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Title: The Little Review, September 1915 (Vol. 2, No. 6)
Author: Various
Language: English
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1915 (VOL. 2, NO. 6) ***
THE LITTLE REVIEW
Literature Drama Music Art
MARGARET C. ANDERSON
EDITOR
SEPTEMBER, 1915
Reversals The Editor
Moods: Ben Hecht
Sorrow
Humoresque
Rain
An Invitation to Cheat Posterity
My Island
Soul-Sleep and Modern Novels Will Levington Comfort
Poems: Maxwell Bodenheim
Pastels
Thoughts
A Woman in the Park
Richard Aldington’s Poetry Amy Lowell
Café Sketches Arthur Davison Ficke
Emma Goldman on Trial Louise Bryant
Poetry versus Imagism Huntly Carter
The New Idol George Burman Foster
Book Discussion
The Poets’ Translation Series
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.
SEPTEMBER, 1915
No. 6.
Copyright, 1915, by Margaret C. Anderson
Reversals
MARGARET C. ANDERSON
Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons.
It is to grow in the open air, and to eat and sleep with the
earth.—_Whitman._
What do you call the place you live in?
* * * * *
I will describe it to you. Perhaps you can find a new name for it.
It is a place where men do not hold up their heads and look free.
Where men dare not seek what they were born for: life.
Where many men work and starve, and many work and turn into cabbages,
and many steal and turn into rats, and a few own the land and turn into
hogs.
Where nature is not as important as law.
Where law is cause rather than effect.
Where religion is faith rather than affirmation.
Where love is never as strong as things.
Where age is decay rather than more life.
Where art is encouraged but not recognized.
Where revolt is the strongest of emotions and the weakest of actions.
* * * * *
What do you call this strange place where it is immoral to take life
deeply, and moral to be a half-thing?
Where it is beautiful to have theories of living, and ugly to apply
them.
Where it is right to dabble and wrong to realize.
Where ignorance is a virtue and knowledge a crime.
Where nature is obscenity and man’s abuse of it purity.
Where philistinism is a habit and intellectual groping a “fad.”
Where reputation is more vital than character.
Where sociability is a goal instead of a vice.
Where indirection is known as unselfishness and self-direction as
egotism.
Where thinking is only a sort of autistic stammering.
Where genius, “being youth and wisdom,” is sent to school to
learn—(Never mind; I can’t remember what).
Where impulse is assassinated before it can prove its worth.
Where one must achieve in gloom or be suspected of “lightness.”
Where beauty comes only when one has struggled beyond the need of it.
Where sex is known as the greatest human experience, and experience in
sex as the greatest human sin.
Where religion is known to be an unfolding, but experience in unfolding
looked upon as irreligious.
* * * * *
What do you call this fantastic place where age that is weak rules youth
that is strong?
Where parents prescribe life for children they cannot understand.
Where politicians and prostitutes and police and the press are despised
but honored and great spirits are suspected of greatness but feared and
cast out.
Where nations go to war for things they do not believe in and
individuals will not go to revolution for things they do believe in.
Where those who know the rottenness in Denmark cannot think through to
what caused it.
Where birds that fly are put into cages and men who soar are put into
jails.
* * * * *
What do you call this incredible place where men go inch by inch to
death in jails? Where they cease to hear and see and feel and smell and
talk and walk and sing and sleep and work and play and think and be—not
by order of gods or monsters but by order of men? What do you call a
place where those who must cease _to be_ are richer than those who
_are_?
What do you call this awful place where every great spirit walks not
only in rebellion and misunderstanding and isolation but in persecution?
Where there are no heroes to make an end of horrors.
Where even to live outdoors cannot clean men.
Where there is no imagination and no faith.
Where there is no silence....
* * * * *
Do you call it an asylum of crazed beings who annihilate each other? Not
at all. You call it the world. You say it is “a good old world, after
all.” And you resent the “freak” who tells you your world is upside
down.
Out of the loneliness of self-direction comes the only completion
of life.—“_The Scavenger._”
Moods
BEN HECHT
I have heard the water beasts roaring in the night,
Leaping and howling,
Stung to madness by the tempest’s might.
I have seen them splintering their heads in a furious race,
Plunging through the bellowing gloom
With a boom ... boom ... boom—
And from each torn face
I have watched their white blood
Sweeping in a foam across the night.
I have heard the water beasts snarling at the wild beating blows
Of the strong handed winds that tore them into rows
And churned their entrails into hissing snows.
The water is a restless smile soft as a woman’s hair.
At noon it closes its vast blue eye and falls asleep.
At night as the swooning day gives birth,
The water is an opal glittering
On the gnarled black fist of the earth.
I have heard the water purring in the sun with its blue back arched,
And have seen the drowsy water beasts rising from their beds.
I have heard them chant as they formed and marched
With their green peaked hoods tipping rakish on their heads.
The water is frozen. Under its stiffened bosom
The beasts run blindly to and fro
And rising from beneath
Crunch one another with their frozen teeth.
It burns.
My soul is like water.
Sorrow
The night is a black poppy.
The moon weeps
Spilling a torrent of silver tears
Across the black petals.
The wind laughs.
The black face of the water
Glistens with rows of flashing teeth
Laughing back.
Always laughter.
Ho, the stars are little devils
And I am their master.
Humoresque
Faces. Faces.
Swimming like white fever specks away.
Faces. Coming close.
See the meaningless odd bumps on them called features:
A maniac crooning over lumps of putty fashioned them.
Look. Important faces!
And there—nice empty ones
(Yellow bits of paper blanks
Blown along the street.)
And look. Good God! A happy one!
Faces.
Crazy bumped and colored discs
Bobbing, bobbing,
Swimming, fading
Like white fever specks
I am one of them.
Rain
The rain is like laughter.
The black devils of my brain
Have leaped outside the window
And are laughing at me.
An Invitation to Cheat Posterity
(_To W._)
Come, thief, an epic seethes within my brain
I will condense it to a sigh
And breathe it in your ear.
Come to my arms, the mad words start
There is a sonnet in my finger tips
There is a lyric bursting from my heart
I will condense them all into
A single kiss upon your lips.
My Island
You shall stand on a rock in the darkness
Naked and shining with beauty.
And I shall sit by the water and gaze on you
And as you come gliding through the mists,
Struggling out of the night’s black mouth,
I shall rush to you and embrace the moon.
You shall lie on the rock like the crest of a wave
White and vague in the distance.
Your hair shall play over you like a sunbeam
And as I come running to you I shall embrace the sea.
You shall play on the wide sheets of sand
Golden against the blue water paint
Curling over the edge of the world
And your arms shall beckon to me until I shall go mad
And run to you to embrace the sun.
You shall lie, a silver jewel in the ebony arms of shadows,
Your breath stirring the white flowers of your bosom
You shall lie in the velvet depths of silence
Like a white stain on the night.
You shall call to me and I shall bend over you,
And that is all there is to life—
I bending over you in the darkness.
Soul-Sleep and Modern Novels
WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT
An American novelist who wanted sales, and who was willing to sacrifice
all but the core of his character to get sales, found himself recently
in a challenging situation. As he expressed it:
“Along about page two hundred in the copy of the novel I am on, the
woman’s soul wakes up.”
“A woman’s novel?” I asked.
“Meant to be,” said he. “Study of a woman all through. Begins as a
little girl—different, you know—sensitive, does a whole lot of thinking
that her family doesn’t follow. Tries to tell ’em at first, but finds
herself in bad. Then keeps quiet for years—putting on power and beauty
in the good old way of bumps and misunderstanding. She’s pure white fire
presently—body and brain—something else asleep. She wants to be a
mother, but the ghastly sordidness of the love stories of her sisters to
this enactment, frightens her from men and marriage as the world
conducts it——”
“I follow you,” said I.
“Well, I’m not going to do the novel here for you,” he added. “You
wouldn’t think there was a ray of light in it from this kind of telling.
A man who spends five months of his best hours of life in telling a
story, can’t do it over in ten minutes and drive a machine at the same
time——”
“We’re getting out of the crowd. What does the girl do?” I asked.
“Well, she wanted a little baby—was ready to die for it, but had her own
ideas of what the father should be. A million married women have thought
the same thing here in America—pricked the obscene sham of the whole
business but too late. Moreover they’re the best women we’ve got. There
are——”
He actually shook the hat off his head—back into the seat at this point.
“There are some young women coming up into maturity here in America—God
bless ’em—who are almost brave enough to set out on the Quest for the
Father of the baby that haunts them to be born.... That’s what she did.
“He was a young man doing his own kind of work—doctoring among the poor,
let us say, mainly for nothing—killing himself among men and women and
babies; living on next to nothing, but having a half-divine kind of
madness to lift the world.... She saw him. You can picture that. They
were two to make one—and a third. She knew. There was a gold light about
his head for her eyes. Some of his poor had seen it. The young man
himself didn’t know it, and the world missed it altogether.
“She went to him. It’s cruel to put it this way.... I’m not saying
anything about the writing or about what happened, but the scene as it
came to me was the finest thing I ever saw. We always fall down in the
handling, you know.... I did it the best I could.... No, I’m not going
to tell you what happened. Only this: A little afterward—along about
page two hundred of the copy—her soul woke up.”
“Why not, in God’s name?”
He glanced quickly at me as a man does from ahead, when his car is
pressing the limit.
“Ever have a book fail?” he asked.
“Seven,” said I.
He cleared his throat and the kindest smile came into his eyes.
“They tell me at my publisher’s that I slowed up my last book badly—by
taking a woman’s soul out for an airing—just a little invalid kind of a
soul, too. Souls don’t wake up in American novels any more. You can’t do
much more in print nowadays than you can do on canvas—I mean movie
canvas. Of course, you can paint soul, but you can’t photograph
it—that’s the point. The movies have put imagination to death. We have
to compete. You can’t see a soul without imagination—or some sort of
madness—and the good people who want imagination in their novels don’t
buy ’em. They rent or borrow. It’s the crowds that go to the movies that
have bright colored strings of American novels, as the product runs—on
their shelves—little shiny varnished shelves—red carpets—painted birds
on the lampshades and callers in the evenings....”
There was a good silence.
“Do you know,” he said presently, “I’ve about come to the conclusion
that a novel must play altogether on sensuous tissue to catch the crowd?
Look at the big movie pictures—the actors make love like painted
animals.... I’m not humorous or ironical. It’s a big problem to me——”
“Why, you can’t touch the hem of the garment of a real love story until
you are off the sensuous,” I offered. “The Quest only begins there. I’m
not averse to that. It belongs in part. We are sensuous beings—in part.
But I am averse to letting it contain all. Why, the real glow comes to a
romance—when a woman’s soul wakes up. There’s a hotter fire than that
which glows blood-red——”
“I know,” he said quickly. “I know. That blood-red stuff is the cheapest
thing in the world, but that’s where the great thing called human
interest lives.... I’m sure of this story until her soul wakes up. She
stirs in her sleep, and I see a giantess ahead—the kind of woman who
could whistle to me or to you—and we’d follow her out—dazed by the draw
of her. They are in the world. I reckon souls do wake up—but I can feel
the public dropping off every page after two hundred—like chilled
bees—dropping off page by page—and the old familiar battle ahead. I can
feel that tight look about the eyes again——”
“Are you going to put her soul back to sleep?” I asked, as we turned
again into the crowd.
I wasn’t the least lordly in this question. I knew his struggle, and
something of the market, too. I was thinking of tradesmen—how easy it is
to be a tradesman; in fact, how difficult it is to be otherwise—when the
very passion of the racial soul moves in the midst of trade.
“She’s beautiful—even asleep,” he said. “I’m afraid I’ll have to give
her something. I’m building a house. She’s in the comprehension of the
little varnished shelves—asleep.”
“Doesn’t a tight look come about the eyes—from much use of that sort of
anæsthetic?” I asked.
“Let’s get a drink,” he answered.
A fairly widespread intellectual movement, though it be madness,
has a profound and almost sacred significance. Primitive races
believe that madmen are the voice of God. As much might be said
of artists. Their madness is often wiser than the average
wisdom.—_Romain Rolland._
Poems
MAXWELL BODENHEIM
Pastels
_(In the city-square)_
I
I think you are a masquerading nun
Who has been lavish with reds, thinking to obliterate herself ...
But you should also
Have placed a red cloth over your etched face.
II
Woman twirling a fan, burdened with many colors,
I salaam to you.
Your youth has gone, but you have made
An excellent effigy.
Thoughts
There is a white-jacketed old man, with eyes like milk-drops,
Who rakes leaves under hundreds of young low trees
With the arms of children and strong bodies.
When he has gravely raked them together,
He burns them and squats beside the fire,
And looks timidly, smilingly ...
He never squints up at the green leaves above him.
A Woman In the Park
She strives to braid her scant hair
And silence the bundled baby at her side.
(Her face has the cast of a frightened novice praying for deftness.)
Then she looks at the spinning-legged children in the wading-pool,
And the charcoal of her eyes has an odd after-glow, for a moment,
As though she half-regretted her tight grey clothes.
Richard Aldington’s Poetry
AMY LOWELL
What a melancholy thing it is to have to admit that one of our national
traits so often interferes with our appreciation of the fine arts, and
therefore with the pleasure and profit to be derived from them! As a
nation, we are dreadfully impressed by noise. The loud and compelling,
even if the blatant, is sure to attract our attention. It is as though
we were tone-deaf to all instruments save those of percussion, and
colour-blind to all except the primary colours.
This is a particularly unsatisfactory condition, as we are really of a
very welcoming temper. We are as anxious to make friends in art as in
life. We have no quarrel with originality; on the contrary, it is
decidedly pleasing to us. But our sympathies are bounded by our
capacities, and our capacities are to a great extent limited to the
perception of loud tones and crude colours. To teach the public to hear
semi tones and see half-shades, perhaps that is one of the functions of
the Imagist poets.
I suppose it is this preoccupation with what Walter Scott used to call
“the big, bow-wow style,” which has kept Richard Aldington’s work from
being as well understood here as it is in England. The very delicacy of
it; its elusiveness, in which suggestions appear and disappear like a
blowing mist; its faint, gradually changing colour; all these things
confuse the average American poetry lover. While a few people find in
Mr. Aldington’s work poetry of a most exquisite and stimulating kind,
the great mass of readers turn away bewildered.
This is inconceivable to me. How is it that we do not notice that a man
is standing beside us unless he digs us in the ribs with an aggressive
elbow? Our own country-woman, who writes under the pen-name of H. D.,
has had to contend with much of the same partial understanding, and it
remained for an Englishman, Mr. Aldington himself, to write an
explanation and appreciation of her work in an American magazine—this
magazine. It is time that an American should explain to her countrymen
the work of the Englishman, who is Richard Aldington.
Water and poetry have a quality in common. They both have a way of
seeping—seeping, and without apparent flow, arriving. We are constantly
finding fault with American publishers for permitting English firms to
bring out the first books of our authors; it is to the honour of America
that Richard Aldington’s first book is to appear in the autumn, with the
imprint of an American house.
Indeed, in speaking of the non-understanding of the mass of American
readers and reviewers, I must add the paradox that the minority here is
quicker to perceive excellence than the people of any other country. It
is our own magazine _Poetry_, with its far-seeing and daring editor, who
first introduced Mr. Aldington to a considerable public, and her lead
was quickly followed by THE LITTLE REVIEW; an American firm, the Boni’s,
printed a number of his poems in an Anthology: _Des Imagistes_; and
another American firm, Messrs. Houghton Mifflin, printed others in _Some
Imagist Poets_. So Mr. Aldington’s work has seeped little by little to
where we can look at it as a reflecting lake. More sputtering brooks of
poetry have brawled away and disappeared, but Mr. Aldington’s output
lies placid and arresting before us.
What is the quality of this work which makes it at once eluding and
enduring? I think it is stark, unsentimental preoccupation with beauty.
Mr. Aldington is in love with beauty. “Not,” to quote Leigh Hunt, “in
the little present-making style, with baskets of new fruit and pots of
roses, but with consuming passion.” There is nothing pretty about this
poetry; it is not prettiness, but beauty, that the poet is after.
This naked beauty Mr. Aldington found in the Greeks. One feels that his
youth was passed in a kind of painful homesickness, the nostalgia of a
beauty which he could not then see about him. Greek poetry and Italian
landscape gave him ease, and, solaced and flowering, his first work was
under their influence.
I do not know which of Mr. Aldington’s poems first saw the light of day
in _Poetry_, and I have not the volumes here to refer to. But the first
collection of his poems in _Des Imagistes_ shows this preoccupation with
Greek themes. All of the poems are Greek in feeling, many of them have
Greek titles and are perfectly Greek in content. Take this one, for
instance:
Bromios
The withered bonds are broken.
The waxed reeds and the double pipe
Clamour about me;
The hot wind swirls
Through the red pine trunks.
Io! the fauns and the satyrs.
The touch of their shagged curled fur
And blunt horns!
They have wine in heavy craters
Painted black and red;
Wine to splash on her white body.
Io!
She shrinks from the cold shower—
Afraid, afraid!
Let the Maenads break through the myrtles
And the boughs of the rohododaphnai.
Let them tear the quick deers’ flesh.
Ah, the cruel, exquisite fingers!
Io!
I have brought you the brown clusters,
The ivy-boughs and pine-cones.
Your breasts are cold-sea-ripples,
But they smell of the warm grasses.
Throw wide the chiton and the peplum,
Maidens of the Dew.
Beautiful are your bodies, O Maenads,
Beautiful the sudden folds,
The vanishing curves of the white linen
About you.
Io!
Hear the rich laughter of the forest,
The cymbals,
The trampling of the panisks and the centaurs.
The objectors say that that is merely a copy. It lays itself open to
that criticism, certainly, but how exquisite a copy. And how difficult
to make such a copy! Try it and see! Mr. Aldington is a master of
suggestion. His descriptions are never overloaded, and yet there is the
picture. In the next stanza to the last, notice the blowing, rippling
linen over the white bodies of the young girls.
A little of this goes a long way, you say. Yes, I think that is true,
but Mr. Aldington has other strings to play. He has irony, a
not-too-common trait in modern poetry. I know few things more beautiful,
and more ironical than this:
Lesbia
Use no more speech now;
Let the silence spread gold hair above us
Fold on delicate fold;
You had the ivory of my life to carve.
Use no more speech.
....
And Picus of Mirandola is dead;
And all the gods they dreamed and fabled of,
Hermes, and Thoth, and Christ, are rotten now,
Rotten and dank.
....
And through it all I see your pale Greek face;
Tenderness makes me as eager as a little child
To love you
You morsel left half cold on Caesar’s plate.
That last line is a triumph of the disagreeable. Mr. Aldington’s beauty
does not cloy; he knows how to spice it:
In the Via Sestina
O daughter of Isis,
Thou standest beside the wet highway
Of this decayed Rome,
A manifest harlot.
Straight and slim art thou
As a marble phallus;
Thy face is the face of Isis
Carven
As she is carven in basalt.
And my heart stops with awe
At the presence of the gods.
There beside thee on the stall of images
Is the head of Osiris
Thy lord.
Even in this first collection we see that the Greek awakening was a real
awakening, and that once taught to see, the poet can go on seeing. The
charge of copying is unfair. There is no “copying” in this:
Au Vieux Jardin
I have sat here happy in the gardens,
Watching the still pool and the reeds
And the dark clouds
Which the wind of the upper air
Tore like the green leafy boughs
Of the divers-hued trees of late summer;
But though I greatly delight
In these and the water lilies,
That which sets me nighest to weeping
Is the rose and white colour of the smooth flag-stones,
And the pale yellow grasses
Among them.
I think that is one of the best poems which Mr. Aldington has done. “The
rose and white colour of the smooth flag-stones” almost sets me weeping
too, so desolate are they, with the yellow grasses growing up between
them.
I suppose the thing which is so satisfying in Mr. Aldington’s work is
the intense feeling which underlies the astringent utterance. With all
his stern, uncompromising technique (for Mr. Aldington is a remarkable
technician) goes a passionate violence of feeling. The Imagists are
constantly accused of being inhuman, mere intellectuals. How strange it
is that the feeling which merely turns white and makes no movement
should go unperceived, while hysterical screams and lamentations, over
in a moment, pass for the outpourings of true passion! What we have
outgrown on the stage still holds in poetry, it seems.
Feeling there surely is in _Childhood_, printed in _Some Imagist Poets_.
Yet, somehow, the poem is not as good as it ought to be. I suspect that
Mr. Aldington has not yet quite mastered the technique of the long poem.
Feeling is there, and we get the dullness of the little town perfectly,
and the stale, salt smell of the harbour; and there are excellent
descriptions—the public park, and the wonderful box in the attic—but the
poem as a whole does not “get over.” Necessarily more discursive than
the shorter poems, it has not enough command of the dramatic to succeed.
Having taught himself for years to say things in the fewest possible
words, the length of this poem has weakened the poet’s method. He must
study the requirements of the longer poem a little more before he will
be quite at home in it. Such as it is, _Childhood_ is interesting as
showing the broadening of its author’s mind and interests. He no longer
sees with the eyes of other centuries; he sees things about him, and as
they are.
Here is a perfectly modern picture:
Round-Pond
Water ruffled and speckled by galloping wind
Which puffs and spurts it into tiny pashing breakers
Dashed with lemon-yellow afternoon sunlight.
The shining of the sun upon the water
Is like a scattering of gold crocus-petals
In a long wavering irregular flight.
The water is cold to the eye
As the wind to the cheek.
In the budding chestnuts
Whose sticky buds glimmer and are half-burst open
The starlings make their clitter-clatter;
And the blackbirds in the grass
Are getting as fat as the pigeons.
Too-hoo, this is brave;
Even the cold wind is seeking a new mistress.
How very well he has given the glinting of the sunlight! And that
“Too-hoo, this is brave” is delightfully joyous and adolescent.
Of all the poems which Mr. Aldington has written, _The Poplar_ is
certainly the most generally liked. And I am not prepared to say that
the public is not right. Perhaps it really is the best, I don’t know. I
am very fond of it.
The Poplar
Why do you always stand there shivering
Between the white stream and the road?
The people pass through the dust
On bicycles, in carts, in motor-cars;
The wagoners go by at dawn;
The lovers walk on the grass path at night.
Stir from your roots, walk, poplar!
You are more beautiful than they are.
I know that the white wind loves you,
Is always kissing you and turning up
The white lining of your green petticoat.
The sky darts through you like blue rain,
And the grey rain drips on your flanks
And loves you.
And I have seen the moon
Slip his silver penny into your pocket
As you straightened your hair;
And the white mist curling and hesitating
Like a bashful lover about your knees.
I know you, poplar;
I have watched you since I was ten.
But if you had a little real love,
A little strength,
You would leave your nonchalant idle lovers
And go walking down the white road
Behind the wagoners.
There are beautiful beaches down beyond the hill.
Will you always stand there shivering?
I wish I had space to quote many more of these poems. _The Faun Sees
Snow for the First Time_ is a charming bit of humour, and _Daisy_, very
modern, aching, and inevitable. But I will give one more little piece
which he calls an epigram:
New Love
She has new leaves
After her dead flowers,
Like the little almond-tree
Which the frost hurt.
This is sophisticated poetry. How often have I not read that in the
reviews, couched in terms of reproach! Why? Is it to be desired that the
world should not grow? Is it a better art which appeals only to
primitive instincts? The primary needs of satisfying hunger, preserving
life, procreating life, are all very well, but civilized man has further
preoccupations. Mr. Aldington’s is a highly civilized—yes, if you like,
a highly sophisticated, art. A certain mellowness of temper is needed to
thoroughly appreciate it; crude minds do not react to such delicate
stimuli. Admitting that, and admitting it as a feather, not as a rotten
egg, we have in Mr. Aldington a lyrist of unusual achievement and fine
promise.
Café Sketches
ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE
I.
Here amid the night-lights
Of the great city,
With the laughing crowd around me
I sit alone
In one of those strange hours
Walled in with solitude
That are my lot forever amid these lights.
Fronting the empty table before me
And its cortege of seven waiters—
Fronting the restless sea of unknown faces—
I mourn for you, boundlessly curious lady,
For you and for your esteemed consort—
But for you chiefly.
Presently persons will come out
And shake legs.
I do not want legs shaken.
I want immortal souls shaken unreasonably.
I want to see dawn spilled across the blackness
Like a scrambled egg on the skillet;
I want miracles, wonders,
Tidings out of deeps I do not know ...
But I have a horrible suspicion
That neither you
Nor your esteemed consort
Nor I myself
Can ever provide these simple things
For which I am so patiently waiting.
II.
Base people!
How I dislike you!
Some of you have come from Park Avenue,
Almost as you might go slumming.
Some of you have come from the suburbs,
Almost as you might go to heaven.
From Greenwich Village there are a few of you;
God alone knows why you have come.
And perhaps there are in your midst
A few incredible two-headed beings
From that mythical land of horrors,
Hoboken.
Also the traveling salesmen, mainly Hebraic;
And the wide-eyed yokels from the little villages of Illinois;
And the two young men-about-town
Conscious of their new evening-clothes;
And the three ladies
Who are trying to pick up someone for the night.
And the music,—Oh Christ and Mohammed and Buddha, the music!
... Base people!
How I dislike you!
Do you know why I have come here?
It will not interest you; nevertheless, I tell you—
I have come here to be alone.
III.
One night, long ago,
As at this table
I sat reflective,
A girl came
And took my hand
And sat beside me.
She was no creature of the roaring town,
But a woman of breeding
With young and delicate eyes.
I had seen her sitting
A long way off
At a large supper-table with many others—
Groomed men and richly dressed women
And an elephantine dowager.
Now, between the dances,
She had strayed away;
And with a wave of her hand to them,
Signifying she had found a friend,
She sat down and looked at me.
We did not talk.
For I did not understand her coming,
And she seemed to desire no speech.
Then suddenly
She laid her hands upon mine across the table
And whispered—“I am so lonely!”
“I am so lonely!”
And after we had looked at each other a long time in silence,—
Silence of doubt, silence of comprehension,—
She turned, and left me.
And now tonight
I forget this sea of faces ...
IV.
In a remote corner
Sits tonight
One whom I know to be a poet—
A great poet, but keyed
In a pitch that is neither the world’s
Nor that of other poets.
Once he was a keen knife of spirit
Stabbing dull hearts;
But now he is wearied out wholly
Save for the brief renascence of the midnight hour.
Across the table
A pale, flame-lipped, very exquisite girl
Looks at him with inscrutable eyes.
Then, as his lips move—
Then, as he leans forward—
I see, I divine, that he says:
“Light-foot whisperer over the dark abysses!—
Beautiful breast
Never to be forgotten!—
Evilly have you worked upon me!
Now the orange floods of afternoon
And the watery green depths of the midnight,
The vestal dawn
And the scarlet screaming dawn
Flicker with your passage!
“Glittering, gay, fantastic, unhappy child—
You seem as old as the oldest sin of the world
And as young as its newest rapture.
You are to me fresh April,
And the last days of October,—
Honey, and myrrh,—
The delicate dusk, and the stark dawn-light.
I have expected you a long time
With wonder and with terror;
And now, with your kiss upon my lips,
I await the miracle to result—
Corruption, or transfiguration.”
And she, having listened
With eyes inscrutable and lips that were motionless,
Drank the champagne in her glass,
And looked curiously into the distance;
While he went on:
“You have brought me a lost wonder
And stirred in me a romance
I had forgotten.
“Now I again see landscapes
Clothed in their rightful mystery,
And the dusk is again holy,
And food is again sweet.
“Now I am alive
Who was dead.”
But her lips did not move,
Not even with a smile.
And then he said,
While the violins sang with him:
“Lovely child—on your breast
Could a head find snowy rest?
Could the dizzy pulses cease
And the madness take release?
Yes! Yes! that I know—
For I dreamed it long ago.
But, child, on what breast
Shall _your_ head find rest?”
She turned her eyes away from him,
And her lips were as quiet as lilies ....
Red lilies of a garden in Cashmere ....
Then the dancers fluttered out
Into the pools of the spot-lights ....
And she smiled.
V.
Last night
I saw these two,
Or two like them,
In the midnight streets.
But before they came
There came an apparition.—
It was a cab, worn, withered, and blighted.
A man like a moth-eaten
Archangel Gabriel
Sat on the box of the crazy thing.
Obviously it had been through Hell;
But its inside was musty and threadbare
As though companies of faded virgins
Had ridden in it for generations.
The horse, as you looked at him from the sidewalk,
Staggered with all four legs;
But to one sitting inside the cab
He must have seemed so thin of beam
As to vanish altogether.
The Archangel Gabriel was inclined to stoutness
And wore a well-preserved Derby hat.
He drove through the night incredulously,
With vague haltings
As if ready to be struck dumb
Should passengers dare
To accept his ciceronage.
Ah, the passengers!
When they rushed
Out of a grilled doorway and across the sidewalk
Their white faces glimmered
As though they would have accepted anything
That could carry them swiftly or slowly
Away from the insupportable
Oppression of Here and Now.
They bundled into the cab,—
Four of them—
Two, whose glass throats were wound with wire and silver
Being destined for destruction
That the other two, with human throats,
Might inherit the _Vita Nuova_.
Then suddenly the Archangel Gabriel,
Leaving the Plaza and steering northwesterly,
Drove his precarious vehicle to the entrance of the Park
And straight down
Into the depths of the sea.
Through watery glooms
And swift gleams as of wave-light,—
Along alleys where vast forests of sea-weed
Aped the summer swaying of terrestrial foliage,
The silent cab moved on,
And the midnight ocean closed around it.
Huge branches of coral
Inky or amber
Lifted themselves in the gloom
Like processional lamp-posts;
And now and then a peering dolphin
Poised questioningly beside the path
Like a policeman.
Now they were gone beyond my sight.
Slowly I followed them;
But the sea retreated before me;
I could not enter the depths of their traversing.
And I walked as in a trance
Pursuing the receding waters
Down the avenues of lamp-posts,
Of foliage, of policemen.
Then, after hours, years, ages,
I saw my quarry returning;
And the sea drew forward with it
In a dark wave and swept over me.
There was the cab,—
And lo! of the two ghostly passengers,
One had become an undulant mermaid
And the other a surging triton—
And they swayed in hollows and foam-heights
Of the shaken water—
Knees, hair, arms
Tossed in confusion—
They were spilled out upon the deep
And the sea-birds shrieked above them.
I think that they went then
To the Sea King’s Palace;
But this is all
That I myself saw.
VI.
Streets everywhere,—
Endless, labyrinthine, chasmy, crowded,—
All leading through the Egyptian night of ancient blackness
To these oases of tables,—
These howling dervish-tents,—
These feasts of lanterns ....
Strange altars of the midnight!
Doubtful sanctuaries between wars!
Perilous tombs of forgotten goddesses!
VII.
I mark you well, my companions,
Though you do not mark me.
To which one of you shall I go
As the girl to me once came,
And take your hands, and speak
With silence across gulfs of silence?
Where in your mist
Is the friend who might be mine?
Do the pale blue veils of smoke
So utterly hide him?
Life, like a restless wave,
Has gathered us here together
As pebbles upon a remote shore—
Scattered when the next wave shall come.
VIII.
It is a chaos, this world.
Therefore it rests me.
For I have striven long
To create a world of my heart’s desire,—
To erect pinnacles of dream
That should shine amid the sunlight,
Giving intelligible form
To the intentions of the earth.
And I am tired—
Tired of my pinnacles of dream,—
Both those that shine already amid the sunlight
And those that shall never be upraised.
And I descend
Into this chaos, this real world of waiters,
And it rests me.
IX.
I too have been here with my gay companions—
But I do not like it.
For I love my companions with an inexpressible passion—
I love them better
Elsewhere.
This is a place
Of desolation—
Of those who do not love
Or honor one another—
A purgatory, a hall
That is entrance to the Pit,
Whither many a one
Will go from here.
Now I will rise,
And taking with me the volume
Of George Santayana, on the back of which
I have been writing,—
Taking my black lacquer stick
That is now almost famous,—
I will pay the check,
Forgetting not the waiter,
And hie me to a friend, if I can find him;
Or failing that,
I will go home
And in the awed grey dawnlight
Read from Santayana’s “The Life of Reason”
In five noble volumes.
For this is a place of madness,
And this city is doomed.
Emma Goldman on Trial
LOUISE BRYANT
Just about the time that one Portland, Oregon, newspaper had smugly
remarked, editorially, that Portland was far ahead of many other cities
in its treatment of Emma Goldman in that it ignored her altogether,
pandemonium broke loose. Within a few days, that paper and all the
others in town gave Miss Goldman such front page notices and such
flaring headlines that the war in Europe seemed quite an insignificant
thing compared to the peril which seemed to be threatening the “Rose
City” on account of her presence in our midst.
The apparent reason for this agitation was that one little, old woman by
the name of Mrs. Josephine Johnson had heard through a friend, whose
name she refused to divulge (even when so ordered by the court) that on
the evening of the lecture on Friedrich Nietzsche somebody had
distributed a pamphlet on birth control.
The real reason for the arrest was that the police wished to break up
the meeting. They had previously sent Miss Goldman a notice that she
could not speak any more in Portland on any subject whatever. This order
could never have been carried out as we have free speech in Portland, so
they used another method.
Miss Goldman and Dr. Reitman were arrested on the evening of August 6
just after the meeting began, and at 10:30 at night all bail except cash
was refused, which is contrary to all idea of justice. But for the
efforts of Mr. C. E. S. Wood, who has always been a staunch friend of
all free-thinkers, Miss Goldman would have been thrown into jail in a
city where she has been allowed to lecture every year for nearly twenty
years and where her friends have come to look forward to her annual
visits as we do to all the other good things that come to us, like the
spring and the rain and the sunshine; for of just such healing and
life-giving qualities are her inspirational messages.
There were two trials. The first was the usual sort and really is of
small interest. At this trial held in the Municipal court, Miss Goldman
and Dr. Reitman were found guilty of distributing obscene literature and
fined $100 each. As a matter of fact, Miss Goldman knew nothing about
the distribution of the leaflet, but she certainly would have approved
of it if she had.
This sentence of the lower court was promptly appealed, and in the
second trial, which took place in Dept. 5 of the Circuit court under
Judge William N. Gatens, the case was dismissed for lack of evidence.
When we remember that one of our bravest rebels, Margaret Sanger, will
soon have to face a trial on a similar charge we can only hope, vainly
and wildly perhaps, that she will be fortunate enough to have a
presiding judge as fair-minded as Judge Gatens.
Some of his remarks were so refreshing, coming as they did in such fine
defiance of the usual attitude of those on the bench towards those who
are accused, that they are worthy of quoting:
During the trial Judge Gatens said:
“The Court says the defendants are not here charged, as has been stated
by the council, with creating anarchistic tendencies, or with being
anarchists; they are here to be charged for the offense set forth in the
information and for no other offense.
“Every person, when charged with a crime, should have the right to know
the nature of the crime with which he is charged, meet the witnesses
face to face, and be tried without prejudice; not to be tried on the
ground that you don’t like this person or that person because they have
some view different from yours.
“Now it seems to me that the trouble with our people today is that there
is too much prudery. Ignorance and prudery are the millstones about the
neck of progress. Everyone knows that. We are all shocked by many things
publicly stated that we know privately ourselves, but we haven’t got the
nerve to get up and admit it; and when some person brings our attention
to something we already know, we feign modesty and we feel that the
public has been outraged and decency has been shocked when as a matter
of fact we know all these things ourselves.
“I am a member of the Oregon Hygiene Society. We get out literature and
place it in the toilets all over the state, telling people how to guard
against the evils of venereal diseases and so forth. We do that for the
uplift of humanity, to protect society from all those things, and the
public does not seem to be very much shocked about it.”
Poetry Versus Imagism
HUNTLY CARTER
_I entirely disagree with Mr. Carter’s point of view—as much of it
as I can fathom. But I hope his article will provoke discussion
that will lead to clearer understanding of the Imagist’s art in a
country where even poets are blind to it. Mr. Carter states his
position briefly as follows: “The Imagists claim that the
subjects with which they deal find a completer and more adequate
poetical expression in the Imagist form than in any other.
Granting that this is so, the question still remains whether this
form is essential to poetry or whether it tends to exclude
poetry. So one has to consider what poetry really is and what
it implies. My article is designed for this purpose.” How
horrible!—to treat miracles like this!—The Editor._
A few years ago I went to the Falkland Islands to sheep-farm for a bare
subsistence, and while living on a lonely station twenty miles from
everywhere, so to speak, tending my flock, what time the half-breeds
came and helped themselves to my humble belongings, I experienced a new
emotion. Perhaps it would be more correct to say I became aware of the
nature of an old emotion. I felt the currents of transcendent energy
which I felt in my childhood. But I now felt them more frequently, and I
saw that I was elevated by them beyond the normal course of every-day
life. At such moments I forgot the sheep, the pastures and the marauding
half-breeds. I even forgot the strong colour and form of nature. I saw
something ridding me of solid things and leaving nothing but a fluid
universe. I saw distinct forms melting to formative motions. I had been
caught in the midst of an intense current—a transforming current of
livingness. Moreover, I was free to the current, with the result that I
became a part of itself—fluid—unresistingly, and was actuated
accordingly. For the time being, I moved as the fluid element most moved
me. Later reflection showed me that I was moved by some ineffable thing
which I believe to be poetry. It may be that the soul is made of poetry,
and after the human soul has freed itself from the fetters of
materialism it becomes re-converted to poetry; that is, a part of its
own flow or motion. I do not think materialists will understand this.
But it will be clear to the spiritual minded.
I am sure that the hypothesis, that poetry is simply soul-stuff, is a
verifiable one. I am convinced that in my Falkland Island days, whenever
I was raised by intensity out of my material self at a higher level than
actuality, whenever such intensity annihilated time and space,
obliterated that personality which I call Huntly Carter, lifted me to
the infinite and eternal and left me dumb, I was experiencing poetry. I
know that the hypothesis involves two assumptions. First, that poetry
cannot be written. It can only be expressed in motion or action. And it
can only be expressed by the person who receives it direct from its
source or fount. Hence a significant poet is not one who writes verse,
but one who lives poetry, _is_ poetry. The second assumption is that
every human being who possesses the smallest soul vibration possesses a
poetry-sense, and is, in fact, a potential poet. Given absolute freedom,
he, too, would become poetry, such is the power of conversion residing
in the element waiting to operate upon him. Which is not absurd when we
come to think of it.
I find I am not alone in the attempt to rescue poetry from the lumber
heap of verbalism and verbalists, to say nothing of verbiage, and to
restore it to the infinite. I remember reading in an early number of the
London _Poetry Review_ that life has a rhythmic origin and poetry
resides first of all in the rhythms of motion and sound. Of course
“sound” is redundant, seeing that sound is the result of motion. I read
further that poetry ultimately finds its way into language as the vocal
expression of the fundamental motion or rhythm. Could anything be
clearer? We feel the motion or rhythm and act it. And we attempt to
express it in words in the last resort. Perhaps, some day nearer the
millennium, it will be discovered that language (verbal of course) is
the last resort of the poetically destitute.
The gist of what I read was this: First, poetry is the transmutation of
some natural element (motion, sound or what not) into simple emotion
(motion passing into e-motion). Then as the generic emotions pass beyond
the senses they are handled by the intellect. One knows what the
intellect does. Being peculiarly constituted to submit everything to
scrutiny and analysis, it seizes upon the vague and indefinable
characters of the human feelings and attempts the impossible task of
analyzing their composition and stating their quantity and quality with
precision. (Note what great emphasis the Imagists place upon the value
of precision.) In other words, the intellect sets to work to regulate
poetry by form and law. (Again, note how the Imagists emphasize the
importance of form and law.) I suppose only the poet who proceeds upon
instinct and despises methodical verse-making, recognizes the stupidity
of trying to express poetry in terms of intellectual states of mind. To
him, the vision of poetry in terms of cerebralism can only have one
effect, namely, to kill poetry.
After reading this explanation of poetry, I felt I ought to credit the
writer with a desire to exalt poetry to the Infinite. First, however, it
was necessary to determine what he meant by the process of
“transmutation.” If he meant the activity of the “thing” which I call
poetry, and not the “thing” itself; if he was thinking of the change
effected in the poet’s soul after it has received the rhythmic element
which effects the change; then poetry to him was clearly the operation
and not the operating agent. Further, there was the individualizing
meaning to be considered. Let us assume that the poet’s soul receives
rhythms or vibrations from the Infinite, which it instantly converts
into its own. Just as a magnetic needle receives its own currents and
points aright. Where is one to look for poetry? Is it the vibrations
themselves, or is it the act of conversion? I sought the answer in the
writer’s own words that “poetry resides first of all in the rhythms or
motion,” and I concluded that he was not making a precise use of the
word “transmutation.” So I was able to relate his explanation of poetry
to one I had published somewhere in _The New Freewoman_. This was my
explanation. There is a creative force underlying all phenomena. At an
early period of the world’s history when self-ownership was real—not a
dream—man was provoked by this force into poetic action. The force
operated by dissolving man into its own and thereby exalting him
mystically. But as man became more and more intellectual, so gradually
he lost the power of being dissolved, and provoked into mystical action.
With the result that he invented words to take the place of action. And
as this process of degeneration continued, so he evolved
substitutes—paid actors, poets, painters—to do for him what he had lost
the power to do for himself. Thus the verbal poet is simply a projection
of man’s lost capacity to poetize himself and for himself. That is, the
power to obliterate himself physically. I need not go into this point
further. If necessary, I could show that many human activities and most
human institutions are symptomatic of the long drawn-out diseases of
self-suppression and self-annihilation. Mind, I speak of the spiritual
self and not that usually confused with a corporeal nature.
This rather long but necessary preface brings me to another and more
recent attempt to recover the old emotion. I refer to my recent
experience with _The Egoist_ and the subject of Imagism in its relation
to poetry. I suppose most intelligent persons are inquiring what Imagism
and _The Egoist_ have to do with each other. _The Egoist_ is obviously,
as its name implies, a journal devoted to egoism. And its sub-title
informs us that it is an individualistic review. Of course, egoism is an
entirely individualistic affair. It consists in putting on the armour of
self-assertion and defending the special faith and interests of one’s
own. The power that one seeks to win is that of subjecting material
conditions and exacting the utmost spiritual toll from everything. One
pays no regard to the opinion of others, and refuses to play the part of
a cypher, and at the same time refuses to play any part with others. To
stand alone, and with a light heart to do the necessary bargaining with
external influences for the possession of one’s own soul—this, it seems
to me, is the true ground of egoism. Opposed to this is the process of
self-suppression, the process of making bundles of cyphers. When men
obliterate not their corporeal natures but the spiritual part of
themselves, by coming together and acting together, and so juggle the
play tricks in order that they may gain the applause and reward of their
fellows, they are cyphers, not egoists, and deserve to be treated as
cyphers. Persons who take this view of egoism have naturally been
watching for the appearance in the pages of _The Egoist_ of numerous
writers with aspirations beyond the group or societal level and not
seeing them appear have begun to ask what _The Egoist_ “stands for.” I
believe this question of “standing for” is one which is hurled at every
new and significant journal. One knows that it has been flung at THE
LITTLE REVIEW. There are two ways of answering it. A journal may show
that it does “stand for” something, or it may confound its critics by
claiming the high distinction of not “standing for” anything. Simply it
does not exist in time and space. It exists by the grace of God, so to
speak. As to what _The Egoist_ “stands for,” it is not my concern. The
thing for me to note is that for some issues it has been affected by a
very strong habit of Imagism. Now Imagism is not egoism. I do not think
the Imagists themselves are egoists. To me they appear to be socialists
by instinct and individualists by profession, just as Mr. Bernard Shaw
is an individualist by instinct and a socialist by profession. He is an
autocrat with a democratic lampblack rubbed over his face to
commercialize his appearance. The Imagists are the reverse with the
added difference that they use the polish to beautify rather than
commercialize their appearance. In saying this I do not wish to appear
to be attacking the Imagists. On the contrary, I am anxious to pay them
every possible compliment. The fact that they are sinning against
themselves must be its own punishment.
The tendency of _The Egoist_ towards Imagism flowered in the May issue.
This issue was in fact “organized” (if I may use a trade term) from
cover to cover to provide an honest and profitable discussion of the
so-called “new” thing in poetry. As if poetry can be new. I had an idea
that God made poetry when the world was very young indeed. Well, I
turned to the May _Egoist_ in order to rediscover my emotion. I found
the journal comprised an admirable treatise on the theory and practice
of Imagism with some uncritical praise and a strong note of criticism
thrown in. I read the prose with a good deal of interest, particularly
Mr. Harold Munro’s history, origin and criticism of Imagism. It seems
Mr. Munro objects to Imagism on the general ground that it is not
inspired by the High Muses. It is rather the work of poets on the way to
Parnassus who have stopped half-way to chase hares. The fact of the
matter is that if an Imagist has a passionate instantaneous impression
to start with he does not end with it. He simply destroys it before he
has got very far with intellectual or technical theories. In Mr. Munro’s
very words, “poets of the Imagist and other kindred modern schools are
no longer visited by the Muses: they are not at home to them.”
How far this is true one may learn from the Imagists themselves. Here
are some extracts from their contributions to the said “Special Imagist
Number:”
“Somewhere in the gleam of the year 1908, Mr. T. E. Hulme,
excited by the propinquity, at a half-a-crown dance of the other
sex ... proposed to a companion that they should found a Poets’
Club. The thing was done, there and then. The Club began to
dine.... In November of the same year, Edward Storer, ...
published the first book of “Imagist poems.” This statement that
the Imagist movement was started by Edward Storer and T. E.
Hulme, was subsequently refuted by Mr. Allen Upward who it seems
received the Imagist message in 1900 from “a poet named Cranmer
Byng,” who had received it from Professor Giles, who had brought
a tablet of China from the East with all sorts of wonderful
little poems painted thereon. Later, Mr. Ezra Pound made for Mr.
Allen Upward the Imagist garland to deck his forehead in the
Court of Eternity. To continue the extracts, “Mr. Storer ... was
in favor then of a poetry ... described ... ‘as a form of
expression, like the Japanese, in which an image is the resonant
heart of an exquisite moment.’” “I (the writer) had been
advocating ... a poetry in _vers libre_, akin in spirit to the
Japanese.” ... “A dissatisfaction with English poetry as it was
then being written” led to a desire “to replace it by the
Japanese _tanka_ and _haika_.” “He (Hulme) insisted on absolutely
accurate presentation and no verbiage” ... “used to spend hours
each day in the search for the right phrase.” ... “We (the
Imagist group) were very much influenced by modern French
symbolist poetry.” “The group died a lingering death at the end
of its second winter.” “He (Pound) had made Imagism to mean
pictures as Wyndham Lewis understands them; writing later for _T.
P.’s Weekly_, “he made it pictures as William Morris understood
them.” So much for the history of Imagism and the expansion of
Mr. Ezra Pound according to Mr. F. S, Flint. One next learns with
regard to Mr. Pound that “he will sincerely work over a few lines
of _vers libre_.” He “tried to cultivate a sense of style, a
feeling for words” ... “he began to try to make poetry out of the
realities of existence.” ... “he is a ‘bookish’ poet.” ... “It is
inevitable that the ‘improved’ and selected world which the
Romantic poet creates should be composed, at least in part, of
ideas, of declaration, of emotions derived from _extensive
reading_.” If the prizes of this world ... were given to merit
... that poem deserves the prize usually reserved for some not
too revolutionary “honest craftsman.” Thus Mr. Richard Aldington
or Mr. Ezra Pound. Next as to “H. D.” “The poetry of H. D. has
been described as a kind of “accurate mystery” ... “it has the
precision of Goldsmith’s work.” “The things she (H. D.) has seen
and the emotions she has felt have been transmuted in her mind
into an unreality that reveals itself in images of an unsuspected
virtue and in phrases that seem to owe nothing to common speech.”
... “A poet who will accept nothing that has not come to her
direct.” ... “Her ceaseless scrutiny of the word and phrase.” “A
tendency to pare and cut too far.” It is Mr. F. S. Flint who
writes. From the next article one gathers that “every poet must
seek anew for himself, out of the _language_ medium at his
disposal, rhythms which are adequate and forms which are
expressive of his own unique personality.” And again, “what will
teach us most is our _language_ and life.” “He (Mr. Fletcher) is
seen at his best where fancy, imagination, musical ingenuity,
verbal magic, and a curious feeling for the landscape of Chinese
painting are fused in an intriguing and quite beautiful lyric
sequence.” Mr. Ferris Greenslet is writing on the poetry of John
Gould Fletcher.
I have quoted sufficient to indicate the history, aim, scope and methods
of Imagism as set forth by the Imagists. Perhaps I should add an extract
or two (also in inverted commas) from Mr. Harold Munro’s contribution.
“Their (the Imagists’) insistence on the necessity of an
absolutely fresh start in poetry.” They claim to have discovered
“poetry as an Art.” They devoted their energies solely to the
cultivation of new form and the adoption of a renovated language
oblivious of the fact that Idea must primarily dictate both.”
“The forms they still felt they might use, the vocabulary that
remained at their disposal, were extremely limited.” They had
thrown so much good material away “that they remained now almost
unprovided with a language or a style.” It looks as though they
threw away the baby with the bath water. So they divided. “Some
decided to tolerate the old subjects, but to discover a new
manner of presenting or representing, them; others, not so
satisfied, probed nervously the psychological recesses of the New
World and dragged out all the strangest rags of fancy they could
find, exhibiting them solely on account of their whimsical colour
and shapes. Further, “they do not profess to sing.” (Neither does
modern commerce). They swear by “the best of intellect.” “Their
minds are obsessed by the Town.” They acclaim the “passing
event.” They suspect the “beauties of poetry.” “The method of the
Imagists is to model little detached patterns of words.” One of
their principles seems to suggest “that if one first design a
poem, then the idea will be present by reason of the design.”
This recalls the principle of certain theatre reformers that if
one builds a new theatre a new form of drama will enter crowned
with daisies. It is equal to saying that given a donkey’s tail
the donkey will be present because of the tail.
After reading the Imagists’ theories I read their verse. Without,
however, recovering my emotion. It left me cold. I asked myself if
poetry had ceased to run through me. Was I no longer its agent? Had
intellect interposed to censor it—with form? In other words, was my
conception of poetry wrong? Was the Imagists’ conception wrong? Then I
remembered that when I first experienced poetry and became aware of what
I experienced, and when I began to express what I experienced, I
proceeded on the principle of not mixing with my expressed experience
any intellectual elements of thought, idea, reason or what not. I simply
allowed some element to flow through me, and myself to be actuated by
the flow. To me poetical expression was really an abstraction of the
individualizing features of a spiritual experience received and
transmitted in an instant of time. It expressed a creative movement
abstracted from a creative movement, just as a subconscious drawing
externalizes certain vibrations received through a magnetic medium. This
creative movement appointed me its receiver that I might impart a
momentary outwardness and sensational reality to its external content.
Actually I was saturated with this precious element as a sponge can be
saturated with rich perfume, and like the sponge was prepared to
saturate in turn. In my belief, poetry is this spiritually saturating
element. I would say it is a unifying element, bringing a like element
in each of us into a unity of Soul or Spirit-consciousness. That is, the
consciousness of Soul states which transcend this sordid material life
in which we are so deeply immersed. I can imagine a true poet saturated
by this element having glimpses of a supreme and superb Being, and thus
entering consciously into that state of Being. But I cannot possibly
imagine such a poet finding poetic expression in pots and pans and
tup’ny tubes, and the confused and meaningless odds and ends of material
life. I know there are certain poets who claim they have poetry in them,
and because of this, they can poetize any object. Just, as I suppose,
the bee can pour forth honey on any object, or wine can be used to
adulterate water. But, of course, the honey does not change the object
into honey, nor the wine turn the water into wine, any more than the
poetry element poured forth lavishly can transmute a motor-car or any
dead thing into living poetry. Indeed, all that poets, obsessed by the
theory of poetizing town and kitchen stuff, really do, is to waste their
precious possession. Actually they precipitate their sweet scent on a
concrete floor. If such poets ever hope to take the Golden Road they
must leave shrieking machinery alone and cease pouring the perfumes of
Araby over cancrous civilization. They must leave perishable things to
perishable minds and fit out an expedition to the Inner Self. Thereby
they may hope to return wet with the poetic spirit. In other words, they
will return with rich experiences lit by the flame of poetry. It seems
then that the reason I could not feel the Imagist verse was because I
was trying it by a law or principle which told me that poetry makes
itself felt through the senses, not through the intellect. Furthermore,
it makes itself felt not only by passionately initiating us into some
mystery or other of reality, but by making us an active part of that
mystery. The poet is a signature of poetic reality.
I do not say this is the ultimate test of poetry. It may be that poetry
is so indefinable as to elude all tests. Again it may be that this very
indefinableness is the test of poetry. The secret in its motion cannot
be analyzed. One cannot explain it any more than one can explain the
odor of a flower. One is aware of it—that is all. Yet, I may ask, how
does the Imagist poetry stand my test? The first thing one notices in
the poetry is its air of cerebrality verging on cerebralitis.
Accordingly one discovers an inordinate love of the intellectual
qualities of style, and consequently, a feverish quest for figures. So
there are figures of every kind. Condensing and visualizing figures,
figures of similarity, contiguity and contrast, figures describing and
analyzing perishable things. There is in fact a profusion of figures
having one characteristic in common, namely, a straining after novelty,
originality and freshness. If for the sake of argument one admits that
poetry can be expressed in words, of course one admits that poetry can
be expressed in images or figures of speech. But this is not to say that
figures of speech are consequently poetry. Otherwise every bit of
foolish verse that has ever been written could lay claim to the
imperishable Garland. Every tup’ny box would be entitled to arrest each
passer-by with a cry of “Behold the poetry in me.”
Turn where we may in the wide-flung Garden of Verse and fruitful figures
face us. Here are some gathered at random:
“He came like night.” (Homer describes Apollo’s descent from
Olympus.)
“Soft as the fleeces of descending snows.” (Ulysses’
eloquence.)
“With lockes crull, as they were laid in press.” (So Chaucer
pictures his Squire.)
“Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain-top with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green.” (Shakespeare.)
“Her voice is but the shadow of a sound.” (Young.)
“The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read,
With loads of learned lumber in his head.” (Pope.)
“Some true, some light, but every one of them
Stamped with the image of the king.” (Tennyson compares Arthur’s
Knights with coins.)
“Hair in heaps lay heavily
Over a pale brow spirit-pure—
Carved like the heart of the coal-black tree,
Crisped like a war-steed’s enclosure.” (Browning describes a lady’s
hair.)
“What says the body when they spring
Some monstrous torture-engine’s whole
Strength on it? No more says the soul.” (Browning describes the
paralyzing effect of a wrong accusation on a highly
sensitive mind.)
“Of the dying year, to which this closing night
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre
Vaulted with all thy congregated might
Of vapours.” (Shelley seeks to raise a resemblance between the
closing night of an eventful year, and the dome of a
sepulchre.)
“Stood aloof, the scars remaining,
Like Cliffs which had been rent asunder;
A dreary sea now flows between,
But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder,
Shall wholly do away, I ween
The marks of that which once hath been.” (Coleridge describes a
break in friendship.)
“There was silence deep as death.” (Campbell.)
“There was silence as of death.” (Macaulay.)
“Earth turned in her sleep with pain
Sultrily suspired for proof.” (Describes a summer night’s thunder.)
“Long shall Comala look before she can behold Fingal in the
midst of his host; bright as the coming forth of the
morning, in the cloud of an early shower.” (Ossian.)
“In short the soul in its body sunk like a blade sent home to
its scabbard.” (Browning describes suddenly suspended
animation.)
I could quote thousands of similar figures. I do not, however, accept
them as poetry, simply because they do not give me poetry. I dare say
the Imagists would refuse to accept them as poetry, but on a different
ground. No doubt they would say that many of these figures have been
manufactured in the wrong place. They have been made in the cerebrum
instead of in the Imagist quarter, the cerebellum. They are in fact
suffering from cerebritis whereas nowadays the proper complaint is
cerebralitis. So the Imagists would complain that such figures do not
conform to their conception of poetry as _an Art_. The ideas in them are
not expressed as they would express them. There is an absence of
clarity, precision, novelty, freshness, originality and so on. Change
the form from cerebriform to cerebraform, clip the words, remove the
clichés, stop the singing, bring the image up to the quick-lunch
standard and most of the figures would pass the Imagist test. All this
is very pretty. But when all is said I do not see why some of the
figures may not pass the test as they stand. When Mr. Hulme wants to
describe a nature experience he does it in this lengthy fashion:
A touch of cold in the autumn night
I walked abroad,
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge,
Like a red-faced farmer.
I did not stop to talk, but nodded;
And round about were the wistful stars
With white faces like town children.
The similitude of a “red-faced farmer” does not raise the subject to
heights. It is entirely lacking in dignity, is commonplace, and suggests
ludicrous associations. For instance, much beer and a hot game of
skittles.
When Browning does it he gets to work in a businesslike manner:
The sun looked over the water’s brim
And straight there was a path of gold for him
And a world of souls for me.
I quote from memory, but I believe I quote correctly. The image is
expressed with brevity, clearness, and dignity. Keats’s way of
expressing the experience is:
I who still saw the universal sun
Heave his broad shoulder o’er the edge of the world
The similitude of “heaving the shoulder” is open to the same objection
as that of a “red-faced farmer.” It is undignified. It calls up a vision
of the sun shooting coals down the front cellar.
Again, when John Gould Fletcher wants to describe umbrellas in a new way
he refers to them as:
Bending, recurved blossoms of the storm.
And a special movement of rain is exactly described as:
Uneven tinkling, the lazy rain
Dripping from the eaves.
The ingenuity of these comparisons takes away Miss Amy Lowell’s breath.
Writing in _The New Republic_ she uses the term “absolutely original.”
And she tells us how well the first figure “makes us see those round,
shining umbrella-tops,” while the second is “a marvel of exact
description.” I dare say Miss Lowell is right. And yet the description,
“The news was a dagger to his heart,” was just as original when it was
written long, long ago, and is certainly as vivid and intense in its way
as anything by Mr. Fletcher praised by Miss Amy Lowell.
Comparing the new with the old in this way, one may well inquire whether
the new-fashioned Imagists differ so very much from the old-fashioned
ones whom they seek to destroy. For my part, I have no hesitation in
asserting that the subject of the old order of verse does not differ
from that of the new order. If present-day Imagists are bringing a
number of contemporary facts and incidents into figurative employment;
if they cut their particular capers _In a Tube_, or in _My Backgarden_,
or in a _Bath_, or at _The Breakfast Table_, or amid _Slaps_, or in
_Chicago_, or in the _Pine Trees’ Tops_, or _After the Retreat_, they
are doing precisely what the every-day Imagist has done with
contemporary facts ever since the world began. So the truth is that
subject for subject they are no nearer the Parnassian height than the
mereset babbler of driveling verse. And if they are really mounting the
peaks, if as they claim they are making an absolutely fresh start at
poetry, they are being pushed there by expression or technique, not
poetry. In their view the mere curling and combing of words is
sufficient to elevate them above such common poets as Shakespeare and
the rest, and to entitle them to a seal among the really elect in the
poetry business. But, of course, the bare fact that the Imagists are out
for a revolution in form does not prove that they are out to give us a
taste of real poetry. It only proves they are out for a revolution in
form. And if one examines their form carefully, I believe it will be
found to prove that there are poets among us suffering rather severely
from the modern cant disease of culture. They “know” so much rather than
feel anything, and because they know so much one meets them in every
nook and corner, talking incessantly about the necessity of other poets
knowing what they know, and doing as they do. Indeed they regard the
production and advertisement of their particular kind of goods, which
have become a sort of cult among a large number of persons who believe
in hard study and discipline, rather than in spontaneity and livingness,
as the beginning and end of earthly existence. But if one come to the
bottom of the whole business it really amounts to no more than this.
Tennyson and Kipling turned their attention to verse-making. They did
not write poetry. They wrote doggerel, because what they wrote was in
doggerel form. The Imagists have turned their attention to verse-making.
Perhaps it should be versicle-making. They do write poetry. They write
poetry because what they write has a poetry form. In short, the
difference between Tennyson, Kipling and the Imagists is one of form. If
the former had used present-day Imagist form they would be supreme
poets. There is nothing to prove that Tennyson and Kipling could not
have cultivated Imagist form. Therefore Tennyson and Kipling could have
written Imagist verse. They were potentially supreme poets. How anyone
can reasonably pretend that mere form transforms a subject into poetry
passes my understanding. How anyone, moreover, can suggest in cold print
that such form is helping to make an absolutely new start in poetry is a
point best left to the decision of mental experts. Still, on reflection,
one finds it is all part of the modern “game” of confusing content with
form. One must be grateful to the Imagists for one thing. For some time
there has been a movement among poets of a certain school to shift the
interest from poetry to themselves considered as deputies. The errors of
the Imagists, who, apparently, are mistaken in their conception of
poetry and the business of poetry, enables one to shift the interest
from these poets to poetry itself. One can say to them, “We are not
interested in you, but in poetry. To tell us that you are deputy
receivers and recorders, to describe your aims and methods, to take us
to museums and to invite us to study the fossilized remains of ancient
literatures, is not to help us to enjoy your verse.” Poets do not get
any nearer to poetry by setting up new rulers and standards. Poetry does
not take us farther afield into speculating on form and technique, but
farther from them. Poetry tends to shift the interest from the poet to
itself, from the solid instrument of transmission to the world in
solution. Indeed it tends to obliterate the poet in the physical sense.
As I said it converts him into poetry. Now the reason why Imagism fails
as poetry is precisely because it shifts the interest from the world in
solution to a group of too, too solid poets. My conclusion is obvious.
Before the Imagists can claim that they are making an absolutely new
start in poetry, they must learn to obliterate their corporeal natures.
The moment they do so obliterate themselves, that moment one can safely
say “Now we are coming to poetry.”
I intended to show that one cannot write free-verse unless one is a free
poet. I must return to the subject.
The New Idol
GEORGE BURMAN FOSTER
An old philosopher—Aristotle, of course—called man a political being. By
this he meant that man was naturally endowed for society, and, further,
that society could find its full fruition only in the state. To the old
Greek, this political vocation of man seemed great and sublime. Only
_one_ will ruled in the state. This one will synthesized all the
individual wills, no matter how powerful and diverse they were. And this
one will made all the distributive wills strong, and demonstrated its
superiority to the totality of all such wills. The one will wills more
than it can do, on that account becomes a statesman, that is, widens out
his will to a state-will. Thus, the one will wins a new and wider sphere
for its abilities and activities.
But it was the modern—post mediaeval—state which was the first to set
the thought of that impersonal, unemotional philosopher in its true
light. The modern state has brought to consciousness the whole gigantic
weight of the world’s political unfolding of force. The modern state is
related to what the ancient Greeks called state, the Hellenic
city-community, much as one of our mighty industrial machines is related
to the primitive tool of a day-laborer, or a modern machine-gun to the
sling and bow of an ancient warrior. Our states are indeed machines. All
their parts fit into each other with the utmost precision, and work with
astonishing accuracy. Our states are also huge weapons with numberless
barrels, but employed by a single will, unloaded at the word of a single
Commander.
It was the first chancellor of the German Empire who once asserted at a
meeting of the _Reichstag_ that _politics ruined character_! This of
course put a damper on all the ardor that lauded to the skies the
greatest invention of modern times, the new miracle of the state. This
assertion clangs like a first elegiac note—like the intimation of an
interior fatality, deep-seated already in the organism of the modern
political and cultural life. This word utters no sentimental fanaticism
which, with all sorts of romantic scruples and moral standards, observes
the course of the immense evolution of folk life. This brave word comes
from a man whom the whole world of his day celebrated as the foremost
master of the art of politics. In his hands, the political machine
underwent an unheard-of development of power. And what this statesman
expressed only provisionally perhaps in an ill-humored, unguarded moment
has been meanwhile developed by earnest men to a conscious, serious
concern for men of a new and growing culture. These men have preached
that men should turn aside from political life; they have seen in spirit
a coming day in which state-less, unpolitical man shall have reached a
purer higher stage of life than was at all possible under the banner of
a political culture. _Anarchists_ we today call these warriors against
the state. What they fight, these warriors, is not this or that
particular form of state, not this or that particular institution, but
the state in every form, state in general. But because the word
anarchism is ambiguous, because it is not simply an ancient theory, but
occasionally signifies a quite tangible _praxis_, we must distinguish
between the ideal, the spiritual champions of anarchism, and the
preachers of a propaganda of bloody deed. While, at best, the latter
would only drive out the devil by Beelzebub, the former would have a
noble faith in the victorious power of the idea. Theirs is the high
faith that the might of ideals is mightier than the might of force. They
trust that humanity will overcome the political malady through spiritual
development and inner strength, and will mature in the direction of an
anarchistic culture. And in the rank of these idealistic anarchists, who
contemplate the state as the most grievous hindrance to a noble and pure
humanity—a Prince Kropotkin, a Count Tolstoi, a former German army
officer von Egidy—_Friedrich Nietzsche_ also belongs, aye, he leads the
van of all the poets and thinkers who espy the future task of humanity
in the negation, the overcoming, of the state.
Anarchism, even in its most ideal form, seems dismal enough to most men.
Yet it is understandable—even a natural necessity—in the evolution of
modern life. It is with the spiritual currents of life as it is with the
vibrations of the pendulum. The stronger the movement toward the one
side, the further the rebound toward the other. As a matter of fact, the
political pendulum has been far removed from the line of equilibrium.
The cultured peoples of Europe—and it was these, not the American
people, which Nietzsche had in mind,—had worked themselves into a
political debauch in which there scarcely seemed to be any other
interest than that of politics. What the Church was to the mediaeval man
the state became to the modern man—God manifest on earth! Men believed
in this state as their Christ. All power in heaven and on earth seemed
to be given to it, too. What was preached in the name of the state was a
gospel to its believers. To these believers it even seemed a sin to
doubt the wisdom of the state at all. It was blasphemy to contest the
state’s claim to omnipotence. Once when it was said: Rome has spoken!
all the rest of the world grew dumb in deferential silence. Later it was
said: Paris, Petersburg, Berlin, has spoken! and a voice from heaven
could not have been hearkened to more sacredly than did political souls
take heed to such state edicts. Good? What is good if not that which
benefits the state? Truth? But where is there truth apart from the word
that proceedeth out of the mouth of the state? The political end
sanctifies any means—makes anything good over which men would be
otherwise enraged, stamps anything as true which would be otherwise
branded a lie in the world.
Nietzsche hit the nail on the head when he stigmatized the state, in the
sense of his time, as the _new idol_, and made it say in a Zarathustra
discourse; “On earth there is nothing greater than I: it is I who am the
regulative finger of God”—“everything will it give _you_, if _ye_
worship it, the new idol.” And this _culture_ of the state was brought
into a system by the philosopher; it was preached in the pulpit; prayed
at the altar. Numberless were the offerings which were brought to this
new idol—of beings, of human happiness and of human life, aye, of human
reason and human conscience! For whoever serves this idol, whoever would
truly serve it, may no longer have regard for himself, may no longer
consult his own judgment. He is the better fitted to be priest of this
state, the less he is burdened with scruples of his own conscience. He
is all the more serviceable a scribe, the more smoothly he can adapt his
well-oiled theology to reasons of state. Truly, they were not the worst
spirits who rebelled against such idolatry. They were prophets of a new
culture who took martyrdom upon themselves, and no small martyrdom at
that, to unhorse a belief in the omnipotence and omniscience of the
state. For this belief oppressed men. Out of men with living souls, it
made ciphers to be added to one so as to give that one worth. Politics
needs masses, herds. The individual, the personality, who does not
surrender himself to the masses, who does not think like an animal in a
herd, is troublesome. Therefore, it passes as supreme wisdom of the
state to uniformize all men, to discipline and drill men to whom the
sight of a uniformized mass arouses the feeling of sublime beauty, to
whom a thousand-throated hurrah sounds like the loveliest music. How
much tender feeling, how much inner life, has been stifled in the day’s
political alarum—who can tell? “Yea,” says Nietzsche, “a dying for many
hath here been devised, which glorifieth itself as life: verily, a
hearty service unto all preachers of death!
“The state, I call it, where all are poison-drinkers, the good and the
bad: the state where all lose themselves, the good and the bad: the
state, where the slow suicide of all—is called ‘life.’”
The sin of the schoolmaster against man as he piles dead history in the
image of the ugliest man upon the present, and blocks his future—all
this has first attained to power and recognition through the political
system, and has thereby become a fatality, an extremity of the cultural
life of old Europe. So Nietzsche saw and said as he looked abroad over
the lands and peoples of his day. Out of the spiritual formation of the
individual, the state made a mechanical drill of the masses. Out of the
teacher and educator of the people, there came to be a master of a
school, a slave of a rule, of a method. The state laid its hand on head
and heart—then it needed the historian to manipulate and adjust history
for political purposes. The state took science into its service—and
conquered praise from the mouth of the artist himself!
To seek salvation from political sickness, this is now the redemptive
service of all the men and women to whom man is higher than the state—to
whom _the ideals of humanity and of personality_ are alone sacred and
supreme. The remedy today is what it once was in old Rome: secession,
migration of the spirit to the holy mount of freedom, where the soul
breathes no state air, where it is not suffocated and oppressed by the
iron bars of the state. Secession in art—that means unpolitical art, an
art which knows higher tasks than the glorification of political power,
than the erection of shafts of victory, than promenades of victory!
Secession in science—that means a free university whose teachers, says
Nietzsche, do not receive their appointments through superannuated
militarists and ministers of state, _a high school of the spirit_, in
which there are no political honors and insignia, but also no state
discipline and non-age—a school where everything is said and taught
which an earnest inquiring soul can receive from the world of nature and
of man in earnest responses of his spirit. Secession in religion—that
means, finally, a free church, in which faith is not an official
dictation, but a firm conviction of the inner man, a church where
worship is not an inherited rule and custom, but the heart’s and life’s
free expression in ways of its own. Who will deny that the best and
highest which our day has to show in every sphere of the spirit’s life,
must be considered everywhere as a work of secession, of rebellion; that
all this has an anarchistic vein, an unpolitical, antipolitical, yes, a
superpolitical stamp? Over all finer natures there have come a bitter
depression and indignation at all political doing and dickering; they
would rather stay and work at home where no one strives nor cries, than
walk the streets so full of the uproar which politicians make. All
souls, turned to within, the clairvoyants of the spirit and the fine
tasters of life agree of course with Nietzsche, that “where the state
ends, there man begins”! The state has its pattern and uniform for the
“many too many,” for the superfluous who in great choruses bawl of the
most superfluous that there is for man. Great souls seek sites for lone
ones and twain ones, they seek them beyond the many too many—there they
sing the songs of that which is necessary for man, the single and
irreplaceable melody, through which man jubilates along to his higher
existence. The state has killed and crushed the peoples, it has summoned
into the world the great lie: “I, the state, am the people.” But there
is only one redemption and convalescence from the state on the part of
the people, a flight “to people who do not understand the state and hate
it as an evil eye and sin in custom and law; which speaks its own tongue
of good and evil and makes its own language of custom and law.” Thus is
secession the emigration from the state into the _people_; the culture
of the future is the overcoming of the state through the people!
To be sure, it is with mixed feelings that we penetrate and interpret
the preaching of the anarchist Nietzsche. The catalogue of sins which,
on a deeper observation of life, we have to charge to state _cultus_ is
indeed great, and hence there is an anarchistic side to the heart of the
modern man, as soon as he thinks of his own rights, as soon as he
requires light and air for the free unfolding of his personality. We
know that the state does not possess eternal life. The state is only a
special form in which human social life can exist, not human society
itself. There have not always been states. They came to be in the long
course of the evolution of a people’s life! What comes to be must pay
its toll to Father Time. The state will change—and pass! Hence it is
indeed folly and superstition, it is idolatry, when we attribute eternal
worth to transitory phenomena, and accord them an unconditional dominion
over us.
But, for all that, there is the state still; and although we may not say
with Hegel, the special hero of state omnipotence, that all that is real
is rational, yet never is anything that really is, entirely irrational.
The state is still the soil on which we stand and which we till, that it
may be able to receive the seed of the spirit—the state is an
evolutionary stage of human culture. It is a vessel for the reception of
the life of the human spirit. It is one of the conditions of life
through which present man must make his way of necessity, if he is to
fulfil his highest destiny. Therefore it is also folly and superstition,
an idolatry of one’s own ego, and of one’s own personality, if a man
thinks he can unfold the wealth of the human by turning aside from the
state. Where the life interests of man solidify to political tendencies,
there remains something for the solitary man to see and to learn, to do
and to achieve; and it is a subtle and dangerous temptation when a man
in his solitude proposes to find his satisfaction in the enjoyment of
his books and in the world of his own thoughts and feelings without
concern for the weal or woe of the political body of which he is a
member. Politics is raw to refined natures. But so is all the material
with which man labors, and out of which he fashions what is fine. Let
creative spirits make out of the state a human society in which all
human greatness can grow.
The idolatry of the state is, like any idolatry, a poison in popular
life. But the antidote which anarchism administers to the present
generation, sick of the state, namely, dominion on the part of the ego,
the _cultus_ of the _Ichmensch_, does not make the matter better, but
perhaps only worse. The personality of man is indeed his _summum bonum_,
his soul and life; but only the whole, free, full personality, which
feels the pulsations of the common life of humanity, of the world—only
the man to whom, as old Terence said, nothing human is foreign, because
he is in a position to read in all the human the language and revelation
of the eternal. This man is a political being, but not a political being
alone. He has his own soul which he affirms against any claim of
politics and preserves from injury. He lives in the state, but also
above the state. He knows well-springs of being without which the state
would be a desert and dry ground. He is a religious personality who
falls down and supplicates no majesty, because he knows God whom alone
we ought to worship and serve!
Book Discussion
Egomania
_Contemporary Portraits, by Frank Harris. New York: Mitchell
Kennerley._
You have surely come across that ubiquitous individual who immortalizes
his travels abroad through innumerable “Kodaks,” to be rubbed into your
eyes on every opportune and inopportune occasion. He bores you ad
nauseam. Why? You are offered an opportunity to observe the majestic
Mont Blanc, the smoking Vesuvius, the respectable Eiffel Tower, the San
Marco, the Brandenburg Gate, the Westminster Abbey, and the rest of the
hackneyed wonders. Yet you are nauseated. Your individual has caused the
Kodak to utilize the magnificent views as backgrounds for his own
central figure; you are compelled to seek the Schlangenberg behind the
back of the complacently smiling tourist. A curious rooster strolling
over a map is harmless, until he gets an inspiration to add something of
his own.
With what impatience I have awaited Frank Harris’s _Contemporary
Portraits_! Not that the name of the “painter” appeals to me
tremendously; I am rather uneasy about the cleverists and the renegades
who of late have found refuge on the hospitable pages of Mr. Viereck’s
monthly pamphlet. But will you consider extravagant my expectation that
any portraitist would reveal exciting things about such unique sitters
as Whistler, Wilde, Verlaine, Swinburne, Maupassant, Maeterlinck, Rodin,
France, or about such remote, semi-legendary personages as Carlyle,
Renan, Burton, Browning?—The book gave me a slap in the face.
The very first chapter annoyed me. I could not make myself believe in
the veracity of Mr. Harris’s conversation with Carlyle, which took place
some time in 1877 during a stroll. Mr. Harris is not a bad fiction
writer, but as a hero of his own fiction he appears clumsy. The
interview presents a study in black and white; the black is the crude,
narrow, obstinate Scotchman, while the white is, of course, the
brilliant, witty, condescending Mr. Harris. This is the leitmotif of the
whole book. The “Portraits” are used to emphasize and accentuate the
superior features of the “painter”; the “sitters” are familiarly patted
on the shoulder, pulled by a string like marionettes, and made to talk
“nice” by whim of the ventriloquist. Defenceless dummies!
In one place Mr. Harris spontaneously exclaims—about the only time he
gives the impression of spontaneity: “What a pity St. Paul did not write
a ‘Life of Jesus!’” Frank Harris would. He would surely not miss the
opportunity of capitalizing such a “contemporary portrait.” What a pity
Mr. Harris has not met at a dinner given by Lady-and-So Mr. Socrates, or
Mr. Moses, or Mr. Adam! What a loss of a good seller.
An editor of a brave magazine, which allows its contributors the free
use of the first personal pronoun, has rebuked me for my too-subjective
animosity towards Mr. Harris’s book and for my failure to see its other,
better, side. I find my justification in Mr. Harris’s own words: “I put
these portraits forth as works of art.” In the same measure as the
artist is allowed—or rather, expected—to present that which seems to him
most intrinsic and striking in his subject, so am I, the appreciator, to
have the liberty of criticising in a work of art those features that
appear to me most salient and conspicuous. As a matter of fact I enjoyed
reading Mr. Harris’s characteristics of the persons he has met; he
doubtless has an artistic touch in his pen-and-ink portraits; his
criticisms on Mathew Arnold, John Davidson, Richard Middleton, are
interesting. But it is the leitmotif of the book that gives you a
general impression. The impression it made on me I have told in the
preceding paragraphs. The pages on Whistler, Wilde, Verlaine, Renan, and
others, are malodorous; the persons whom you admire or love appear
blurred and maimed, for in front of them spins the annoying little
figure of the portraitist, who preaches good behavior to Oscar, who is
charitable to Jimmy, who tells silly anecdotes about Paul, who
condescendingly smiles at old Renan, and journalistically interviews
Anatole France and Maeterlinck.
K.
Pot-Boilers
_The Sorrows of Belgium, by Leonid Andreyev. New York: The
Macmillan Company._
It does make you feel sorry. Sorry for a big talent corrupted by the
omnipotent Huhn-Public. During the Russo-Japanese war Andreyev wrote his
_Red Laughter_, a rough affair, yet powerful in its horror. This
pamphlet is nothing but an editorial from an anti-German newspaper.
A test of man’s well-being and consciousness of power is the
extent to which he can acknowledge the terrible and questionable
character of things, and whether he is in any need of a faith at
the end.—_Nietzsche._
_The Poets’ Translation Series_
The object of the editors of this series is to present a number of
translations of Greek and Latin poetry and prose, especially of those
authors who are less frequently given in English.
This literature has too long been the property of pedagogues,
philologists and professors. Its human qualities have been obscured by
the wranglings of grammarians, who love it principally because to them
it is so safe and so dead.
But to many of us it is not dead. It is more alive, more essential, more
human than anything we can find in contemporary English literature. The
publication of such classics, in the way we propose, may help to create
a higher standard for poetry than that which prevails, and a higher
standard of appreciation of the writers of antiquity, who have suffered
too long at the hands of clumsy metrists. We do not deny that there are
many good translations in English of classical writers—Lang’s _Homer_
and _Theokritos_, Mackail’s _Anthology_ or Aldington’s _Apuleius_, for
instance; but too often such works are lonely and austerely expensive.
THE POET’S TRANSLATION SERIES will appear first in _The Egoist_
(starting September 1st) and will then be reprinted and issued as small
pamphlets, simple and inexpensive, so that none will buy except to read.
The translations will be done by poets whose interest in their authors
will be neither conventional nor frigid. The translators will take no
concern with glosses, notes, or any of the apparatus with which learning
smothers beauty. They will endeavor to give the words of these Greek and
Latin authors as simply and as clearly as may be. Where the text is
confused, they will use the most characteristic version; where obscure,
they will interpret.
The first six pamphlets, when bound together, will form a small
collection of unhackneyed poetry, too long buried under the dust of
pedantic scholarship. They range over a period of two thousand years of
literature—a proof of the amazing vitality of the Hellenic tradition.
If this venture has the success its promoters look for, other similar
and possibly larger pamphlets will be issued.
1. (Ready September) The complete poems (25) of Anyte of Tegea, now
brought together in English for the first time: translated by Richard
Aldington. (8 pages) 2d. (2½d. post free).
2. (Ready October) An entirely new version of the poems and new
fragments, together with the more important of the old fragments, of
Sappho: translated by Edward Storer. (12 pages) 4d (4½d. post free).
3. Choruses from the _Rhesos_ of Euripides: translated by H. D.
4. A choice of the Latin poetry of the Italian Renaissance, many now
translated for the first time, by Richard Aldington.
5. The Poems of Leonidas of Tarentum, now collected—and many translated
for the first time in English: by James Whitall.
6. The _Mosella_ of Ausonius, translated by F. S. Flint. All the
pamphlets—except the first—will be twelve pages long and cost four
pence; 4½d. post free. The series of six 2s. post free. The pamphlets
will be issued monthly.
To be obtained from: The Egoist, Oakley House, Bloomsbury Street, W. C.,
or from Richard Aldington, 7 Christ Church Place, Hampstead, N. W.
Subscriptions will be taken through THE LITTLE REVIEW.
_Wanted: A “Spoon River Anthology.”_
A first edition of _The Spoon River Anthology_ has been borrowed or
filched from our office. First editions are scarce, and we prize ours
beyond words. Will the guilty person please return it; or will any one
wishing to dispose of his at a reasonable price let us know about it?
The Reader Critic
“_CULTURE_”
_Richard Aldington, London_:
... It is almost impossible to get English people to subscribe to an
American literary review. English people are so conservative, so
self-satisfied, that it will be years and years and years and _years_
before they even become aware of the new spirit in America—and then it
will be more years and years and years before they will take it
seriously and still more years before they will _pay_ to know anything
of it. In a sense, you are more fortunate than we are—in England the big
circulating libraries have almost stopped the sale of new books, and
there is such an amazing mental lassitude that no one ever buys literary
and art periodicals. England is well behind the four other great
powers—France, Russia, Austria, and Germany. There seems to be a
tremendous Renaissance in Russia, but that comes, I think, from their
reading French stuff seriously. Have you ever tried to make an English
person—I expect it’s the same with Americans—read a new French book, a
book which has original ideas? If you haven’t, don’t!
... Is Comstock’s successor worse or better? It seems to me—who am
down-trodden by a corrupt aristocracy—amazing that the Great Republic
(?) should humbly let Comstock sit on its head for forty years; why even
in stodgy, money-bagged, hypocritical old England, someone would have
arisen—some Shaw—and assassinated him! There is no tyranny for the
artist comparable to that of an “enlightened” (God save us) democracy.
Notice that Vienna and Petrograd, the two capitals of benighted
feudalism, are, at this moment, the two great art centres of the world.
Paris has become a provincial town since the war; I don’t believe it
will recover—at least not for a decade.
_TO THE EDITOR, “WHO TENTS—INTENSE!”_
“_Ursus_”:
How dare you seek the adventure of beauty? To release, to joy, to clout
with hilarious freedom is to outguess the crowd. To outguess the crowd
is to encourage critical suicide in episodal splendor. The unknowable is
not wanted known; to venture is contagion.
Man ruts—knowingly, wilfully; slithers in purring abandon so long as
steaks fry and pieces of silver rattle in the pocket. When you attempt
to stir unthinking recesses, whip at latent possibilities, you prove
that you outclass, and he stares fishily from his Mongolian eyes. You
seek beauty; the average person tortures it! His father did not diet him
upon such. Your creed is not his. Mass brains chemicalize into a common
ingredient. Why precipitate? The world wants its filing cabinets to
contain regular, trimmed memos.
How dare you seek the adventure of beauty? Shall you consecrate yourself
to individual newness, to truth, against age-old creeds? Against
mountains of odds?
Then I congratulate you. You are different—you shall be singular and
never plural. Go your way! You may find beauty because of the adventures
in seeking it.
_Arthur Davison Ficke, Davenport, Iowa_:
Witter Bynner has sent me a copy of his letter to you on the subject of
the imagists, with the rubric—“Come at them yourself! Print something
about them! The public mustn’t think itself alone in disliking them!” In
spite of our very old friendship,—or perhaps because of it,—he and I
have never agreed on any subject under the sun; and now, when I find
that the greater part of his letter is just what I should like to say, I
am dissuaded from following his suggestion only by the fear that he and
I must both be wrong since we are at last in agreement. But I suppose
that even an unholy alliance cannot poison a good cause; and I therefore
beg you to append this as a footnote to Bynner’s communication.
_AN OBJECTION_
_John F. Weedon, Chicago_:
Your menu promises “Literature, Drama, Music, Art,” and as your guest I
sat down to enjoy one of those “feasts of reason and flows of soul,—so
extremely rare since _The Chap Book_ went out of print,—and I was
immediately plunged into five or six pages of dyspeptic regurgitation of
war dope.
I hate the war,—I am sick of the war. It is not, according to my
well-worn lexicon, either Literature, Drama, Music, or Art. I came near
pitching your magazine into the waste paper basket and getting a drink
to take the taste out of my mouth.
Really, we caterpillars are tired of the war. Can we not find refuge
from it even in THE LITTLE REVIEW, or will you always get the head of
Charles the First into your Memorial?
However, I admit the picture of Rupert Brooke alone was worth the price
of admission; and Ben Hecht,—I don’t know who he is,—I could love like a
brother. Lucian Cary is enjoyable, and your stuff is good but a little
inclined to be sophomorish. I bet old Dr. Johnson would have insisted
that “you define your terms, young man.”
Anyhow, as an elderly gentleman with a large family I bow to the
superknowledge and exuberance of your youth, and freely admit you are
giving full value for the money. But you will cut out the “vaarrr”—von’t
you?
_The following letter, typical of many that come in, expresses much
of what we have hoped to do through_ THE LITTLE REVIEW.
Until I read Mr. Ben Hecht’s article on _The American Family_ in the
August issue I had not believed that any one in America would have the
courage to give expression to the terrible truth about our most prized
institution, the family. It is splendid; it is the kind of thing we
“struggling daughters” need to keep us from being unselfish once too
often.
I imagine there are not enough emancipated souls in Chicago who are
understanding your work to make a word of sincere appreciation a mere
bore.... My social position is such that just a suggestion of the
revolutionary things which are “going on inside” would be a matter for
intense horror to most of my friends. THE LITTLE REVIEW is one of the
sources from which I am deriving strength to cling to my ideals, and to
keep on hoping until school is finished and it is time to strike for
freedom.
_THE “ARTIST IN LIFE”_
_M. Isadore Lyon, Chicago_:
Please permit me to point out to all the Mrs. Quackenbushes in one that
the obviously clear though much misunderstood article, _The Artist in
Life_, so far from being a snobbish self-revelation of pessimism is a
clarion feast of optimism; it is the optimistic urge back of it which
presupposes people _do_ possess latent will power, latent art love back
of—deep under—the lethargic brooding sleep of the Mass. It is a strong
plea to cease crawling in slumpy illusions and become self-conscious,
self-directed beings. I would ask the Quackenbushes to read it from this
view point.
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Without doubt the most complete and authoritative as well as the
most amazing book ever written on sexual matters. Subject treated
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The chapter on “Love and Other Irradiations of the Sexual
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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. 20]:
... But here lips did not move, ...
... But her lips did not move, ...
[p. 35]:
... Again, when the John Gould Fletcher wants to describe
umbrellas in ...
... Again, when John Gould Fletcher wants to describe umbrellas
in ...
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Little Review, September 1915 (Vol. 2, No. 6)" ***
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