. The former may move us, as a crying
child may move us; but they cannot exalt us to a peak that rises above
the region of mere sympathetic response. They can never bring us a wind
of revelation, or a flame from beyond the world. They are never the
poets to whom other poets--and these are the only final judges--turn for
inspiration or for fellowship.
For after all, there is no magic in any theme or in the emotion behind
it; what is magical lies wholly in the design, the mould, in which the
poet embodies a feeling that is probably common to all. No thought is so
profound, no intimation so subtle, that it alone suffices as the stuff
of poetry. But any thought, any intimation, if it be justly correlated
and moulded into an organic and expressive shape, will serve to awaken
echoes of a forgotten or unknown loveliness, and pierce its way into the
very soul of the listener.
This sense of design of which I speak is not a hard, formal, conscious
thing in the mind of the poet; but rather a carefully trained instinct,
like the instinct that guides the hand of a fine draughtsman in the
drawing of a curve of unexpected beauty. There is a right place to begin
the curve, and a right place to end it; and at every instant of its
length it is swayed and governed by a sense of relation to preceding and
succeeding moments,--a sense subject to laws that defy mathematical
formulation, but are perilously definite nevertheless. This sense of
control is a rare thing to find in the work of so young a man as Mr.
Brooke. Most young writers seem to approach their work as an
unrestrained expression of themselves,--which it should be: but they
forget that, for real self-expression, the most scrupulous mastery of
the medium of expression is necessary. They regard the writing of verse
as something in the nature of a joy-ride with an open throttle,--instead
of seeing in it a piece of difficult driving, to be achieved only by the
use of every subtlety of modulated speed and controlled steering that
the mind is capable of employing.
That Mr. Brooke needs no such warning, let the following fine sonnet
bear witness:
SUCCESS
I think if you had loved me when I wanted;
If I'd looked up one day, and seen your eyes,
And found my wild sick blasphemous prayer granted,
And your brown face, that's full of pity and wise,
Flushed suddenly; the white godhead in new fear
Intollerably so struggling, and so shamed;
Most holy and far, if you'd come all too near,
If earth had seen Earth's lordliest wild limbs tamed,
Shaken, and trapped, and shivering, for _my_ touch--
Myself should I have slain? or that foul you?
But this the strange gods, who had given so much,
To have seen and known you, this they might not do.
One last shame's spared me, one black word's unspoken;
And I'm alone; and you have not awoken.
It is significant that for his sonnets Mr. Brooke frequently chooses the
Shakesperian form,--a form which, strangely, English poets have
generally for at least a century discarded in favor of the Petrarchan
model. The common feeling appears to be that the Petrarchan (a-b-b-a,
a-b-b-a, c-d-e-c-d-e or some variation on that scheme) is musical and
emotional; and that the Shakesperian (a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g-g) is
harsh, cold, mechanical, and incapable of subtle harmonies. The exact
reverse of this is the case. It is perhaps too much to ask the reader to
write a sequence of a hundred sonnets in each form, as a test; but I am
confident that after such an experience, he would agree with me. The
Petrarchan form is capable of only one successful effect; a rising on
the crest of a wave, whose summit is the end of the eighth line; and a
subsidence of the wave, in the course of the last six lines. The
Shakesperian form, on the other hand, is capable of a literally infinite
variety of effects: no pattern is set arbitrarily in advance, but, as in
blank verse, any pattern may be created. The first twelve lines--which
are nothing but three quatrains--can be moulded into a contour that fits
any shape or size of thought whatsoever; and the couplet at the end--a
device despised by the ignorant--may be used either to clinch the
purport of the preceding twelve lines, or to blend with them, or
startlingly to refute them, or to serve any other end that the genius of
the writer is capable of imagining. The mere novice will like this form
because of its simple rhyme-scheme and its superficial ease of working;
the experienced amateur will prefer the Petrarchan form because, while
the more complex rhyme-scheme presents for him no difficulties, the
basic inadequacies of his thought-structure are fairly well concealed by
the arbitrary sonnet-structure; but the master of imagination and
expression is likely to follow Shakespeare and the novice in preferring
the true English form, wherein he can with perfect freedom create a
subtly modulated movement that will answer to every sway and leap of his
thought. Mr. Brooke, whose sense of form is keen, is one of those who
can safely and wisely try the more interesting and more dangerous
medium.
I have thought it worth while to talk a good deal of the sonnet in
connection with Mr. Brooke for the reason that several of his very
finest pieces are in this form. The following is one that stands a good
chance of being in the anthologies a hundred years from now:
THE HILL
Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill,
Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass.
You said, "Through glory and ecstasy we pass;
Wind, sun, and earth remain, the birds sing still,
When we are old, are old ..." "And when we die
All's over that is ours; and life burns on
Through other lovers, other lips," said I,
"Heart of my heart, our heaven is now, is won!"
"We are Earth's best, that learnt her lesson here.
Life is our cry. We have kept the faith!" we said;
"We shall go down with unreluctant tread
Rose-crowned into the darkness!" ... Proud we were,
And laughed, that had such brave, true things to say.
--And then you suddenly cried, and turned away.
Perhaps as magical as any of Mr. Brooke's work is a longer poem called
_The Fish_,--a remarkable and original piece of fantasy that makes the
sub-aqueous universe vivid and real to the senses of the reader, and
opens to him a new world of imaginative experience. Even the opening
lines will serve to indicate something of the curious trance-quality:
In a cool curving world he lies
And ripples with dark ecstasies.
The kind luxurious lapse and steal
Shapes all his universe to feel
And know and be; the clinging stream
Closes his memory, glooms his dream,
Who lips the roots o' the shore, and glides
Superb on unreturning tides ...
In other of these poems, one is struck by Mr. Brooke's passion for
ugliness. He loves to take the most hideous and base facts of life and
give them a place in his work alongside the things of beauty. It would
be hard to find anything more humorous and at the same time more
repulsive than this:
WAGNER
Creeps in half wanton, half asleep,
One with a fat wide hairless face.
He likes love music that is cheap;
Likes women in a crowded place;
And wants to hear the noise they're making.
His heavy eyelids droop half-over,
Great pouches swing beneath his eyes.
He listens, thinks himself the lover,
Heaves from his stomach wheezy sighs;
He likes to feel his heart's a-breaking.
The music swells. His gross legs quiver.
His little lips are bright with slime.
The music swells. The women shiver,
And all the while, in perfect time
His pendulous stomach hangs a-shaking.
Now, a passion for ugliness like this is really a revolt against
ugliness,--not the tender-skinned æsthete's revolt, which consists in
denying ugliness and escaping into a remote dream, but the strong man's,
the poet's,--the revolt that is in effect a seizing of ugliness in all
its repulsiveness and giving it a reason for existence by embodying it
in a chosen pattern that is beautiful. By this method the poet masters
emotion, even unpleasant emotion, making it subservient to a decorative
design dictated by his own sense of proportion. It is thus that he is
able to endure the world of actualities, and to find it comparable in
interest with the world of his own thoughts. And by this process he
saves himself from the sharpest bite of evil. For there is a curious
consolation in transforming a spontaneous cry into a calculated work of
art. By such a process one can give, to elements that before seemed only
parts of a torturing chaos, their ordered places in a known scheme. One
can impose propitious form upon one's recollections, and create a little
world of design-relations where the poignancy of experience is lost in
the discipline of beauty. It is for this reason that the poet must be
considered, in spite of everything, the happiest of men.
THE NEW LOYALTY
GEORGE BURMAN FOSTER
Back to the Old Greek for a starting-point! Two seeds, of the same
species, though distant in space and time, go through an identical
development. Root corresponds with root, stem with stem, flower with
flower, fruit with fruit. Something seems to control all this change. It
is not mere change. It is change with a plan, a purpose, a pattern.
Hence the Greek said that there must be an unchanging type, a fixed
"idea," a spiritual, invisible norm, the "first" and "final" cause of
all this change, to which all concrete, particular plants of the species
are true. Back of the visible tangible plant must be its _Eidos_, its
eternal norm, form, idea, "species." So with everything. An elaboration
of this conclusion gives the real unchanging, fixed eternal world back
of, underpinning, supporting this visible changing, temporal world.
Such a world-view as this was made more valuable and more imperative by
the break-up of the traditional morals and religion of the Greek state.
The search for the _meaning_ of life was precipitated by the
disintegration of social sanctions and of the guarantees of custom. This
search was voiced in the questionings of Socrates. It was made serious
by the menacing individualism of the sophists. The outcome was that
stability, security, confidence were found in the Platonic doctrine.
Back of this ephemeral world is the real world of "ideas," the
unchanging and eternal, upon which we may rest our minds and hearts amid
all this disappointing and desperate flux.
Passing by the Middle Ages, which, _mutatis mutandis_, appropriated this
scheme, we pause over the significance of the Renaissance period. Two
things are uppermost in one's mind and as one thinks of the tumultuous
beginnings of modern life which characterized the fourteenth, fifteenth,
and sixteenth centuries. For one thing, the Renaissance was the
culmination of a long period of absorption in which men had been
gradually working their way back, by intellectual assimilation, towards
the beginnings of the rich tradition which Church and Empire had stored
up. This period of absorption was that five hundred years during which
pagan hordes that had conquered Rome were conquered by the knowledge,
faith, custom, civilization of their victims. From the cultural
standpoint the new nations were hungry, the larder of the old
civilization was replete, and hence authority on one side and absorption
on the other became natural and inevitable. Thus, the philosophical
preconceptions, the cosmological ground-principles, the whole general
attitude toward life's problems of the whole old world were fastened
upon the mind of the young European peoples. _It must not be forgotten_
that all this was _aat_ the _hatural_ achievement of the new European
life and genius, but as foreign to it, as inherited (and at first as
cherished) as grandfatherly ideas are in the mind of a child. If some
day the child must shake off the old conceptions because he hears the
call of life to go forth and achieve his own inner world, it would be
only natural to expect that this young European giant should some day
struggle to cast aside his intellectual inheritance and go forth to
conquer reality for himself, in his own way, with his own weapons.
Well--and this is the second matter--it was just that very thing that
was happening in the early "teens" of our era. The young western world
began to look at life for itself, and a curious, astonished, wild-eyed
look it was. Europe had learned at its mother's knee to say: "The true
world is fixed and final. Reality is static." But looking out now in
wonderment, seeing farther than the ancient world had ever seen, the new
world said: "Ah, no! The world is not static. The world _moves_. Things
change."
Two well-known anecdotes are told of Galileo, which, if not authentic,
are well invented. The one tells how, in the dome at Pisa during
worship, the litany or the sermon boring him, he observed the cathedral
chandelier move by the wind and, studying its vibrations, discovered a
basic law of mechanics. The profound meaning of this anecdote is,
obviously, that God spoke to the man more effectively through the
_self-moving_ pendulum than in the rigid, immobile litany from a rigid,
immobile, hieratic heart; and that, if we do not understand such litany,
and it bores us, we may still devoutly worship by meditating upon what
we can understand.
The other narrative tells how, imprisoned, tortured inwardly by a
compulsory recantation, Galileo gathered himself together and declared:
"_E pu se muove_" ("it moves though"). Galileo never uttered these
words; but the history of the world has uttered them for him! Yes, it
moves _itself_, this earth, and in its motion it knocks everything down
that is in its way. Not the earth alone moves--all that is in the world
is eternal motion!
Man moves--in space, and time, extensively and intensively. Truth moves,
and, moving, demolishes thrones and altars. Morality moves, making
ancient good uncouth. Faith moves, the human heart putting into it the
pulse beat of its life, and there is no way to stop this self moving
Faith.
Those old stories are not true to fact, but they are true to truth.
Galileo _did_ say: "It is my opinion that the earth is very noble and
admirable by reason of so many and so different generations and
alterations which are incessantly made therein." And Descartes joined
him: "The nature of things physical is much more easily conceived when
they are beheld coming gradually into existence, than when they are only
considered as produced at once in a finished and perfect state." Thus
these men--and many others--voiced the changed temper that was coming
over the world,--the transfer of interest from the permanent to the
changing.
Slowly the new attitude was adopted in many departments of knowledge,
but the facts of biology were apparently all against its becoming a
general philosophical movement. The species of plants and animals had
every appearance of being fixed and final, unchangeably stamped once for
all upon the sentient world by the Creator. Not only so, but the
wonderful adaptation of organism to environment, of organ to organism, a
marvelous and delicate complexity of teleological adjustment, seemed to
testify unanswerably to the reality of fixed and final types, to a
static underpinning for all this changing order.
_Origin of_ Species! That was the bomb with which Charles Darwin
destroyed the last stronghold of a static world-view. "Species" is the
scholastics' translation of the Greek _Eidos_, the fixed and final type
or idea which is first and final cause of the changing life of each
creature. Species is a synonym and epitome of fixity and finality; it is
the key-word of a static other-world reality. When Darwin said,
"_Origin_ of Species," he was cramming the conflict of the ancient
wisdom and the modern knowledge into a bursting phrase. When he said of
species what Galileo said of the earth, _e pu se muove_, he emancipated
once for all genetic and experimental ideas as an _organon_ of asking
questions and looking for explanations. He lifted the biological gates
which had kept back the flood of change from inundating the old fields
of fixity.
In sum: The world of thought is slowly, painfully making a change in its
fundamental attitude toward reality such as is not made oftener than
once in several millennia: One general conception of reality was
all-controlling for 2,000 years. Then from Copernicus to Darwin many
factors in a world-subversive change were struggling for recognition.
Conceptions that had reigned in the philosophy of nature and of
knowledge for 2,000 years rested in the superiority of the fixed and
final: they rested on treating change and origin as signs of defect and
unreality. In laying hands upon the sacred ark of absolute permanency;
in treating forms that had been regarded as types of fixity and
perfection as originating and passing away, the "origin of species"
introduced a mode of thinking that in the end was bound to transform the
logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment of all our values and
verities and virtues.
But heaven and earth and species are not all. Shall there be no
Copernicus of the moral heavens, no Galileo of the moral earth, no
Darwin of the moral life?
Hove now Friedrich Nietzsche into sight!
Loyalty has ever been the basic virtue, foundation of life and of law.
Naturally, in the moral world, the objects to which loyalty shall be
related will be objects that are real. But, as we have seen, in the old
world, the real was the unchangeable, the immobile, the finished, the
final, the absolute. To these, therefore, the old loyalty was directed
and dedicated.
Comes now Friedrich Nietzsche, a man in whose name the entire moral
revolution of our time has found its most pregnant expression, and
declares war upon that old loyalty, and does so in the name of a new
culture, a new humanity. To him this loyalty is not only an empty folly;
it is more than that--a crime against life, a weakening of human power.
To him, not stationariness, but _self-changing_, is the life task of
man. He feels himself akin only to him who changes. Every moment of life
has an existence, a right, a content of its own. No present point of
time has a right to lay claim, on its own account, to the next point.
From what we now will, think, feel, no man may presume to require us to
will, think, feel the same way tomorrow. And this preaching of
Nietzsche's on the duty of change as against the old duty to change
never has found more ears to listen and more hearts to believe than any
other preaching of our time. This new preaching is at once most
influential and most dangerous. But its very dangerousness is a most
wholesome and necessary part of the modern moral view of life.
Is loyalty, then, something about which there is nothing to be learned?
Is there no counterfeit and caricature of loyalty? No mask behind which
men hide their indolence and complacency and thoughtlessness? You meet a
man whom you have not seen in long years, and you say to him: "Why, you
have not changed a bit, you are precisely the same as in the old days."
Have you praised him, necessarily? If he left you as a child, looking
and speaking and thinking and acting like a child, ought he not to have
changed? Does a fruit remain what it was as bud and blossom? Life is
development--but development is a constant _self-changing_. Development
is an incessant _dis_-loyalty to what is already there. And if man, just
because he is man, and has a will of his own and can set himself against
the law of development, should sell his life to the force of
inertia--would not that be a crime against life? And yet, even such a
deed men call loyalty! Men say that they want to be faithful to the
heritage of the fathers. Which is often enough simply to say that they
mean to store away their heritage where it will be kept from the world's
light and air that would destroy it--but where, also, it can enter into
no human intercourse, serve no life, fulfil no end of life. This loyalty
of unchangeableness to the heritage puts the talent in a napkin, and
there can be no increase. Men say that they mean to abide faithful to
their faith unto death. Often enough this is only stubbornness and
narrowness. It requires no art and no merit to exercise such
faithfulness. All one needs to do is to close one's eyes and ears to
what lies beyond the bounds of this faith, to forego the questionings
and uncertainties that others must pass through,--and then to send in
one's claim to the reward and gratitude due such loyalty! Today it is
quite the thing at college commencements to spy out the men who are
models of such loyalty and to say: "Look how firm and steadfast and
rock-like they are!" But it cannot be denied that much of this
illustrious loyalty is nothing but natural or voluntary incapacity to
think more widely than others have taught them to think, or, for the
matter of that, permitted them to think. Back of this bragging about
principles which are vainly declared to be unshakable, there is
frequently nothing but an ill-natured obstinacy whose so-called
principles have no other basis than the self-interest to which they are
contributary. It was this loyalty to the finished,--finished cult,
finished belief, finished customs and practices, finished religion and
morality,--that stoned the prophets and crucified Jesus. It was this
kind of loyalty that the mediaeval church imposed upon the "Faithful,"
imprisoning the conscience therein for time and for eternity. Bound by
an oath of loyalty, the priest renounced the world; the monk and nun
under monastic vows dedicated their lives to the church, their services
to "heaven." And hence it marked an epoch when Luther called their
loyalty a sin, and went forth into the world, the home, the vocation,
the business, breaking the vows of priest and cloister. Was such
disloyalty to a sacred obligation loyalty in the sixteenth century, and
shall it be blasphemy in the twentieth? Is it not rather a blasphemy to
preach to men a loyalty which obligates them to forego the use of their
best and noblest powers, which condemns them to spiritual standstill in
the eternal progressive movement of life?
Take some illustrations which will test insight and courage. There is
the constitution of the United States. Shall we assume toward it the
loyalty of fixedness and finality, or the loyalty of change? No man of
veneration and equipoise would favor capricious or precipitate or
superfluous change in so noble a document. But, for all that, the
experience of life made the constitution for life's sake, and the maker
is more than the made. If our national life pass--as pass it has--into
new seas and under new stars, where life needs a change of the
constitution, then the principle which prompted the people to frame the
constitution in the first place requires them to change it to meet the
new needs of our growing and changing national life. The superficial
loyalty to the changeless letter must yield to the profound loyalty to
the ever-changing spirit. The constitution is for the sake of the
people, not the people for the sake of the constitution. They, rather
than it, are sacred.
Similarly, there is the modern problem of marriage, the family, and the
home. Shall ours be the old loyalty that holds the customs of the past
inviolable, marriage indissoluble, the inherited patterns of home and
family unchangeable--the loyalty of fixedness and finishedness; or shall
it be the loyalty of change in all these matters to meet the changing
needs and situations of our burdened and bewildered modernity? Again, no
man of sanctity and sanity and stability of soul can favor any arbitrary
radicalism that is subversive of time-honored institutions _for no
better reason_ than a fleeting fancy, or the passing of the romance of
the honeymoon, or raw self-will, or an unanticipated burden or hardship.
But, for all that, the marriage institution, like all others, is for the
sake of man and not man for the sake of the institution. It was _life_
that originated our domestic ideas and customs and conventions and
codes; and if ever life, in the interest of its well-being and progress,
requires changes suited to new needs and new days, then the "new
loyalty" to life that ever changes must replace the old loyalty to codes
that never change. Codes, too, are for the sake of life, not life for
the sake of codes. No loyalty to the letter that means disloyalty to the
spirit.
And there is the everlasting problem of education. Education in the past
had for its subject matter symbols--reading, writing, arithmetic,
grammar, rhetoric, logic, and the like. The new education has for its
subject matter realities--nature and history. The old education taught
topics or subjects; the new education teaches boys and girls. According
to the old education, knowledge precedes action; according to the new
education, action precedes knowledge. In the old education things were
done to the pupils; in the new education the pupils do things.
The old school teacher was a "star and dwelt apart"--that is, his
aloofness and superiority were indispensable. He taught from above. The
new school teacher is down among the students, a democrat of democrats.
The old school teacher communicated knowledge from without; the new
school teacher develops interest from within. The old education was
atomistic, the new organic. The old education was a donation to the
pupils, the new is an achievement by them. The old education proceeded
on the assumption that man is primarily intellect; the new that he is
primarily will. The old education preceded life and fitted for it; the
new education is a part of life itself.
It is a great change. According to the old theory, there was perfection
to start with, perfection at the top. All that we needed was to pipe it
down through aqueducts so well constructed that nothing that was in
could get out, nothing that was without could get in; and thus--thus
only--would the vain and empty world and life be filled with value and
verity and virtue--donation on the one side, reception on the other.
But the time came when men asked: if there is perfection to start with,
why start? Why paint the lily? And if there is perfection to start with,
how does there come to be imperfection? How can imperfection come from
perfection? Ugly questions, these! Soon the world was turned upside
down.
The new theory holds that matters began very humbly and struggled and
fought their way slowly upward. Ascent from below, not descent from
above. No values or verities or virtues donated, all achieved. Education
an evolution, not a communication.
Some business men favor the old education. Their world is one of
mechanism and authority. They think that they do not need men with
initiative, spontaneity, freedom. That is their prerogative, as it was
of the king of old. They need the mechanical, the automatic, the
impersonal in man. This fits into their world. This is what the old
education stands for. The new education unfolds and matures
personalities. Personalities make good masters but poor servants.
Business men as a class are perhaps our best men. But the very
conditions of business economy and certainty are the impersonal, the
unfree, the mechanical. So business has warped the judgment of some good
men and led them astray on the most fundamental problem in the history
of the race.
Were it not multiplying illustrations, the same point might be urged as
to politics. Does not party loyalty often mean personal servility? As a
matter of fact what is loyalty in one situation, or one age, may be
simple cowardice or abjectness in another.
The upshot is that the modern man has to endure the reproach of not
thinking and feeling and judging and acting as men formerly did--the
reproach of perfidy toward the past, its solutions and its sanctities.
In consequence, it would not be a bad idea for him to cultivate respect
for the past, gratitude for its achievements, appreciation for its
unfinished tasks. Still, he should learn to accept the reproach as
praise,--recognition that, though problems remain the same, solutions
change; though sanctity abide, the objects which are sacred change.
_Evolutionism no longer recognizes any fact as sacred._ Man is inwardly
working on ever farther, ever overcoming the old and conquering ever the
new--this must also be recognized.
It is said that we ought to love the old, the finished. But is love
blind? Does it consist in advocating the point of view of one's friend,
not because it seems true, but just because love requires it? Is loyalty
of love the faculty of adaptation with which we remodel ourselves after
the image of another? Is one disloyal in love if one affirm one's self
against another, or if another affirm himself against one? Surely
fidelity of friendship, even of marriage, ought not to be the grave of
one's own being. Surely loyalty should be the life and not the death of
one's self! Surely we must all see with our own eyes, hear with our own
ears, judge with our own judgments, love with our own hearts, for the
quite plain reason that we have no others with which we can do these
things.
And so, if we take up this great subject in a large way, as Nietzsche
has done, we see that we have all broken with the old loyalty, and that
the consummation of this breach has been life and blessing to us.
We moderns all somehow live in a disloyalty which we have
committed--imputed to us as transgression, viewed by us as our strength
and pride. We have all become unfaithful,--as children to our parents,
as pupils to our teachers, as disciples to our masters. We felt
ourselves bound to them; we loosed ourselves from them. The paths they
walked we have forsaken. In the strange untrodden land whither our
vagrant feet have wandered, we "came to ourselves" in declaring
disobedience to the laws of tradition, in breaking loyalty to the rules
of the schools. It is precisely on this account that once again we have
won spiritual life, a living art and science, a living religion and
morality. We have snapped the fetters fastened upon us in the name of
the old loyalty, and all that is great and fruitful and constructive in
the life of the modern spirit is a monument of the disloyalty which its
creators have built thereto. Nothing is gained any longer by our
screening ourselves behind this word loyalty, and making believe that we
shall not be found out! We owe it to ourselves and we owe it to the
world to confess frankly that we have done with the old loyalty to the
unchangeable and the finished, for that is to be loyal to an unreality,
_since there is no such thing_. Even God, if he be the living God,
cannot be the same yesterday, today, and forever. But we owe it even
more to ourselves and to the world to strive for a clear position in
reference to this question which is so profoundly agitating our entire
moral world today. We may not abandon the field to those who would
demolish the temple of the old goddess simply that they may celebrate
upon its ruins the orgies of their caprice and inconstancy and
characterlessness. If ever there was a doctrine whose right is easily
turned into a wrong, whose truth into an error, whose blessing into a
curse, it is this Nietzschean doctrine of the right and the duty of
ceaseless change, of self-dependence, by which we are redeemed from
slavery to the past. If the old loyalty--loyalty to the past--no longer
holds men, wherewith shall they be held? Shall they be like the
weathervane blown hither and thither by every wind of doctrine, or like
the rudderless ship driven aimless and planless over the high seas by
the midnight hurricane? Better a thousand times be tethered to the old
loyalty than to be doomed to such a life of levity and poiselessness and
flightiness.
But the new loyalty which we seek, without which we go forward into no
future, should it not be more stable and enduring and loyal than the
old? If a moment releases itself from what to it is past, and validates
its right as a self-dependent life to its predecessor, a birth has
transpired in man, and birth means pain. Without such pain, man has
changed his situation, but not himself. A new color has come upon the
motly manifoldness of his life--_he_ has remained the same. Trees do not
have their roots in the air. Weaklings cannot make the real change--it
needs a strength that they do not have. The strength to change
really--only he has this who bears the new loyalty in his own bosom;
loyalty not to his opinion, not to his learning and heritage, but
loyalty to his _growth_, to the great eternal goal of life, to the great
sacred task which he has yet to fulfil in life.
Loyal to ourself? Would that it might be so! But the self that we would
at first be loyal to is not our self at all. It is foreign wares, loaded
upon us,--first even in the nursery, slyly slipped subsequently upon our
shoulders,--foreign words, foreign worths! Loyalty to what satiates, not
the better loyalty to our hunger! We begin to live only when we live in
our hunger; our hunger is we ourselves. It is a good satiety only if a
new hunger comes from it. Loyalty to our self--this is to keep our life
alive in us--a young glad life, that never grows old, because the old is
ever transmuted into a new. This loyalty to ourself,--it is to expel
from every truth its error, from every boundary its limit which blocks
the vision into the wide world, the blue sky, and the distant sea.
Loyalty to men? Would that it might be so! But such loyalty costs so
much trouble and toil. For the faithfulness that is genuine and living,
there is no law, no binding _I must_, only a glorious _I will_. One day
we shall have done with the loyalty which means master and servant,
leader and led--the loyalty of the dog that is loyalest to him who feeds
him best or beats him hardest. One day we shall understand what the
loyalty of man means--this new loyalty toward man, in which souls meet
and chime and work together, and live in each other, yet each remains
itself and true to itself.
So, then, the law of change and of growth is the law of the new loyalty,
as the law of fixedness and finishedness and finality was of the old. It
is the duty of such new loyalty to protect itself against the deadening
force of habit and of petrifaction, to guard itself against any
obedience by which it would become disloyal to itself. Such loyalty is
too honorable to humor inertia and laziness under its banner, too
courageous to conceal cowardice behind a slave's patience.
But thought on our theme is usually lifted up to where the sky keeps
company with the granite and the grass, to a religious elevation. Nor do
we need stop short here. Ultimately the new loyalty is loyalty to God,
the new God, of whom something must be said later. The God in whom all
fulness dwells summons us to ever new truths, and reveals underground
wells of living water throwing its spray aloft on life's ferns and
flowers. To be loyal to him is never to sunder ourselves from his
fulness and freshness, but to co-work with him who is forever making all
things new.
And now I think we are at the end. The result? It is needless to state
it, but I would not shrink from the thankless task. In a word, then, the
new loyalty--in harmony with the whole great changed view of the world
and of life--is loyalty to change and becoming rather than to
finishedness and finality; to the future rather than to the past; to
ideals rather than to conventions; to freedom rather than to authority;
to personality rather than to institution; to character rather than to
respectability; to our hunger rather than to our satiety; to the God
that is to be rather than to the God that is. Thus the loyalty abides,
but the objects of loyalty change and pass.
THE MILLINER
SADE IVERSON
All the day long I have been sitting in my shop
Sewing straw on hat-shapes according to the fashion,
Putting lace and ribbon on according to the fashion,
Setting out the faces of customers according to fashion.
Whatever they asked for I tried to give them;
Over their worldly faces I put mimic flowers
From out my silk and velvet garden; I bade Spring come
To those who had seen Autumn; I coaxed faded eyes
To look bright and hard brows to soften.
Not once, while they were looking in the glass,
Did I peep over their shoulders to see myself.
It would have been quite unavailing for me,
Who have grown grey in service of other women,
To have used myself as any sort of a model.
Had I looked in the mirror I should have seen
Only a bleached face, long housed from sunshine,
A mouth quick with forced smiles, eyes greyly stagnant,
And over all, like a night fog creeping,
Something chill and obscuring and dead--
The miasmatic mist of the soul of the lonely.
When night comes and the buyers are gone their ways,
I go into the little room behind my shop.
It is my home--my silent and lonely home;
But it has fire, it has food; there is a bed;
Pictures are on the walls, showing the faces
I kissed in girlhood. I am myself here;
All my forced smiles are laid away with the moline
And the ribbon and roses. I may do as I please.
If I beat with my fists on the table, no one hears;
If I lie in my bed, staring, staring,
No one can know; I shall not suffer the pity
Of those who, passing, see my light edge the grey curtain.
One night, long ago, merely for madness
I stripped myself like a dancing girl;
I draped myself with rose-hued silks
And set a crimson feather in my hair.
There were twists of gold lace about my arms
And a girdle of gold about my waist.
I danced before the mirror till I dropped!
(Outside I could hear the rain falling
And the wind crept in beneath my door
Along my worn carpet.)
I folded my finery
And prayed as if kneeling beside my mother.
Whether there was listening I cannot say.
There was praying! There was praying!
Never again shall I dance before the mirror
Bedizened like a dancing girl--never, my mother!
I have a low voice and quiet movements,
And early and late I study to please.
As long as I live I shall be adorning other women,
I shall be decking them for their lovers
And sending them upon women's adventures.
But none of them shall see behind this curtain
Where I have my little home, where I weep
When I please, and beat upon the table with my fists.
"NUR WER DIE SEHNSUCHT KENNT"
MARGARET C. ANDERSON
In one of Chicago's big department stores of the cheaper type you
may--provided you're something of a poet--walk straight into the heart
of a musical adventure. It is that amazing, resentful, and very
satisfying adventure of discovering genius at work, under the by no
means unique condition of being unrecognized.
You go to one of the upper floors where the big lunch-room is. You find
a table near a platform in the center, on which sit four musicians--a
pianist, a 'cellist, a clarinet_ist_ (if there is such a thing), and a
second violinist. You expect the usual clamor....
Suddenly you notice a fifth figure who has been sitting quietly in the
background. She comes forward with a violin in her hand, and stands
ready to play. There is something still about her--that quality of
stillness which is invariably the first thing you notice in any dynamic.
She seems not scornful of her surroundings, but quite indifferent to
them; not arrogant, but sure of power; not timid, and yet incredibly
soft and shy and serious. She is plainly foreign; she is German, looks
French, and plays like a Viennese. Or, to be exact, she merges the
German "heaviness" with the Viennese gay-sadness, and the result is a
sensuousness that is both deep and clear, with the haunting wail that
distinguishes all the music which comes from Vienna. She looks almost
like a little girl; but you would notice her any place because of that
stillness and the haunting appeal that always attaches to a certain type
of eyes and mouth--the kind which seem to say: "I will make music for
you; I will take you to a new world. I will do it because I can dream
intensely."
She begins to play, and you understand why you watched her. The depth of
it startles you at first--it is so big, so moving, so almost uncanny
coming from such a small person, whose hands seem scarcely large enough
to hold a violin. It is playing of the Mischa Elman type, without his
emotional extravagances and with something that is more soul-shaking. If
I were an Imagist I could find the right word; but this music eludes me.
It is sure and simple. It grips you till you don't know whether you are
listening to music or to the urge of some hidden inner self. It is a
divine thing.
In the midst of it the waitresses rush back and forth, the patrons eat
their food with interest, only pausing to applaud when some tawdry
vaudevillian sings a particularly vulgar song. The dishes clang, some
one upsets a tray with a great crash, and at intervals there is a tango
outrage by a couple who know nothing about dancing. Underneath it all
the violin throbs its deep accompaniment.
I wish I could make a poem of it. I have thought of taking my poet
friends there and having the thing done. But almost without exception
the poets I know don't care for music essentially; though why a mind
keyed to the tone qualities of words should be so tone-deaf in another
medium has always been a mystery to me. And what a poet's opportunity
here: "the boom and squeal," and out of it music that is as sacred as an
organ meditation and as passionate as a Russian slave song!
However, generalizations will not serve to give any musician's special
quality, and this one is so emphatically individual as to make
description easy. To begin with, she was concertising in Europe as a
wonder-child at the age of six. For a number of years her playing
brought forth a chorus of superlatives from the critics: "her full
blooming tone, her great taste in phrasing, economic use of the bow,
glowing passion of interpretation; her fiery temperament, remarkable
earnestness and will power, the soul, life, and emotion in her
presentations." The verdict of a "a veritable artist soul" appeared to
be unanimous; and one man summed up with admirable insight and
simplicity: "Her chief excellence is in this: that she seeks her main
task to be an artist in the real and earnest sense of the word, and
whosoever comes to hear music does not go empty from her."
Friedrich Spielhagen wrote a sonnet to her, of which I have a careful,
but metrically inadequate, translation:
Thou standst before us, a picture of wondrous charm;
The little violin thou holdst, in tenderess,
Half maidenly, half like a child in dress
Hast soared away from Heaven's angel-farm
Toward where thy large mild eye is dreaming.
And he ended it with these lines:
Thou movest thy bow;
No sounds are these of nicely movéd strings,
No, No! Thy own sweet soul rings out and sings
The melodies that have with you come
From yon high wide-sphered home,
To where thy longing soul swings upward now.
Our apologies to Mr. Spielhagen for that more than atrocious twelfth
line and for the other deficiencies! But the last line is particularly
keen in its photography. It has the spirit of her.
After much touring in Europe she came to this country and played under
the same promising conditions. The critics predicted that if she should
decide to stay here she would probably out-rival our own few noted women
violinists. And then came a period of sorrow, bereavement, hardship, and
illness--and in the meantime the problem of living. That problem becomes
a real one when an artist loves life just a bit more than her art and
refuses to make that spiritual compromise which life tries to wrest from
one in the hard places. One must live, and it takes money to do it
rather than art. The romantic notion that all genius has to do is to
stand up and make itself heard is one of the silliest notions the great
public suffers from. Only the hundredth person recognizes genius when it
proclaims itself; the rest are as blind as this department-store
audience until the sign-posts have been put up, with letters large
enough to be easily read. Also, the amount of machinery and money
involved in the arrangement of concert engagements would surprise the
public as much as the true stories of what it costs the "wealthy patron"
to get his artist started toward recognition.
And so this particular genius will continue for a while to cast her
pearls in a lunch-room, and a few of the discerning will find her out
and thank their stars that they may hear such beauty at the small cost
of a bad club sandwich and a worse cup of coffee.
If you go there you will be haunted by music for days afterward. I say
"haunted" because that is the only word to describe your feeling of
pursuit by melody. And I think I have discovered the reason for it. A
poet once said that the only permanent emotion we human beings are
capable of is--not love, as we like to imagine--but _longing_. And that
is what this music says to you. It is the very essence of longing--the
eternal seeking, the rapturous satisfaction, the disappointment, and the
renewed quest. I have never heard such a quality of _sehnsucht_ in any
music; it is almost more than you can bear. Of course, in these
surroundings, you must listen to the complete gamut of new popular
songs; but at intervals, when the managerial demand for "noise" can be
ignored for a moment, you will be rewarded by the Thais _Meditation_ or
a Schutt waltz or that exquisite Saint-Saens poem called _The Swan_--or
even a Tschaikowsky song. Where does the tone come from, you keep
wondering? Not from a wooden instrument, not from small human fingers,
surely. It is tone of such richness and depth that you sometimes have
the illusion of each note being sung twice. "It transcends music to me
entirely and becomes a matter of life--or of soul," said a critic who
listened with me the other day.
Through it all the artist's earnest face is still and unchanging. That
is part of the fascination--the contrast of that tumultuous singing and
the thoughtful, dreaming face that seems to control it all. "My violin
belongs to me--yes," she says, "but that is such a cold word. It is part
of my body. I feel it is growing on me just like my arms and hands. I
could not live without it." If you watch her closely you will decide
that her playing is the result of an extraordinary sensitiveness to
life. If you know her, as I do, you will expand that judgment to this
one: an extraordinary strength about life; for she is both deep and
strong--qualities that are supposed to be inseparable, but which are so
rarely found together that their combination means--a great spirit.
I am afraid I am too much of a musician not to be a romanticist.
With out music life to me would be a mistake.--_Nietzsche to
Brandes, 1888._
* * * * *
All restlessness, misery, all crime, is the result of the
betrayal of one's inner life.--_Will Lexington Comfort in
"Midstream."_
EDITORIALS
Our New Poet
Charles Ashleigh, who makes his appearance in this issue, was born in
London twenty-five years ago. He was educated in England, Switzerland,
and Germany, and speaks French, German, and Spanish, "as well as two or
three varieties of English and American slang." He has wandered in
Europe, South America and this country, traveling on foot through
Argentine, Chile, and Peru, and in the States as a hobo. He has been
sailor, newspaper man, tramp, actor, farm hand, railroad clerk,
interpreter, and a few other things. He has written verse, short
stories, social studies, literary criticism, and lectured on his travels
as well as on sociological, literary, and dramatic subjects. Quite
unlike those poets who insist that they have no opinions on any
subject--that they simply photograph life--Mr. Ashleigh states his creed
in this way: "I am interested in Labor, literature, and many other
aspects and angles of Life. Men and deeds are to me of primary
importance and books secondary." We look for big things from this young
man.
Two Important Books
Mary Austin has written a study of marriage which she calls _Love and
the Soul Maker_. It appears to be about as big a thing on the subject as
any American woman has done. Will Lexington Comfort has written an
autobiographical novel which he calls _Midstream_. It tells the truth
about a man's life, and is also a big thing. Both will be reviewed in
the August issue.
The Congo
Nicholas Vachel Lindsay's new poem, _The Congo_, is to appear in _The
Metropolitan_ for August. Mr. Lindsay's opinion is that the best effect
will be got by reading it aloud.
The Basis for a New Painting
Truly these Imagists are enchanting! The following examples are selected
from the anthology published by _The Glebe_:
Fan-Piece for Her Imperial Lord
O fan of white silk,
clear as frost on the grass-blade,
You also are laid aside.
Ezra Pound.
In A Garden
Gushing from the mouths of stone men
To spread at ease under the sky
In granite-lipped basins,
Where iris dabble their feet
And rustle to a passing wind,
The water fills the garden with its rushing,
In the midst of the quiet of close-clipped lawns.
Damp smell the ferns in tunnels of stone,
Where trickle and splash the fountains,
Marble fountains, yellowed with much water.
Splashing down moss-tarnished steps
It falls, the water;
And the air is throbbing with it;
With its gurgling and running;
With its leaping, and deep, cool murmur.
And I wished for night and you.
I wanted to see you in the swimming-pool,
White and shining in the silver-flecked water.
While the moon rode over the garden
High in the arch of night,
And the scent of the lilacs was heavy with stillness.
Night and the water, and you in your whiteness, bathing!
Amy Lowell.
Au Vieux Jardin
I have sat here happy in the gardens,
Watching the still pool and the reeds
And the dark clouds
Which the wind of the upper air
Tore like the green leafy bough
Of the divers-hued trees of late summer;
But though I greatly delight
In these and the water lilies,
That which sets me nighest to weeping
Is the rose and white colour of the smooth flag-stones,
And the pale yellow grasses
Among them.
Richard Aldington.
Ts'ai Chi'h
The petals fall in the fountain,
the orange coloured rose-leaves,
Their ochre clings to the stone.
Ezra Pound.
Liu Ch'e
The rustling of the silk is discontinued,
Dust drifts over the courtyard,
There is no sound of footfall, and the leaves
Scurry into heaps and lie still,
And she the rejoicer of the heart is beneath them.
A wet leaf that clings to the threshold.
Ezra Pound.
NEW YORK LETTER
GEORGE SOULE
GEORGE BRANDES--A HASTY IMPRESSION
The man who fought the big battle for Ibsen and Nietzsche should have
filled Madison Square Garden; as it was, the little Comedy Theatre
wasn't large enough to hold the audience, although Scandinavian
patriotism accounted for a good deal of it. He came on the stage with
Brander Matthews, the apotheosis of the academic, and the contrast was
striking. Matthews was tall, dull, professional. Brandes, with his keen
face, alert eyes, and shock of grayish hair, was possibly the most fully
alive person in the room. He radiated interest--human connection with
anything vital.
We were all a little sorry his subject was Shakespeare; we wanted to
hear of something modern. And when the first part of the lecture was
read, couched in scholarly but terse English, we felt cheated. It was
good criticism, and informing, but it wasn't the sort of thing we had
expected from Brandes. Suddenly a spark shot out. (The quotation is from
memory):
We cannot emphasize too strongly the fact that all works of
literature which have a real effect on mankind, all works which
endure hundreds of years, find their inspiration not in books,
but in life.
The words were pronounced with excited intensity. Soon came another:
We used to define the genius as the man who interprets his age;
now we know that the genius is the man who, working against his
age, creates new times.
Dr. Brandes broke into a lively sally at the Baconians. He spoke of
Shakespeare's errors in scholarship. These Bacon would surely have
avoided, but of Shakespeare's great lines Bacon could not possibly have
written one. He ended that section with something like this:
The Baconian theory was founded by the uneducated, it was
developed by the half-educated, and it is now held solely by
idiots.
The audience was immensely pleased at his sharp fire.
Dr. Brandes' epigrams sometimes sound as if he substituted wit for
wisdom. But that is because the epigrams stick and are repeated. His
method is to open with an epigram to catch the attention, to proceed
with a line of sound argument, and at the end to finish superbly with a
sentence that contains his conclusions and impales his opponent at the
same time.
With Frank Harris, Dr. Brandes was no more gentle. By parallel quotation
Harris was made to appear ridiculous. Brandes showed that whatever in
his writings is sound has been said before. This was the end of the
lecture:
Mr. Harris says that it is possible to admire Shakespeare, but
that it is impossible to worship him. Ladies and gentlemen, I do
the impossible.
Afterwards came a supper of the Scandinavian Society, at which the guest
of honor made a speech that looked brilliant and was lively even as a
piece of pantomime--but it was in Danish. Dr. Brandes was beaming and
unaffectedly cordial with everybody. He smilingly interrupted one of the
pompous addresses in his honor to correct a quotation from Goethe. He
proposed a toast to the charming young lady who acted as his American
manager, and said that the success of his tour was due entirely to her.
Later a consul made a highly complimentary, but exceedingly tedious,
speech. Dr. Brandes fidgeted until he could stand it no longer, then he
quickly got up, took his champagne glass, ran over to the orator and
slapped him on the shoulder, saying, "You are a very nice man." The rest
was drowned in the toast.
A NEW LITERATURE
The other day an illustrator saw a hand-mirror in a publisher's office.
He put the mirror against a book cover and held it at arm's length.
"There," he said, "is the ideal jacket for a novel. Every woman likes to
imagine herself the heroine of the book she is reading." But the
publisher was wiser. "You are half right," he answered. "But she wants
to be a Gibson heroine. To see her own face, without flattery, would
startle her into disapproval of the book."
A recent symposium in _The Sun_ bore the impressive title, _The
Sentimentalization of Woman in American Fiction_. All the authors were
agreed that realism doesn't go because of the desire of the reader to be
flattered. If she isn't, the novel is "unpleasant," "depressing." You
may paint your villainess black, but, as your reader will take her for
an enemy, you must see that she is properly punished. But if your
heroine does anything unconventional, it must be of the kind that your
reader enjoys by imagination, though she wouldn't have the courage to do
it. Only you must not make the thrills so strong as to shock the reader
into self-consciousness and self-disapproval. Georg Brandes said that
our novels are written by old maids for old maids. If we would only put
into our literature the same genius and daring that we put into our
skyscrapers!
The thing none of the authors seemed to see is that it is futile to stop
at blaming the readers. Of course the great public is comparatively
stupid. It is everywhere, it always has been and always will be. What is
a leader if he is not someone in advance of the others? And the
essential act for a leader is to lead. He can't get a following until he
does that. Only a coward stays behind and flatters the crowd because he
is afraid they will not come after him. Perhaps they won't follow his
particular route. But if he goes on fearlessly he has done the best that
is in him, anyway. The chances are that if he has a sincere conviction
and marches far enough in one direction they will at least struggle
along after a while. They may even follow in hordes. What we need first
is not a more intelligent public, but courageous writers.
Naturally the matter is not simple. Your artist has to be fed and
clothed. If he is creating a new medium--as did Wagner--he even needs
large resources to produce his art. The solution used to be the wealthy
patron. The petty monarch maintained a musician or a painter to enhance
the glory of his court. The noble supported a writer from personal
pride. The monastery afforded a refuge for the unworldly creator. It
would be difficult to find a great artist before the last century who
did not have some such subsidy, unless he had means of his own.
Since then democracy has permeated the world. Fast presses, advertising,
and royalties have been invented. Now the public is the writer's patron.
Music is often subsidized, to be sure, and painters can still sell their
canvases to the wealthy. But the earnings of the writer are in strict
proportion to the number of copies of his books that can be sold.
There is a distinct advantage in this situation. The virtue of democracy
is not the government of the majority, but the opportunity of the
minority. The minority becomes, not a defensive close corporation, but a
body of fighting visionaries. The emphasis is placed on growth. The
eternal impulse of the minority to turn itself into a majority prevents
a static age. The strongest lead, instead of the highly born.
So it must be with our writers. Difficulty insures heroes. We can
discount at once the truckling commercial writers. But the others must
be deeply sincere and strong in order to exist at all. There is little
room for the dilletante. Let our young people who have something to say
recognize the situation. They must dedicate themselves to a probable
poverty. They must gird their loins and sharpen their weapons. They must
be prepared to wait years, if need be, even for recognition. Every
energy must be devoted to saying as well as may be the thing that is in
them. And so, hoping nothing, fearing nothing, living simply, supporting
themselves as best they may, but always doing the thing that is worth
while for its own sake, they may produce a literature that has not been
equalled since the world began.
Others of us can share in this glorious undertaking. Discerning critics
must sift the true from the false. They must lay aside the twin
snobberies of praising or blaming a work because of its popularity. They
must fight eternally for the sincere. They must point out directions,
they must prize meanings above methods. They must give a nucleus to the
intelligent reading public and constantly augment it. They must bear
sturdy witness to the fact that art is not an amusement for idle
moments, but the consciousness of the race. They must show its relation
to life as well as to living. They must be predisposed in favor of no
work on account of its nationality, school or tendency. Just as Brandes
enlarged the conception of literature by showing it as a world
phenomenon, they must rid it of petty divisions in the realm of thought.
No more should such a statement as "Galsworthy is a poet rather than a
novelist" be allowed to pass as criticism. A novelist may be a poet or a
philosopher or a psychologist or a historian or a sociologist. Any of
these may combine the intrinsic abilities of any or all of the others.
He is greater for doing so. The only test of his work is its
effectiveness. A work of art is an organism, the highest product of
nature, infinitely more real, more beautiful, more potent, than any
flower. Only when we see it as such, and not as a collection of petals
and stamens, or as a member of a species, shall we know it.
The whole problem of creating a literature, as of doing anything else,
is one of direction and power. If we blame someone else for our
deficiencies, if we stand aloof, if we bow to circumstances and are
afraid to pay for what we want, we shall of course do nothing. And we
shall not enjoy ourselves or the world much either. But if we fix on a
goal that is worth a life, and set out for it with the joyous spirit of
adventurers, risking everything, enduring everything, sleeping under the
stars, staying hard and keen, we shall command the fates. What more
could we ask of the world?
DOSTOEVSKY'S NOVELS
MAURICE LAZAR
_The Idiot_, _The Brothers Karamazov_, _Crime and Punishment_, etc.,
translated by Constance Garnett. [The Macmillan Company, New
York.]
It's not a matter of intellect or logic, it's loving (life) with
one's inside, with one's stomach....
--Ivan Karamazov.
Chiefly concerned with the fester of civilization, literature, music,
painting, all the modern forms of individual expression are elliptical
in the sense that the old æsthetic values of emotional beauty seem to
have become nullified, or else congealed, in the artist's direct
application of his instrument to the repudiation of fixed social values
or moralities; to the expansion of life-interests. We today want more
than beauty of external form; we want the beauty of depth!
The true artist is such primarily because of his engrossing appetite for
life, because (as Flaubert said) of the chaos in his soul. And although
Flaubert kept on chiseling words around the lives of men and women
totally devoid of inspirating individuality, his dictum has been nobly
exemplified in the life and writings of Fyodor Dostoevsky, that
great-hearted epileptic Russian of whose psychological powers Nietzsche
admittedly availed himself.
Tolstoy was reported to have said, in conversation with a writer for _Le
Temps_, "A woman who has never suffered pain is a beast." He could have
stretched the allegation to include the other sex, if only by way of
illusion to that intense spiritual quality in modern Russian
literature--a literature that has never been (notably) an off-shoot of,
as much as a protest against, the retrogressive structures of its
respective periods.
This spiritual, or psychical, concern with the individual's adjustment
to the functioning of life has been revealed to highest degree in
Dostoevsky's novels. It is also manifest in the analytical mould assumed
by the creative arts of our time.
While Dostoevsky's personality is separably bound up with his work,
profitable appreciation of the latter can be considerably amplified with
knowledge of the important facts of his life and the conditions with
which he struggled. I will record the more essential facts of his life
as I have gathered them, and try to explain the causes that have made
for the distinction in his work from that of all other writers.
He was born in a charity-hospital in Moscow, in 1821. His father was an
army-surgeon, his mother a store-keeper's daughter. I like to think that
he derived his expressive powers, or rather the nebulæ out of which they
subsequently developed, from his mother, perhaps partly because of my
theory that men of acute genius ultimately do transcend the difference
of sex in the quality of their personalities as well as in that of their
work.
Like most imaginative youths who come into contact with fine art,
Dostoevsky was stimulated to literary expression by his study of
classical and contemporaneous European literature. He had lived
twenty-three years when he graduated from a St. Petersburg school of
military engineering. His first novel, _Poor Folk_, was published three
years later, and served to focus upon him the attention of the critics.
In 1849 Dostoevsky was arrested, with members of a radical organization,
on governmental charges of sedition. The terrible suffering he sustained
while awaiting his execution (he was first confined in prison for eight
months) have been set forth in striking passages of his novels, _The
Idiot_ and _Letters from a Dead House_. The sentence of death was
finally, and very unexpectedly, commuted to one of imprisonment in
Siberia for four years. At the expiration of this period he served
perforce as a private soldier in the Russian army for three more years.
When he was permitted to return to St. Petersburg he was accompanied by
his first wife, whom he had loved and married while in exile.
Dostoevsky's interminable suffering from epileptic seizures (it has been
suggested that these fits originated in a beating administered to him by
his father when Fyodor was a boy); his poverty, and the constant
accumulation of debt; the terrific haste with which he found it
necessary to write his most profound books--all have made it natural to
him, in dwelling upon any physiological aspect of his characters, to be
as unconvincing as the eremite attempting an analysis of conditions of
sex life.
In short, Dostoevsky's nervous disorders pervaded his "sensual sense" of
beauty--of beauty in all its manifestations. At the same time it must be
remarked that this negation of physical responsiveness surely
intensified the acuteness of his mental vision, which was otherwise
refined emotionally by the results of his imprisonment and life-long
hardships. And this also explains why Dostoevsky's novels are lacking so
singularly in the tingle of the physical contact of his characters; why
the suffering of his men and women move us so profoundly; why his
writings are so uneven, his dialogues of such elemental power, and his
purely descriptive passages so ordinary.
The elemental power in his dialogues is due chiefly to the vigor of
action accredited his characters. In his work is not to be found the
picturesque phrase, the adroitly-turned period, the illuminating
metaphor, the sequence of construction, the tone or shading offered by
the commingling of his objects. Dostoevsky has no style of form, his
outlines are amorphous. It is in his power of transcribing the living
voice, of recording in never-failing reflex emotionalism the lives and
deeds of his startling figures that he is supreme.
If you have read one of his books you know much of what he has to say.
His other works are repetitions, mainly. For Dostoevsky does not attempt
to paint character, and rarely does he stop to show the subtly-reacting
influence of environment upon his men and women. Always he is concerned
with the idea of the individual's personal adjustments to life. Each
book of his throbs with the discordant elements that clash over the
establishment of this idea; and always its conclusions are recognized.
That is why I regard Dostoevsky as an optimist. And his emphasis on
humanity's spiritual conception of life, no matter what the cost, grew
more and more pronounced in his later works.
His faith in human beings is expressed in one set theme, which can be
conveniently resolved into terms of comparison: on one hand the
individual's evasion of life's realities by the exercise of material
(and therefore fictitious) values; and on the other hand, the frank
acceptance of life's realities for the attainment of a proportionate
spiritual balance.
In _Crime and Punishment_, Dr. Raskolnikov is in doubt as to the
ultimate worth of this attainment, until he expiates his crime
in killing the old moneylender (I forget her name) not by
confessing,--Dostoevsky is too fine a realist for that,--but by
obtaining personal solace from the regenerating qualities of his
resignation. And it is characteristic of our writer's method that
Raskolnikov is assisted toward this state of resignation by his love,
Sonia, the prostitute, whose regard for the murderer is based upon the
confirmation evidenced in him of the faith that has been stimulated in
herself.
Similar in thesis, though expressed in terms of minor differences, is
Dostoevsky's last and unquestionably finest work, _The Brothers
Karamazov_. It is incomplete, actually one-third as long as he had
intended it to be. He died before he could finish the book. Nevertheless
it is compactly-formed material as the work now stands, and superior to
his other novels not because his outlines are more constrained, his
movement more co-ordinate, and the actual writing of a more intensive
quality, but because here he defines his own conception of spiritual
beauty in a distinctive fashion not to be found in his other books.
He offers us the history of a family,--and what a family! Each figure in
this domestic (?) group embodies conflicting phases of his great idea.
Fyodor Karamazov, the father, is a sensualist of the lowest type
imaginable. His three sons are Dmitri, Ivan, and Alyosha. There is also
another (illegitimate) son, Smerdyakov, an epileptic.
Dmitri Karamazov inherits his father's passion for wine, women, and
song, but the son's pursuit of this tame and conventional item is
tempered by frequent lapses, by periods of misgiving. The second son is
a materialist and a cynic. He changes his mind after a severe illness,
and his materialistic beliefs are all but supplanted by intense
spiritual curiosity. The third and youngest son is an idealist, lovable
and loving. Here again we have Dostoevsky's discordant elements conveyed
in terms of human characterizations. The plot of the story is as
formless as life itself, for it is with life, not with plots, that
Dostoevsky deals.
Dmitri's hatred of his father is intensified by the rivalry that exists
between the two in their common pursuit of Grushenka's affections.
Grushenka is a woman of the demi-monde. The author, I think, tried to
draw her in lines that would reveal a physical zest of life, as
evidenced, for example, in Tolstoy's _Anna Karenina_. His failure to
make Grushenka a convincing individual, as an individual, is typical,
for the reasons I have already advanced.
Development of the story shows how Dmitri's repeatedly avowed
determination to kill his father bears fruit. The elder Karamazov is
found dead one night, with his skull crushed. Dmitri is imprisoned. And
the rest of the book, which is devoted to Dmitri's trial, the moral
regeneration of Ivan, and the urge of life in Alyosha, approaches
psychological heights (or depths) that have not been surpassed to this
day. Small wonder that Nietzsche referred so affectionately to the
"giant spirit."
I have made reference to Dostoevsky's "optimism." A better word for it
is faith--faith of a new high order. He is the most cheerful,
sunlight-giving writer in Russian literature. "The essence of religious
feeling," says Prince Myshkin in _The Idiot_, "does not come under any
sort of reasoning or atheism, and has nothing to do with any crimes or
misdemeanors."
Prince Myshkin is the central figure of the novel; he is the "idiot,"
and everybody abuses him. He is insulted and beaten, and robbed and
deceived and loved. He is the most singular figure in literature--he is
Dostoevsky himself.
But he is not an idiot in any sense. He is so profoundly simple and
wise, and has such great faith in human beings, that he is mistaken by
the men and women of ordinary passions as a fool. While he can be
readily toyed with by women--a significant phase of the writer's own
attitude toward the sex--Prince Myshkin is regarded by them from a
common basis of understanding. For them he holds no quality of sex.
"Perhaps you don't know that, owing to my illness," he says (he too is
an epileptic), "I know nothing of women."
It is in _The Idiot_ that Dostoevsky's women are at least life-like. The
Epanchin sisters, especially the youngest, Aglaia, are not "types" in
the usual sense, but preconceived studies. The pages devoted to Aglaia's
love affair with Prince Myshkin are of the happiest in the book.
Besides the books I have already mentioned, the more important works are
_The Possessed_, in which national politics play a large part; _Poor
Folk_, the story of a poor clerk's love for a poor woman who eventually
turns from him; and _Letters from a Dead House_. This last is a book of
personal experiences, and reveals Dostoevsky's relations with the
criminals with whom he was imprisoned in Siberia. The mental temper of
men who disregard and break the common and social laws, is set forth
with the passionate curiosity that lies behind all his probings of the
human soul. I am strongly tempted to offer quotations; to show, in this
passage or that, how deeply Dostoevsky looked into the most extreme
boundaries of human sensibilities; but on the whole extracts from his
writings would do more harm than good. His work is so disconnected,
though not in any sense detached, that extracts could not serve here to
indicate the amazing clarity of his vision.
His books arouse a feeling of wonder that there can be so many things in
our own individual emotions with which we never before came into
contact. He moves us so profoundly because he tears his men and women
out of their morally-bound lives and makes them confront stupendous
questions--the questions of life. He plies detail upon detail of human
misery until one feels that the whole world is reeling from him--then
grows aware of the sweet white glow of Dostoevsky's faith, and feels
that life can hold no terrors--that he is above the petty miseries of
human strife! That is why I say Dostoevsky's optimism is of the new high
order.
Dostoevsky purges one's mind. He makes you conscious of the beauty of a
soul.
BOOK DISCUSSION
AN UNREELING REALIST
_The Titan_, by Theodore Dreiser [John Lane Company, New York]
Theodore Dreiser possesses none of the standard qualifications for the
art of fiction writing. He is not imaginative but inventive; he is not
clever but clear; he is not excited but calm. Whatever the flaws in his
considerable body of work no fair-minded reader may say that it is made
to catch popular applause. Its tremendous distinction is sincerity.
Another characteristic which his novels exhibit is resolute purpose.
Dreiser is aiming at something, and in _The Titan_, the second book in
an unfinished trilogy, he takes a long if wobbly step toward it.
Previously to the publishing of this volume he had not even hinted at
what he intended to work out. One thing was certain: he was not a
trifler; he was not trying to write best sellers; literary success was
not in his mind. He had set out seriously and indefatigably to write,
not so much what he felt and thought, as what he saw. Some day he would
try to get at the realities that lay back of their representations. He
would probably undertake to reveal the soul of the American nation. He
would pass through the growth stages of a nation, and achieve some kind
of spiritual national life. In the last two pages of _The Titan_ this
guess at his purpose receives appreciable encouragement. Moreover, it is
made evident for the first time, in these concluding paragraphs, that
Dreiser's prosaic realism springs not only from a vague, deep idealism
but a large, hidden spirituality. For at the core of him Dreiser is a
profoundly religious person.
Neither his style nor his stuff is far above the dead level of
mediocrity; in fact, Dreiser's rhetoric is often inexcusably
atrocious--intentionally crude, one is tempted to assert. Obviously he
is not interested in style; he is conscious of something bigger than
that revealing itself in a huge, ugly, unfinished moving picture--a net
result symbolical of a young, raw, riotous, unsynthesized national life.
One is therefore tempted to say that Dreiser, more than any other
author, is the personification of America. He represents the composite
personality of Uncle Sam.
After reading _The Financier_ and running far into the interminable
pages of _The Titan_ I felt that in the absence of cameras, kodaks,
Baedekers, and historians Dreiser would be worth while. His endless
reels of pictorial facts did not impress me as possessing sufficient
animation successfully to compete with these odd rivals, but I admired
his consistent sincerity and simplicity and felt that something
important was promised by the mere unfinishedness of his pictures. I was
sure that he did not write as one inspired, and certainly not as one
fired. And after finishing _The Titan_ I felt that here was a work
having the aspects of a seriously performed duty, exacted by fidelity to
some personal theory of industrial change. I could not imagine the
author happy as an artist is happy in his creative work; he was too
conscious of service to a cause. But in the last paragraph I discovered
a big, personal note which introduced an attitude that extends beyond
the borders of materialism. It presented another Dreiser--an author who
was much more than a cinematograph, snapping superficial impressions of
a vast panorama. Two years ago I should not have attributed the
following words to Theodore Dreiser:
In a mulch of darkness is bedded the roots of endless
sorrows--and of endless joys. Canst thou fix thine eye on the
morning? Be glad. And if in the ultimate it blind thee, be glad
also! Thou hast lived.
After laboring through arid deserts of description, this memorable
passage, fraught with recognition, satisfaction, challenge, hope, and
promise, stands out as an oasis.
_The Titan_, by virtue of its bold, graphic strokes, loses its identity
as a tree, with sharply defined individual characters, and represents
the forest. It is more like a jungle, and the jungle is our national
life, into which the morning sun inevitably will shine.
--DeWitt C. Wing.
THE REVOLT OF THE "ONCE BORN"
_Challenge_, by Louis Untermeyer. [The Century Company, New York]
There has recently appeared a volume of verse by Louis Untermeyer which
is an excellent example of the determinedly young and eupeptic
philosophy so prevalent today--the philosophy of revolt. The book is
named _Challenge_ and as challenge it must be considered. To be sure it
is rhymed, but the fact seems quite incidental. To rhyme a polemic does
not make it poetry, and one feels sure that Mr. Untermeyer is more proud
of the spiritual attitude than of the artistry.
The book is a revolt, but a careful perusal of its pages fails to reveal
against what it revolts. At first glance one might think it socialistic,
but it is not clearly enough visualized for that. Socialism has at least
found the enemy. Mr. Untermeyer manfully girds on his armor and sets
forth to war, shouting his challenge lustily the while. And why, after
all, be particular about having an actual enemy? Life, with a capital L,
can do duty for that, or "the scornful and untroubled skies," or the
"cold complacency of earth." The revolt is the point, and Mr. Untermeyer
drives it home with all the phrases of frozen impetuosity to be
discovered in a very useful vocabulary. "Athletic courage," "eager
night," "Life's lusty banner," "impetuous winds," "raging mirth," etc.,
are scattered carefully through the pages. But unfortunately,
virility--with all due respect to the reviewer who mentioned these poems
in the June number of The Little Review--has a way of oozing out of such
phrases, leaving them empty of everything save a painful determination
to be manly at all costs.
But though Mr. Untermeyer is not quite clear on some subjects he is very
clear on others. Several things seem to have struck him with peculiar
force--that city streets are dirty, for instance; that strife is tonic
for young blood; and that it is difficult for the human soul to conceive
of complete annihilation. These things he proclaims passionately and
challenges the world to disprove them. A little couplet from Kipling's
_Jungle Book_ suggests itself rather maliciously as the probable
attitude of the world towards this outbreak:
"There is none like to me!" says the Cub in the pride of his
earliest kill;
But the Jungle is large and the Cub he is small. Let him think and be
still.
Seriously, however, Mr. Untermeyer's attitude is what William James
calls the attitude of the "once born." One feels that he thinks in one
dimension, that he does not see around his subject, nor hear the
overtones which surround every happening for a man of deep intellect.
The revolt is Walt Whitman's magnificent revolt, which is overpowering
in a giant, cropping out in a man of very ordinary stature, where it
sits a little ridiculously.
As philosophy much of this, printed on a neat little card, would do
splendidly to hang in a business office for the encouragement of the
employees. As poetry it is negligible. Mr. Untermeyer lacks entirely the
one gift which could redeem it--the gift of poignancy. This lack is
particularly striking in the middle section, called _Interludes_, in
which he pauses for a little from revolt. These are love songs and
lyrics, a field in which anything not perfect is no longer acceptable.
And Mr. Untermeyer's are not perfect. His sense of rhythm is extremely
primitive and his lyrics are full of words. Only now and then, when he
forgets for a moment how manly he is, does he say anything simply enough
to strike home. These lines, for instance, from _Irony_ stick:
There is no kind of death to kill
the sands that lie so meek and still ...
But man is great and strong and wise--
And so he dies.
But in the main it is unfortunate that Mr. Untermeyer, who writes so
much and so readably on the subject of poetry, should put out so
pretentious and undeveloped a volume as this is. It is inevitable that
it should affect his standing as a critic, and there seems little doubt
that his work in that field is really valuable to the cause of poetry in
America today.
--Eunice Tietjens.
TWO BIOGRAPHIES: VERLAINE AND TOLSTOY
_Paul Verlaine_, by Wilfred Thorley; _Tolstoy: His Life and
Writings_, by Edward Garnett. [Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.]
When autumn is in your heart--not that of the golden delirium of exotic
agony, but bleak weeping autumn of crucifixion and dead leaves--what
dirge, what note haunts you in accompaniment to your grief? Maddening
darts from Tchaikowsky's _Pathétique_, or _Weltschmerz_-moans from
Beethoven's _Marchia Funebre_, or an unuttered accord known only to your
soul? Or, if you are a brother of mine, do your lips soundlessly mutter
this?
Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l'automne
Blessent mon coeur
D'une langueur
Monotone.
Don't you hear the resonance of the tolling bells in Chopin's _Funeral
March_? Your sorrow grows crescendo as you proceed, recalling Massenet's
_Elégie_:
Tout suffocant
Et blême, quand
Sonne l'heure,
Je me souviens
Des jours anciens
Et je pleure;
Et je m'en vais
Au vent mauvais
Qui m'emporte
Deçà, delà
Pareil à la
Feuille morte.
When I think of Paul Verlaine I invariably recall Oscar Wilde, despite
or because of the abysmal dissimilarity of the two personalities. The
sincere, ingenuous, all-loving child Paul, and the thoroughly
artificial, paradoxical Oscar; the typical Bohemian with the
criminal-face like that of Dostoevsky, and the salon-idol, the refined
and gorgeous bearer of the sun-flower. Fate had somewhat reconciled the
two contrasts. Both had been "sinners," both were condemned by society
and imprisoned, both had "repented"--one in _De Profundis_ where the
haughty humility of the self-enamored artist stirs us with its
artificial beauty; the other in the primitive-Christian--nay,
Catholic--_Sagesse_:
_Mon Dieu m'a dit: Mon fils, il faut m'aimer ...._
Some months ago in reviewing Edmond Lepelletier's voluminous book,
(_Paul Verlaine: His Life and Work_) I remarked that the Poet of
Absinthe and Violets was still awaiting his Boswell. My view has not
changed after reading Wilfrid Thorley's monograph on Verlaine; but my
wish for an adequate biography of the signer of _Romances sans Paroles_
has now become counterbalanced by an earnest prayer that the memory of
the poet may be saved from such indelicate manipulators as Mr. Thorley.
Why this respectable Englishman should have attempted to treat the life
of the most wayward French poet since Villon can be explained by no
other reason than that it was a case of "made to order." When a
Velasquez is pierced by a fanatical suffragette the whole civilized
world is roused to indignation; but when an honest philistine
unceremoniously puffs his cheap smoke into the face of a dead poet there
is not a single protest against that sort of vandalism. Fear of the
editor's blue pencil restrains me from putting my attitude more
outspokenly.
A conscientious compilator would have found sufficient material for an
unpretentious sketch of the life of Verlaine and for an appreciation of
his works. Lepelletier gives an amazing mass of facts and personal
reminiscences (you may ignore his naive interpretations); Arthur Symons
in _The Symbolist Movement in Literature_ has a masterpiece essay on
Verlaine, not to mention a number of other French and English writers
who have given us glimpses of the imperceptible image of the
poet--writers who _knew what they were taking about_. Mr. Thorley has
made use of various sources, but in a peculiar way. He fished out the
anecdotal scraps, the piquant details, the filthy hints, and patched up
a caricature-portrait of a lewd, perverse "undesirable," whose poetry (I
quote reluctantly) "was born solely of the genitals," whose "life is but
the trite old story of the emotions developed at the expense of domestic
peace and civic order; of art for art's sake made to condone the manner
of its begetting, and the trend of its appeal; of the hushed
acquiescence in emotion as a sacred thing, whatever the quality of the
impulse from which it ripens or the level of ideas on which it feeds."
Out of the ninety-odd pages of stuff seventy-nine are devoted to
"biography" sufficiently spicy to make any toothless old rake chuckle;
the rest is given over to "criticism"--a mutilated melange of some of
the views of Symons, George Moore, and others, flavored with the
compilator's own commonplaces. I quote from the closing lines:
A specious and high-sounding phrase has been invented to excuse
the perversities of imaginative genius by speaking of its
achievement as a "conquest of new realms for the spirit." But the
worth of such acquisitions depends on the nature of the
territory, and if it be, morally, a malarial swamp conducive only
to a human type found subversive in our normal world, it will
always appear to the English mind that we shall do well to forego
the new kingdom and to withhold our homage from its
discoverer.... That "nice is nasty, nasty nice," and the creative
artist the sole arbiter, must be hotly opposed so long as a
social conscience survives.
And this was written in Anno Domini 1914!
A sense of fairness urges me to rehabilitate the "English mind" by
recalling a passage from Mr. Thorley's compatriot, Arthur Symons:
The artist, it cannot be too clearly understood, has no more part
in society than a monk in domestic life: he cannot be judged by
its rules, he can be neither praised nor blamed for his
acceptance or rejection of its conventions. Social rules are made
by normal people for normal people, and the man of genius is
fundamentally abnormal.
It is high time that this axiom became a truism and that we cease to
measure the artist with the yard-stick of conventional morality. "L'art,
mes enfants, c'est d'être absolument soi-même," sang Verlaine, and
somewhere else he reveals a bit of that self with his usual sincerity:
I believe, and I sin in thought as in action; I believe, and I
repent in thought, if no more. Or again, I believe, and I am a
good Christian at this moment; I believe, and I am a bad
Christian the instant after. The remembrance, the hope, the
invocation of a sin delights me, with or without remorse,
sometimes under the very form of sin, and hedged with all its
natural consequences.... This delight ... it pleases us to put to
paper and publish more or less well expressed: we consign it, in
short, into literary form, forgetting all religious ideas, or not
letting one of them escape us. Can any one in good faith condemn
us as poets? A hundred times no.
"And, indeed, I should echo, a hundred times no!" exclaims the
Englishman, Arthur Symons.
I cannot resist the temptation of quoting the happiest definition of
Verlaine's personality written by Charles Morice back in 1888:
The soul of an immortal child, that is the soul of Verlaine, with
all the privileges and all the perils of so being: with the
sudden despair so easily distracted, the vivid gaieties without a
cause, the excessive suspicions and the excessive confidences,
the whims so easily outwearied, the deaf and blind infatuations,
with, especially, the unceasing renewal of impressions in the
incorruptible integrity of personal vision and sensation. Years,
influences, teachings, may pass over a temperament such as this,
may irritate it, may fatigue it; transform it, never--never so
much as to alter that particular unity which consists in a
dualism, in the division of forces between the longing after what
is evil and the adoration of what is good; or rather, in the
antagonism of spirit and flesh....
I have not mentioned the most striking "feature" of Mr. Thorley's ...
production--the appendix. Six of Verlaine's poems are translated by him
for the benefit of those who do not understand French "intimately." "To
offer them to other readers, would, of course, be an impertinence," he
modestly admits. Impertinence is not the word for that outrage. I have
experienced physical pain at the sight of the Hunnish sacrilege
committed by this well-wishing moralist. The poet, for whom "De la
musique avant toute chose; De la musique encore et toujours!" who had
pleaded, "Car nous voulons la nuance encore, Pas la couleur, rien que
la nuance!" has been mercilessly crucified in the form of
quasi-Tennysonian, taffy-like verses. One recalls with gratitude the
careful albeit pale translations of Gertrude Hall, who at least had the
sense of æsthetic propriety in endeavoring to remain true to the
master's meter and rhythm.
* * * * *
From Tolstoy's diary in 1855:
... a great, a stupendous idea, to the realization of which I
feel myself capable of devoting all my life. The idea is the
foundation of a new religion corresponding to the development of
mankind--_the religion of Jesus, but purified from dogma and
mysticism; a practical religion, not promising bliss in future,
but giving happiness on earth_.... To work consciously for _the
union on earth_ by religion....
From a letter to the poet Fet in 1898:
I am so different to things of this life that life becomes
uninteresting.... I hope you will love me though I be black.
From the fragment _There are no guilty people_:
There was a time when I tried to change my position which was not
in harmony with my conscience, but the conditions created by the
past, by my family and its claims upon me, were so complicated
that I did not know how to free myself. I had not the strength.
Now that I am over eighty and have become feeble I have given up
trying to free myself. Strange to say, as my feebleness increases
I realize more and more strongly the wrongfulness of my position,
and it grows more and more intolerable to me.
On his death-bed at the railroad station Astapovo, November, 1910:
I am tired of this world of men.
Tolstoy's failure was inevitable, for he had approached life with the
uncompromising logic of a child or a god. For fifty years he preached
his religion, and during all that time he remained splendidly
inconsistent. He opposed private property and proceeded to live on his
estate; he had denounced marriage and was a father to thirteen children.
Notwithstanding his deadly hatred for the Russian government, he
bitterly denounced the liberals and the revolutionists for their
"un-Christian" ways of fighting the enemy; but his greatest
contradiction, to the joy of the intellectual world, consisted in the
victory of the artist over the moralist as manifested in his numerous
novels and plays.
The work of Edward Garnett is conscientious and is, to my knowledge, the
best short biography of Tolstoy. It was a happy idea to discard the
traditional portrait and use a reproduction of Kramskoy's painting,
which dates back to the sixties, if I am not mistaken. It is when
looking at this portrait, a great piece of art in itself, that we
envisage the author of _War and Peace_. A few words from the description
of Tolstoy's face by P. A. Terzeyeonvo:
His face was a true peasant's face: simple, rustic, with a broad
nose, a weather-beaten skin, and thick overhanging brows, from
beneath which small, keen, grey eyes peered sharply forth.... One
instantly divines in Tolstoy a man of the highest society--with
polished, unconstrained manners.
... On the one hand an insatiable thirst for power over people,
and on the other an unconquerable ardor for inward purity and the
sweetness of meekness....
In this chain of seething, imperious instincts linked with
delicate spiritual organization lies the profound tragicness of
Tolstoy's personality.
Mr. Garnett succeeds in giving the quintessence of Tolstoy's works and
teachings in less than a hundred pages. Like most of the Russian's
eulogistic biographers, Mr. Garnett has not escaped the fallacy of
exaggerating the moral power that Tolstoy exercised over the government.
To say that the Czar and his ministers "dared not touch" the outspoken
anarchist and heretic "out of dread of Europe--nay, of Russia," is to
reveal one's ignorance of the brazen defiance displayed by Muscovite
autocrats in regard to public opinion. As the Germans put it: "Herr
Kossack, schämen Sie sich!" Tolstoy, as a matter of fact, had helped to
check the revolutionary spirit of his compatriots in a greater degree
than the tyrannic persecutions of Von-Plehve. Had he not appealed time
and again to embrace his doctrine of Non-Resistance? Had he not
denounced the revolutionists as violent prototypes of their hangers?
Could the government see any danger in a man who wrote in _The Times_
during the revolution of 1905: "To free oneself from the government it
is only necessary to abstain from participating in it and supporting it.
Our consciousness of the law of God demands from us only one thing:
moral self-perfection, i. e., the liberation of oneself from all those
weaknesses and vices which make one the slave of governments and the
participation in their crimes"? Another tragic contradiction of the
restless soul of the anarchist who, despite himself, renders aid to the
despots.
--Alexander S. Kaun.
INTROSPECTION
_Chance_, by Joseph Conrad. [Doubleday, Page & Company, New
York.]
Did you ever take supper in the apartments of a dear bachelor friend, on
a night when the wind howled outside the window, and the rain beat
against the pane? And after the satisfying meal, whose perfect
appointment made you forget all save the luxury of living, did you
retire to the spacious living room, and after accepting an aromatic
Havana, stretch your feet out to the crackling log fire, and as the
smoke from your cigar crawled upward listen to the philosophical
analyses of your cultured host on that marvelously simple and profoundly
complex servant and master of man, the human mind? Of such an evening is
the atmosphere of _Chance_. Not academically deep, but deep from the
standpoint of a full life and an active intelligence.
Everyone loves to analyze his fellow creatures. Some do it well, some do
it badly, but we all do it. Conrad does it masterfully. There doesn't
seem to be a type which holds a mystery for him. The village pillar; the
frail, ill-fated maid; the buxsom housewife; the silent captain ashore
and afloat; the opinionated, retired old gentleman; the cynical,
good-natured man of thirty-five; the flat, tintless fraud. Into the
mental realm of all these he makes expeditions long and short. His
characters live. They mingle good and bad, and, as strong characters
should, weave for themselves a charming story of love, adventure, trial,
and victory, never trite, and always surprising. It is a tale built of
character studies and garnished with odd conjective philosophy.
Our new acquaintance paused, then added meditatively:
"Queer man. As if it made any difference. Queer man."
"It's certainly unwise to admit any sort of responsibility for
our actions, whose consequences we are never able to foresee,"
remarked Marlow by way of assent.
"The consequence of his action was that I got a ship," said the
other. "That could not do much harm," he added with a laugh which
argued a probably unconscious contempt of general ideas.
But Marlow was not put off. He was patient and reflective. He had
been at sea many years and I verily believe he liked sea-life
because upon the whole it is favourable to reflection. I am
speaking of the now nearly vanished sea-life under sail. To those
who may be surprised at the statement I will point out that this
life secured for the mind of him who embraced it the inestimable
advantages of solitude and silence. Marlow had the habit of
pursuing general ideas in a peculiar manner, between jest and
earnest.
"Oh, I wouldn't suggest," he said, "that your namesake, Mr.
Powell, the Shipping Master, had done you much harm. Such was
hardly his intention. And even if it had been he would not have
had the power. He was but a man, and the incapacity to achieve
anything distinctly good or evil is inherent in our earthly
condition. Mediocrity is our mark. And perhaps it's just as well,
since, for the most part, we cannot be certain of the effect of
our actions."
"I don't know about the effect," the other stood up to Marlow
manfully. "What effect did you expect anyhow? I tell you he did
something uncommonly kind."
"He did what he could," Marlow retorted gently, "and on his own
showing that was not a very great deal. I cannot help thinking
that there was some malice in the way he seized the opportunity
to serve you. He managed to make you uncomfortable. You wanted to
go to sea, but he jumped on the chance of accommodating your
desire with a vengeance. I am inclined to think your cheek
alarmed him. And this was an excellent occasion to suppress you
altogether. For if you accepted he was relieved of you with every
appearance of humanity, and if you made objections (after
requesting his assistance, mind you) it was open to him to drop
you as a sort of impostor. You might have had to decline that
berth for some very valid reason. From sheer necessity, perhaps.
The notice was too uncommonly short. But under the circumstances
you'd have covered yourself with ignominy."
Our new friend knocked the ashes out of his pipe.
There is something about Conrad which gives a warm feeling about the
heart. A certain fineness of humor, a certain fullness of sympathy. He
never mixes his similes; they always take the same tone and the same
color. For instance:
I took a piece of cake and went out to bribe the Fyne dog into
some sort of self-control. His sharp, comical yapping was
unbearable, like stabs through one's brain, and Fyne's deeply
modulated remonstrances abashed the vivacious animal no more than
the deep, patient murmur of the sea abashes a nigger minstrel on
a popular beach. Fyne was beginning to swear at him in low,
sepulchral tones when I appeared. The dog became at once wildly
demonstrative, half-strangling himself in his collar, his eyes
and tongue hanging out in the excess of his uncomprehensible
affection for me. This was before he caught sight of the cake in
my hand. A series of vertical springs high up in the air
followed, and then, when he got the cake, he instantly lost his
interest in everything else.
No, this illustration is not of Conrad's finest, but in a homely way it
illustrates a deep sympathy with life, which this strong worker and
writer gives in such bountiful measure in all his literature; and, to
quote an eminent writer, "Literature and Conrad are interchangeable
terms."
--Henry Blackman Sell.
AN AMERICAN NOVEL
_Clark's Field_, by Robert Herrick. [Houghton Mifflin Company,
Boston.]
It was but the other day that Mr. Herrick told us what he thought about
the American novel. Those who read the trenchant article found not only
a criticism of our machine-like fictionists and their half-baked
methods, but also a sturdy conviction that the day was surely
approaching when we should demand and receive a truer and more vital
presentation of our national life in our literature. And if Mr. Herrick,
long since tagged an apostate to our national creed of turgid optimism,
believes this, we can safely trust to his cool vision and be glad that
the tide has turned. The rich human material lies ready at hand, and the
audience is fast growing intelligent and discriminating. As yet,
however, "we await the writer or writers keen enough to perceive the
opportunity, powerful enough to interest the public in what it has been
unwilling to heed, and of course endowed with sufficient insight to
comprehend our big new world."
Whatever may be said for our other novelists, surely not one of them can
exhibit a mingling of the powers of insight and artistry equal to that
of Robert Herrick. His work from the beginning has been an honest and
incisive attempt to interpret our life in its peculiar and universal
aspects, in spite of the clamor of the public at his tearing away of the
veils of sentimentality and prudery. The errors into which he fell were
due to the ardor of his spiritual vision, which drove him into an
impassioned taking of sides. He has emerged from that stage into what
his critics call his "old manner," a more objective treatment of his
material. But in the process of change something was lost--the element
of flaming intensity which gave the reader a similar capacity to feel.
In this latest performance, as well as in _One Woman's Life_, he is
always cool, clear-sighted, and admirably efficient in the task he sets
himself; but never passionate. On the contrary, despite the pervading
atmosphere of earnestness, he often assumes a playful satiric tone,
mordant but not bitter,--a method well suited to his matter and purpose.
_Clark's Field_ tells the story of the influence of property upon the
human beings who own it and hope to reap gold from its increasing value.
All that is left of the great Clark farm is a fifty-acre field in a
growing New England town, bequeathed jointly to the two brothers, Edward
and Samuel, the former of whom has emigrated to the West and wholly
disappeared from the ken of his relatives. So at first the tale is of
the baleful influence of expectation delayed again and again: in the
case of Samuel who cannot sell the land because of his brother's
half-interest, and who in consequence sinks into a sodden inertia; in
his son's disintegration into a lazy and drunken "Vet"; in his sister
Addie's sordid and pathetic sally into life resulting in the birth of
another human being destined to taste of the fruit of their tree and to
find it, one day, very bitter.
The greater portion of the novel, then, deals with the influence of the
realized wealth upon the unformed, colorless little girl, Adelle, the
last of the Clarks. It is a masterly piece of work--the gradual
development of the pale rooming-house drudge into the silly and insolent
woman of fashion, and slowly but certainly into a human being with a
soul. Less promising stuff for a heroine neither fate nor Mr. Herrick
could have chosen; the latter delights in ample admissions throughout
the book of Adelle's lack of beauty, brains, and charm. Yet he is always
sufficiently temperate to escape the danger of caricature. Adelle is a
convincing figure. The slow dawning upon her consciousness of the power
of money, her "magic lamp" which she need only rub to gratify any
desire, is followed by swift and constant use of the new weapon. It
brings her a fresh assurance, a few scatter-brained friends, some
stylish clothes, and, at length, a callow youth for a husband. It never
brings her contact with a real person or friendship with a stimulating
individual; nor can it save her from the failure of her marriage, nor
compensate her for the death of her little boy.
Adelle's story, then, turns out to be what we least expected it,--a
hopeful one. It leaves us with almost a sense of security, for is she
not one of those who can "derive good from her mistakes," and therefore
"the safest sort of human being to raise in this garden plot of souls"?
And although we are still saddled with "that absurd code of inheritance
and property rights that the Anglo-Saxon peoples have preserved from
their ancient tribal days in the gloomy forests of the lower Rhine," the
situation is not without hope, since it has yielded a man of the judge's
type, in whom the beauty of a past idealism is coupled with the
freshness of a new vision of responsibility.
To hark back to the recent article in _The Yale Review_, we believe that
Mr. Herrick himself has given us an American novel--thoroughly American
in situation, character, treatment, and even in philosophy. We, as a
people, are beginning to suspect our boastful optimism as we become
aware of the sordidness beneath the fair exterior of our glorious
civilization. And in accordance with the western temperament, the
awareness of wrong leads not to bitter cynicism but to sturdy efforts
toward amelioration. Such, then, is the spirit of _Clark's Field_--a
hopefulness in the power of courage, and labor, and a growing sense of
social responsibility to move mounds that seem to have become immovable
mountains through a tenacious fostering of tradition.
--Marguerite Swawite.
THE "SAVAGE" PAINTERS
_Cubists and Post Impressionism_, by Arthur Jerome Eddy. [A. C.
McClurg and Company, Chicago.]
An attempt to explain the new schools in art "in plain, every-day
terms." An earnest appeal for tolerance in regard to seemingly
perversive forms. The book has a wealth of material and numerous
quotations from Picasso, Picabia, Cézanne, Matisse, and others,
considerably more interesting and instructive than Mr. Eddy's own
truisms. Although the author repeatedly resents any accusation in his
adherence to Cubism, the reader gets the impression that the Cubistic
movement has received a more thorough and fair treatment than the other
new schools. Of the sixty-nine reproductions of Post-Impressionistic
paintings and sculpture, only five represent the Futurists. Idillon
Redon, who gave us the greater delight in last year's International
Exhibition, is totally ignored. Among the Self-Portraits that of Matisse
is sorely missed--a work that helps greatly in understanding the quaint
painter of the Woman in Red Madras. Whether Mr. Eddy will succeed in
convincing the prejudiced conservatives is doubtful; but in those who
have appreciated the daring attempts of the new schools his book will
arouse a renewed longing for the foreign "savages" and an ardent hope
for their further invasions in our "sane and healthful" galleries.
THE SAME BOOK FROM ANOTHER STANDPOINT
(With apologies to the author of _Tender Buttons_)
_Oil and Water_
Enough water is plenty and more, more is almost plenty enough.
Enthusiastically hurting sad size, such size, same size slighter, same
splendor simpler, same sore sounder. Glazed glitter, eddy eddies
discover discovered discoveries, discover Mediterranean sea, large print
large. Small print small, picked plumes painters and penmen, pretty
pieces Picasso, Picabia plus Plato, Hegel, Cézanne, Kandinsky, more
plenty more, small print single sign of oil supposing shattering scatter
and scattering certainly splendidly. Suppose oil surrounded with watery
sauce, suppose spare solely inside, suppose the rest.
--A. S. K.
SENTENCE REVIEWS
(Inclusion in this category does not preclude a more extended
notice.)
_The Return of the Prodigal_, by May Sinclair. [The Macmillan Company,
New York.] Eight short stories, all subtly done. _The Cosmopolitan_
proves beyond a doubt that women, or at least the thousandth woman, is
capable of a disinterested love of life and of nature. It is a big story
and a very finished one.
_John Addington Symonds_, by Van Wyck Brooks. [Mitchell Kennerley, New
York.] A biography of rare charm and distinction in which Mr. Brooks
builds a clear picture of Symonds's life as it is related to our day.
_The Sister of the Wind_, and _Other Poems_, by Grace Fallow Norton.
[Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.] Some of this will disappoint lovers
of _Little Gray Songs From St. Joseph's_--in fact, none of the poems
here has such extraordinary poignancy. But there are many that are worth
knowing.
_The Continental Drama of Today_, by Barrett H. Clark. [Henry Holt and
Company, New York.] Invaluable to the student of continental drama. A
half dozen pages of critical analysis devoted to each of thirty modern
playwrights.
_Stories and Poems and Other Uncollected Writing_, by Bret Harte,
compiled by Charles Meeker Kozlay, with an introductory account of
Harte's early contributions to the California press. [Houghton Mifflin
Company, Boston.] A very beautiful Riverside Press volume with
photogravures.
_I Should Say So_, by James Montgomery Flagg. [George H. Doran Company,
New York.] Yes, he is silly; but Mr. Flagg is so nicely naughty and so
naughtily human that you simply must laugh.
_Broken Music_, by Phyllis Bottome. [Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.]
Charming and well done. The story of a young French boy's struggle to
create music, and his success after the tradition of a "broken heart"
had been fulfilled.
_The Old Game_, by Samuel G. Blythe. [George H. Doran Company, New
York.] A temperance tract by a man who knows; minus sanctimoniousness
and plus a punch.
_Dramatic Portaits_, by P. P. Howe. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.] One
man's opinion of the modern dramatists. A "shelf book" for occasional
reference.
_Billy and Hans_, by W. J. Stillman. [Thomas B. Mosher, Portland,
Maine.] A charming story of the most temperamental of pets, the
squirrel. A Mosher book bound in a cover dark enough to stand wear. A
distinct relief from the Alice blue and pale old rose of Mr. Mosher's
more delicate periods.
_Billy_, by Maud Thornhill Porter. [Thomas B. Mosher, Portland, Maine.]
The true story of a canary bird. One of those little documents written
for the enjoyment of a family circle and read on winter evenings.
Bright, human, and personal.
_The Social Significance of the Modern Drama_, by Emma Goldman. [Richard
G. Badger, Boston.] Miss Goldman discusses Ibsen, Strindberg, Sudermann,
Hauptmann, Wedekind, Maeterlinck, Rostand, Brieux, Shaw, Galsworthy,
Stanley Houghton, Githa Sowerby, Yeats, Lenox Robinson, T. G. Murray,
Tolstoy, Tchekhof, Gorki, and Andreyev, outlining the plays of each and
emphasizing their relation to the problem of modern society. She is the
interpreter here rather than the propagandist, and her interpretations
are not academic discourses. They give you the plays partly by
quotation, partly in crisp narrative, and they are not the kind of
interpretations that make the authors wish they had never written plays.
Whether you like Emma Goldman or not, you will get a more compact and
comprehensive working-knowledge of the modern drama from her book than
from any other recent compilation we know of.
DEDICATED
TO THAT HISTORIC MOMENT
WHEN
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
THE GREAT AMERICAN CHANTECLIER
SHALL AWAKE
TO FIND
THE SUN HIGH IN HEAVEN
AND THAT
HE
HAD CROWED NOT
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THE COMPLETE WORKS OF
WALT WHITMAN
[AUTHORIZED BY THE EXECUTORS]
COMPLETE LEAVES OF GRASS
This edition contains the text and arrangement preferred by Walt
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Transcriber's Notes
Advertisements were collected at the end of the text.
The table of contents on the title page was adjusted in order to reflect
correctly the headings in this issue of THE LITTLE REVIEW.
The article THE NEW LOYALTY--in the print interrupted on page 31--was
continued on page 66. Page 66 was therefore moved directly after page
31.
The original spelling was mostly preserved. A few obvious typographical
errors were silently corrected. All other changes are shown here
(before/after):
[p. 56]:
... Pas la coulem rien que la nuance!" has been mercilessly
crucified ...
... Pas la couleur, rien que la nuance!" has been mercilessly
crucified ...
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Little Review, July 1914 (Vol. 1, No. 5)" ***
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