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Title: The Little Review, March 1915 (Vol. 2, No. 1)
Author: Margaret C. Anderson, - To be updated
Language: English
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(VOL. 2, NO. 1) ***
THE LITTLE REVIEW
_Literature_ _Drama_ _Music_ _Art_
MARGARET C. ANDERSON
EDITOR
MARCH, 1915
Two Poems Fritz Schnack
For the New Animal in America Will Levington Comfort
Maurice Browne and The Little Theatre John Cowper Powys
Winter’s Pride George Soule
Two Points of View:
Mrs. Ellis’s Gift to Chicago Mary Adams Stearns
Mrs. Ellis’s Failure Margaret C. Anderson
The Acrobat Eloise Briton
A Young American Poet Richard Aldington
Editorials and Announcements
Ten Grotesques Arthur Davison Ficke
A New Standard of Art Criticism Huntley Carter
My Friend, the Incurable Alexander S. Kaun
New York Letter George Soule
“Alice in Wonderland”
Samaroff and Claussen Herman Schuchert
Book Discussion
The Reader Critic
Published Monthly
15 cents a copy
MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Publisher
Fine Arts Building
CHICAGO
$1.50 a year
Entered as second-class matter at Postoffice, Chicago
THE LITTLE REVIEW
Vol. II
MARCH, 1915
No. 1
Copyright, 1915, by Margaret C. Anderson
Two Poems
FRITZ SCHNACK
(_Translated from the German by William Saphier_)
BLOOMING SUNLIGHT
Sharp rips the plow
And roots the day into the opened field,
And kneads the light and splendor of the world
Into the conquered darkness.
In summer, between close rows
Of waving blades, grow flowers
Blooming buried sunlight.
EVENING GIFT
Spread like the palm of a hand
Lies at bottom the evening, gold and red.
Every man may take as much as he likes
Of its beauty, up to the farthest hilltops,
As if it were wine and bread
Handed out to feed hungry souls
And to fill with light the thirsty.
I stroll alone on gentle roads into the splendor
Bathing my face in a thousand rosy waves;
Far away like smoke from a black stack lies my pain.
I know it, yet I wander.
We may, like expectant children, be blessed.
For the New Animal in America
WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT
My enemy has written a book.[1]
This is not man-to-man enmity, but there need be no quibble about it.
For seventeen years I have studied T. R. as representative of that
America which has consistently betrayed the finer aspirations of our
people, shamed the real workman, bewildered the young in millions with
noise and show and shine, and unerringly dimmed for the many the
approaches to the Real. He stands today for armament, against all that
the New Spirit has shown us out of the bleeding heart of the world,
against the plain fact of the war as the quickener of spiritual life,
and against every dream that was ever born in the human breast out of
the loss of the love of self.
You will say, “But why this study of T. R. now? Surely he has received
his _Thumbs-down_ even from the crowd, and with a unanimity seldom
accorded a public man still in the flesh.” ... I am not so sure. I wish
I could be sure that his latest message would be shut from the
receptivity of this land, as a door upon an evil draught.
We have managed to clump along with bunglers through the recent
dropsical years of peace, but there was never such a need as now for a
man of vision and power at the forefront of our affairs. These States
since August have committed atrocities of short-sightedness and triumphs
of selfishness—enough to complicate us for future years. The partisan
and the militarist have already made our neutrality unclean. I would
like to be sure that their strongest influence has already been
encountered.
On our southern borders is war, and our northern border is black with
distrust and the British point of view. From Vancouver to Halifax, the
voice of this hour is, “If Roosevelt were only in the chair at
Washington——” The ensuing part of the “if” covers the present issues
from Mexico to Belgium, and the trouble is that Canada knows from
England what she is wishing us; at least, in part, the venom and
abomination of the saying. To judge from the Press of the States there
are still many who would incite afresh the animal efficiency of our
country, and who range themselves in the background with this master of
the low vibration, calling upon us to answer Europe with a similar
desolation.
... How many times have you heard it said, “This T. R. is in the
comprehension of the crowd.” This is true. The saddest conviction ever
forced into the mind of genius of any age is the opaqueness of the
surface which the crowd presents to light or loveliness of any kind. And
T. R. is in the comprehension of the bleakest generation which this
country has ever known; nor will there ever be another like it, for we
are at the end of the night. That which is about to break is either dawn
or doom.
T. R. is still searching for the crowd through the endless folds of its
obliquity. Who shall say that these folds are not endless; that he may
not turn over still another fateful, if momentary allegiance, from the
bowels of our materialism?
Enough that he is the voice to-day of the Prussian factor in America, a
voice from the throat of the militarists—that curious solution of beef,
iron and wine, from which—as Thou seest the Oise and the Aisne and the
Vistula flow red—oh, Lord, deliver us!
I hold the conviction that if the militarists ever get in full cry after
this country, we shall lose our Peace and our personality. This is an
hour to stand by, and it is only in such an hour that I would venture to
study a party through the character of its loudest voice. For seventeen
years I have watched T. R. stand for the physical and the obvious. There
has been more noise about his name in America than about any other, and
yet he has never risen to a single great moment. And steadily he has
mounted higher in the consciousness of T. R. Many of us thought that the
crisis was reached, when for a day (a little before the last
presidential nominations) the ego broke within him, and those close at
hand saw a deranged creature.... A troop of us camped beside him in
Tampa, and followed the Rough Riders afield above Santiago. Perhaps he
has a certain animal courage—the cheapest utility of the nations—but
there is no moral quality to the courage of a man who would permit
himself to be cast into popular approval on a fake.... There was a
reunion two years afterward of those same Rough Riders in Oklahoma. T.
R. was there, campaigning on the shoulders of McKinley, much as Dr. Cook
did. On the way down through Kansas for two days, we heard him on the
back platform of the private coach, at every station where two or three
would gather together—pouring the most terrific physical energy into
political bickerings and half-truths, the same at each station—until we
drew the press table as far as possible forward, and bore the oppressive
heat with shut windows rather than that repeated clamor of words. He
would come in conqueringly, the black coat damp with sweat.... I
remember the ruffian exhibition with the cattle—steer-torturing, the
brand, the snap of bone, the tightened noose, thud of poor beasts to the
ground—all in a frame for him—the hat with the pinned-back brim, waving
over all....
No other man has been so mighty to keep the pestiferousness of America
alive in the minds of medieval Europe. As our representative citizen, he
has romped our yankeeisms and cutenesses from Queenstown to Port Said
and around. And so it has been for seventeen years since that Tampan
camp, from party to group, from fame to notoriety, from brute-shooting
and affidavits, to cocktails and new African rivers furnished with sworn
statements, from woman’s suffrage back to bayonetism,—always in the
sweat and heft of flesh, unvaryingly the animal man.
They say that if a child is bred and born right, his earlier years
passed in hands that start him straight—such a child will return to the
beauty of his inception, if time and the world are permitted to work
sufficient misery upon him; misery being the great corrective. These
States of America were bred of a fair dream and born of a singular
beauty. The hope of the world today is that as a nation, we restore the
old dream, the old inspiration; not a turning back, for that is against
the law, but turning to a finer dimension of that old passion which made
us a refuge and a brotherhood.
There has been fine living virtue in two recent actions of this
government—two bits of high behavior. Through one of these, it seemed
that a shaft of light poured down from the fatherland of the future—if
day is ahead and not doom. I refer to the return of the Boxer indemnity
to China.... It was like a fine moment in a busy life, and there was
poetry in the answer from old Mother China.... There are men who love
these States well enough to hate her many moments of unworthiness. The
other figment of true national character is the determination of the
part of Washington to keep her promise to Colombia.... I perceived that
T. R. has risen against that, even since his book setting forth the
needs of a new predatory impetus for our national life.... To anyone who
asks a law to go by, for the good of the country and the rectitude of
self, I would say, “Take the side that this man does not, and it will be
impossible for you to lose.”
[1] _America and the World-War, by Theodore Roosevelt._ [_Charles
Scribner’s Sons, New York._]
Maurice Browne and The Little Theatre
JOHN COWPER POWYS
Sick of war and discussion of war; sick of “first and last things” and
discussion of them; deafened by the raucous howling of the preachers,
and dumb before the fathomless stupidity of the mob, one may totter into
the cool quietness of The Little Theatre just as Heine, scarcely a
century ago, escaped from the madness of the crowd, and in that gallery
on the Seine fell at the feet of the armless Goddess! And she smiles at
us too—poor unknown strangers—just as she smiled at that famous
Wanderer; and though “she has no arms to help,” it is enough if for a
little while one can rest at her feet and forget “the voices of hate.”
It was by the incantation she has never been known to resist that she
was drawn here; to rest, after her long pilgrimage: for here she has
found the altar they had lost the secret of building, and the incense
they had forgotten how to burn! O the heavenly quietness of this place,
and the absence, even round about the purlieus of it, of the voices that
grate and jar and harrow and murder!
Favete Linguis! Keep the holy silence, good stranger; till thou knowest
completely on what ground thou standest. “Numen inest!” There is Deity
in this sanctuary. Do the children of Gath howl with laughter, and the
daughters of Askalon shake with spleen, that one should speak of Deity
in the Fine Arts Building, and of Altars on Michigan Avenue? Let them
put out their tongues—let them spit forth their venom—the stone which
they have rejected has already become the head-stone of the temple of
the Future!
Visit other so-called “Little Theatres,” my friends, and you will
understand why the Uranian had to make so long a journey. For there is
none like this. They are either—those others—too gaudy and “artistic”;
or they are too shoddy, ramshackle, littered, patchy and “bohemian.”
This is the place; the place where one can draw large even breaths; the
place where one can cool one’s fever; the place where one can drink, as
Shelley says, “of deep and liquid rest, forgetful of all ill.”
And it matters not what they are “playing,” this gracious company of Our
Lady’s Servants, or whose liturgical “Use” they honor with their
acceptance. Many are such “hours,” such “offices.” It makes no
difference. One Gregorian Harmony brings them into the circle of One
Rhythm. Many and diverse are the offerings they offer up to that great
Goddess. Some are wanton and capricious, some grave and solemn, some
foreign and exotic, some native-born and natural, some from the
market-places of this very city, some from the far-off land of the
Goddess’s own engendering; some light as gossamer-seed, from no land at
all, but from the kingdom of airy nothings, sans habitation, sans name,
sans purpose!
Yes, whatever the words of the “local breviary” we persuade them to
adopt to their music, the effect of it upon the listeners is the same.
“Razed out” at last are those “written troubles”; “cleansed” at last, of
“that perilous stuff,” is the poor “stuff’d bosom”!
Chicago’s Little Theatre is the real “Alsatia”—the authentic
“Arcanum”—the true “Hesperidean Grove”! And do you ask how it rose,
“like an eschalation,” into being—what hands built it—what genius, what
magic, still sustains it? What, do you suppose, questioner at the gate,
worked this miracle? What, do you surmise, wrought this spell? Have you
really no inkling, in this sphere of the raising of Altars, how such
things are done?
Only in one way! There is only one kind of occult adventure—Goethe tells
us that—by means of which these Euphorions of Beauty grow into life!
There must be the creative spirit of Man, giving the thing “Form”; and
the creative spirit of Woman, giving the thing “Color.” Thus we
understand. Thus we unravel the mystery. Thus we learn how the
impossible happens! Look, inquisitive Stranger, at the Inscription over
the entrance to this enchanted retreat. Read the names written upon the
door. Do you catch the trick of it now—do you glimpse the clue? _Two_
names are there—our Faust’s and our Helen’s—and behind those two names
lurk the creative genius that _wills_, and the creative genius that
gives color to what is _willed_. Thus the miracle is accomplished. And
behold—Euphorion! For English “Maurice” and American “Nelly” have that
inestimable bond, between the links of which alone can the true
Parnassian Hyacinths put forth their “hushed, cool-rooted flowers” for
the delight of gods and men;—I mean agreement of “opinion,” with
diversity of “temperament.”
The supremely happy “chance” of the coming together of these two—why not
believe the legend that gives to the very Land of the Muses the spell
that achieved it?—resulted in nothing less than that indescribable
synthesis of Man’s Intellect and Woman’s Instinct which is the desire of
the ages! So ought human beings to be united. So ought their poor mortal
“love,” radiating from Zenith to Nadir, to provoke the return of Saturn,
the unbinding of Prometheus, the Vita Nuova for which we all pine!
It is in fact the presence of our “New Helen” as the guiding, balancing,
mellowing, sweetening influence, in this enterprise, which has enabled
the austere “Formula” of the Founder to take to itself flesh and blood.
For the director of the Little Theatre of Chicago is no Dilettante—no
Petit-Maître of a pompous coterie—no bric-à-brac Virtuoso. Stern and
high and cold is his Ideal; clear and clean-cut the lines that limit it!
To reproduce in the heart of the great mad City—the City of the
“Middle-West”—the City of America—that Rhythm and Harmony which Plato
felt as the secret of the ultimate spheres, is not such a thing worthy
of the gift of a man’s life?
And it is nothing less than a man’s life, and a woman’s too, which is
being given for this. For such temples are not built without the
shedding of blood. Those who have ears to hear let them hear! As the
wise Lady says, who comes from the Isle of the Saints, “The Bridge to
the World’s Future hides within its arches the bodies of the World’s
First-Born!” It is not for any “strayed reveller,” however sensitive to
what he has seen, to give the word of Initiation to these devoted ones’
long-labored Mystery. Maurice Browne’s methods may be seen, and the
passionate irritability of his over-tasked nerves may be teased and rung
upon; but the high invisible walls of the Citadel he is raising—the
“topless towers” of his Ilium—are not for the searching of the profane.
And yet a modest guess may be hazarded as to where, in our horizon,
those towers will grow. They will grow, as all true classical ramparts
have grown, protecting us from the hordes of vulgarity, out of the
ground and soil of inveterate tradition. They will not grow to the tune
of the idealization that spurns “reality,” they will grow to the tune of
the idealization that sifts, selects, winnows, purifies, and heightens
“reality.” They will not be built, they are not being built, according
to the fierce fanaticism of any particular School or Cult or Pass-word.
The sub-soil of their tradition has been watered by no tears but those
of Humanity, and will be sown with no harvest but the harvest of
Humanity. If they are more Greek, or more Hebraic, than anything else,
that is only because to the Greeks and the Jews rather than to the rest
it has been allowed to sweep the unessential absolutely aside and return
with clear-eyed innocence to the main facts. Maurice Browne is not the
slave of Euripides—though, by God! some might think so—nor is he the
slave of the Bible. It is only that he knows too well—too well for his
peace and the peace of his friends!—that only from the depths of that
one tragic fountain—the naked human heart, my friends—spring the little
opal-tinted bubbles that reflect the World!
What has been revealed to our modern Faust in those queer “absences from
the Body,”—what has been revealed to him in those hours, when his nerves
find us so hard to bear—what “the Mothers” have really whispered to
him—who were bold enough even to guess? But this much a poor Satyr of
the Outer Court may without impertinence divine. For Maurice Browne the
whole world resolves itself into an act of worship. The thing worshiped
we know nothing of, save in the eternal rhythm of life; and the “other
worshippers” we know nothing of, save in the music which responds to
that rhythm; but the whole drama—down the long desperate
centuries—resolves itself into nothing less than an attempt to attune to
reciprocity those two cadences—the voice of the Unknown World-Priest,
intoning through the ages, and the voice of the innumerable generations
answering! Have I been able in the remotest degree to indicate why to
the good sneering philistines who mock at all this and ask “what is a
Little Theatre but—a Little Theatre”? there may come some day a somewhat
ghastly awakening, a somewhat damning remorse? In that hour—in that
“Judgment”—happy will those citizens of Chicago be who have prepared the
way, and not laid themselves down in the way, of the builders of the
Abbey of Thelema!
What The Little Theatre is doing is nothing less than a restoration to
the worship of the Eternal Gods of an Institution which has been
bastardized, perverted and profaned! Think what the Drama in our days
has become! Think what “buyers and sellers” have set up their “tables”
in the Lord’s House! The Theatre, in our generation, is no more that
sacred stage where Life is purged and winnowed and heightened; and
where, out of the Tragedy and Comedy of it, clear triumphant music is
made audible. Poetic Drama is extinct. And yet can Life be said to be
even approximately mimicked by anything less than poetry? _Emotions_ we
have enough of and to spare—emotions and sensations! But these are not
poetry. These are but the heavy, raw, crude, chemical protoplasm of
poetry. Thus the only plays of our time which are beautiful and
successful and true to the life-instinct are _Farces_. Farces need not
be poetical. They represent the kicking up of satyr-heels round the
outer circle of the Dionysian grove. They represent the insurgent
rebellion of the humorous mob against all law or rule. And as such they
are admirable. As such they have their place. Indeed they are all that
is left of admirable in our modern Theatre. They are our only
contribution to this world-old act of worship—the contribution of
beautifully kicking up our heels! Putting aside Wagner and Strauss and
half-a-dozen Latin Opera-Makers, what has our stage got which really
answers to the religious exigency of which I am speaking? Nothing but
Farce, nothing but Satyr-heels! Devoted revivals of Gilbert and Sullivan
restore to us our youth once in a long season and _Fanny’s First Play_
and _Pygmalion_ hit our tired heathen fancy. But for the rest—!
Hyperborean morbidities technically adjusted to bourgeois drawing-rooms
with snow-avalanches muttering at the window, are indeed enough to make
unlaid troublesome ghosts of the great psychological names of Ibsen and
Strindberg. But psychology, whether it dissect the old Bourgeois Family
or the New Feminist Lure, is, after all, only a transitory analysis of
ephemeral situations. It does not spring from what, in the relations
between Man and Woman, is eternal and unchangeable. It does not turn
into dramatic poetry the long cry of our common fate. The pathological
“macabrism” of Ibsen and Strindberg dissolves like mephitic scum when
the eternal constellations, under which Job and David and Sophocles
wrote, mount up through the deep hushed air. Mr. Browne has an artist’s
and an Irishman’s passion for Synge—but he knows better than we could
tell him that gaelic Mythology is not classical Mythology and gaelic
poetry is not Universal poetry. And so we return to the one old Path—the
one undying Tradition. We _literally_ return to it. For, after all their
lovely and alluring experiments in a hundred directions, the great work
of The Little Theatre—until Mr. Browne writes his own epoch-making
Poetic Play—is, as we all confess, the revival of Euripides. It is here
and only here that The Little Theatre of Chicago rouses itself, through
every nerve and vein of its corporate body, to grand and undistracted
reciprocity. And here we are in the presence of a true Renaissance: a
Renaissance as authentic and deep as that which the fifteenth century
stumbled upon. The truth of what I am saying will be sealed, for the few
who understand this “open secret,” by the fact of the instinctive
preference displayed, not only by the director but by the whole company,
for _The Trojan Women_, over the less universal, the less classical, the
more modern _Medea_.
No one who has a real insight into what Poetic Drama means—Poetic Drama
the highest of all human Arts—can hesitate for a moment as to where The
Little Theatre rises to a permanent and tradition-making height. It
rises to such a height in its performance of _The Trojan Women_. And it
does so because here and here alone, by reason of the universal nature
of the subject—nothing less in fact than the incarnation of World’s
Sorrow—every member of the company is touched and attuned and compelled
and transfigured to the same ultimate Pity.
It is not only of “Ilion” we think, it is not only for “Ilion” we weep,
in those world-deep choruses; we weep for all the sons and daughters of
men, doomed by the same doom, who “must endure”—with Argive Helen—“their
going hence, even as their coming hither.” The magical Irish “plummet”
of Synge does not, cannot, sound much depth;—and before the bowed
figures of those world-mourners, carved as if by the chisel of Pheidias,
our pathological Hyperborean Phantoms go squeaking, bat-like, to
oblivion.
When, in the future, Poetic Drama once more attains the position to
which the self-preservative instincts of humanity entitle it, it will be
recognized for what it is—the true religious focussing of man’s
permanent protest against Fate—lifted above the dust of all ephemeral
questioning. It will then be seen that in Poetic Drama, rather than in
the noblest sacraments of Religion, the race must find its orchestral
unity, the rhythm of its natural and Tragic breathing. And when this is
seen, and the history of the thing written, The Chicago Little Theatre,
its directors and its company, will receive (too late, as always, for
personal relief) their delayed appreciation.
It would be unjust, in any such tentative anticipation of Time’s verdict
as these pages suggest, to praise Maurice Browne at the expense of those
who so wonderfully work with him. We may have our European blood, our
European Formalism; but, after all, our stage is an American stage, our
company an American company. In estimating the actual contribution of
individual members of the company, to the Idea behind it, it were wise
to be cautious and discreet. Any praise of a particular performer must
needs fall a little discordantly when a certain impersonal rhythmic
orchestration is the note of the whole matter. No such faux-pas is
risked in the mention of three names. This “Chicago Renaissance” in
which Maurice Browne plays the part of the golden-mouthed Mirandola hath
also its young Angelo, “seeking the soul” of light and form and color.
The work that has been done is so much, after all, a matter of technical
inspiration, that to omit the name of Raymond Johnson from its annals
were to write the history of Florence without alluding to Michele.
Chicago may indeed regard itself, for all its chaotic tumult, as the
Tuscan City of America; for nowhere else is so pure a flame, of
single-hearted devotion to Beauty, burning on this side of the Atlantic!
And with the name of Raymond Johnson, the artist of the company, it is
necessary to link that of Edward Moseman, its greater actor. It is
strange that it should have been left to a wandering European—and yet
perhaps not strange!—to make audible the prediction, which all
discerning dramatic critics must inevitably be making in their hearts,
that in not so very many years Mr. Moseman will be recognized, from
shore to shore, as the most interesting and most personally-arresting
player that this country has produced since Booth.
That a genius of his peculiarly _idiosyncratic_ type should have been
magnetized—against his will—into the “formalism” of the One Tradition,
is about as good an evidence as could be found of the power and
conviction of Maurice Browne’s impersonal Ideal!
The third name I may be allowed to mention, without impertinent
intrusion into orchestral harmonies, is the name of Miss Vera White. I
am not now referring to Miss White’s untiring constructive labor upon
what one might call “the architectural scaffolding” of The Little
Theatre’s productions. I am referring to her personal genius as an
actress. Nothing more natural, nothing more _inevitable_, nothing more
winning and seductive, than this gentle actress’s rendering of the
wronged mother in Mrs. Ellis’s Cornish Play could be possibly imagined.
And the same enchanting qualities of direct self-effacing emotion will
no doubt be even more irresistible when, in a classic role, she comes to
play the Nurse in Medea. Of Ellen Van Volkenburg’s own acting in this
classic Renaissance which she is helping her husband to summon from “the
vasty deep,” I cannot speak; for I have only seen her in those charming
“genre” plays where she loves, mischievously enough, to transform
herself, like a witch-fairy, into every mortal kind of dream-person! But
I know enough of her to know at least one aspect of her October-shadowy
moods, which will make us tremble before her Medea!
Well! The Euphorion—the child of this encounter of Past and Present has
yet to grow his full wings. He is still a “Ge-Uranic,” a Child-Angel.
But those who have had the fortune of being present at the scene of his
high engendering will never forget their privilege. “It is a long way”
to the shores of Troas from the shores of our Chicago Lake; but for one
wanderer at least the great goddess of the Gallery of the Louvre has not
worked her spells in vain. Still, with the Elizabethan, we can cry aloud
to her through the mists of many journeyings: “Her lips suck forth my
soul. See where it flies.”
Winter’s Pride
GEORGE SOULE
Intolerant wind, cold, swift over the sand,
An icy-silver sun upon the sea,
Back-spraying plumes of molten white
Wind-lifted from the curling breakers’ tips
That proudly charge the shore with steady roll
And crisping plunge,
The soft advance of foam—
Its million breaking bubbles,
Its elfin rush and tingle;
A thousand gulls awing,
Startled to dipping flight and curving glide,
Their flashing arabesques against the sun
Twisting a thousand beauties never still
Until they rest, fearless, lifted and falling
Upon the surging surf;
And you and I
Striding the flat, resilient sand,
Seeking the distance tirelessly,
Our faces burning,
Our speech of silence made,
In equal freedom joined perfectly,
And our uplifted spirits
Plumed like the waves, exulting with the gulls;
These things are potent
To cleanse us through the years
And to redeem
All dull and sluggard hours;
These things are proof
Of all bright beauty, all swift ecstacy.
Two Points of View
Mrs. Ellis’s Gift to Chicago
MARY ADAMS STEARNS
Love, eugenics, marriage, are not three questions, but merely different
aspects of the one great sex problem, which, according to Mrs. Havelock
Ellis, must be solved within the hearts and souls of men and women and
not by the acts of any legislative body. Those who braved the wind and
the rain to hear this well known writer and thinker talk about “Sex and
Eugenics” were filled with sharp expectancy as she stepped forward to
speak—a short woman about fifty years old, with iron gray hair cut close
to her head, piercing blue eyes, eloquent hands and a low voice,
wonderfully modulated and seemingly as tireless as her poised, vigorous
body; yet expectation seldom fulfills the bright dreams it dangles
before our eyes. We let ourselves be carried away with enthusiasm, and
then are hurt because our visions lack fulfillment. Some expected too
much.
Chicago has welcomed Mrs. Ellis warmly, yet within this cordiality there
have been hidden germs of fear, unreasonable hopes, slavish admiration,
mental indifference and misunderstanding—it is always so. She is without
question in the foremost ranks of women thinkers, and behind her, trying
more or less sincerely to gain an understanding of the great truths that
she teaches and upholds, are hordes of women—curious, broad-minded,
bigoted, desperate, frightened, sane thinkers, and sentimentalists;
women who are economic slaves and others who are financially
independent. What does Mrs. Ellis mean to each one of them? What
message, if any, has she brought? Has she added anything vital and new
to our store of sex and eugenic knowledge which is already burdened with
much mediocre and even valueless information?
Nothing but death could have kept me away from her lecture in Orchestra
Hall February 4th—to which after considerable unnecessary hesitation men
were admitted. Although I knew that I was approaching a burning bush I
felt it was doomed to be hidden in a cloud of misapprehension,
disappointment, and disapproval, and I walked gingerly with my mind open
and unprejudiced and alert. I was fully as eager to catch the atmosphere
of the audience, to fathom the thoughts of the thousand odd brains that
listened, as I was to see and hear Mrs. Ellis herself.
The lecture was an event. The dignity, the lack of sensationalism, the
quiet earnestness of what was said revealed a force at work in the world
as steady and inevitable as the glacier’s erosion of the Swiss hills.
Yet this quality of Mrs. Ellis’s mind is shown in all she writes and is
shared by all who read her pages. _Her great gift to Chicago was her
personality._ It gleamed through every word she spoke and blazed into a
pure white flame, that seemed by its very intensity to create a new
heaven and a new earth where love shall rise Phoenix-like from the ashes
of souls and bodies consumed by a misunderstood and misused passion.
There were well-known and influential women who stayed away from the
lecture because they were afraid—afraid of the truth. Because in their
blindness they could not see behind the cheap sensationalism of certain
newspapers and understand the spiritual purity for which Mrs. Ellis has
always stood. Yet their absence showed them not so much cowards as women
incapable of reaching the great white lights of life.
Then there were women who came to the lecture expecting to be shocked;
and they went away disappointed. There were women who came laughing and
gossiping; and they went away still laughing and wondering what all the
fuss was about anyway. They could not see anything extraordinary; it was
all rather commonplace and not altogether new.
And a few came quietly, knowing that they were to contact a great
earnest and wonderful personality; who above all her broad wisdom stands
for the highest ideals that humanity knows—a little woman with a big
mind. These went away thoughtfully, and were satisfied, for they
understood.
They felt as well as did Mrs. Ellis herself what could and what could
not be said on a public platform to a gathering of more than a thousand
prejudiced and in some cases antagonistic listeners. They had in their
minds, as of course she had also, knowledge of the many scientific
volumes that her husband has written. Those familiar with Havelock Ellis
were better prepared to listen than the others. They were grounded in
the facts and science of sex which has never been disclosed as he has
done it, and those who have read his pages know that in them he is the
complete scientist, weighing, comparing, crediting, and discrediting the
facts that have come to him. In no way are his sex studies
propagandic—they are a tremendous reservoir of static power. It has been
for his wife and co-worker, she of independent mind and high purpose, to
take all this vast collection of scientific information in her small
hands, crush out the sordidness, the misery, the heart-sickening
perversions and distortions of human lives and holding up the bright
ideals, fling them out to her listeners in phrases burning with hope for
both men and women and faith that true love will make everything whole.
She did not pose as a righter of personal grievances or a solver of
private woes. The individual was lost in the group; details were
submerged in generalities; isolated examples made way for guiding
principles. When Mrs. Ellis said “We must improve our knowledge if we
would improve our morals” and that there can be no guide to right living
except that which comes from within, she gave us the key to happiness.
If one might guess, she is a little impatient with laws and quite out of
sympathy with those who, knowing but little themselves, try to bind
others by rules and regulations which often defeat the very ends for
which they were made. “What we want is more eugenics by education, and
less eugenics by legislation” she cried; and what she implied many times
was that when we come to regard sex love as one of the greatest
manifestations of the soul—not one of the offensive expressions of the
body—then and then only shall we have eugenic babies and happy men and
women.
Mrs. Ellis referred to the sex function as a “great spiritual
enterprise” and said that only through the conflict of ideals can
progress be made. With “courage, sanity, and cleanliness” in our hearts
we must “cease to regard sex as mere animalism,” and must “forge passion
into power.” “The sex function is divine fire,” it is “as much an affair
of the soul as of the body” and “it is no more disgraceful to function
on the sex plane than on the hunger plane or on the thirst plane.” She
sees that only in the economic independence of women can sex relations
be righted—love and money must be completely divorced. Any form of
barter, whether lawfully within marriage or unlawfully outside of
marriage, is fatal to the free giving of love. Sex love must exist only
where there is affinity—never where there is question of possession.
Only by being economically free can a woman raise herself above the rank
of a prostitute.
Mrs. Ellis spoke of our changing ideals; that what is normal for the ape
is gross for the average man and woman, and that what has been accepted
as inevitable by ordinary men and women will be utterly intolerable to
the super men and women of the near future. “The woman of the future
will be the high priestess of sense, not the victim of sensuality as she
now is.” “She will learn to love beautifully and live joyfully.” She
referred to the way our bodies have sunk into disrepute ever since Greek
times until to the Puritans everything was impure and emphasized the
fact that “our bodies and our souls are not enemies, but mates.”
Mrs. Ellis could not in a lecture of this sort have touched upon special
sexual situations. She was raising the standards of purity, right
living, and sanity; she was creating ideals, she was destroying
sordidness, she was upholding the sanctity of knowledge and holiness of
a love that is free to give or withhold. She was showing women their
weakness and pointing out where men have been tyrannical; she was
creating a divine dissatisfaction in every soul that heard her. She was
the angel fearing to tread where legislative and police fools rush in
and slash about with the sword of reform.
“Create in us clean hearts and our bodies will take care of themselves,”
seemed to be her prayer. She showed the goals of happiness and right
living; revealed that her own life had proved these things and found
them good. Those who went away disappointed were those who expected her
to lay down rules and say “This shall you do and that, but not the other
thing.” But that is not Mrs. Ellis’s way. She shows us what it is
possible to do, but she distinctly leaves it to every individual to find
his or her own way, unhampered by law, and free to make mistakes if
unavoidable. She points out that some of the world’s greatest geniuses
have been neurotics, as Oscar Wilde, Michael Angelo, Chopin, Rosa
Bonheur, Nietszche. We must make our own paths by looking within, not
trusting to man-made laws and customs.
Those who found the lecture vague and unsatisfactory must increase their
knowledge, not expect a woman to tell in thirty-five minutes all she has
learned in thirty-five years. Was it not enough for her to confess that
we must engage in the sex relation with a “fine passionateness and
spiritual deviltry”? Was it not enough for her to set up the ideal that
the sex function is the “great spiritual enterprise”? Was it not enough
for her to set before men and women the highest ideals that the human
mind had yet conceived? And was it not enough to look at and to listen
to a woman who knows whereof she speaks and who has lived all that she
teaches?
She has found her way through the same clouds of prejudice and prudery
that surround us, and to us of Chicago she has given the great privilege
of sharing with her what she called the proudest moment of her life and
of listening to what, for the first time in her life, she could freely
say. Those looking for cheap sensations will not find them in Mrs.
Ellis. Those trying to limit human action by passing laws will receive
no help from her words. Those hampered by conventions and shackled by
fear of the truth must be born again into the beauty and holiness of
every side of human life before they can even see the heights whereon
Mrs. Ellis stands. Let those who would find happiness for themselves and
a happy issue out of the sufferings of the men and women and children
and unborn babes, look into their own hearts and bravely face what is
there.
Women have always run away from anything sexual as unwomanly. She must
face her own nature; she must learn that to most women “the sex impulse
is the hunger of her soul”; she must study men and find a way to raise
them from the errors into which they have fallen. She must cease to be a
prude, and learn to be brave, patient, wise; she must study, read and
think. Nothing is unwomanly save dishonesty, and until women are honest
enough and fearless enough to face what is within themselves, neither
Mrs. Ellis nor anyone else can help them. Mrs. Ellis is a leader, not a
driver, and because she has found life good she is an inspiration which
no woman can afford to disregard.
Mrs. Ellis’s Failure
MARGARET C. ANDERSON
There was one great fault to be found with Mrs. Ellis’s lecture: it was
not illuminating. It might have failed in any number of other ways and
still have been a real contribution; but it should not have dared to
fall short in that respect, because Mrs. Ellis came forward in the role
of one who has a message and because she chose a subject upon which one
must have a message or not talk at all. What Mrs. Ellis did is the kind
of thing against which our generation has its deepest grudge, and it
constitutes a very special case of what we mean when we talk so heatedly
about Truth. We mean nothing startling by that:—simply that quality
which some one has had the good sense to call “releasing.”
A few days before the lecture Mrs. Ellis said that she might as well
call her talk anything except merely “Sex and Eugenics,” because she
meant to discuss love, spiritually, sex abnormalities, and many other
matters. “I have read all my husband’s manuscripts before they were
published and I know he has never told anything but the truth about
sex,” she said. “I have waited some thirty years to talk about these
things, and I shall tell the truth as I know it, if I am sent to jail or
put out of Chicago for it.” On another occasion she said that she meant
to talk of those people who, through perverted or inverted
sexual tendencies, faced the problem of having to turn their
abnormality—perhaps their gift of genius, if we understood these things
better—into creative channels. Because of all this it was only natural
to expect a message from Mrs. Ellis.
But what actually happened was this: Dr. W. A. Evans opened the meeting
by reading a short paper on Havelock Ellis—a paper full of pompous
phrases and of real interest in its utter lack of thought. He gave some
biographical data which everyone knew, told the dates of Mr. Ellis’s
various publications, repeated the chapter titles of one of his less
important works, and really said nothing at all. Then Mrs. Ellis read a
paper which her husband had written especially for the occasion—the most
uninteresting thing that wonderful man has ever written, I am sure. It
had a lot of abstractions about masculinism and feminism, and really
said nothing at all. (I use the word “nothing” on a basis of Ideas.)
Then Mrs. Ellis read her own paper, which was beautifully written and
charmingly delivered, and which said nothing at all. She said in brief
that there should be no war between body and soul, and that Oscar Wilde
should have been understood rather than sent to jail. These things are
not ideas; they are common sense. They are all quite simply recognized
by thinking people; and most of Mrs. Ellis’s audience was composed of
thinking people who wanted her individual philosophy on these matters.
They were not asking her for art but for thought—not for expression but
for meaning. Her failure was of the sort of which prophets are never
guilty.
Of course, Mrs. Ellis may not wish to be considered a prophet or a
philosopher. Then there should not have been so much talk of offering a
completely new view of sex. She may regard herself as a poet, an
interpreter. Very well; then she should have given a substantial vision
of a future state when love in all its aspects is valued and understood.
Mrs. Ellis cannot be blamed for the sensational stories in the paper.
Her suggestion that men be admitted to the lecture because they need
education in this field as much as women need it, was made simply and
without any thought of sensation. Everybody knows what the press will
make of such material as that. And everybody knows how an organization
managed exclusively by women is likely to be twisted into silly,
sentimental, or malicious issues. But Mrs. Ellis _can_ be blamed for
that attitude which promises more than it has to give, and very
seriously blamed for that spirit which hints that there may be cause for
shame where there is no cause. There has been something altogether too
suggestive of “Did my lecture shock you?” in Mrs. Ellis’s attitude.
These things are not _shocking_; they are beautiful or terrible,
according as they are understood or misrepresented, but so long as the
truth about them is faced squarely they should carry no hint of shock.
The only test of an “emerged personality” is its arrival at a point
where it is not shocked by anything human beings may do or be. You may
be deeply moved or terribly hurt, but you are not merely offended or
embarrassed or startled. All that brings things down to such a little
scale. I don’t know just why, but Mrs. Ellis’s attitude has reminded me
of the man who advised me not to read Havelock Ellis’s volumes on the
psychology of sex, because after such an experience I could never
respect human beings again. If he had been ignorant or puritanical his
remark wouldn’t have mattered; but he was a rather well-known sexologist
and he believed those books to be very valuable! What he meant was that
it is “so disillusioning” to know the truth. If Mrs. Ellis were that
sort of person these things I object to wouldn’t matter in the least. As
it is, they matter hugely. Her failure to assume that knowledge is too
important a thing to concern itself with people’s pruderies is on a par
with the man’s failure to recognize that truth is never disastrous.
Nearly all the people in Orchestra Hall that night had read Ellis and
Carpenter and Weininger and other scientists, and they expected to hear
how far Mrs. Ellis’s personal views coincided or disagreed with these
authorities. But she had no intention of such elucidation, it seems. She
didn’t say what she thought about free love, free divorce, social
motherhood, birth-control, the sex “morality” of the future, or any of
these things. On the other side of the question, in her reference to
intermediate types, she didn’t mention homosexuality; she had nothing to
say about the differences between perversion and inversion, nor did she
even hint at Carpenter’s social efforts in behalf of the homosexualist.
What does Mrs. Ellis think about Weininger’s statement that intermediate
sexual forms are “normal, not pathological phenomena, in all classes of
organisms, and their appearance is no proof of physical decadence?” Does
she agree with him, in his reference to the idea that inversion is an
acquired character and one that has superseded normal sexual impulses,
when he says, “It might equally be sought to prove that the sexual
inclination of a normal man for a normal woman was an unnatural,
acquired habit. In the abstract there is no difference between the
normal and the inverted type. In my view all organisms have both
homosexuality and heterosexuality.... In spite of all present-day clamor
about the existence of different rights for different individualities,
there is only one law that governs mankind just as there is only one
logic and not several logics. It is in opposition to that law as well as
to the theory of punishment according to which the legal offense, not
the moral offense, is punished, that we forbid the homosexualist to
carry on his practices whilst we allow the heterosexualist full play, so
long as both avoid open scandal. Speaking from the standpoint of a purer
state of humanity and of a criminal law untainted by the pedagogic idea
of punishment as a deterrent, the only logical and rational method of
treatment for sexual inverts would be to allow them to seek and obtain
what they require where they can, that is to say, among other inverts.”
It is not enough to repeat that Shakespeare and Michael Angelo and
Alexander The Great and Rosa Bonheur and Sappho were intermediates: how
is this science of the future to meet these issues? They move into the
realm of the world’s sublime tragedies when one reads the manifesto of a
community of such people in Germany:—“The rays of sunshine in the night
of our existence are so rare that we are responsive and deeply grateful
for the least movement, for every single voice that speaks in our favor
in the forum of mankind.” Mrs. Ellis may have thought her audience
entirely too unsophisticated, too untutored in these matters, to admit
of specific treatment. But that is all the greater reason to talk
plainly. When you reflect how difficult it is for the mass to become
educated about sex it becomes rather appalling. It is worth your life to
get Havelock Ellis’s six volumes from a bookstore or a library. You can
only do it with a doctor’s certificate or something of that sort. Even
if you ask for Weininger you are taken behind locked doors, forced to
swear that you want it out of no “morbid curiosity,” that you will keep
it only a week, and above all that you won’t let anyone else read it. Of
course, it is practically impossible to do work of this sort under the
auspices of women’s medical leagues or similar organizations. But Mrs.
Ellis had dared the impossible. I can’t help comparing her with another
woman whose lecture on such a subject would be big, brave, beautiful....
I am criticised for having too much about this other woman in THE LITTLE
REVIEW; so “not to mention any names,” as the story goes, I will merely
say that Emma Goldman could never fail in this way.
It is not a question of what could or could not be said on a public
platform; it is a question of what _should_ be said. If the findings of
science are not to be made accessible, we must all find ourselves in the
position of Rousseau when he said that the renascence of the arts and
sciences had not ennobled morals. Isn’t that almost as true now as then?
A week ago, as I write, a young man named Roswell Smith was hanged in
Chicago for having strangled a four-year-old girl. He had no
recollection of the murder, and his father’s testimony brought out the
fact that the boy had always been epileptic. Since he must die for his
“crime”—oh, the heart-breaking tragedy of his quiet acceptance of that
hellish law!—Smith begged that he be allowed to die under the knife, so
that at least humanity might benefit by an examination of his brain.
But, no—he must be _hanged_: Justice must be done, the public wrath
appeased, the penalty held up to other criminals, prevention enforced
again by methods which don’t prevent! The governor, unwilling to risk
public indignation, salved his conscience by the testimony of one
alienist who pronounced Smith “sane.” And so the boy paid the penalty,
to the accompaniment of Psalms and readings from the Word—the “_Light_
of the world!” ... And sixty people watched the murder and not a voice
was raised in protest. Think of it!—or rather don’t think of it unless
you are willing to lose your mind with horror and shame.
How far have we _advanced_ when things like this can still happen among
us? With us love is just as punishable as murder or robbery. Mrs. Ellis
knows the workings of our courts; she knows of boys and girls, men and
women, tortured or crucified every day _for their love_—because it is
not expressed according to conventional morality. All this was part of
her responsibility on February 4th; and this is why I say she failed.
The Acrobat
ELOISE BRITON
Poised like a panther on a bough
He swings and leaps.
His taut body flashes clear,
And in a long blue arc cuts the hushed air
Tense as a cry.
The keen, sharp wind of Death
Blows after like his shadow, and I feel
A strange beast stir in me.
I almost wish
That which I cannot think,
A scream, a falling body ...
A new thrill!
But he shoots onward, arms outstretched
To clutch at life as it speeds past.
His hands grip vise-like;
With a wrench
That half uproots his fingers, he has caught,
And airily
He twists about the bar
And comes to rest.
Sidewise he sits, and carelessly
High up among the winds,
His taut body
Grown lax and restful.
He smiles—
As a vain child, pleased with himself, he smiles,
While our applause comes up
Like incense.
He breathes a moment deeply.
Then again the supple form grows tense,
All wire, all vibrant,
Poised for one tingling breath
Before another flight.
I watch him
And a quick desire comes over me
Of those slim hips,
Those long! clean! slender limbs
That stand for health, and for the sheer
Keen beauty of the body.
I desire him.
And I desire the spirit of the man,
The bodily fearlessness,
The reckless courage in a swaddled age.
I desire him.
How lithe and firm would be the child
Of such a man....
A Young American Poet
RICHARD ALDINGTON
It is the defect of English, and in a lesser degree of American,
criticism that such criticisms as are not merely commercial are
doctrinaire. The critic, that is to say, comes to judge a work of art
not with an open mind but with a whole horde of prejudices, ignorances,
and eruditions which he terms “critical standards.” “A work of art,” you
can hear him say, “must be this, must be that, must be the other,” when
indeed a work of art may well be no such thing. Just now the cry is all
for “modernity,” for lyrical outbursts in praise of machinery, of
locomotion, and of violence. And the “critics” obediently fill their
minds with these prejudices until at length you discover them solemnly
declaring that a work of art has no value except it treat of machinery,
of locomotion or of kindred subjects! I have yet to find the critic who
approaches his job in the right spirit; who asks himself first, What has
the artist attempted to do?, and then, Has he succeeded? The commercial
critic is of course the more reprehensible; the doctrinaire critic is
nevertheless a serious menace to that liberty of the arts of which one
cannot be too jealous. In England especially the doctrinaire critic
reigns. Yesterday it was all Nietzsche; then Bergson; now there is a
wild fight between a dozen “isms,” combats between traditional imbeciles
and revolutionary imbeciles. So that one spends half one’s time becoming
an “ist” and the rest of the time in getting rid of the title.
The neglect of the poems of the young American poet—H. D.—who is the
subject of this article, is due, I think to the following facts. The
author, who apparently possesses a great degree of self-criticism,
produces a very small bulk of work and most of it is lost in magazines;
such work as attained publicity was judged, before being read, from its
surroundings; the work being original, seemed obscure and wantonly
destructive of classic English models (you must remember that there are
very, very few people in England who have the faintest idea of what is
meant by vers libre); the use of initials rather frightened people; and
the author had no friends among the professional critics.
Now America has this advantage over most European countries that its
inhabitants are mostly willing to accept a fresh view of things. The
lack of a “tradition” has advantages as well as disadvantages. An
American author, then, is less likely to see things in a conventional
way, and is less likely to be deterred from any novel and personal
method of expression. (For in 1911, when H. D. began to write the poems
I am considering, vers libre was practically unheard of outside France.)
If I were asked to define the chief quality of H. D.’s work I should
say: “I can only explain it by a paradox; it is a kind of accurate
mystery.” And I should go on to quote the ballad of Sir Patric Spens in
which from a cloudy, vague, obscure atmosphere, where nothing is
precise, where there is no “story,” no obvious relation between the
ideas, certain objects stand out very sharply and clearly with a very
keen effect, objects like “the bluid-red wine,” “the braid letter,” the
young moon in the old moon’s arms, and the ladies with “their fans intil
their hands.” And then I should go on to say that this “accurate
mystery” came from the author’s brooding over—not locomotives and
machinery—but little corners of gardens, a bit of a stream in some
Pennsylvanian meadow, from memories of afternoons along the New Jersey
coast, or of a bowl of flowers. Curious, mysterious, rather obscure sort
of broodings with startling and very accurate renderings of detail. And
then I should explain the author’s use of Hellenic terms and of the
rough unaccented metres of Attic choruses and Melic lyrics—like those
fragments of Alcaeus and Ibycus and Erinna—by pointing out that it is in
those poems—the choruses in the Bacchae, for example—that this
particular kind of brooding over nature found its best expression.
Let me quote a portion of a poem to illustrate these qualities: the
quality which I have called “accurate mystery,” the quality of brooding
over nature and the quality of spontaneous kinship with certain aspects
of Hellenic poetry. I take it that, if one liked to be specifically
modern the poem could be called “Wind on the New Jersey Coast.” But the
author’s innate sense of mystery, of aloofness, just like that of the
anonymous author of Sir Patric Spens, makes her place the action in some
vague, distant place and time. Though it be contrary to current opinion
I hold that the poem gains by this.
HERMES OF THE WAYS
The hard sand breaks,
And the grains of it are clear as wine.
Far off over the leagues of it,
The wind,
Playing on the wide shore,
Piles little ridges,
And the great waves break over it.
But more than the many-foamed ways
Of the sea,
I know him
Of the triple path-ways,
Hermes,
Who awaiteth.
Dubious,
Facing three ways,
Welcoming wayfarers,
He whom the sea-orchard shelters from the west,
From the east
Weathers sea-wind;
Fronts the great dunes.
Wind rushes
Over the dunes,
And the coarse, salt-crusted grass
Answers.
Heu,
It whips round my ankles!—etc., etc.
I am not willing to have that poem read quickly and cursorarily, as one
reads a column of newspaper print. It must be read with some of the
close, intense attention with which it was written. Each word and phrase
were most carefully considered and arranged. The reader must remember
that the object of such writing is not to convey information but to
create in the reader a mood, an emotion, a sense of atmosphere. Mr.
Yeats is right when he complains that newspapers have spoiled our sense
of poetry; we expect poetry to tell us some piece of news, and indeed
poetry has no news to tell anyone. Its object is simply to arouse an
emotion, and no emotion is ever aroused in a person who skims through a
piece of poetry as he skims through a journal.
When I read that poem I have evoked in me a picture—like a picture of
Courbet or Boudin—of a white sea roaring on to yellow sands under a
bright sky, with the wind sweeping and whistling in the dunes. And I
have a feeling that it is a magic sort of picture, of somewhere a great
way off, where it would not surprise me to find the image of a god at
the cross-roads, with the offerings of simple people about the pedestal.
And at the same time I always remember bathing from some sand-dunes near
Rye, in Sussex, on a very windy afternoon, when the sand blinded me and
the sharp grass cut my ankles as I ran down to the water.
I cannot, of course, tell what sort of an effect such writing has on
other people. It may be that I am especially sensitive to it. But let me
quote another of the author’s poems, conveying a totally different mood.
SITALKAS
Thou art come at length
More beautiful than any cool god
In a chamber under Lycia’s far coast,
Than any high god who touches us not
Here in the seeded grass.
Aye, than Argestes,
Scattering the broken leaves.
If you ask me to say precisely what that “means” I could only explain it
in this way. When I read that poem I experience the emotions I should
expect to receive if I were lying in a sunny meadow on some hot late
September afternoon—somewhere far inland, where there would be a great
silence broken very gently by the rustle of the heavy headed grass and
by the stir of falling beech leaves—somewhere so far inland, somewhere
so hot, that it would come as a shock of delighted surprise to think of
a “cool god in a chamber under Lycia’s far coast.” It does not annoy me
that I have never been to Lycia, that I have no more idea who Sitalkas
and Argestes were than who Sir Patric Spens was; it is all one; I get my
impression just the same, which, I take it, is what the author aimed at.
And indeed the odd unknown names give it a very agreeable sense of
mystery and of aloofness.
Such are some of the qualities of the work of the young American who
hides her identity under the initials H. D. I believe her work is quite
unknown in America, though, before the war, I remember seeing some
comment on it in a French literary paper. It was in another French
review that a critic complained that this author was not interested in
aeroplanes and factory chimneys. Somehow I feel quite coldly about
factory chimneys when I read sudden intense outbursts of poetry like
those I have quoted and like this:
The light of her face falls from its flower
As a hyacinth,
Hidden in a far valley,
Perishes upon burnt grass.
Editorials and Announcements
_On Criticism_
There is something particularly delightful to me in reviewing John
Cowper Powys’s book, _Visions and Revisions_, in THE LITTLE REVIEW. For
Mr. Powys, though quite unconscious of it, was one of the main
inspirations behind the coming-to-be of this magazine. Two years ago we
heard him lecture on Pater and Arnold and came from that rite
determined, if possible, to reflect something of his attitude, his
critical appreciation, in a magazine. I remember the thrill of it very
vividly: “_That is criticism!_” we said. And so I am going to let Mr.
Powys speak for us by quoting almost the entire preface from his new
volume with its critical essays on Rabelais, Dante, Shakespeare, El
Greco, Milton, Lamb, Arnold, Shelley, Keats, Nietzsche, Hardy,
Dostoevsky, Poe, and others. I am sure that, as THE LITTLE REVIEW’S
godfather, he will not mind being quoted so at length:
“Most books of critical essays take upon themselves with unpardonable
effrontery, to weigh and judge from their own petty suburban pedestal,
the great Shadows they review. It is an insolence! How should Professor
This, or Doctor That, whose furthest adventures of ‘dangerous living’
have been squalid philanderings with their neighbors’ wives, bring an
Ethical Synthesis to bear that shall put Shakespeare and Hardy, Milton
and Rabelais, into appropriate niches?
“Every critic has a right to his own Aesthetic Principles, to his own
Ethical Convictions; but when it comes to applying these in tiresome,
pedantic agitation, to Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Lamb, we must beg
leave to cry off! What we want is not the formulating of new Critical
Standards, and the dragging in of the great masters before our last
miserable Theory of Art. What we want is an honest, downright and quite
_personal_ articulation, as to how these great things in literature
really hit us when they find us for the moment natural and off our
guard—when they find us as men and women, and not as ethical
gramophones....
“There is an absurd notion going about, among those half-educated people
who frequent Ethical Platforms, that Literary Criticism must be
‘constructive.’ O that word ‘constructive’! How, in the name of the
mystery of genius, can criticism be anything else than an idolatry, a
worship, a metamorphosis, a love affair! The pathetic mistake these
people make is to fancy that the great artists only lived and wrote in
order to buttress up such poor wretches as they are upon the particular
little, thin, cardboard platform which is at present their moral
security and refuge.
“No one has a right to be a critic whose mind cannot, with Protean
receptivity, take first one form and then another, as the great Spells,
one by one, are thrown and withdrawn.
“Who wants to know what Professor So-and-So’s view of life may be? We
want to use Professor So-and-so as a Mirror, as a Medium, as a
Go-Between, as a Sensitive Plate, so that we may once more get the
thrill of contact with this or that dead Spirit. He must keep his
temperament, our Critic; his peculiar angle of receptivity, his capacity
for personal reaction. But it is the reaction of his own natural nerves
that we require, not the pallid, second-hand reaction of his tedious,
formulated opinions. Why cannot he see that, as a natural man,
physiologically, nervously, temperamentally, pathologically different
from other men, he is an interesting spectacle, as he comes under the
influence first of one great artist and then another, while as a silly,
little, preaching school-master, he is only a blot upon the
world-mirror!...
“It is because so many of us are so limited in our capacity for
‘variable reaction’ that there are so few good critics. But we are all,
I think, more multiple-souled than we care to admit. It is our foolish
pride of consistency, our absurd desire to be ‘constructive’ that makes
us so dull. A critic need not necessarily approach the world from the
‘pluralistic’ angle; but there must be something of such ‘pluralism’ in
his natural temper, or the writers he can respond to will be very few!
“Let it be plainly understood. It is impossible to respond to a great
genius half way. It must be all or nothing. If you lack the courage, or
the variability, to _go all the way_ with very different masters, and to
let your constructive consistency take care of itself, you may become,
perhaps, an admirable moralist; you will never be a Clairvoyant critic.
All this having been admitted, it still remains that one has a right to
draw out from the great writers one loves certain universal aesthetic
tests, with which to discriminate between modern productions.
“But even such tests are personal and relative. They are not to be
foisted on one’s readers as anything ‘ex cathedra’. One such test is the
test of what has been called ‘the grand style’—that grand style against
which, as Arnold says, the peculiar vulgarity of our race beats in vain!
I do not suppose I shall be accused of perverting my devotion to the
‘grand style’ into an academic ‘narrow way,’ through which I would force
every writer I approach. Some most winning and irresistible artists
never come near it.
“And yet—what a thing it is! And with what relief do we return to it,
after the ‘wallowings’ and ‘rhapsodies,’ the agitations and
prostitutions, of those who have it not.
“And what are the elements, the qualities, that go to make up this
‘grand style’?
“Let me first approach the matter negatively. There are certain things
that _cannot_—because of something essentially ephemeral in them—be
dealt with in the grand style.
“Such are, for instance, our modern controversies about the problem of
Sex. We may be Feminists or Anti-Feminists—what you will—and we may be
able to throw interesting light on these complicated relations, but we
cannot write of them, either in prose or poetry, in the grand style,
because the whole discussion is ephemeral; because, with all its
gravity, it is irrelevant to the things that ultimately matter!
“Such, to take another example, are our elaborate arguments about the
interpretation, ethical or otherwise, of Christian Doctrine. We can be
very entertaining, very moral, very eloquent, very subtle, in this
particular sphere; but we cannot deal with it in the ‘great style,’
because the permanent issues that really count lie out of reach of such
discussion and remain unaffected by it.
“Let me make myself quite clear. Hector and Andromache can talk to one
another of their love, of their eternal parting, of their child, and
they can do this in the great style; but if they fell into dispute over
the particular sex conventions that existed in their age, they might be
attractive still, but they would not be uttering words in the ‘great
style’....
“The test is always that of Permanence, and of immemorial human
association. It is, at bottom, nothing but human association that makes
the great style what it is. Things that have, for centuries upon
centuries, been associated with human pleasures, human sorrows, and the
great recurrent dramatic moments of our lives, can be expressed in this
style; and only such things. The great style is a sort of organic,
self-evolving work of art, to which the innumerable units of the great
human family have all put their hands. That is why so large a portion of
what is written in the great style is anonymous—like Homer and much of
the Bible and certain old ballads and songs. It is for this reason that
Walter Pater is right when he says that the important thing in Religion
is the Ceremony, the Litany, the Ritual, the Liturgical Chants, and not
the Creeds or the Commandments, or discussion upon Creed or
Commandment.... Why, of all the religious books in the world, have ‘the
Psalms of David,’ whether in Hebrew or Latin or English, touched men’s
souls and melted and consoled them? They are not philosophical. They are
not logical. They are not argumentative. They are not moral. And yet
they break our hearts with their beauty and appeal!
“It is the same with certain well-known _words_. Is it understood, for
instance, why the word ‘Sword’ is always poetical and in ‘the grand
style,’ while the word ‘Zeppelin’ or ‘Submarine’ or ‘Gatling gun’ or
‘Howitzer’ can only be introduced by Free Versifiers, who let the ‘grand
style’ go to the Devil? The word ‘Sword,’ like the word ‘Plough,’ has
gathered about it the human associations of innumerable centuries, and
it is impossible to utter it without feeling something of their pressure
and their strain. The very existence of the ‘grand style’ is a protest
against any false views of ‘progress’ and ‘evolution.’ Man may alleviate
his lot in a thousand directions; he may build up one Utopia after
another; but the grand style will remain; will remain as the ultimate
expression of those aspects of his life that _cannot change_—while he
remains Man....
“There are a certain number of solitary spirits moving among us who have
a way of troubling us by their aloofness from our controversies, our
disputes, our arguments, our ‘great problems.’ We call them Epicures,
Pagans, Heathen, Egoists, Hedonists, and Virtuosos. And yet not one of
these words exactly fits them. What they are really doing is living in
the atmosphere and the temper of ‘the grand style’—and that is why they
are so irritating and so provocative! To them the most important thing
in the world is to realize to the fullest limit of their consciousness
what it means to be born a Man. The actual drama of our mortal
existence, reduced to the simplest terms, is not enough to occupy their
consciousness and their passion. In this sphere—in the sphere of the
‘inevitable things’ of human life—everything becomes to them a
sacrament. Not a Symbol—be it noted—but a Sacrament! The food they eat;
the wine they drink; their waking and sleeping; the hesitancies and
reluctancies of their devotions; the swift anger of their recoils and
retreats; their long loyalties; their savage reversions; their sudden
‘lashings out’; their hate and their love and their affection; the
simplicities of these everlasting moods are in all of us—become, every
one of them, matters of sacramental efficiency. To regard each day, as
it dawns, as a ‘last day,’ and to make of its sunrise, of its noon, of
its sun-setting, a rhythmic antiphony to the eternal gods—this is to
live in the spirit of the ‘grand style.’ It has nothing to do with
‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ Saints may practise it, and sometimes do. Sinners
often practise it. The whole thing consists in growing vividly conscious
of those moods and events which are permanent and human, as compared
with those other moods and events which are transitory and unimportant.
“When a man or woman experiences desire, lust, hate, jealousy, devotion,
admiration, passion, they are victims of the eternal forces, that can
speak, if they will, in ‘the great style.’ When a man or woman ‘argues’
or ‘explains’ or ‘moralizes’ or ‘preaches,’ they are the victims of
accidental dust-storms, which rise from futility and return to vanity.
That is why Rhetoric, as Rhetoric, can never be in the great style. That
is why certain great revolutionary Anarchists, those who have the genius
to express in words their heroic defiance of ‘the something rotten in
Denmark,’ move us more, and assume a grander outline, than the equally
admirable, and possibly more practical, arguments of the Scientific
Socialists. It is the eternal appeal we want, to what is basic and
primitive and undying in our tempestuous human nature!
“The grand style announces and commands. It weeps and it pleads. It
utters oracles and it wrestles with angels. It never apologizes; it
never rationalizes; and it never explains. That is why the great
ineffable passages in the supreme masters take us by the throat and
strike us dumb. Deep calls unto Deep in them, and our heart listens and
is silent. To ‘do good scientific thinking’ in the cause of humanity has
its well-earned reward; but the gods ‘throw incense’ on a different
temper. The ‘fine issues’ that reach them, in their remoteness and
disdain, are the ‘fine issues’ of an antagonist worthy of their own
swift wrath, their own swift vengeance, and their own swift love....
“Beauty! That is what we all, even the grossest of us, in our heart of
hearts is seeking. Lust seeks it; Love creates it; the miracle of Faith
finds it—but nothing less, neither truth nor wisdom nor morality nor
knowledge, neither progress nor reaction, can quench the thirst we
feel.”
_A Benefit Recital_
The sonata recital of Josephine Gerwing and Carol Robinson on March 7 is
to be a benefit for THE LITTLE REVIEW. Our gratitude is so deep that we
can’t even begin to express it. But you will not be so interested in our
gratitude as in our taste: we know both these musicians and we know that
whoever comes to them for _music_ will not go away empty. It will be
beautiful. The program is on page 59. Tickets are on sale at 917 Fine
Arts Building.
_More Nietzsche_
Dr. Foster’s series of Nietzsche articles will be continued in the next
issue.
Ten Grotesques
ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE
I. WHY WOMEN HATE ARTISTS
Thanks, belovèd; here’s your pay.
Now get you quickly out of the way.
For there are many more things to do;
And all my pictures can’t image you.
II. THE PRUDENT LOVER
I dreamed a song of a wild, wild love
And purposed to follow her flying hair,
Singing my music, through vale and grove,
Till dusk met the hills—and I clasped her there.
But—mumbling ancient I have become!—
I sang two staves, and then gave o’er;
And carried my song with prudence home;
And nailed it as motto above my door.
Now, the angels in heaven will crown me with bays;
And give me a golden trumpet to blow
When at last I die, full of virtuous days ...
But my wild, wild love—will she ever know?
III. A POETRY-PARTY
Fronting a Dear Child and an Infamy
You sat; and watched, with dusk-on-the-mountain eyes,
The marching river of the beer go by,
Alert in vain for a band-crash of surprise.
I also! Dawn, that in respectful way
Entered a-liveried, could no lightnings rouse
For which I watched; the calling-card of day
Flushed with no guilt your Hebridean brows.
Wherefore the Infamy and I went down
Into a street of windows high and blind.
His face, his tongue, his words, his soul, were brown.
But from a window lofty and left behind,
Like a silver trumpet over the gutter-dirt,
You waved!—(I know not what; perhaps a shirt.)
IV. PORTRAIT OF A SPIRITUALLY DISTURBED GENTLEMAN
O piece of garbage rotting on a rug,—
To what a final ending hast thou come!
Art thou predestined fodder of a bug?
Shalt thou no more behold thy Dresden home?
When green disintegration works its last
Ruin, and all thy atoms writhe and start,
Shall no frilled-paper memories from the past
Drift spectral down the gravy of thy heart?
Can the cold grease from off the dirty plate
Make thee forget the ice-box of thy prime,
And soon, among the refuse-cans, thy fate
Blot out the gay fork-music of old time?
Ah well! all music has its awkward flats—
And after all, there are the alley-cats!
V. PORTRAIT OF THE INCOMPARABLE JOHN COWPER POWYS, ESQ.
When first the rebel hosts were hurled
From heaven,—and as they downward sped
Flashed by them world on glimmering world
Like mileposts on that road of dread,—
One ruined angel by strange chance
On earth lit stranded with spent wing.
There, when revived, he took his stance
In slightly battered triumphing.
And still he stands; though lightning-riven,
More riotous than ere he fell,—
Upon his brow the lights of heaven
Mixed with a foregleam out of hell.
VI. TO AN OUTRAGEOUS PERSON
God forgive you, O my friend!
For, be sure, men never will.
Their most righteous wrath shall bend
Toward you all the strokes of ill.
You are outcast—Who could bear,
Laboring dully, to behold
That glad carelessness you wear,
Dancing down the sunlight’s gold?
Who, a self-discovered slave,
As the burdens on him press,
Could but curse you, arrant knave,
For your crime of happiness?
All the dogmas of our life
Are confuted by your fling,—
Taking dullness not to wife,
But with wonder wantoning.
All the good and great of earth,
Prophecying your bad end,
Sourly watch you dance in mirth
Up the rainbow, O my friend!
VII. IN A BAR ROOM
Across the polished board, wet and ashine,
Appalling incantations late have passed.—
For some, the mercy of dull anodyne;
For others, hope destined an hour to last.
Here has been sold courage to lift the weak
That they embrace a great and noble doom.
Here some have bought a clue they did not seek
Into the wastes of an engulfing gloom.
And amorous tears, and high indignant hate,
Laughter, desires, passions, and hopes, and rest,—
The drunkard’s sleep, the poet’s shout to fate,—
All from these bottles filled a human breast!
Magician of the apron! Let us see—
What is that draught you are shaking now for me?
VIII. THE DEVIL AMONG THE TAILORS
They groaned—“His aims are not as ours.”
He mused—“What end to mortal powers?”
They urged—“Your fair ideals have fled.”
He smiled.—“The living tramp the dead!”
They told him—“You have done a wrong!”
He asked—“Which is my faulty song?”
They cried—“Your life lies wrecked and vain!”
He laughed.—“That shell? Pray, look again!”
They shrieked—“Go forth! An outcast be!”
He answered—“Thanks. You make me free!”
IX. THE NEWEST BELIEVER
Through his sick brain the shrieking bullet stormed,
Wrecking the chambers of his spirit’s state.
The gleam that brightened and the glow that warmed
Those arrassed halls sank quenched and desolate.
Out of the balefully enfolding mesh,
Life he would free from dominance of evil;
And purpose deeper than the weak-willed flesh
Bade him renounce the world, the flesh, the devil.
And as I looked upon his shattered face
Hideously fronting me in that dark room,
I saw the Prophets of the Church take place
Beside him,—they who dared the nether gloom
For worlds of life or silence far away,
So hated they the evil of their day.
X. SONG OF A VERY SMALL DEVIL
He who looks in golden state
Down from ramparts of high heaven,
Knows he any turn of fate,
It must be of evil given—
He perhaps shall wander late
Downward through the luminous gate.
He who makes himself a gay
Dear familiar of things evil,—
In some deepest tarn astray,
Close-companioned of the Devil,—
He can nowhere turn his way
Save up brighter slopes of day.
Plight it is, yet clear to see.
Hence take solace of your sinning.
As ye sink unfathomably,
Heaven grows ever easier winning.
Therefore ye who saved would be,
Come and shake a leg with me!
A New Standard of Art Criticism and a Significant Artist
HUNTLEY CARTER
It has been clear to me for some time that a new standard of art
criticism is needed to assist the present-day revaluation of Art. A
constant examination of advanced pictures has shown me that the key to
revaluation resides in the ultimate effect attained by the new
“masters.” In studying this effect I have become aware of certain facts.
(1) The effect is one of solid motion at a greater intensity than is
found in actuality. It is solid motion actually exaggerated. (By solid
motion, I mean motion expressed by actual forms.) (2) The greater the
intensity the more it tends to obliterate actuality. (3) There is a
fluid motion behind phenomena. This motion informs phenomena but loses
its intensity when it becomes phenomenalized. It changes its character
from fluid motion to solid motion, as though undergoing a process of
conversion similar to that by which water is frozen into ice. (4) The
meaning of the attainment of the said effect would therefore seem to be
that solid motion, as expressed by artists, is being melted into fluid
motion, as ice is melted into water, and water is, in turn, converted
into steam. Moreover, the solid motion is being melted by the higher
intensity of the fluid motion. In other words fluid motion is converting
solid motion into its own flow, or that from whence solid motion came.
The conclusion is that the quest for intensity is a sign that artists
are awakening to a feeling for fluid motion behind solids.
Perhaps artists are becoming purer mediums. It is conceivable that the
revolt against academic formulae and the consequent movement towards
neo-primitivism, have had a refining influence. In ridding artists of
certain forms of culture and convention, they have removed inner
obstacles to the intense stream-line flow or fluid motion, and have made
them accessible to the motion itself. Hence the present-day pursuit of
abstraction in painting and the tendency of representative forms (i. e.:
solids) to disappear from the canvas and to be replaced by
non-representative forms (i. e.: fluids). As an example I may point to
the shadowy forms pursued by Kandinsky. It is true that many of
Kandinsky’s studies do not contain evidence of fluid motion working
freely through the artist and tracing its own designs on his canvas. In
his earlier studies he certainly expresses solids. He puts down forms
which the conventional memory recognizes as having a relation to the
known, and thereby defeats his own object. But his recent studies
exhibit a refining away of solids and a larger feeling for fluidity,
that leads one to believe the artist is striving for a true dream-like
state in which the fluid motion is left to express itself at its own
degree of intensity. Whether he will ever attain this state is uncertain
as yet, especially in view of the intellectual attitude of his writings.
In _Spiritual Harmony_, for instance, he is seen working out a scheme of
color thus showing he hopes to produce an effect upon the spectator by
the use of a mathematical formula. He has evidently conceived the theory
that certain colors are equivalent to certain emotions and by adding or
subtracting color he can add or subtract an emotion to or from the
spectator. Thus yellow equals joy, but add red to the yellow and the
effect will be joy tinged with passion. In this way the fluid motion
actuating Kandinsky is bound to be subjected to theoretical treatment
instead of being left free to do its own work. The emotion of joy in
passing through the painter on its way to the spectator will be
subjected to mental checks, with the result that it will be deprived of
its greatest value in its original intensity.
The study of the aforementioned facts led me in turn to new views on
Art, (a) as to the origin and nature of Art, (b) as to the order,
intelligibility, and coherence that exist in the natural manifestations
of Art, (c) as to the law of growth and progression to be applied to art
forms, (d) as to the illumination of this law by a proper standard of
criticism. Accordingly I came to see that Art is a potential creative
movement in space. It first exists in the fluid motions of the universe
and ultimately in a work of art only as the inevitable and efficient
expression of itself through a specially adapted medium called the
artist. In a metaphysical sense, Art may be said to be a spiritual
experience capable of assuming visibility. But it becomes visible only
by a process of debasement. Apparently, as I have said, the fluid motion
in which Art expresses itself loses its intensity and becomes solid
motion in the process of conversion into a work of art, as applied by
all civilized artists (as far as we know) up to the present day. In
fact, it is only recent years that have witnessed the discovery by the
artist of the fluid motion potential in solid motion. Cezanne, Gauguin,
and Van Gogh were among the first of the moderns to arrive at the point
of realizing this potential character. All three were actively engaged
in the refining of solids and suggesting their potential ultimate
fluidity. What they actually did was this. They demonstrated that Art is
a fluid motion seeking to produce an ultimate creative effect upon the
spectator through efficient application, and that fluid motion can only
produce its creative effect as fluid motion. Now, largely owing to
blindness or wrong direction, artists, with rare exceptions, have
hitherto concerned themselves with converting fluid motion into various
forms of solid motion. They have in fact stopped at the expression of
representative forms of nature and human life, apparently unconscious
that in doing so they were not completing the expression of the art
flow, but were stopping at a half-way house, so to speak, where of
course the maximum creative effect could not be produced. Before this
effect can be produced it is necessary to complete the journey by
reconverting the solids into fluid motion. It cannot be said that either
Cezanne, Van Gogh, or Gauguin completed the magic journey. But if they
did not refine away the solids in their canvases and set them going as
fluid motion, if they put down forms recognizable as houses, men, trees,
and so on, they certainly exhibited such forms undergoing a process of
melting. In Van Gogh’s canvases the forms are simply being melted by the
fierce internal intensity to which the artist is subjecting them. Van
Gogh, perhaps more than any of his contemporaries, shows us known forms
in the act of being converted into their original fluid motion. And it
is for this reason, I think, Van Gogh’s pictures produce a greater
creative effect upon the spectator than any merely representative forms
of art. We experience in them a rush of liberated energy due to the
change from solidity to fluidity.
So much for the new conception of the origin and nature of Art. With
regard to the principles by which Art moves towards its ultimate effect,
I believe they are analogous to those by which an unseen agency assumes
visibility in natural forms. There is the same order, intelligibility,
and coherence throughout. Corresponding to the invariable order of
growth and progression in a plant as represented by the seed (enclosing
the life and unifying principle) stem, branches, leaves and fruit, is
the order of ascent, or perhaps it should be descent, by which Art takes
concrete form. First there is the initial flow, then the root-point
answering to the seed or unifying principle, then follow in turn, lines,
planes, and solids. The fruit and the solids appear to be the
culmination of the initial flow, but really they contain a potential
power of growth in a realizable fluid motion. This abstract motion has
ever since the start been descending and slackening into solid motion,
and its forms have become more and more concrete as they attained
actuality. Behind these actual forms, it is clear, there is the
potentiality of further movement and growth which in our limited state
of intelligence we conceive of as realisable only on the original lines.
If there is an infinite growth and development inherent in actual forms
very few persons are aware of it. Indeed most persons are aware only of
particular growth. To them growth begins with the seed and stops with
the fruit or its art expression as fruit, and the only form of
continuation is to be found in repetition. The old process must be
repeated from seed to fruit. According to this view the phenomena of
growth as expressed by art-forms is manifested in a succession of
parallel movements and not in one continuous and ever-expanding
movement. Generally speaking, things are transferred to canvas as they
appear, particular solids, not infinite fluids as they are. If they have
a life principle in them it is carefully concealed, for they suggest no
power of infinite growth. It would seem indeed as though art-expression,
during civilized times, has reached a deadlock. For it is noticeable
that throughout all the great periods of art-expression, artists have
expressed the same things. In the canvases of the old masters a flow of
solids manifests itself with depressing regularity. Time, one might
think, would have lifted the soul of the artist out of solid space. But,
as we know, the feverish desire to express a too solid world has not
grown less till of recent years. It may be due to this deadlock that art
criticism has seldom risen above mediocrity. How indeed could it reach
the highest creative achievement of the critical mind if works of art
lack the creative principle to be judged? The creative critic cannot
possibly build his house of illumination without the essential
fundamental materials. And these the artist must provide. He cannot
illuminate the non-existent. And if there are no creative elements to
work upon criticism is bound to fall and remain far below the creative
standard. It will be uncertain and chaotic in its judgments. History
says it is so, and not without proof. It shows us that the art judgment
of one age has been sufficient to reverse the art judgment of a previous
age. Yet Art itself does not change. If it is badly expressed at any
time it is badly expressed for all time. Therefore the said fluctuating
judgment has but one interpretation. It means that the judgment itself
is at fault, and much of the art criticism to which art critics have
given utterance is worthless. The reason is apparent. Art criticism is
not based upon a fundamental principle. There is no established law of
art criticism.
Of course I shall be told there is no such law to establish, because it
does not exist and never will exist. The art critic has been and will
continue to be guided by his conscious experience. And as such
experience varies from age to age, so judgment founded upon it varies
also. But a statement so independent of common sense is plainly
nonsense. The law to which I refer is within the critic just as it is
within the artist. It does not always operate because it is not allowed
to do so. It is hindered by conscious experience. Actually the law is
the artist, and if left to itself it would make an efficient application
of itself to produce the highest creative effect of which fluid motion
is capable. Such is the unconscious method of using the law. The artist
uses it not because he can or will but because he must. His picture
producing is a work that can only be done in one way, not by thought and
reason, not by compulsions and restraints, but through the livingness of
free energies left free to find their own expressions through their own
channels. His starting point, representing the seed of unity, is
sensibility, and feeling if left alone will do everything to unite all
parts of his vision, to bind and cement them together. The result would
remain as an example of organic growth not limited to solid space but
extended to a higher space as far as the emotional impulse in the artist
can be expressed by the limited means at his disposal. The question of
how far the artist can use solid (that is, dead) materials, paint
brushes, and canvas, to reach a transcendental effect (effect of
livingness) is one that I must leave for future consideration.
In such a result would be found evidence not only that there is a great
principle or law by which art operates and reaches its highest mark
humanly possible, but that it remains constant and true in the sensible
artist and can be traced running through all he does. If further
evidence of the existence of the law is needed I can point to the
conscious use of it today by painters who are seeking to give the facts
of ordinary experience a non-representative character, as though
belonging to a world of abstraction. We know that Picasso is busy
converting everyday forms of his own contemporary surroundings into
rhythmic shape from which all clichés have been carefully eliminated. We
know too that other painters following the epoch-making example of John
D. Fergusson are boldly rhythmising the people and affairs of everyday
life as though convinced that the big unified rhythmic design is
symbolic of the intense movement by which Art moves and expresses
itself. We see in their canvases an obvious attempt to give the widest
expansion to the fundamental rhythm of each subject treated. At first
sight it appears to be a step in the right direction, one leading away
from the fallacy or blindness, which led the old masters to turn out
wonderful patchworks by giving each object in their canvases a
structural unity of its own. Indeed it looks as though these painters
have mastered the secret of binding a composition together by a unified
design springing from a central note that expands by spontaneous motion
till it not only fills the canvas but passes out of it on a very wide
sweep, and having order, intelligibility, and coherence in all its
parts. It looks as though they have discovered the great law of creative
organic unity of which I speak. Closer examination of their work,
however, reveals it is not so. For one thing their pictures are not
growths from small beginnings to great ends, each the successive sweep
of one curve expanding in oneness from a root-point. It is true that the
starting point in them may be feeling, as with the work of the
unconscious artist. But as soon as feeling has decided the start,
knowledge and reason decide the rest. They decide what shapes and colors
are to be selected and carefully related to the central shape and color.
If the character of the subject is zigzag then the composition will take
a zigzag course. If a sharp curve, then sharp curves will be gathered
from objects surrounding the central one and related to it. In fact the
law of association is called in and kept busy throughout. Everything in
a picture is consciously associated just as a builder associates the
materials of a house. Intuition is checked by reason.
So we find one principle being applied alike by conscious and
unconscious methods. With this difference, that whereas the movement,
growth and unity attained by the unconscious method is organic that
reached by the conscious method is mechanical. It is the difference
between the natural growth of a plant and the artificial manufacture of
one. The first is a process whereby the life flow organizes itself. The
second a process of eliminating the life flow. The one is mediumistic
and spontaneous, the other is volitional and mechanical.
What, it may be asked, is this principle or law? Briefly it is the law
of spiral growth and progression traceable in all natural phenomena. It
is a law which actuates human nature at its best and which shapes all
work done in the finer way. If we wish to see how it operates we cannot
do better than symbolize it in the form of a motion-curve starting from
a point in space and expanding in ever-widening curves. Thus:
This law may be found completely applied to one picture or it may be
traced running through a succession of pictures, each a part of a
creative unity, the whole manifesting the growth and development curve
of the artist. In the first case the picture would have an organic unity
of its own. In it the fluid motion would be seen coming to fruition from
the initial point of feeling to its fullest statement as vision at the
highest pressure of fluid expression. Thus:
In the second case, each period of the artist’s work represent a section
of the development-curve. By placing the sections together it is
possible to view his work as a whole and to construct the course of
development which he has undergone. And we can tell by the widest sweep
of the curve precisely where he stands and how much he has detached
himself from the world of solids. Thus:
Needless to say, this motion-curve may be applied as a standard of
art-criticism. Indeed it is the business of art critics to experience
this curve in themselves and to apply it to all works of art. So far as
I know it has never been applied. When it is it will transform art
criticism. For it will enable the critic to judge whether a work is an
inevitable growth of a movement inherent in the artist,—and to value it
rightly and fully in its relation to this movement,—or whether it is
merely a bit of clever brain juggling.
I have not time nor space to illustrate in minute detail the truth and
importance of the application of this law to art-forms. But I may take
one concrete instance of its existence and inevitableness, and of the
growth and progress that result whenever the artist happens to work
under its guidance. I have within recent months seen the existence of
this law and traced the course of its working in the studies of a new
and comparatively unknown comer in the world of painting. Here is a
painter, Clarence E. King by name, who is undoubtedly working out his
high destiny in terms of Art, at the bidding of a force to whose
direction he is willing to surrender himself. And he surrenders himself
not because he has no judgment, no discriminating sense of his own, but
because he believes that the true artist works without volition. I know
very little about Mr. King’s first experiences, but I can quite imagine
that art-expression came to him as a bewildered dream. Perhaps he felt
instinctively it was but an imaginary magician’s wand and the effect it
ever sought to produce was far above the limited measure of the artist’s
dead materials. It was an effect that could only be attained in one way,
not by stone, wood, or canvas, but by direct surrender to its
livingness. I remember once receiving a letter from Mr. King in which he
hinted at some such transcendental vision of Art and indicated its
difficulties—both aesthetic and economic. The latter will be seen to be
very real when I say that Mr. King is a poor man, that he has to engage
in a mechanical form of occupation which constantly opposes him with the
dread of losing guidance and his real purpose, and of falling under the
subjection of aims and methods entirely opposed to his own. From the
letter I learned that he began with a longing to attain the maximum
intensity of expression and he has ever since been impelled irresistibly
towards this end. But the path was not easy, for it seems he became
aware at an early period of the small measure of expression in the
painter’s dead materials. He relates how one day he took his colors into
the sun so that they should rival its livingness. But when he looked at
them (in the light of the sun) they were dead. Then he bought the most
expensive paint, he kept his palette clean, he slept in the open,
watched the sunrise, absorbed its magic, and prepared himself and his
materials in every way, as he thought, to express the fluid character of
the experience flowing through him. He grappled with powerful feelings
and sought to fix them in form. To no purpose. Apparently there was a
point beyond which paint, like words, could not go. The fault, however,
was not altogether in the materials. The artist too was to blame. He was
a boy strenuously striving to transcend representative forms. But in
doing so he neglected one thing. He made no attempt to escape from the
illusion of volume and solidity contained in solid space. In other words
he tried to transcend solids by the process of merely copying solids. He
tried to express the eternal livingness of a tree by painting an
ephemeral tree. This is the meaning underlying the earliest example of
his work. It accounts for the expression of representative forms very
slightly raised above actuality. In the second example the next upward
sweep of the curve is apparent. The pursuit of the maximum intensity of
expression is maintained, with the result that there is a further escape
into fluid motion. And actuality becomes very much exaggerated as by a
hand that feels the stimulating impulse which the steadily increasing
growth of an unknown power brings with it. Perhaps the most noticeable
characteristic of the second example is the attainment of a greater
freedom of expression. There is in consequence an increase of intensity,
and as intensity is the source of rhythm,—rhythm being but the natural
characteristic of what we call intensity—a greater manifestation of
rhythm. This rhythmic ascent, if I may call it so, marking the growth
and development of intense expression, is continued in the third
example. The illusion of volume and solidity to be found in the other
two examples is still noticeable. But the flow is at a far higher
pressure than in actuality, and if the painter is not yet fully afloat
on fluid motion, he is certainly moving in the desired direction. He is
in fact true to his widening curve.
It is too early to predict what degree of intensity of effect Mr. King
will ultimately attain. He is still a young man with an enviable future
before him. And he approximates more and more towards an unconscious
method of expression. He applies the natural law of growth and
progression because he must. A time may come when he will take up his
pencil and trace a picture as in a trance simply at the bidding of the
inner flow called inner necessity. It is certainly hopeful that he has
remained up to the present a fairly pure medium, having escaped the
pollution of conventional art education. He turned to painting at the
urge of inner necessity and expressed himself in intense form and color
because such form and color were in him to express. The technical
characteristics of his work are really a part of himself. He expresses
everything with simplicity and freedom because they are characteristics
of his own nature. It should be said that he does not aim to produce the
so-called automatic work of art. There is nothing automatic in a fluid
force organizing itself by uniting itself to a medium that is really a
part of its own livingness. If the artist’s hands are guided by a
mysterious agency it is not a mechanical process any more than the
guiding of a plant into leaves, blossom, and fruit is one. The artist is
really guided by that which is a part of his higher self. He surrenders
himself to the guidance of a spirit which is his own, the spirit of Art.
And in doing so he achieves his highest destiny. For in the complete
surrender to Art lies the affirmation of Art.
My Friend The Incurable
V.
WAR HALLUCINATIONS
_An interview with Mme. Truth_
I found her in an obscure corner of a wein-stube which bore the legend:
In vino veritas. She beckoned to me appealingly. “Mr. Incurable, will
you come and sit at my table? They all shun me nowadays; to associate
with me is considered _mauvais ton_. But you, I am sure, need not fear
for your reputation....” To be sure, my reputation could not suffer any
more, even if I committed patricide; so I went bravely to Madame’s
table, and ordered Rhine-wine and a neutrality sandwich à la Wilson
(caviar and Limburger dressed in petals of French roses); to complete
the expression of my loyalty to the President, I requested the national
hymns of all the belligerents, after which conscience-clearing ordeal I
turned to my companion. Her appearance was shocking; not even the clumsy
robe of Censor O’Connor’s cut could conceal her bruises and many-colored
insignia. “Madame,” I gallantly inquired, “whence these atrocities?”
“These are love-tokens from the special war correspondents. Ah, dear,
since the death of Tolstoy I have had no true lover. You say, how about
Shaw? Well, George Bernard has championed me daringly, I admit; but I
can never tell whether he is in earnest or whether he makes use of me
for his clever jugglery. G. B. S. has made it his profession to say
unpopular things; how could he have overlooked such a rare stunt as
telling the truth in time of war? He is so very skilful in the gentle
art of making himself unpleasant to the majority that I am inclined to
believe he would readily betray me for my rival, Mlle. Lie, as soon as
she had lost her popularity. As for Maximilian Harden, you see, I am an
old flame of his; he has suffered prison and persecution for my sake,
the dear; do you remember the Eilenburg affair, when Maxie removed the
figments from Wilhelm’s bosom friends, and demonstrated that the “crime”
punishable in England with two years of Reading Gaol was freely
practiced by the august princes of Germany? O, he is a darling,
Monsieur; but, between us, he handles me too roughly, the bulldog. Think
of Bismarckian hugs and Kruppesque caresses! You see how hard it is to
please me as a lover: I am such a frail sweetheart.”
I protested that I have never had the ambition of becoming her lover,
consequently I was in no need of her warning. Mme. Truth felt offended.
“I shall get you yet. Wait till you grow older, when you will declare
from the house-tops your devotion for me. You do not think objectively,
Mr. Incurable, hence your numerous offences against me. With all your
endeavor to appear neutral, your anti-German feelings are transparent.
Why don’t you give ear to me occasionally? Think of a people generally
hated and envied, yet strong, successful, defiant. How can you help
admiring their wonderful achievements in the present war?”
I rejoined that I could admire war as an art; that there was art in
Napoleon’s warfare, no matter whether he won or lost, no matter whether
it was St. Bernard or Waterloo; while the Germans are merely good
mathematicians, clever technicians; but I prefer Zimbalist’s artistic
flaws to the perfect technique of Albert Spalding, the craftsman.
“You are hopelessly incurable, sir. Do you perceive that Germany has won
already? Whatever the outcome of the war, the Germans are the victors.
To be hated by all one must accomplish something meritorious. Surely the
Germans will emerge from the struggle forged with self-respect,
self-assurance, and contempt for the rest of the world. Surely they will
be spared the demoralizing influence of universal sympathy, which is so
atrociously showered upon poor Belgium. In their splendid isolation the
Teutons will achieve gigantic things; they may become a race of
supermen....”
I hastened to order Moselwine and sauer-kraut.
_Shmah Yisroel_
There is an inmate in one of the Russian insane asylums at present, a
Jewish soldier who paces up and down his cell, continually groaning:
“Shmah Yisroel.” His story is simple. One night lying in the trenches on
the Prussian frontier, he observed an approaching grey figure, obviously
that of a German soldier. When the figure came close to the trenches,
the Jew leaped upon his foe and pierced him with the bayonet. The German
fell, moaning in agony: “Shmah Yisroel.” The two words have been
haunting the Russian since, until, they say, he lost his reason.
It is a grave symptom for the Jews, when they begin to lose their reason
under the stress of tragedy; their very existence as a people is
imperiled, as soon as they show signs of normality, and fail to endure
grief and suffering. For what has kept the Eternal Ahasver so
wonderfully alive these two thousand years but his philosophical
defiance of seeming reality? “Shmah Yisroel,” “Hear, o Israel, the
Eternal is our God, the Lord is one,” has been the motto of the nation
through the long centuries of persecution, the pillar of fire on its
historical Golgotha; it has become the symbol of Judaism, the
coat-of-arms of the “Chosen People” who were destined to wander among
gentiles, to teach them the living word, and to be rewarded for the
instruction with hatred and contempt.
“Shmah Yisroel” were the last defiant words of the Palestinian martyrs,
when tortured to death by the Syrian Hellenizers of the time of
Antiochus Epiphanes, who attempted the apparently easy task of
annihilating Judaism by the force of his mighty legions. “Shmah Yisroel”
cheerfully cried the Rabbis enwrapped in the scrolls of the Law, set
afire by the order of Emperor Adrian, “and their souls returned in
purity to their Creator,” relates the Agadah. “Shmah Yisroel” was the
cry that thundered amidst the blaze of the Auto-da-Fe set up by the
Spanish Inquisition ad maiorem Dei gloriam. Throughout the ages,
humiliated and offended, but inwardly proud, despising and forgiving
those “who knew not what they were doing,” the Jew marched his endless
road with his Motto as a talisman, as an invulnerable shield. Recently,
during the first decade of the twentieth century, the world heard once
more the cries of “Shmah Yisroel” piercing the air of Russia from end to
end, when Jewish men, women and children were slaughtered by
governmental hooligans in order to quench with the blood of Israel the
Revolution.
Neither is the present great trial new for the indestructible people:
many battles have been fought, with Jews taking part on both sides.
There is a popular print in Germany, presenting the Jews of the
Kronprinz’s regiment praying on the day of Atonement before Sedan; a
grotesque mass of warriors entreating the Lord of peace to grant the
world eternal peace. What greater incongruity can be imagined than Jews
exterminating one another; what more terrible absurdity, than the
descendants of the prophets waging war, the descendants of Isaiah who
was the first to preach to the nations “to beat their swords into
ploughshares”! Yet the life of Israel in the last two thousand years has
been a continuous incongruity, an anomaly, a miracle; will this nation
collapse under the tragicness of the present situation?
The Russian-Jewish soldier who lost his reason, because he failed to
understand the “Why” of his having killed his brother, a German-Jewish
soldier, is a grave symptom for the abnormal, supernormal people. Has
“Shmah Yisroel” ceased to serve as the all-answering formula, as the
justification of the impossible reality, as the invincible watch-word,
as the great stimulus to live on, to march on, ever forward, into the
unknown future?
_Bestialization_
The other day I received a deserved blow. A letter from the war-zone
reached me. Nothing but the handwriting told me that it was written by
an old friend of mine, a poet of exquisite sonnets—so rude was the
style, so dry and matter-of-fact the tone of my erstwhile elegant
correspondent. She cynically derided my glorification of the war as
Europe’s healthful purgatory, and spoke of death and want, cruel prosaic
want. Do we ever realize the actual stultifying, bestializing conditions
of the non-combatants under whizzing shells and roving aeroplanes? We,
the calm philosophizers, the curious spectators and speculators? Do we,
neutrals, envisage Death and Murder raging in a bacchanale over the
embroiled lands? Of all the war poems and sermons it was only Eunice
Tietjens who perceived the trans-Atlantic horrors in her prophetic
_Children of War_; the rest are cold, labored writings. Perhaps our
American diplomats, who are anything but diplomatic, will innocently
involve this country in the world mess, and our authors will be given a
fair test.
IBN GABINOL.
New York Letter
GEORGE SOULE
Now that the New York legislature has decided to submit the question of
woman suffrage to popular vote, we are being bored and sometimes
horrified by the revelations of a battle which most of us get into the
habit of thinking was fought and won long ago. That is the trouble with
many radicals. The investigation of new causes comes to mean with them
merely a process of personal salvation. A belief attained is taken as a
matter of course, as if there were nothing more to be done about it.
Even to mention it seems in bad taste—there are so many more important
things, so many more ecstatic attitudes. And then the world rumbles
along to it like some prehistoric monster, and we are caught unaware in
the midst of quarreling which seems to us beside the point. Have we not
discarded fighting machinery? Have we not thrown our siege guns on the
scrap heap? How rude of the unintelligent to disturb us! We are like the
pacificists who thought that war could be abolished by the mere act of
willing. We forget that mankind never wills all at once. We forget that
it is sometimes necessary to sacrifice our energy in the battle for a
distressingly old cause. Or else we never see the necessity, and damn
the naive volunteers with a supercilious smile of superior enlightenment
while we cuddle ourselves in the cotton wool of private emotions. We
offer them a new word as a reagent for all their difficulties.
Who, for instance, could have imagined that _The New York Times_, mental
yokel though it is, could come out with a two-column editorial article
against suffrage on the ground that women are not fitted to vote because
they do not share men’s economic burdens? It must have been six months
ago at least that _The Times_ published a census report on its back page
showing that 30.6 per cent of all the females in New York over ten years
of age are engaged in gainful occupations. You would think census
statistics would be just the thing to attract the eye of that editorial
writer. But here the editorial is, like an unbelievable fossil come to
life. If it represented merely a Tory minority we could afford to laugh
and wait for its partisans to die. It represents, however, the astute
judgment of _The Times_ as to what several hundred thousand people in
New York city really think. The big newspaper cannot afford to try
leading public opinion. It must agree with as many people of buying
capacity as possible. And here we are again, face to face with a blind,
stupid majority.
One begins to speculate on what possibility there is for a democracy
except running about in circles. Everything is apparently arranged so
that the majority can enforce its immediate will, and its immediate will
is always several generations behind the wisdom of its best citizens. An
enthroned tyrant can be dynamited, but a hydra-headed tyrant in the
election booth must be educated. What a wearisome, unromantic task that
is! Many a man who would exultingly give his life in the adventure of
assassination retires to his study before the labor of training a mob.
He has neither the strength of imagination nor the strength of heart
necessary to fight his way inch by inch. Here is a real sacrifice to be
made for the future. Here is a chance for modern heroes with stuff in
them. Here is an opportunity to substitute soul-testing labor for
amateur theatricals. To leaven stupidity, to work with raw and shouting
enthusiasts, to be humble enough to accept each partial victory, each
compromise, and still to fight for the next one—this is the challenge of
faith which proves to us there is still iron in mankind. There is
satisfaction in the thought that victories have not become easier. Many
a Launcelot would go insane in the trenches.
Everyone is looking for the supremacy of his own pet reform or reaction
as a result of the war, and it is banal to indulge in prophecies. Yet it
seems to me there will be a great gain in our understanding if we
approach the monster with humility. It has, to be sure, shown us the
brutality lurking in modern civilization. We can easily use it as a text
for denouncing politics, commercialism, militarism, and all the other
abstractions which represent to us the sum of present human failings.
Yet why not go a little farther, and blame as well an intellectualism
which slides about on the surface of things, a species of reform and
enthusiasm which does not bite into the substance of humanity? Do not
our philosophies now appear as futile as the pedantic dreaming of
mediaeval schoolmen and alchemists? Does not our separation of the ideal
from the material now seem as vicious as Christian asceticism? What
business have we to toy with perfectionist theories when to do so we
must ignore what is to-day and what will be to-morrow in the blood and
brain of nearly all human beings? We must make human breeding the test
of effort. We must admit that the will is powerless without the hands.
We must create our social tools to accomplish our social ends. We must
forget the false distinctions between emotion and intellect, and use
both for their common purpose. Let us not repudiate machinery because it
has not yet been consciously directed to an end that is worth gaining.
Modern civilization has spent its force developing in opposite
directions—toward the brute and toward the god—and now we are amazed at
the contradiction. Our task is to make a synthesis and arrive at man. It
will be a task to engage the highest qualities of the poet and the
scientist—this job of putting man’s will in control of his overgrown
body. And it will be more fascinating than any other work man has ever
set himself.
The Drama
“Alice in Wonderland”
(_Fine Arts Theatre_)
Judging from this initial production of _Alice in Wonderland_ the new
management of the Fine Arts Theatre is going to justify the name of the
theatre and yet compete with the loop theatres in attracting the
attention of the general public. The Players Producing Company has been
wise in securing the services of an exceptionally good professional
company under the direction of Mr. W. H. Gilmore, and they have made an
unusually happy start with Miss Gerstenberg’s dramatization of Lewis
Carroll’s classic, supplemented by the scenery of Mr. Wm. P. Henderson
and the musical setting of Mr. Eric de Lamarter.
At first thought it seems incredible that the subtle comedy of _Alice in
Wonderland_ could lend itself to the wider stage values; but the
dialogue loses nothing—it gains, rather, by the transposition. Some
doubt has been expressed as to whether _Alice_ is really a children’s
classic or an adult classic. On the stage that doubt is resolved—it is
both. The children appreciate seeing all the quaint creatures and people
that Alice meets in her adventures, and the grown-ups enjoy the humor of
the dialogue and the extraordinary real unreality of Carroll’s
imagination. As a matter of fact the psychology of Lewis Carroll is
amazing! He lived long before Mme. Montessori; yet in his own whimsical
fashion he has recorded how absurdly unreal and fantastic the unrelated
elements of education must seem to the child mind! The grown-up who does
not appreciate the humor of _Alice in Wonderland_ must be a very dull
person. Both the fun and the dream quality of the original have been
carefully emphasized in the production. Mr. Henderson’s scenery is
successful in more senses than one. First of all it is beautiful and
entirely in the spirit of the play, and, secondly, it does not sacrifice
the actors as so much of the new stage craft has a tendency to do.
Although extremely rich and varied in color, the setting waits for the
final complement of the actors in costume before the design is complete.
As Mr. Henderson is a _painter_, rather than a “man of the theatre”—that
vague term invented by Craig—he knows how to obtain effects on the stage
by color, and does not depend upon the manipulation of direct
lighting—often as imitative and theatrical as the old style scenery—to
create illusion. He obtains the effect of depth or distance on the stage
by the tonal quality of his painted drop, rather than by an increased
cubic depth which is apt to reduce an actor to the thin and non-existent
quality of a paper silhouette. It is well to indicate these principles,
for they are all important in connection with drama that depends upon
speech, and in his use of these principles Mr. Henderson is probably the
most radical of all the advanced scenic artists.
Altogether Chicago has reason to be proud of this production. It reveals
the fact that Chicago is not without independent artistic initiative,
and a full conviction of this fact should lead to interesting
developments. Unfortunately in this review it is impossible to speak of
the acting in detail, but this is hardly necessary as the critics have
given it the stamp of their approval. For the professional finish of the
performance credit is due to Mr. W. H. Gilmore. Little Miss Alice Tobin
made an ideal Alice. In fact not one part is mis-cast, and all the
actors give the impression that they are having the time of their
life—which contributes much to the spirit of the entertainment. Mr. De
Lamarter’s music has a charming fantastic quality and great delicacy of
imagination. And above all the delightful freshness of the play is due
to Miss Gerstenberg’s good faith in sticking to the text of the original
and not attempting to pump into it any extraneous matter which might
have deteriorated into musical comedy or farce. As it is the play is a
fantasy, and, when successful, as in this case, no form is more capable
of giving lasting enjoyment.
S. H. R.
Music
SAMAROFF AND CLAUSSEN
Olga Samaroff is not conspicuous for her bad piano-playing. There are a
great many others, as prominent as Mme. Samaroff, as popular in their
own way, who make just as much noise when they play—pianists who seem to
exert an odd vigilance lest music enter in for a moment. Mme. Samaroff
played Beethoven’s E-flat piano concerto with the Chicago Symphony. This
work is unique in its bombast, causing one to blush for the composer.
The soloist appeared in an ample gown of scorched orange, with slippers
of scarlet, and gave the work its traditional beating. The eye suffered
only less than the ear.
But the excellent Claussen, taking part in a Wagner program, swept away
all pettiness. She liberated emotions that Wagner alone can touch, when
adequately interpreted. Here is no prima donna, but an artist who sings.
Her voice is a brimming-over of loveliness; her emotional power becomes
inevitable, for she sings in phrases of beauty—a living beauty that
moves to tears. Hers is an art that pervades and satisfies ... something
to be treasured.
Vocalists are generally peacocks—usually moulting. It is a great event
to discover a singing artist, for when the lack is neither a matter of
intelligence nor of intensity, it often happens that the musician uses a
voice that could never perjure itself as beautiful. Julia Claussen gives
a feeling of utter security. No sensibility is wounded or left asleep.
Samaroff is not to be blamed, individually; although what she represents
is not an art, but a menace, for it is always applauded, copied, and
taught to the youth. Sonority and power in tone-masses are never
obtained by blows upon the piano-keys, or by waving the arms over the
head. The piano is capable of infinite shading and many kinds of tone,
from mighty chords and fierce tumult to delicate tonal weavings and
vague states of calm, from crystalline brilliance to low-sung intimate
melodies; and there are certain artists now living who listen closely,
hear these strange secrets, and bring them out for other ears. Olga
Samaroff, apparently, like her Chicago audience, is aware chiefly of the
difference between loud and soft.
HERMAN SCHUCHERT.
Book Discussion
A Peter Pan Lover
_Young Earnest, by Gilbert Cannan._ [_D. Appleton and Company, New
York_]
A man “who is submissive to his emotions is not in power over
himself”—so wrote Spinoza; and such a man is René Fourmy, the Peter Pan
lover of Gilbert Cannan’s latest novel, who never grew up into the fact
that he should not have everything he wanted. After a boyhood and youth
of almost unconscious surrender to environment, he suddenly rebelled
against the pretense that surrounded him and gave himself up as
completely to his emotions as he had hitherto yielded himself to
external circumstances. He had been educated to be a professor and had
married an ambitious girl without having awakened to the meaning of
life, love, or passion. His first great disillusionment came with his
honeymoon, when instead of finding in his bride “the new wonders and
sweet joy” of fulfilled love, they together “attained nothing but heat,
hunger, and distress.”
When he could bear this relationship no longer he fled to London, cast
in his lot with Ann, a girl of the slums, and became a taxi driver. Here
he was happy for a time because of his savage hunger for real things, no
matter if they were degrading. The crude, harsh reality of this life
fascinated him until he discovered that Ann’s love was no more the
fulfillment of his dreams than his wife’s had been; only its honesty had
made it endurable. When he discovers that Ann is to have a child—an
unwanted, unexpected child that will be like a chain binding their two
lives—he is driven to a second rebellion and the ultimate rediscovery of
his first sweetheart. Ann shows her anger in the vulgar, uncontrolled
outbursts natural to such a woman, and finally disappears to Canada,
leaving René free to go to Cathleen. We are given to understand that at
last René has attained to the happiness of his love dream, but nothing
Mr. Cannan has told us warrants the belief that he might not suddenly
discover that Cathleen too falls short of his vision of what real love
should be and start out madly once more in pursuit of he knows not what.
If he and Cathleen do finish their lives together it is safe to gamble
that it will not be because René has learned to adjust himself to life
but because he has met his Waterloo in Cathleen, a clever woman who
wanted him and understood how to keep him.
René was a rebel against the conventions which interfered with his
happiness, a dreamer, and a seeker after the Holy Grail of love. His
attempts to find happiness were utterly selfish, yet honest, so that our
quarrel is not with his morals but with his egotism. He never awoke to
the responsibilities of life, never felt remorse for the sufferings that
he caused others, never grew up to the consciousness that life was
intended for something higher than the fulfillment of his enthusiastic
visions, but blundered into more or less freedom where another man,
perhaps equally rebellious but more scrupulous, would quietly maintain
his outward equanimity and let conventional spiders weave their webs all
about him.
Quarrels there will be and condemnation arising from _Young Earnest_,
but will they be because readers think Mr. Cannan does not understand
whereof he writes or because he is audacious enough to describe a man
who would not accept shams? We may not like the subject any better than
we would a painting of a maimed or ugly person, yet that objection does
not destroy its art, and art it has, in an unusual degree. Only a
skilled writer could depict a man doing sensual things without being a
sensualist, and René was just the opposite of that. All his sins were of
the spirit rather than of the flesh. His ambition in life was to find
happiness at any cost. He desired love as many desire money and with as
little consideration for others, and although hopelessly at odds with
conventional standards and prudish morals it seems to me that the study
of Young Earnest’s efforts to understand life and his own self is rather
a glorious attempt, and that Gilbert Cannan has been decidedly
courageous to try to reduce to printed terms the emotions, aspirations,
cravings, and blunders of a young man too honest to accept deceits, yet
too cowardly (or perhaps too brave) to stand by his blunders. Not a
pretty story, of course, but life is seldom pretty when it is frank, and
his stumbling “from one love to another” is not the expression of
sensuality but rather a spiritual attempt to live out the best that was
in him.
The book has many passages of beauty, many expressions of keen
philosophy which seem to indicate that the author’s soul belongs to the
divine side of life—not to its sordidness. So wonderfully does he
reproduce mediocrity, middle-class respectability, and the vital if less
commendable phases of Mitcham Mews that one is led to believe that all
of life—from visions to slums—is unfolding to him, and that no matter
what his subject, his pen will paint a picture that rings true. One
could hardly find a more subtle task than has been accomplished in
_Young Earnest_—that of painting a man who was not a sensualist doing
sensual things. That Mr. Cannan knew precisely what he was doing is
revealed in the words that he puts into the mouth of one of his
characters who describes René as being a man “simply inappropriate in a
community of creatures who live by cunning.”
M. A. S.
Nietzsche in Fiction
_The Encounter, by Anne Douglas Sedgewick._ [_The Century
Company, New York_]
Nietzsche—jealous, dyspeptic, wonderful—lives in these pages so vividly
that the illusion of biography is attained. His dreams, his faults, his
fears stand forth. Light is focussed upon the great thinker. Ludwig
Wehlitz, as he is called in the novel, loves a young and beautiful girl
from America—Persis Fenamy. He is rivalled in his love by two other
Germans, disciples of his, but very different personally. Persis, who is
a combination of loveliness and good sense, proves to be a difficult,
even impossible, problem for the three philosophers. Their wooing is the
basis of the work.
Such a story achieves originality at one stroke; and it is fair to say
that the author’s development of this dangerous theme is fully equal to
her daring. She catches the high-lights upon the soul of this curious
Titan; she constructs the man as he must actually have been, and places
him in circumstances of her own arrangement. His imperative genius and
his characteristic childishness work out consistently together. Pedants
and long-winded scholars, who know not the poet in their god, will argue
that the real Nietzsche neither could nor would have waxed passionate
over a lovely woman ... the book is not for them. Anne Douglas Sedgewick
sees deep and imagines clearly, and her findings are authentic. Her
lesser people, notably Wehlitz’s untidy Italian friend, Eleanora, and
the inscrutable Mrs. Fenamy, are created with the same splendid skill
and vision. This writer’s realism is not the vaunted “crude and
ruthless” variety; for, although it displays life in a plain and natural
manner, there is in it an intense emotional quality which always evades
the camera or the microscope. _The Encounter_ is altogether worthy.
HERMAN SCHUCHERT.
Joseph Campbell
_Irishry, by Joseph Campbell._ [_Maunsel and Company, London_]
Joseph Campbell holds an enviable position among the present-day Irish
bards. His poems are big, vital themes, readable by every intelligent
person. In his volume of lyrics—for he possesses to a remarkable degree
the enchanted tongue—he takes you into every walk of life in Ireland.
And what goes in regard to life and occupations in England and Ireland
holds good in this country and elsewhere. He does not shun the
pig-killer, the quarry-man, the mid-wife, the unfrocked, or disgraced
priest, the blind man, the osier seller, or even the ragman. The
characters are not put before you as repugnance personified; he makes
you sympathize, admire, and even love them. You could call it a drama of
characters; each one unfolded being a separate act.
How beautiful is _The Shepherd_. You can see the stars, and clearly
comprehend the beauty of the simile in which he compares the shepherd to
the man of Chaldea. The picture of the pasture of eld looms forth like a
marvelous mosaic or mural painting:
THE SHEPHERD
Dark against the stars
He stands: the cloudy bars
Of nebulae, the constellations ring
His forehead like a king.
The ewes are in the fold:
His consciousness is old
As his, who in Chaldea long ago
Penned his flock, and brooded so.
_The Shepherd_ can justly be compared to Sir Richard Lovelace’s _To
Lucretia on Going to War_. They have in common the same metallic
sweetness. A companion piece in both strength of beauty and lyrical
qualities is _The Mother_:
The hearthstone broods in shadow,
And the dark hills are old,
But the child clings to the mother,
And the corn springs in the mould.
And Dana moves on Luachra,
And makes the world anew:
The cuckoo’s cry in the meadow,
The moon, and the earthly dew.
In _The Blind Man at the Fair_ there is a truly masterly imagining of
the blind one’s agony.
O to be blind!
To know the darkness that I know.
The stir I hear is the empty wind,
The people idly come and go.
. . . . . . . . . .
Last night the moon of Lammas shined,
Rising high and setting low;
But light is nothing to the blind—
All, all is darkness where they go.
In _The Laborer_ he reminds one of Whitman in lyrics. Here he speaks of
the open roads, the blue hills, the tranquil skies, and the serene
heavens. A beautiful passage from _The Whelk-Gatherer_ reads:
Where the dim sea-line
Is a wheel unbroken;
Where day dawns on water,
And night falls on wind,
And the fluid elements
Quarrel forever.
What satire, profusely laden with bitter irony is contained in _The
Orangeman_:
His faith, ’Sixteen-Ninety;
His love, none; his hope,
That hell may one day
Get the soul of the Pope.
. . . . . . . . . .
Lives in beauty, with Venus
And Psyche in white,
And the Trojan Laocoön
For his spirit’s delight.
Last, but not least, is _The Old Woman_:
As a white candle
In a holy place,
So is the beauty
Of an aged face.
As the spent radiance
Of the winter sun,
So is the woman
With her travail done.
Her brood gone from her,
And her thought as still
As the waters
Under the ruined mill.
The Reader Critic
_Will Levington Comfort, Kingsville, Ontario_:
I have just had the January number.
I feel as if I had found my companions. You who rejoiced in Caroline
Branson and Margaret Swawite will know what one means by finding his
companions.
And when I came to the line of George Soule’s—“I am the greatest
anarchist of you all—” the fact is I had settled for a nap by the fire,
and here I am by the machine instead.
I am proud of you and glad to be in the world with you all. I am sure
you must feel the same about each other—for you must have been very
lonely in a world that has lost the art of playing—you who play so well.
I have looked long for the new voices; of late I have put every faith in
the conviction that they were just behind. You will have everything in
ten years. No voice from Germany, England, or France—all must come from
you. The only thing that can possibly hurt you is Beauduin and his kind.
They are poison and vision is not with them. I think you must belong to
that generation now of the twenties—that I have felt behind me so long
and so wonderfully. Again and again I have written about this new race
of Americans—there is a touch of it in the _January Craftsman_ which I
wish you would read.
You are singing it. You are of it. You ask nothing—you sing, you play.
There are moments in which I caught you (you of the little book) in that
wondrous naivete which is the loss of the love of self—that cosmic
simplicity of the workmen of to-morrow.
How dreadful is the old—
“And then O night, deliberate, unlovely—”
But the new which you voice, and must always voice—
“In the inspired improvisation of love—”
I have read your January poems to all who come to the study. I have
looked with even more delight at old Walt—who opened the door for (y)our
generation—the dear old pioneer. He helped to make possible, too, our
acceptance of the Zarathustra man—the pillar of fire of our transition,
but Walt is the pillar of cloud by day.
I’m sure you’ll see my zeal for you. I have plugged through fifteen
years in which every ideal of workmanship has sunk visibly in America
until it can sink no lower. The great crowd is forgetting even how to
read. It has lost the cohering line of expression—a series of broken
pictures is enough to hold its eye. But the end is reached with the
war—and the new generation which will witness the tragedy of greater
human waste perhaps than the one before it, also contains the superb
individuals—the few—such individuals as _we_ never dreamed of in our
twenties. I want some time to do for you a bit on this generation of
mine (the bleakest in the world). The age of advertising.... Imagine a
race that can only point to Herrick and London and Atherton and Dreiser
and Watts—weakened solutions of Zola and Thackeray—except London who was
great and open-souled—but lost his way. So I laugh and think of myself
as born out of due time, and though just past midstream, I want to
belong to the twenties again. I believe that you can become the heart of
our new age of letters—if you are true; and I know you will not
encounter the bleakness and the killing terror that we met, for the way
is preparing momentarily. The glory of it all will come from your being
yourselves—as you are so splendidly now. But the prison-house will close
on some, and others will hear the call of the markets and others the
decadence of Europe’s withered loins—and that is why I venture to ask
you to hold fast to the dream—not to listen to anyone—for you have
_emerged_ truly.... Remember there are no others but you in the
world—you alone have touched the new harmony—and it had to come from
America. The New Republic is not doing it, nor _The Masses_, nor _The
Unpopular_. Though they are great—they are of the old. Just to be true
to your vision is all Heaven asks, and believe me one with you. I am
just beginning, too. I want to belong—although I have ten years start.
Great good to you—all.
P. S. We have all loved the little milliner’s hat, and some of us have
wept over it.
ANOTHER NOTE ON PAROXYSM IN POETRY
_Rex Lampman, Portland, Oregon_:
Quoting Mr. Edward J. O’Brien’s instructive article in THE LITTLE REVIEW
for January: “Paroxysm is the poetic expression of that modern spirit
which finds its most notable expression in the sculpture of Meunier, the
polyphonic music of Strauss, the philosophy of Bergson, and the American
skyscraper.... It aims to attain and express, with the quick, keen vigor
and strength of steel, the whirling, audacious, burning life of our
epoch in all the paroxysm of the New Beauty.”
Quoting the dictionary, a paroxysm is “any sudden, violent and
uncontrollable action or emotion; a convulsion or fit.”
The dictionary definition seems more nearly to apply to inspirational
poetic effort, such as Poe had in mind when he advanced his theory that
a long poem is an artistic impossibility; such an effort is as necessary
to any truly poetic performance. Mr. O’Brien’s definition refers to a
particular kind of poetic effort, which, to achieve its aims, also must
be inspirational, and finds its inspiration in “modern industrial and
mechanical effort,” rather than in all creation, free field for the poet
of no prescribed and particular province.
I am totally unacquainted with the sculpture of Meunier, almost as
innocent of knowledge of Strauss’s music, and of Bergson I know but a
little, but I have seen the American skyscraper clutching its black
steel fingers toward the blue, amid the rat-tat-tat-tat-tat of the
pneumatic riveting hammers. Here in Portland the skyscraper is
pre-empting one by one our views of the evergreen hills and the snowy
mountains. Perhaps the other things Mr. O’Brien enumerates as paroxyst
manifestations are shutting off our views of the eternal verities of
life and the silent splendors of the soul—or rather, perhaps they
symbolize the materialistic ideals that are walling us away from the
things of the spirit.
If we accept these paroxyst manifestations as art, and keep our eyes
fixed on them, surely the infinite horizon, with its never-conquered
boundaries always beckoning out and on, is lost to us.
But do we accept them? Beyond the skyscrapers are the quiet hills, and
however we throw ourselves into the vortices of cities, however often we
go down among the red-mouthed, roaring furnaces, however we may
acquiesce in, and even exult in and exalt, the materialistic horrors
that multiply around us like monsters in a steamy primal fen, deep in
ourselves we know that all these things are vain and vanishing, and that
the actual and enduring lie outside and beyond, or within ourselves. The
skyscraper is a monument to the Moloch of Rent. The furnaces are those
of Baal, in which we give our souls as well as those of our children for
sacrifice.
“The evolution of poetry is to be as rapid and terrible henceforth as
material evolution,” says M. Nicholas Beauduin, as quoted by Mr.
O’Brien. No, the gods will not forbid it, for it is their way to let
things run their courses.
Doubtless there were singers, when Babylon was building, who insisted
that a new poetry was necessary to celebrate the city, with its walls
and towers and the efficient wonder of its sewer system, if it had one.
Perhaps these poets, blinking in the glare of the furnaces and confused
by the thunder of the shops whence issued the swords and spears and
war-chariots, said to each other, “These are the supremest things, the
worth-while things, and we must sing of them or be out of date.” And a
paroxyst school was born.
But always the heart of man has yearned toward things other than the
works of his hands. When the walls and towers and spears and chariots
have returned to the earth from which they were fashioned, there still
endured the love for those other things, and the joy in their artistic
expression.
The springtime, banal as it is as a poetic subject, will remain forever
more pleasing to the singer and his audience than can any paroxysm, of
however “scientific technique,” proclaiming in “swift, hurtling, dynamic
rhythms” the clamor and clangor of an armor-plate factory or the din and
danger of a textile-mill. The earth is our mother, and hers are our
deepest yearnings, first and last. “She waits for each and all.”
And if the paroxysts seek for power—for power that overcomes and
subdues, that smites suddenly or conquers slowly, and recreates again
the same—let them look aside from their banging machinery, from all
materialistic illusion—from “the poetry contained in modern cities,
locomotives, aeroplanes, dreadnoughts and submarines; in a stock
exchange, a Wall street or a wheat pit—and behold the power and the
marvel, beyond all “scientific marvels,” of Nature, singing slow or fast
as suits her business, chanting her inevitable rhythms through the ages,
taking back into her patient bosom all the marring excrescence that man
for a little while has reared thereon. What is New York or Pittsburg but
an itching pimple on the face of the earth? There is much outside
incorporate limits, and beyond the sound of mill-whistles and the scream
of trains. The earth is scarce disturbed as yet.
“My love is like a red, red rose”—the same song that sang the enraptured
Solomon, or whoever it was that indited the Canticle—will, I believe,
outlast any paroxysm which records a “cinematographic vision of modern
life.” This is possibly the idea of the paroxysts themselves, they to
sing anew as the occasion demands, and keep their product, like that of
the movies, down-to-now. But though the words of the love-song perish,
some man will sing it again, for joy at sight of his beloved, when
springtime urges on the rose. Sappho sang of love, and men search the
sea-floor for her fragments.
However, if the paroxysts wish to see their notions expressed in proper
relation to all things else, let them read Walt Whitman, who had room
for everything, as he lustily proclaimed, in his sturdy chants.
The New Beauty: is there any such thing? Why the adjective?
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Earth Triumphant
_and_ Other Tales In Verse
BY CONRAD AIKEN
Opinions of the Leading Reviewers
“There are many volumes of poetry this season, Conrad Aiken’s
‘Earth Triumphant’ being given first place not only because of
its excellence, but because it voices the spirit of the new world
in sonorous tones.”—_Los Angeles Graphic._
“The narrative poems in this book in hand are written by one
whose thought has sounded further depths than the author of ‘The
Everlasting Mercy’ has yet found. In particular is this true of
‘Youth,’ the second number in the book, a poem of greater daring,
strength, and scope than has come from any singer of recent
note.”—_New York World._
“A new champion has entered the lists, for it is impossible to
read Mr. Conrad Aiken’s volume, ‘Earth Triumphant,’ without
realizing that he sounds a note quite different to any that has
been heard before.... A remarkable sense of balance and of value
is combined with no little beauty of expression and the result
cannot fail to be impressive. The philosophy is that of the
transcendency of youth, of the cleansing that is to be found in
the forces of nature. To make use of a phrase lately rediscovered
by one of our novelists, Mr. Aiken makes us ‘touch earth.’”—L. B.
Lippman, in _The Book News Monthly_.
“Aiken sings the praises of Earth and Youth with genuine
sweetness and exuberance ... rapid moving narratives with many
soaring lyrics by the way.”—_Chicago Evening Post._
“His stories are graphic, his shorter lyrics steeped in warm
earth music.... Mr. Aiken’s book is one of the most pleasing of
the year.”—_American Review of Reviews._
“The author’s manifestly accurate power of observation finds
fullest scope in this (Earth Triumphant) the greatest of the
poems.... There are descriptions of the effect of nature upon the
man noticing its beauties for the first time which remind us of
the younger Wordsworth; but there is in addition the fuller flood
of tide of modern life which is always heard in these poems. The
appeal of the earth and her relation to man are spoken of again
and again in various poems, all of which give forth an atmosphere
of keen, vibrant life, of largeness, and of the fuller music of
reality in life.”—_Boston Daily Advertiser._
“With genuine beauty they relate tales which reveal the heart of
modern life in various phases of youth, and contain a reading of
earth which differs in essentials from that of Meredith. The
volume deserves a wider audience than the usual public which
cares for poetry.”—Wm. S. Braithwaite, _Anthology of Magazine
Verse, 1914_.
_CLOTH, 12mo., $1.25 NET, POSTAGE EXTRA_
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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 original spelling was mostly preserved. A few obvious typographical
errors were silently corrected. All other changes are shown here
(before/after):
[p. 5]:
... quietness of this place, and the absence, even round about
the purliens of it, ...
... quietness of this place, and the absence, even round about
the purlieus of it, ...
[p. 8]:
... “macrabrism” of Ibsen and Strindberg dissolves like
mephitic scum when ...
... “macabrism” of Ibsen and Strindberg dissolves like
mephitic scum when ...
[p. 27]:
... to be fostered on one’s readers as anything ‘ex
catheda’. One such ...
... to be foisted on one’s readers as anything ‘ex
cathedra’. One such ...
[p. 40]:
... example of John D. Fergussion are boldly rhythmising the
people and affairs ...
... example of John D. Fergusson are boldly rhythmising the
people and affairs ...
[p. 47]:
... horrified by the relevations of a battle which most of us get
into the habit ...
... horrified by the revelations of a battle which most of us get
into the habit ...
[p. 51]:
... fierce tumult to delicate tontal weavings and vague states of
calm, from crystalline ...
... fierce tumult to delicate tonal weavings and vague states of
calm, from crystalline ...
[p. 54]:
... The Hearthstone broods in shadow, ...
... The hearthstone broods in shadow, ...
[p. 54]:
... And Dana moves on Lauchra, ...
... And Dana moves on Luachra, ...
[p. 55]:
... And the Trojan Laöcoon ...
... And the Trojan Laocoön ...
[p. 56]:
... Imagine a race than can only point to Herrick and London and ...
... Imagine a race that can only point to Herrick and London and ...
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Little Review, March 1915 (Vol. 2, No. 1)" ***
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