The Little Review, October 1915 (Vol. 2, No. 7)

By Author	[ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z \| Other Symbols ]
By Title	[ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z \| Other Symbols ]
By Language

Download this book: [ ASCII ]

Look for this book on Amazon

We have new books nearly every day.
If you would like a news letter once a week or once a month fill out this form and we will give you a summary of the books for that week or month by email.

Title: The Little Review, October 1915 (Vol. 2, No. 7)
Author: Various
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.

*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Little Review, October 1915 (Vol. 2, No. 7)" ***

This book is indexed by ISYS Web Indexing system to allow the reader find any word or number within the document.

1915 (VOL. 2, NO. 7) ***

THE LITTLE REVIEW

Literature Drama Music Art

MARGARET C. ANDERSON
EDITOR

OCTOBER, 1915

Songs and Sketches Ben Hecht
The Dionysian Dreiser “The Scavenger”
Leather Lane Mitchell Dawson
Etchings Alexander S. Kaun
The Truth Burt Harris
Romain Rolland Ellen Key
Poems— Witter Bynner
I Shall Come to You Again
Sicilia
Christian
Marriage
A Glimpse at Russia, An Editorial
Sophomoric Epigrams A. E. D.
Henri and Manship C. A. Z.
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

OCTOBER, 1915

No. 7

Songs and Sketches

BEN HECHT

Night

Who hath not sung to thee, Night? So silent; so deep. But this night
thou hast given thyself to me. Thy black wings brush silently against my
soul.

Thou hast come to me, for I feel thee resting like a soft sorrow on my
heart.

Thou who art alive with the shadowed wounds of ages hast heard me crying
out to embrace thee, my soul beseeching thee to fold me against thy
black bosom. And in answer thou hast let the mysticism of thy
wonder-gloom sink into me until my soul hath opened to receive its kiss.

Tonight no one but I shall sing to thee. For thou art my mistress. Thy
blackness and mine have wedded. And now thy dark kiss stingeth like a
pain in me.

Into thy long arms I give myself. Night, Night, thou art so filled with
longing. I hear the soft lament of thy deep heart murmuring to me.

Thy dim fingers trail across my face in a blind caress.

I feel thy yielding body that is spirit more than my spirit behind the
somber veils thou wearest. I possess thee and our sorrows swell into an
ecstacy.

Night, thou art the beautiful shadow thrown upon the earth by my sorrow.

I have carried thee a buried miracle in my soul of souls until this
hour—when thou hast taken wings and flown out of me to confront me.

Night, my Night, let me enter now into thy darkness until all life beats
in vain outside the obscurity of my soul. I would vanish from myself.

Night, my somber mistress, upon thy face my tears shine as stars and
make thee more beautiful.

Night, thou art infinity revealed. I will stir thy ancient fires on thy
cold lips until thou willst thunder to me with thy hidden voices out of
thy vast silence.

Night, I open my heart to hear but I hear only my heart crying out.
Speak.

Beautiful one, I sing to thee for bringing me the madness of silence. I
sing to thee, for thou art mine; for thou art fierce and pregnant with
still wounds.

Night. Behold! I know thee. I have seen the black flames of thy spirit
that burn in the depths of thee. I have heard the murmuring music of thy
tears.

Thou art glorious. Come. Come, thou and I shall make of our sorrow
rejoicing. Come, place thy long, cool fingers in mine and lead me
beyond.

Night! Night! Thy face is paling. Thou art stricken. Thou art treading
silently away without me.

Night—thou hast taken from me the pain of thy kisses. There hath come
into thy deep eyes a weariness. Thou art dying. Thou art dying from my
arms. The red glow of death burneth in thy face and is transforming
thee.

Night, where shall I find thee again? Where shall I seek thee?

The dreadful day that is thy white shadow hath come. And a part of me
hath died.

Sleep Song

I lay in a field of black flowers, and there were purple veins and green
that floated like thin worms about me.

There were soft thick shapes swaying liquidly, moving unseen, and I lay
under them gripped by soft thick mists.

Deep under them I lay hidden and they pulled me deeper into the field
rolling softly around me.

A sorrow that had pursued me in my soul left me as I vanished, left me
and floated above the flowers.

And I saw a white face drifting away like a pale bubble over the top of
my black garden.

A white face like a dim sorrow, like a mute pain, drifting far away; the
white face of a dead love searching in vain for me, in vain.

The day was a white monster, naked and bellowing; grinning after me with
its buildings that were jagged rows of dirty teeth. There was no place
to hide from my sorrow.

It lay in the sky that winked at me like a vast and blue and relentless
eye. And it lay in the sun that burned like a golden grotesque. It lay
in every laugh and in every beauty and in every little bird that lost
itself over the water.

I felt the black flowers grow blacker and higher and I moved deeper into
the blackness.

And then a sorrow that had pursued me in my soul left me as I vanished.

It floated away over the tops of the black flowers and I saw her white
face moving from me like a pale bubble.

I saw the white face of a dead love moving beyond the soft shapes that
swayed unseen; drifting away like a mute pain and searching in vain for
me, in vain.

I ran, but there was no place to run; for the monster day ran after,
glaring like a white torment, shouting and scampering after, and there
was no place to hide.

Now the day was a white grave opened to me. Now it was a wide wave
breaking over me.

And now it was a great bird, white-breasted and grey-pinioned, flying
after me and after, bearing my sorrow in its blue beak; racing after me
until its heart burst in the west and it sank, bleeding gorgeously
across the sky.

And still I ran; but now the night came, running after, and there was no
place to hide from my sorrow.

I fled in the streets before the darkness. But the stars found me and
the trees loomed after me and the houselights followed me and the
darkness wept around me—and they were my sorrow.

But there on the distant verge, where the night sinks exhausted into the
blood-red arms of the white monster leaping over the world again, I
fell; deep I fell.

Far into a hidden land where I lay hidden; hidden in a field of black
flowers that were threaded with purple veins and green floating like
thin worms about me.

Autumn Song

My heart scatters tears over the dark day. The dull silvered poplar
leaves float in the air like dead butterflies.

It is the autumn come again, speaking with its soft-tongued winds to the
trees and to me.

It is cold. I have lost my warmth. I have lost thee. And the autumn has
come again to tell me of it.

Listen to the sad-tongued winds. See the storm faltering in the street.
It is cold.

It is the autumn come again, the autumn in whose wild sad treasures we
once laughed; once when your hot hands reached out to me like a bright
cry mocking the somber lisping of the twilight season.

Where are the songs I sang, the songs that leaped out of flame? Do they
echo still in your listening ears? Do they fall like warm tears in your
heart?

See the winds droop wearily into the trembling tree arms. See the street
grows pale. A dying panoply drifts across the grey-girthed sky.

Ho, Life, I have still a song for you. Though you come whispering to me
from the golden tombs of youth, from the scarlet graves of love, I will
make of the lament you bring me—music. I will make of the dull tears you
bring me—lyrics. I will clothe the grey ghosts of sorrow in rich
trappings.

For it is only she who hath died. It is only she whom I loved with all
my soul. Though my heart scatter tears over the dark day they are the
tears of plenty. For her death hath enriched me.

For the autumn is come again speaking with its soft-tongued winds to the
trees and to me things I have never heard before; things that her white
breasts never told me; things that her burning lips never said to me;
wild, sad things that the flame from whence my songs once leaped never
held for me.

The dull silvered poplar leaves float in the air like dead butterflies,
and they are beautiful.

Death Song

Last night you came and sat by my bed in a little dark room and boasted
to me like a child.

“I have come to destroy the sun,” you said; “I will take the great,
yellow sun in my fingers and blow on it once and it will go out like a
match.”

And I wondered, because the sun is so large and hot, how such a little
one as you could blow it out like a match.

But you said: “I will blow once into the night and the stars will
sputter like little flames in a great wind and scatter away in ashes.
And the moon will spin around and around like a bright coin until it
breaks into little black bits.”

And I wondered because the night was so far, how such a little breath as
yours could reach into its soul.

But you said: “I will go out and touch the trees and the green leaves
will shrivel and the brown trunks will vanish. I will breathe just once
on the houses, the great big houses of iron and wood and stone, and they
will sway like long pieces of black cloth in the wind and they will melt
into a dark mist.”

And I wondered and wondered.

But you said: “In an instant I will walk up and down all the roads you
have known; I will wander in all the fields you have wandered and pass
through all the highways you have been. And each place that I move in
will cease to be. Under my feet the earth will become a powder and
vanish.”

Then you said, for I had ceased to wonder and was listening sadly: “I
will go to your beloved whose hair is like the silk on the corn and
whose eyes are like the deeps of the sea and I will smile on her and she
will become as nothing. She will become as a speck of dust and she will
never be again.”

And I wondered again how such a little one as you could make my beloved
into a speck of dust when she was so beautiful.

But you said: “I will touch all the faces you have seen with the point
of my finger and they will change into little dark clouds and I will
blow them away with the stars and the moon and the yellow sun.”

And I thought of all the faces you boasted to destroy and
wondered—because there were so many.

But you said: “Do you remember the little bird you saw hopping on the
stones in the park one day: I will go find the little bird and lay my
hand on her and she will never hop on the stones again.”

I remembered the little bird.

And you said: “Do you remember the wide, green water that rolled itself
into a great colored ball and bounced up and down under the sun?
Listen—I will go and blow on the water and it will disappear into a
single drop. And I will bring this drop back to you to wear in your eyes
when they close.”

And I wondered and wondered.

But you said: “Listen:—there is an old woman who smiles when she thinks
of you. I will walk up behind her and touch her gently on the shoulder
and she will vanish.”

And I murmured, “Do not touch the old woman.”

But you said: “Listen:—I will lay my hand over all the wild notes and
sweet notes you have heard and they will be hushed. I will kill the
songs that lie unborn in the earth and the sea and the cherry trees and
in the white throats of birds and women and in the hearts of men.”

And I wondered how such a little one as you could hush so great a
chorus.

But you came closer to me and said: “I have come to destroy the world
for you, to pluck out every little blade of grass and every flower, to
brush away the stars and kick over the hills and tear up all the
fields.”

It was dark in the little room where we were and I sighed.

And you came closer to me and said: “I will gather up in a great, black
bag everyone and everything and every God you have known and I will drop
them into a great, black hole. And listen:—and then you will be alone.”

II.

The Synagogue

This street in the ghetto looks at night
Like a prison corridor,
And the houses facing it are dark cells.

And then you come to a block where the rickety, thin tenements
Rise like gnawed, patient pencils tracing crazy star lines
In the sky.

And then you come to the Synagogue of Judas the Servant,
A little church of the Jews
Crouching on its knees
And enveloped in the rags of cheap saloons and hovels.

It thrusts its iron star into the night
Like a strange voice whispering in a dark place.
And its stained walls impregnated with an ancient faith
Murmur stoically to the stars of burning prayers and hopeless sobs
And other things they have never heard.

And if you stand before it for a time
Strange wild things will cry out of the shadows,
And you will see the torn, bleeding image of a race
Whom Christ crucified.

In the Sun

O what a day!
The buildings are bursting into bloom—
Huge, dazzling flowers sweeping against the heaven;
Dizzy ferns waving like dreadful fans under the flying clouds.
The shining windows flutter down like a shower of golden petals.

O what a day!
The buildings are crashing into bloom;
Gleaming stalks of purple sprawling with a graceful frenzy into space.
Smoke monsters dance lazily over their heads.
The sky swims like a blue butterfly in and out among them.
The streets race away.
A golden wind sweeps with a roar through the world that has become a
fierce gorgeous garden, and it nods breathlessly.
Out of its blazing depths color leaps and the growling music of a torn
God singing in pain.

O what a day.
Beauty bursting into madness.

On the Beach

The lake comes gliding in and in,
And gliding out it goes,
Running up and back on the ribbon of the beach
That plays with its silver toes.

And the lake reaches down to the hem of its gown
With its cool curved wind of a hand,
And throws out its petticoat lacy and white
With a swish-swish over the sand.

Its blue dress fluttering, tinted with the sun,
Hangs from its girdle white-spaced,
And a far ship riding with its nose in hiding
Stands black like a buckle at its waist.

It begins to rain and the lake birds fly
With a whir and an angry screech,
As the thin grey fingers reach down from the sky
And tap, tap faintly on the beach.

Digging little holes for an elfin folk,
Pointing up the water like a grate;
And the sky moves closer like a gust of smoke
And behind it crouch and wait

Great half shapes and grey cloud apes,
And a grey, old water crew,
And the lake birds fly with their wings awry,
Searching in their faces for the blue.

Now the long rain chants in the grasses on the hill,
And the lake runs in with a frightened sound,
And sullen and wet the sand sinks low,
Like a heavy brown cloud on the ground.

On the hill top green the trees bend away
And brood as they lower and bend,
And grey things walk beyond the grey
Where the sands and the waters end.

The rain has stopped and the earth like a bride
Has hung white petals in her hair,
And the sky draws back till the white clouds ride
Like soft white gardens in the air.

And a butterfly flutters like an endless note
Over the lake’s thin brink,
And the sand takes off its heavy brown coat
And the cloud apes vanish and sink.

The gay water dawns and the grasshopper pipes
And the lake glides in anew,
Dressed in greens and in awning stripes,
And little birds leap toward the blue.

The Dionysian Dreiser

Theodore Dreiser is the greatest novelist in America. It is not a
distinction. He has written poor novels. His latest novel, The “Genius”
published by John Lane Company is loose in parts. It limps. It loses its
breath. It grows thin. But it is a novel of sweep and magnitude, of
sledge hammer blows and fine chiseling. In the caramel chorus of
America’s chirping fictionists Dreiser raises the smooth, virile voice
of an artist. And there is no voice like his in America.

I prefer to write of what Dreiser has done in The “Genius” than to tell
in detail of what it is about. Calmly, aloofly with a consummate
dispassion Dreiser has thrust his magic pen home into the heart of
American Puritanism. God forgive him. God forgive the publishers. God
forgive everybody who reads the book and forgive me who write about it.
For American Puritanism is a sacred thing, as sacred as the gilt on the
cathedral altar places, as hallowed as the bathroom in a bawdy house.
And Dreiser has peeled off the gilt and ruthlessly thrust open the door.
May he be cursed with the wrath of an avenging public conscience. May he
be made to wither under the distinction of being a maniacal sensualist,
a libidinous ruffian, a lascivious distiller of corrupting langours.
Amen.

Against the gray-dirt background, the shallow-hued smears of his many
contemporaries, Dreiser’s book stands forth like a red cry of truth. It
is not the book of a man enraged with the narrowness of a country,
sputtering against the insipidity of its composite ideals. Dreiser never
descends to the punitive hectoring of a Robert Herrick. Nor does he join
the plaintive assaults upon the pusillanimous conventions which
characterize the “advanced” fiction of the country. He does not make his
men and women vehicles for the antiquated day dream of brotherhood bosh.
He does not prostitute his work in dramatizing the current quibbles,
marketing asinine public convulsions in the literary capsules so
commonly compounded by our quack “creators.” All these things he does
not do and if the reading public of today will not reward him, the God
of Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Huysmanns, Shakespeare and Ambrose Bierce will.

What Dreiser does do is tell a straightforward story, tell it with all
the painstaking genius of the old Flemish painters. And he uses for his
background not the isolated strata of any single calling, but a
country—your world and mine and our neighbor’s. Life is greater than any
of its truths, sings Theodore Dreiser. There are many kinds of good,
many kinds of standards and many kinds of virtue. There is the virtue of
farmer Blue, the solid, masculine, clear and open virtue rooted in the
laws of the land and the rigmarole of society; thriving on the long,
brown roads, the ploughed fields and the homely beauties of existence.
And there is the virtue of Eugene Witla, the aesthetic, vibrating
pursuit of beauty rooted in the soul of the artist, thriving on the
illusive lust of women, the intangible urge of inspiration; spitting in
the face of laws unnatural to it and the fallacies that would be its
fetters. Yes, says Dreiser, (I do not quote him), life is a wide field
bearing on its bosom beautiful flowers that do not resemble each other
and that require widely different care and nourishment. To think that
such commonplaces should be distinctive notes in the art of a country!
But they are. If you have read these things into novels before you have
not read them into American novels. I do not recall a single hero in
American fiction, who is not a Puritan, who does not suffer when he
sins, whom the indulgence of his desire for women does not inspire to
repentance and “reform” and success as the blue literary laws of America
demand. For further particulars on this general subject see Mr.
Mencken’s fulmination in last month’s Smart Set.

On this broad canvas of thought it is that Dreiser works. In his new
novel he begins in a little town in Illinois. Out of the midst of a
mediocre family living in the concentric provincialism of the middle
west he launches his young hero Witla—a lad suffering from dreams and
stomach trouble and a vague distinguishing unrest. His types are
masterpieces. His style, shorn of pretentious reticence or rhetorical
pomp, is the painstaking and poetical diction he revealed in Jennie
Gerhardt. But he is not infallible. There are sentences, paragraphs
which jar. Although his strokes in delineating character and situation
are swift and certain, his language often seems lame, his words watery,
his phrases trite. But these are as the flaws of a panoramic pen crowded
at moments to a point of impatience and not the faults of a weak writer.
The effect is untouched. His people breathe out of the pages. They are
personalities. From beginning to end Dreiser reveals a psychology of
character amazing in its range and detachment. Witla as a boy lives in
Alexandria, Illinois. Dreiser traces the development of his soul and sex
and struggle out of the blanketing bourgois of his birthplace. The young
’Gene answers the call of beauty, without knowing what it is that calls
him. He comes to Chicago. He is a laundry wagon driver, a collector for
an installment furniture house, a student of the old Art Institute, a
worker in the art department of a newspaper. Dreiser traces him out of
the half way stratas of Chicago to New York, to success, and then
through a labyrinth of incidents all interesting and big. He follows him
through one development after another until Witla, the painter, realizes
himself. I cannot begin to tell what the book is about. It is partially
a depiction of the struggle between an artist husband and a “good woman”
who is his wife, partly the struggle between the flesh and the spirit of
the same husband and the tale of their final adjustment. It is an
Odyssey of a type of man in whom the future of the arts rest as they
always have rested. In the 736 pages there are persons of every type.
You will meet everyone you have known and many you have dreamed of
knowing. Every shade of womanhood flashes between the covers. It is as a
novel should be—complete. It tingles with the quick spasmodic life of
the city, of the country, the factory, the field, the drawing room. And
above all, it breathes the atmosphere of America’s art life, the lively,
struggling workers of the studio.

Witla, however, remains Dreiser’s calm, masterful argument against the
one-sided perversions of the Puritan. Witla is a genius. What are you
going to do with him, you proselyting blue stocking? Such a detached
study in perfidious polygamy is enough to damn the very printers who set
the type for the book. Here is a man of strong ideals, great productive
talent, an indispensable contributor to life, who naively considers
setting up an establishment for his pretty model just after he has
proposed matrimony to the woman he loves at the time with all the finest
desires of his nature; a miserable fellow who ruins and ravishes without
compunction every shapely creature who crosses his path. He is without
even unconscious morality, innate morality. Woman is beauty when she is
anything and to possess beauty is the motive force in his life. His eye
possesses the beauty of the city’s filth and dirt, the beauty of
landscape, his mind possesses the beauty of books and talk and other
minds, and his body the beauty of passion wherever he encounters it.
Logical, natural, primitive and entirely artistic. But immoral? God,
yes. No one woman can satisfy a man unless he deliberately stunts
himself, is the Dreiserian Gospel. A man needs blonde women, brunette
women, short ones and tall ones, radical ladies and conservative
creatures—that is, a man like Witla does. And is Witla a supreme type, a
distinctive Sanine sort of fellow? Not a bit of it. Whether Dreiser
thought he is, I don’t know. He doesn’t say. But he isn’t. He is man and
not artist in his “sins.”

There is naturally more color to his escapades, to his “pursuit of
beauty,” for he is the “genius” with an eye to shades and a soul for
nuances not possessed by his more hum drum brothers. To him matrimony is
naturally a pit, a degradation, a series of cages, for he is the eternal
masculine. But how many men are there who have always been faithful to
their wives? What? I do not know of a single one. In his high lighted
type of Witla, Dreiser tells of this rudely, brutally and
beautifully—with the indifference of a Juggernaut and the cunning of a
magician.

Really, you of the firm-fireside-faith, what is there to be done? Here
is the Dionysian dastard who dares proclaim that life is a decent,
orderly routine and that life is also a wild, warm passionate thing;
that it is also a flame in which there is only one color, the red,
golden color of youth.

And the answer is—howl. A howl will go up, I swear it. It will start
from the critics.

I can almost read their forthcoming reviews as I close my eyes.

“A sensually depraved and degenerate type.”

“Striking at the bed rock of public solidarity, of home happiness, of
everything decent and worth while.”

And America’s reading public—“Horrible, filthy.”

Howl, you who have stultified your artists and buried them under the
gingerbread morality of your own monotonous lives. Dreiser is the one
novelist being published in America today who doesn’t listen to you, who
describes you at your various bests, who wrings the pathos and joys out
of your little worlds; who paints in with the brush of a universal art
what you and I are doing in Alexandria and Chicago and New York and all
the milk-station stops between.

I am not a disciple of the Dreiserian Gospel. I would like to argue with
him the certain superiorities of monogamy for the artist. But he has
limned a hero who is not a sugar-coated moralizer. He has ignored
superbly the mob-begotten mandates of literary excellence. Whatever his
faults of composition or construction, and there are not so many as his
friends endeavor to make out there are, he has magnificently booted the
reading public, the morally subsidized critics and the very publishers
in the coarsest regions of their bodies—their souls.

And for these things I hail him as the greatest novelist in the country.
I acclaim him as the only real, uncontaminated genius of these States
and pray to God that my friend Sherwood Anderson will hurry up and get
published so that there will be two of them.

THE SCAVENGER.

Leather Lane

Three restless gas-jets
In Leather Lane;
A thousand faces,
Wandering in the night,
Too dull for pain.

God saw;
God quenched the light.

But God had not choked
The clamor of gaunt curses
That stalk in Leather Lane,
Uncloaked,
Blatant with strength of dour years.

God heard;
God stopped His ears.

Ho!
God had forgot His nose,
And in the stench that rose
From Leather Lane,
God died.

—_Mitchell Dawson._

Etchings

ALEXANDER S. KAUN

I. Gratitude

On the play-grounds. The pretty girl and I withdrew from the noisy
festival to the desolate fountain. It was too hot to think, so I merely
talked.

An old, ragged, grey-bearded, gibbous Jew, with a basket over his arm,
was slowly approaching us.

The meaningless eyes of the pretty girl clouded.

“Peddlers are not allowed on the grounds. He must have sneaked in.”

The Jew stood at our side. He said nothing, but his timid eyes appealed.

It was too hot to think, but for a moment I thought that a waft of
eternity breathed upon me from out the sad, timid eyes, and from out the
folds of the soiled old coat, and from out the clotty grey beard of the
descendant of Isaiah and the Maccabees.

“I shall buy some peaches, yes?”

The pretty girl twitched her little nose.

“But they are dusty.”

“Oh, no. See, they are covered.”

The sad, timid eyes smiled at me. I looked into the depth of those
eyes-of-ages. A half frivolous notion passed through my mind: I raised
the fruit, and pronounced the ancient Hebrew blessing:

“_Barukh atah, Adonay, elohenu melekh haolam, bore pri haetz._” (Blessed
art Thou, O Lord, our God, creator of the fruit of the tree.)

The sad eyes became faintly radiant and moist. A suggestion of a smile
appeared around the hairy mouth. The lips mumbled something inaudible. A
lean brown hand rubbed the glossy side of the coat, and tremblingly
extended to me. I grasped it, embarrassed.

“_Lange Johren magt Ihr hoben, lange Johren auf Euch!_” (Long years may
you have, long years unto you!)

I turned to the pretty girl. With her handkerchief she was diligently
rubbing off a drop of juice from her white blouse.

It was too hot to think, so I resumed our playful talk.

II. Nocturne

It was night, and soft and blue and starry. A uniformed nurse emerged
from the dark alley of the park, and heavily dropped on the bench where
I sat. For some time she leaned backward, her eyes closed, her breast
heaving, her mouth half open. Then she looked widely, straightened
herself, sighed deeply, and casually glanced at me and at my box of
paints.

“Are you an artist?”

“Yes. Obviously, you are a nurse?”

She nodded, and burst forth into a rapid talk, as if she had long been
waiting for an opportunity to unburden herself.

“Just got off duty. See those lighted windows across the road? That is
our hospital. Ah, I shan’t stand it much longer. Moans and groans,
suffering, tears, madness—God! You know, it starts at twilight. As soon
as the sun sets all the miseries get loose. Even the quiet patients
become delirious and raise bedlam. And so till midnight. It will drive
me insane. Give me a cigarette, will you? There is nobody around at this
time.”

Her “shop talk” bored me. Silently I gave her a cigarette and a light,
and watched her inhaling the smoke eagerly and intently. Her grey
striped dress with the tight white apron outlined a light, slender body,
a supple breast, and full strong arms. Her face was in the shadow, but
my professional eyes noticed its lovely oval contours. The little white
cap seemed toyishly small on the vast mass of disobedient hair. She
flung away the cigarette, and turned to me:

“Thanks, stranger. Why don’t you say something? Ah, what a night! See
the blue mist away there beneath the trees, and see that big oak—it’s
like a tower. Gee, I am getting romantic. Ah, what a night!”

I was amused with her half bookish, half street-talk. Somehow she did
not irritate me, as the rest of the people did, with her trivial remarks
on things which I believed to belong exclusively to the realm of colors
and music.

“Look!” She grasped my hand. “See the star falling? There, it dropped
into the lagoon. Ah, I smell hyacinths, do you? Hey, if you are not
going to say something, I’ll smash you!”

She snatched off my hat, threw it high up in the air, and, laughing
loudly, ran away, dropping her cap on the grass. I picked it up, and
pursued her. She was a swift runner, and we raced a long while across
the wide lawn before I caught her. In the dim bluish light she stood at
my side, a savage figure with stormy cascades of hair over her face and
shoulders, with flashing eyes, open mouth, dilating nostrils. In my
professional delight (I never lose my self-consciousness) I seized her
by the waist and lifted her up above me. She waved her good arms and
shrieked in joy, tossing her Medusa-head, arching her tense chest,
quivering in ecstacy.

“Hey, there. Cut that out!”

A husky policeman on a motorcycle approached us. He dismounted, looked
at us (I was still holding her in the air), and burst into a hoarse
guffaw.

“Well, I’ll be.... Beat it now. It’s improper.”

I handed her the mussed white cap. She twisted it with her fingers, and
her lips muttered somnolently:

“And at six thirty in the morning I must be on duty....”

III. Will to Power

At a crossing line on a Saturday night about 2 A. M. Tired men, women,
children, families, couples, waiting for a street car. Some lean towards
the wall, some sit on the sidewalk, on the garbage-box, on the curb.
Dull silence. The June night rolls on indifferently.

Suddenly the calm is disturbed by violent screams and oaths. A woman is
hurled out by invisible hands from the corner-hotel. She crosses the
street towards the waiting crowd, staggers, waves her big handbag, and
swears hideously.

No response. The ennui on the faces remains unstirred. The coarse solo
of the prostitute, who ejaculates fantastically ugly verbs, nouns,
adjectives, bespatters the velvet night.

A baggy figure in a battered derby rises from the sidewalk, and
hesitatingly accosts the woman.

“You stop this noise....” Then threateningly: “Want to take a ride?”

Her foul flux interrupted, the woman thrusts her red face into the
man’s, and hisses half coquettishly, half contemptuously:

“A ride? With you, sweetheart? Sure!”

He grabs her by the shoulder. His face grows pale.

“Come on, now. Move on, I tell you!”

The woman shrieks and struggles.

“Let go! Look what he is doing to me! Who are you? You are not a
detective.... Let go!”

The crowd does not stir. Some one yawns desperately. A little boy
whimpers, and clings to his dozing mother.

The man drags his shrieking victim. He pulls out a chain of keys, and
swings it triumphantly. The woman screams and hits her assailant on the
face with her heavy handbag. New figures appear from the adjoining
streets. A voice is heard:

“Maybe he is not a detective.... Hey, where’s your star?”

The man’s pale face twitches convulsively. The woman feels encouraged,
strikes him short, rapid blows, and shouts wildly:

“He is not a detective! Look what he is doing to me!”

A big fist plunges into the man’s face. He gasps, and falls. When he
rises, a shower of fists meets him. Many of the erstwhile indifferent
figures are now up, eager to lay a hand on the imposter. Like a toy, he
falls and rises, looking astonished, in a trance.

The long-awaited car suddenly plunges into the imbroglio. Men, women,
children, push and justle at the narrow entrance.

The man stands alone, hatless, wiping a bleeding face with his sleeve,
muttering faintly:

“I am a detective.... I am.”

The night rolls on indifferently.

The soul of music is something more than the soul of humanity
expressing itself in melody, and the life of music something more
than an audible dramatization of human life.—_Arthur Symons._

The Truth

BURT HARRIS

The truth, my friend? There is no truth. It is impossible for the human
mind to attain the truth. You can tell the truth with reservations, with
omissions. Perhaps you can speak the truth that is only part truth. Yes,
that is often done by virtuous people and by clever people. But to speak
the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, to place your soul
naked before either God or man,—that, my friend, is impossible. I have
listened to women lie. Sometimes it is only necessary to watch. And it
is the same with a man.

What? A man will tell the truth before God? You are quite wrong. A man
will lie to himself and he will lie to his God. I know. I listened to a
man lie to God. I will tell you the story.

The man’s name was Henry Spencer. You perhaps remember it. He was a
murderer. One of his victims was a tango teacher named Mrs. Allison
Rexroat. When the body of Mrs. Rexroat was found behind a clump of
bushes in a lonely spot the police somehow blundered upon a clew. In
four days they traced the murder of the woman to Henry Spencer. They
wove a net of evidence about him. Oh they are clever, sometimes, my
friend. On the fifth day Henry Spencer sat in the police captain’s
office and they sweated him. After five hours he confessed. Ordinarily
this means nothing. I have seen criminals confess to crimes of which
they were innocent. Sweating is an unintelligent process, but then
criminals are unintelligent persons and for a stupid mind the whole
affair becomes quite an ordeal. The police captain says, “You did.” The
criminal replies, “I didn’t.” It is very simple, my friend, but very
wearing; particularly when there are five policemen to say “You did,”
and none but yourself to say “I didn’t.” But it happened this time that
the policemen blundered upon a real confession. After five hours Henry
Spencer jumped to his feet and shouted, “Yes, I did. I killed her.” He
was led away. Two days later he repeated his confession and elaborated
on it. He sketched the murder, described the events leading up to it.

The policemen, highly elated, rushed out and verified all he had said.
They found the hammer he told them he had used where he said he had
thrown it. They found the effects of the murdered woman where he said he
had hidden them. Henry Spencer went to trial. A number of attorneys
defending him pleaded insanity. Spencer upset their efforts by rising in
the court room and informing the jury he was quite sane and that he had
committed a number of murders in his life. Given permission by the court
he informed them that his life had been an extremely illegal one. He
named five women he had killed. The police, highly elated, rushed out
and verified his statements. In concluding, the defendant again sought
to impress them with the fact that he was quite sane and willing to pay
the penalty for his crimes. In fact several times he cried out from his
seat, “Hurry up and hang me.”

You will argue, my friend, that there was an instance where in the very
depravity of his nature a man attained the naked truth. You are quite
wrong. Henry Spencer killed the women he said he killed, but he failed
of the truth. For three months he had sat in his cell figuring the thing
out. He came to the conclusion that by telling truthfully of his crimes
and pleading truthfully of his sanity he would create the impression
that he was indeed a maniac. You see, it is quite simple. Lies are
always simple. It is only the truth which is impossible to understand.
Henry Spencer’s logic proved accurate. He convinced the jury that he was
a maniac. But he had placed too much faith on the technical
interpretation of the law. The jury sentenced him to hang, anyway. So
did the judge.

The date was set and Henry Spencer waited in the jail of a little town
in Illinois. It is the duty of a large number of people in the world to
save souls from Hell. Do not think I speak sarcastically, my friend.
There is nothing wrong in this, except, of course, its utter futility.
For two months the Rev. Mr. Williams, his wife, and his son visited
Henry Spencer daily in his cell. They taught him religion. The doomed
man was an illiterate. He had been brought up in the streets. He spoke
English vulgarly and he understood nothing. His mind was unformed and
his ideas of any particular life to be were as vague as his ideas of the
life that was.

So he became religious. This is quite a story in itself, his acquiring
“faith.” They played hymns in his cell on an old melodeon. Each night
the Williams family knelt with him and prayed. He found in the
Scriptures and their promise something that stilled the cold terror of
death. His nerves became quiet. In fact he became buoyant. You will say
it is impossible for a man to acquire genuine faith under such
circumstances. You are quite wrong, my friend. I will prove it to you
soon.

On the day preceding his execution Henry Spencer exhibited the only bit
of nervousness during his watch for death. He objected to the big clock
that hung in the corridor outside his cell. He didn’t like the way it
ticked. You know why. So they removed the clock. How kind people are to
those whom they are about to destroy. They quite resemble the Gods in
the matter.

I am coming now to the point of the story, so be patient, my friend. It
was a sunny morning in early July. Inside a stockade they had erected a
scaffold. During the night Henry Spencer sang hymns. The sheriff sat on
the doorstep of his home adjoining the jail listening and looking at the
moon and greasing a hempen rope with cold cream which he borrowed from
his daughter. He was a religious man and the hymns made him sad.

At ten o’clock the death march started from Spencer’s cell. Now there
were thirty-eight steps leading to the top of the scaffold which rose
high above the stockade top. I know this because a young man named Smith
and I walked up the steps the midnight before and counted them. After
counting them I made a wager with the young man that Spencer would never
reach the top unsupported. So I was exceedingly interested when the
death march entered the stockade. A number of persons were privileged to
march in the line, and the first to appear was Spencer. He was dressed
as if he were hurrying to a tennis game—white trousers, white shoes, a
soft white collar, and a white shirt. On the pocket of his shirt he had
pinned a red carnation. He walked with a light, springy step. Behind him
trailed the Rev. Mr. Williams and the others.

Henry Spencer wore a good-natured smile on his face. When he reached the
bottom step of the scaffold I held my breath. I watched him skip nimbly
up the stairs, never missing a step, never tripping or hesitating. Under
more virtuous circumstances the thing would have passed for heroism. At
any rate I lost the wager.

Spencer stood on the scaffold, the noose hanging over his shoulder. The
smile had not left his face. Several hundred necks were craned towards
him. I would have felt chilled to see so many necks at such a time had I
been he. The sheriff and his assistant began dressing him in a white
robe that covered him from the neck down.

He commenced talking at once.

“My friends,” he said, extending his arm. They strapped it to his side
as he did so but he continued unflustered. “I am glad of the opportunity
this gives me of telling you that for the first time in my life I am
happy. I have found a mother and a God and a friend while I have been in
jail waiting for death. Although it is going to cost me my life I am
glad I am here to tell you this. I have repented for my sins. I have
made my peace with my God and my fellow men. And I am happy, my friends,
happy. I have found a mother who has shown me the way to peace and
salvation. I am grateful to Him for the gladness he has put in my heart.
Oh, my friends—”

He raised his head to the sky. Standing against the sun in his white
robe, his face transfigured with a wonderful smile, he looked like some
Crusader giving himself into the arms of the Virgin. Above him stretched
the green leafy branch of a tree that rustled faintly in the breeze. A
little bird sat on a twig and chirped. And still above stretched the
pure blue sky with its white fleece clouds. Henry Spencer looked at it
all—life, the little bird, the sky, the green leaves—and smiled; smiled
as I have never seen a man smile before.

They strapped his ankles and then the sheriff adjusted the rope around
his neck with great care. His political future was dependent on his
task. Spencer resumed talking.

He recited two long psalms with never a wrong word, and I who had
listened to him five months ago sat astounded. His voice, his accent,
everything about him had changed. A theologian could have rendered the
psalms no more accurately. Then he looked at the sky again. I felt that
before his eyes the clouds rolled away and God revealed himself, a
gigantic figure seated on a golden throne. I felt that he saw the
cherubs and the angels he had read of in the scriptures, perceived the
jewelled streets and the harpists and Christ waiting with outstretched
arms and forgiveness.

“Yes, my friends,” he went on, “I am not afraid, for I have given myself
to Christ, pure in spirit, strong in faith.” He quoted from the Bible.
“See, I smile at it all, for believe me, O Lord, I am happy.” The
sheriff had lifted the white hood to the man’s head and was beginning to
adjust it. The smile never left his face, the light that blazed from his
eyes never dimmed. “I am going to heaven,” he said as they settled the
hood on his head, “and I want to say only one more thing before I go. My
friends, as I stand here, I tell you I am innocent of the murder of Mrs.
Allison Rexroat.”

And they hanged him.

The truth? The human ego is too weak for truth. What do you say, my
friend?

We carry faithfully what we are given, on hard shoulders, over
rough mountains! And when perspiring, we are told: “Yea, life is
hard to bear!” But man himself only is hard to bear! The reason
is that he carrieth too many strange things on his shoulders.
Like the camel he kneeleth down and alloweth the heavy load to be
put on his back.—_Nietzsche._

Romain Rolland

ELLEN KEY

(_Authorized translation from the Swedish by Mamah Bouton
Borthwick. Copyright, 1914._)

In Clamecy, a quiet town in Nivernais in Central France, Romain Rolland
was born in 1866. His family had dwelt for centuries in the little
place, both as country folk and townspeople. Quite contrary to the
inference one would draw from _Jean Christophe_, neither German nor
other foreign ancestry is discoverable in the family lineage; Rolland is
descended from pure French Catholic burgher stock. His parents devoted
themselves with loving zeal to his education; his mother endowing him
with a musical sense and love of music that made music, from earliest
childhood, his passion and joy; his father, a notary in Clamecy, gave up
his profession that he might accompany his young son to Paris.

It is not the external events of his life, but the spiritual atmosphere
and environment of his native town, that Rolland depicted in the sixth
part of _Jean Christophe_, under the sub-title, “Antoinette.” The
landscape of Nivernais is a mingling of rivers and canals, great forests
and Mont de Moran’s peaks. The region unites memorials of the Keltic and
Gallic-Roman times and cathedrals of the Gothic period, stimulating the
historical sense which, next to the sense of music, is most
characteristic of Romain Rolland.

He entered the _Ecole Normale superieure_ in Paris, when about fifteen
or sixteen years of age, and later went to the _Academia di Francia_ in
Rome. He considers the friendship formed there with Malvida von
Meysenburg[1] profoundly significant in his development. As she was a
faithful friend of Mazzini and Herzen, of Wagner and Nietzsche, in
middle age, so in her old age she was the friend of Romain Rolland. “Her
memory is sacred to me,” he recently wrote, and he had continued in
regular correspondence with her from 1890 until her death in 1903.

[1] See my article in _Verk och Människor_, in which I endeavored
to show my countrymen the value to them of _Memoiren einer
Idealistin_.

Rome exercised a profound influence upon his entire spiritual life. He
spent there the years 1889 and 1890, and has since made frequent visits
for longer or shorter periods. Italy is the country which, next to
France, he knows best and loves most. Germany, on the other hand, which
he has described in _Jean Christophe_ so vividly that one is convinced
he must have passed a great part of his life there, he knows only
through some minor journeys.

In 1895, he received his doctor’s degree at the University of Paris, and
presented two theses.[2] He was, first, instructor in the History of Art
at the school he had attended; later he became professor of History of
Music at the Sorbonne, a position he will probably resign; partly,
because an automobile accident injured his arm so that he can no longer
illustrate his lectures on the History of Music with the piano; partly,
because he has found the combination of authorship and lectures too
great a strain upon his delicate health.

[2] _Histoire de l’Opera en Europe, avant Lully et Scarlatti_,
(Les origines du theatre lyrique modern), and also _Les causes de
la decadence de la peinture italienne_.

Concerning the literary impressions that were decisive in his
development, he says that his education, like that of most young
Frenchmen, was founded upon the classics of the seventeenth century. He
found his way, himself, to the writers who gave him spiritual
sustenance: Shakespeare, Goethe, and the Encyclopedists, especially
Diderot.

In 1886, along with his school comrades, he became acquainted with
Tolstoy. In his book on Tolstoy, Rolland says, “He was the purest light
that illumined our youth, the cheering star in the twilight of the end
of the century—our only real friend in contemporary European art.” It
was Tolstoy’s intoxicating adoration of life that enraptured the young
Frenchmen as well as the young Northerners. It was the realism in
Tolstoy’s art that “opened the portals to life”; it was the mysticism in
Tolstoy’s nature that opened their ears to “the music of the soul for
which they longed” ... “Tolstoy was to our generation what Werther was
to the youth of the eighteenth century.”

“But,” wrote Rolland in a letter, “the most potent influence in my life
was and continues to be—music. It has been an ever-flowing spring, not
only for my emotional life, but also for the interpretation of life.
For, to him who can rightly listen, music is a language that can
interpret the subtlest emotions of the soul, and reveal manifold secrets
which literature has never been able to express. If in any degree I
understand the German soul, it is due to music.”

Romain Rolland is familiar, alike, with the old German masters of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and with those of most recent
times. _Jean Christophe_, the world’s greatest novel concerning a
musician and music, is therefore written by a thoroughly-trained
connoisseur and practitioner of music; a man who demonstrates that, for
his own and for his hero’s individual culture, music is the most
profound determining influence.

Even though Romain Rolland differs from Tolstoy in questions pertaining
to his conception of music, still it is in Tolstoy’s spirit that he
glorifies in this form of art its universal breadth, its power—beyond
national boundaries and personal limitations—to unite mankind in and
through the joy of beauty, which is one of the highest conditions of the
soul.

One aspect of Romain Rolland’s literary work is a direct expression of
his profound belief in the ethical mission of art. He participated
ardently in the movement, instituted at the close of the last century,
that purposed to educate the workingman by means of elevated amusements,
especially plays. But Rolland did not, like Tolstoy, seek to awaken love
of mankind; he wanted to strengthen power of action and heroism. Rolland
has recently published the second edition of a book in which he has
collected his controversial articles, written at the time when he and a
group of friends hoped to create a new theatre for the awakening people,
and thus contribute to the encouragement of that energy of action
necessary to the solution of the great problems the time presents.

Pleasure, enlightenment, energy, says Rolland, are what the theatre
should furnish the people. Neither the classic drama, which bores the
workingman to death by presenting to him _les parties mortes de l’ame_,
nor the present drama, which injures or lowers him by setting him in a
fever of sordid passions, is fit for a people’s theatre. It must furnish
the best drama of the present time, the spectacle in which the serious
aspect of the time is reflected, or scenes from those earlier phases in
which the spirit of struggle and of devotion lived; in other words, it
must furnish a virile and wholesome art.

The heroes of the French Revolution were Rolland’s inspiration for the
drama, and he utilized the struggles of the time of the Revolution for
spectacles and folk festivals. At that time he wrote and produced for
the people’s theatre: _Le 14 Juillet_, _Danton_, _Les Loups_, _Le
triomphe de la raison_. The last he has recently published, together
with two other early dramas, _St. Louis_ and _Aërt_. They are all, as he
himself says, devoted to religious enthusiasm; for God, for country, for
reason.

He wished to set these pictures of struggling devotion against the
cowardice of thought and cowardice of will that he saw everywhere around
him. He voiced his own sentiment and that of his young kindred spirits
in the words of one of his heroes, who was condemned to death:

“Life will be what I will. I have anticipated victory, but I shall be
victorious.” And in the words of another:

“You are always thinking of what you can keep or lose. Only think of
what you can give. Live; be like the water that flows.... The world
would not exist without that happiness of beings, of flowers in the sun,
that joy of giving one’s life to the point of exhaustion—which is also a
joy of dying continually!”

“It is elder brother to Jean Christophe,” Rolland says, “less robust but
not less faithful,” who uttered these words, which comprise Rolland’s
creed in its most succinct formula.

To revive the energy of action of the French Revolution in order to
continue thus the work interrupted in 1794; to set in motion the great
passions, not for the purpose of arousing chauvinistic or revolutionary
fanaticism, but in order to kindle anew the universal feeling of
solidarity—this was the hope of Rolland and his friends for the future
of France.

“This hope,” he says, “was one of the purest and holiest forces in our
young lives.” Rolland, therefore, calls his _Théâtre du peuple_ a
document of the time, because it “reflects the artistic ideas and hopes
of a whole generation.”

He gives voice now (1913) to that proud utterance: “Let the future judge
us even should it prove that it was our crime to have believed too much
in the future.”

That this little group has not yet been victorious, we know. Romain
Rolland indicated the reason when he said: “In order to fashion a
theatre for the people, we must _first have a people_; a people with a
_freedom of the soul_ able to enjoy art; a people with _leisure_; a
people not oppressed by misery or incessant toil; a people not
brutalized by every superstition and fanaticism from right and left; a
people lord over itself and victor in the battle fought out from day to
day.”

To these utterances of 1903 can be added one of this year, in which
Rolland expressed himself most fervently and with comprehension in
regard to the working class of _women_—and in that connection in regard
to the whole woman question.[3] It was made evident, then, that the
idealist Rolland is no advocate of the chauvanistic-religious reaction.
His idealism is of the whirl of revolutionary times and the future.

[3] In a preface to _Celles qui travaillent_, a work of the
notable and sincere French authoress, Simone Bodève.

His critique upon the classic French literature, his “Teutonism” in
_Jean Christophe_, his political and religious radicalism, have made him
as obnoxious to nationalistic-Catholic France as Mme. de Stael once was
because of her _De l’Allemagne_. Among other evidences of Rolland’s
status in his own country is the circumstance that when the French
Academy recently awarded its new prize of 10,000 francs, it was given,
through the influence of Maurice Barrès, to a wholly new man in French
literature: André Lafon du Blaye, instructor in a Catholic private
school, who had written a book about a school boy, a book which was
found to possess that “elevated character” the awarding of the prize
demanded! _Jean Christophe_ had just been finished! It is, however, not
merely in academic circles that Romain Rolland is denied recognition. He
has succeeded in getting himself well hated in many another circle
because of the cutting truths in _Jean Christophe_, directed against all
factions. In _Ord och Bild_, 1912, George Brandes has given a brief but
excellent characterization of Rolland’s spiritual and intellectual
endowments and of his limitations.

Without doubt Rolland’s spiritual tendency in youth was determined not
only by Tolstoy but also by Guyau; the more because Tolstoy has Guyau to
thank for whatever of reason is found in his theories of art.

In regard to the influence of Guyau upon Tolstoy and Nietzsche, see, for
example, Professor Albert Nilson’s excellent essay upon _Guyau’s
Aesthetics_.

In the mind of Rolland as well as of Guyau, the ethical ideal is the
highest intensive quality of life, the most effective energy. Rolland is
far from the Christian asceticism that diluted the wine of Tolstoy. But
along with Tolstoy, with Guyau, with Nietzsche, he demands an art that
possesses life’s consummate vigor; that is itself the richest life, the
highest intensity of power. In other words: the ethical ideal and the
aesthetic are at heart the same thing; the fundamental principle of art
and religion is solidarity; the sense of beauty is at the same time the
most intensive and the most expansive of feelings, and so—like the love
of humanity—the great fraternizing power. “They who love most create
most richly,” and “the work that reveals to us the life of greatest
value is the noblest”: these propositions permeated Rolland just as they
did Guyau and Tolstoy, although Rolland establishes a basis of valuation
quite different from that of the latter. Perhaps Bergson, too, has in
some respects confirmed Rolland’s personal view of life. But as
Rolland’s view was enunciated before Bergson began to write, the
influence could have been only to strengthen, not to determine it. No
idea harmonized better with Rolland’s own innermost being than that
respecting the power of the spirit to make a way for creative,
unfathomable, inexhaustible life. _Jean Christophe_, from the first
chapter to the last, is an illustration of this explosive power, this
_élan vital_.

Schiller’s words come to mind: Der Dichter ist der einzige wahre
_Mensch_ und der beste Philosoph ist nur eine Karikatur gegen ihn.[4]
The poet is the only real _Man_ and the best philosopher is only a
caricature beside him.

[4] In a letter to Goethe, 1795, after reading _Wilhelm Meister_.

Not only with his dramas of the Revolution did Romain Rolland endeavor
to make his countrymen hero-worshippers; he also began a series of
popular biographies aimed to present, not the great man’s work, but the
personal powers and experiences that found expression in his work. He
says in the preface: “Europe is poisoned with materialism and egotism;
we must throw open the windows to get air: _Respirons le souffle des
heros. Let us breathe the breath of heroes._” He rejoices that he too
has witnessed contemporary heroic deeds: the defense of the Boers and
the vindication of Dreyfus. But he knows that it is “easier to kindle
enthusiasm by heroes of the past,” heroes “who were great in heart.”

His hero-worship did not lead him, however, to glorification at the
expense of truth. He utters the thought, profoundly true and all too
little understood, that every lack of harmony between life and its laws
depends—even in great spirits—not upon their greatness, but upon their
weaknesses. “But these weaknesses render them not less worthy of our
love.... The idealism that will not recognize the truth is cowardice;
there is only one heroism in the world: _to see the world as it is—and
to love it_.”

So without hesitation, Rolland points out weaknesses in Michael Angelo’s
life, and inconsistencies in Tolstoy’s. He sees in both great specimens
of the “type that will pass away”; the Christian—those who “have had
their refuge in God and the everlasting life when this life has gone
against them; those whose faith has often been expression for deficient
belief in life, in the future, in themselves; a lack of courage and a
lack of gladness.” “I know,” he continues, “of how many defeats your
grievous victories are made, and therefore I pity you and admire you.
You make the world more doleful but more beautiful. Praised be pain and
praised be joy! Both are holy; they form the world and they broaden
great souls: joy and pain are powers, are life, are God.”[5]

[5] Epitome of the introduction to _Michael Angelo_.

The three biographies that Rolland has thus far published are of
Beethoven, Michael Angelo, and Tolstoy. In the first, it is the love of
life and the courage of life; in the second, creative power and strength
of belief; in the third, the ecstacy of life and the love of mankind,
that he emphasizes. Such souls, he says, restore to us belief in life
and in mankind, for from them “issues a current of social power and
potent goodness.”

II.

Beethoven is Rolland’s own conception of life, and is nearest his heart.
To that “soul of music, heroism, and goodness” Rolland has reared the
only memorial worthy of Beethoven that art has created: _Jean
Christophe_.

This book was published during the course of nine years. But long before
it began to appear it had lived in and with its writer for the greater
part of his life. In it Rolland has committed to writing his profound
conception of the innermost being of a musical genius, and has done it
in such a manner that one is firmly convinced of the truth of the
revelations that one follows from the cradle to the grave. In other
novels concerning geniuses the writers assert incessantly that they
_are_ geniuses; here the genius evinces himself through his being. One
does not read a book, one lives a life—and a life of the highest value,
the existence that great spirit creates: that of the genius, who out of
the flaming chaos of his nature forms a cosmos. An “educational novel,”
of which the world’s literature thus far possesses only one such in
_Wilhelm Meister_, and, in a measure, in Keller’s _Der Grüne
Heinrich_.... I have lived more intensely with _Jean Christophe_ than
with most living people.[6]

[6] Lack of space forces me to omit Miss Key’s interesting but
very long analysis of _Jean Christophe_.—The Editor.

World fame is a curious thing. Sometimes it is attained quickly through
glorifying friends: a path to fame that often early avenges itself,—that
is more dangerous even than the fame that the attacks of enemies
furnish. Sometimes fame is won with one blow, by an exceptional work;
again it is prepared for in silence and then suddenly rushes forth with
the roar of a great torrent formed by many small streams. The last is
the case with Romain Rolland.

When I read him in 1909, in Switzerland, I went shortly afterwards to
Paris, where, at that time, he was not mentioned among the celebrated
writers and where even his friends thought he dare not reckon his circle
of readers larger than the ten or fifteen thousand faithful he possessed
in the world of French-speaking readers. In Germany his circle was still
narrower; in Sweden, he was unknown even by name.

For the new generation the book is a document of the spiritual history
of the time. For the serious-minded portion of the French youth, Rolland
has possessed an influence comparable with his own description of
Tolstoy’s influence upon himself and the young generation with him.
Youth has learned from him that the fleeting fashionable attitude toward
the great souls or ideas that Paris shapes is sterile; that it is only
by devotion that a spiritual growth can be attained; that skepticism in
the face of all greatness is poverty, but admiration and love “is the
way, to the most potent, the richest, life.” Youth has found in him
contempt for mere fine phrases, for declamation, and received from him
Goethe’s conception of creation: “In the beginning was action.” They
have heard him proclaim _that_ nationalism that is loyalty to the best
in the essence of the French nation: love of truth and justice, desire
for freedom and fraternity, devotion to its ideal values and above all
the dream of happiness for all mankind. This dream that among us Teutons
is content to sleep, is among Frenchmen an ever restless disturbance of
the blood. And it is only by occasionally letting his blood flow for
these dreams that he feels he is living up to his highest ideals. _This_
Youth for whom each new part of _Jean Christophe_ has been a great
event, despises with Rolland the estheticism that turns from life. This
youth has learned to distinguish between great art and the work of those
who think they are creating art but are only making arts. But above all,
at a time of reaction toward the Christian “faith”—a reaction that has
been justified by the fact that science has not been able to “explain”
life nor “vindicate” it—they receive a new fountain of living water.
Rolland has attempted neither to explain life nor defend it. The
leit-motiv of his great symphonic work is Beethoven’s thought: “Durch
Leiden Freude,”—“Through suffering joy comes.” We can, so he says,
neither understand life in all its plenitude of contradictions nor
ennoble it in all its brutality in any way other than by _living_ it
one’s self in the fullest and highest meaning of the word. Music, the
all-unifying art, love, the all-embracing condition of the soul, are the
two highest attitudes of devotion to God, who is life.

More Rolland knows not. And more than he knows the veracious man does
not say.

“I cannot,” he writes, “give any metaphysical credo. For, in the
first place, I will never deceive myself by saying _I know that
which I do not know_—which, at the most, I can imagine or hope.
In the second place, I will never confine myself within the
limits of any belief. For I hope to develop until my last day; I
wish to reserve for myself unlimited freedom of intellectual
transformation and renewal. I have many gods in my Pantheon; but
my chief godhead is _Liberty_. At present I do not separate the
essence of the human soul from that of the divine spirit, of
which the former is a part. But I hardly believe that this divine
spirit fills the universe. It _seeks_, certainly, to fill the
world and guide it; but nothing indicates that it will succeed.
Even in this regard I reserve space for liberty. Pure monism does
not satisfy me. I am more inclined to a dualism such as the
ancient Empedocles believed in. I have an unbounded admiration
for the pre-Socratic philosophers, the sages of Ionia and Magna
Graecia. Indeed my first work, written at Rome, twenty years ago,
was a drama with Empedocles as hero. The struggle between two
principles is manifest to me in the whole history of the world,
material as well as moral history. The question is whether there
is not a _third_ principle, in which the other two are included
or harmonized. A trinity therefore—it is singular how this form
forces itself upon the human mind—but a trinity very different
from the Christian conception of the trinity, since it comprises
a father and two striving brothers: a triad that approaches the
antique cosmogony of which we find a reflection in Hesiod, in
_Chaos_, _Gaea_, and _Eros_. If I live I shall go deeper into
ancient thought. Those ancient philosophers lived in more
intimate contact with nature than any of their successors, and,
moreover, collected the thousand-year-old wisdom of the whole
Orient.”

Besides this personal utterance of Rolland himself, a French friend of
his, intimate with his thought, has given me permission to communicate
the following statement of the trend of Rolland’s thought:

The liberty of his mind, his lucidity, his keen penetration,
render him incapable of accepting the least dogma or the least
constraint. It is impossible to conceive of anything that could
have upon such a mind, not to say a direct hold, but even an
appreciable influence. That mind is alone, magnificently alone,
as independent as if the world were just born. Moreover, he is
quite as far from all revealed religions as from all systems. He
would in no wise admit that the Christian or any other religion
is more closely related to the past, and Darwinism or any
scientism whatever more to the future. He would see, in these
diverse ways of viewing life, forms of the human mind which
return at periodic intervals and of which one no more than the
other is an absolute progress in which he does not believe. Only
by his very nature, he is antimaterialistic. He believes in the
duality of soul and body in an absolute, organic manner. He hopes
sincerely to quit this body and go to live a larger and fuller
life. No personal immortality! He cannot endure the thought. That
would be the continuation of this captivity in a limited
personality, which to him appears stifling. He feels that he is
also going to live in God, not understanding by that word any
anthropomorphic god, but a fountain of universal life. He loves
to plunge, through time and space, into a meditation in which he
totally forgets his personality, and wherein he finds a sort of
intoxication. He has uttered this admirable and terrible
sentence: “Sometimes I feel _no difference_ between my friends
absent or present, living or dead.” To ask such a being if he is
of the past or of the future would have no significance; he is
beyond the compass of time.

I have met Rolland only through letters. But some words concerning his
personality, as it had affected another poet, I can communicate here in
conclusion:

“The confident grasp replete with experience, the modest ripeness ... in
his being; the benignity, the unprecedented purity in all his purpose
... are beneficent.... Everything is genuine, developed with will and
consciousness: a man who has improved steadily.... From him emanates a
gentle plenitude, consummate in action, like that of a star at
twilight.”

When world renown comes to such a man, it has not much to say to him.
Rolland meets it with an averted glance in his far-seeing luminous eyes,
eyes which quietly and steadily look towards new works and new horizons.

From all corners of the world he hears: that he has given to the time
the book most brimming with the whole seething life of the time; that he
has given men the book most permeated with the essence of music and
Orphean effects; that he has created an entire human race, a race in
which all ages of life and degrees of development, in which women as
well as men are equally convincing in truth to life; that he has given a
work overflowing with ideas, with philosophy of life, with vital help,
by exhibiting a great human life in all its weakness and in all its
strength. And assuredly this will give him joy.

But he will feel proud only when the word comes that his French heart
longs to hear: The people that has given to the world such a work is
not, as its enemies say, going to destruction. That nation is ever
potent with the energy of life.

Rolland’s great book is not merely a glorious revelation of the fact
that all the greatest ideas that France has given the world live ever in
the French people. It demonstrates also that mankind needs the French
spirit always in order to realize them.

Poems

WITTER BYNNER

I Shall Come to You Again

If you have pity, pity me a little,
For I had seen your pitiless lips and dared them
And I deserve the pity given fools...
Your mouth was passion but your eyes were love.
Your mouth might soon consent to harshness, but your eyes,
Your eyes would see me and be kind to me.
I should not suffer, loving you.
I should but carry the heroic pain of love.
Wounds that might come from hardness of your heart,
If I received them, I should heal, watching the everlasting pity of your
eyes...
If you have pity, pity me a little.
I who had seen your cruelty and dared it
Am stricken with it now
And have come through the streets in daylight
As though the daylight were the sound of laughter
Surrounding and consuming me.
I have put up my hands to ward it off,
The heaviness of light that would not let me hide
But held me and looked leering in my face...
For there has come a passer-by ....
And you have come with him.
I have no hatred for the passer-by, and none for you,
But hatred only of my own humiliation,
For I had challenged and been overthrown...
If you have pity, pity me a little.
For I who love life
Have heard its mouth despise me
And have seen its eyes, that had been kind, turn into stone.
Wherefore I lack new strength, new laughter.
And in the time before that strength is due,
If you have pity, pity me a little.
But if you have none—soon I shall have no need.
For I who choose life,
Shall receive my strength,
And I shall come to you again, laughing with love...
For my humiliation shall have been a rain,
Its arms about me and its lips alive.
And I shall walk in daylight
And it shall be a singing waterfall
Surrounding me and pouring over me.

Sicilia

(_In memory of Salvatore Garrito who was hanged at Reading,
Pennsylvania, October 29, 1908, for the killing of a State
Trooper._)

“It shows you on that paper where she lives,
In Sicily. Write her that I today
Am dead for having killed my second man.”
“Your second?” “Yes, sir, two. It’s not so bad
To kill a trooper. But I killed, before,
A friend who, like my brother and like me,
Loved her in Sicily. The jury thought
My brother did it. He’s been all alone
In jail eight years. Tell her I shall be glad
If now she gets him out and marries him.”

Christian

Truth heard him ask employ
And took him in,
A poor unfriended boy,
As her own kin,
And everything she made
She taught the youth.
When he had learned her trade
He went from Truth.

And when his eyes were dim
And he was rich,
Then Truth returned to him
Out of a ditch,
Poorer than he had been,
Pleading she came...
He would not let her in
Nor ask her name.

Marriage

Shall marriage never be the glory
That was wooed?
But ever enervate and vex,
Obstruct, intrude,
And make more wistful and complex
The solitude,
Trying to tell the human story
To its brood?

No matter how the homes are humming
In a mood
Of ecstasy or sentiment
Or love renewed,
What favored two can circumvent
The ancient feud?—
Till both in one shall die, becoming
Multitude!

A Glimpse at Russia

Wars have been the landmarks in Russian modern history. The Napoleonic
war was followed by the insurrection of the Decembrists, the first
attempt on the part of liberal Russia to break the autocracy. The iron
reign of Nicolas I culminated in the Crimean campaign, which revealed
the utter rottenness of the old order and necessitated the general
reconstruction of the estate, from the liberation of the serfs to the
establishment of jury-tribunals. The reaction under Alexander III and
Nicolas II came to a collapse with the Japanese war, more disastrous and
richer in results than Sebastopol. It may be interesting to notice that
each of the mentioned epochs followed the previous one at a space of
about a quarter of a century, and the fact that the present war broke
out only ten years after the last one may be interpreted as an attempt
for self-correction on the part of History. Both the war with Japan and
the revolution that came as its result were abortive and premature
phenomena, and were destined “to be continued.”

It is necessary to get an idea of what has occurred in Russia during the
last ten years in order to understand her present situation and
perspectives. The Russian people were neither prepared nor desirous of
fighting against Japan for the Yalou forests, a problem that interested
only a group of greedy capitalists. Nicolas was egged on by the Kaiser,
who was more than anxious to involve his neighbor in a mess in the Far
East, and thus to divert his attention from the Near East where the
interests of the Triple Alliance demanded the elimination, or at least
the weakening, of the formidable ally of France. The Czar caught the
bait, and was rewarded with the Treaty of Portsmouth, which put an end
to Russia’s ambitions in Manchuria and crippled her international
prestige, to the immediate advantage of Germany and Austria. The
defeated bear was forcibly driven to introspection. Her navy almost
totally destroyed, her army decimated and demoralized, her population
torn by revolutions and civil warfare, Russia faced a Herculean task.
The government was confronted with a double problem, to quench the
internal conflagration, and to get ready for “retaliation.” The first
aim was more or less achieved; the revolutionists were hanged, shot,
imprisoned, exiled; the moderate elements and the European financiers,
who demanded a guarantee for their enormous loans, were hood-winked by a
semblance of parliamentarism, the butaforial Duma, an institution
elected and managed practically by the Czar’s ministers. With feverish
energy the government set out to carry through its second purpose. The
Dumas were forced to sanction gigantic war-budgets, and the entire
bureaucratic state was thrown into a crucible of radical, sweeping
reforms. The reconstruction of the army has become the all-important
issue. Without naming the potential enemy, all parties, except the
Socialists, agreed that Russia must concentrate her forces on the
building up in the fastest possible time of an enormous, efficient,
_modern_ army. The majority of the people differed with the government,
however, on one point, as to who should carry out the great task. The
people have had little confidence in the capability of the bureaucracy
for self-reformation; they have applied to them the Russian saying,
“Only the grave can change the hunchback.” Alexander Guchkov, while
president of the Duma and later as an influential private citizen, has
revealed the hopelessly rotten state of affairs in the military and
civil organization of the country, managed by unscrupulous thieves and
grafters, by useless sinecure-holders from among the nobility and the
royal family. The reorganization of the state, pointed out Mr. Guchkov
and his followers, must be taken from the hands of the effeminate and
imbecile Grand Dukes, and entrusted to representatives of the nation.
For such a heresy Guchkov had to resign from his post as head of the
“parliament,” and the work of reconstruction continued to be handled by
the old _chinovnicks_, the puppets of the Czar and of his uncles and
cousins.

Public opinion in Russia has been crystallizing simultaneously with
military preparation and diplomatic negotiations. Austria’s annexation
of Bosnia and Herzegovina gave Russian diplomacy the gravest slap since
the Berlin Congress; Wilhelm’s threat to appear in “shining armor” to
the assistance of his ally compelled foreign minister Sasonov to
withdraw his protest against Austria’s act. The humiliation was felt
deeply by all classes; the Russian people have come to regard Germany as
their bitterest foe, responsible not only for their past and present
military and diplomatic fiascoes, but largely responsible also for the
internal retrogressive policy of their government. It has been widely
known that during the last revolution the Kaiser had counselled Nicolas
“unrelenting firmness,” and had even offered to “loan” his army for the
suppression of the uprising. The popularity of the present war in Russia
is thus explained. The conservatives see in it an opportunity to
strengthen the power of the autocracy through drummed up patriotism and
loyalty to the throne; the liberals hope that with the defeat of Germany
there will come an end to the “dark influence” of the Prussian
retrogrades on Russia’s policy; the masses are eager to fight against
the “Antichrists,” the enemies of the Slavs and of the Slavonic church.

Whatever the outcome of this war may be, it has done inestimable service
for the awakening of Russia. The country has been elevated and purified
morally and nationally. The abolition of vodka, the unification of
differing parties and of hostile races, the liberal concessions granted
by the government,—these are the few tangible results of the war that
can be checked off already. But there is considerably more to come. The
ignominious failures of the army have pointed a burning finger of
accusation against the real enemy of the people, the bureaucracy. The
Russian soldiers have fought like lions ... led by asses. The shameless
lack of munition, the use of antiquated guns, the wretched equipment of
the soldiers, the inefficiency of field-hospitals, the continuing graft
in giving out contracts, the presence in the army of such time-proved
nonentities as General Rennenkampf and other Manchurian celebrities,
these facts have shown to the people that the Czar and his clique have
forgotten everything and have learned nothing. The general
dissatisfaction in army circles and among the civilians may bring about
a storm that will sweep away the tottering throne of Nicolas Romanov.

This is not a mere theoretic conjecture. Since 1904 an intense
revolutionary propaganda has been carried on within the army and navy.
The germ of rebellion has penetrated not only the common soldiers, who
are largely recruited from among the down-trodden peasants and
workingmen, but also the officers, who have learned a good deal in the
last ten years. A military _coup d’état_ after the model of the Young
Turks has become a popular idea with the intelligent officers who cannot
fail to see that the autocratic régime is a detrimental anachronism.
There have been persistent rumors about the high ambitions of the
ex-Supreme Commander. Grand Duke Nicolas is a happy exception among the
degenerated Romanovs. He has been long considered as the “strong man,”
and therefore feared and opposed to by the Court-camarilla. Necessity
compelled the Czar to appoint him commander; his appointment was
insistently recommended by Joffre and Kitchener. Unlike Kuropatkin, the
Grand Duke refused to follow dictations from Petrograd. When in early
spring he received an order from the Czar to evacuate Warsaw, the
commander telegraphed back that he was willing to obey, but that he
would move his army against the capital. The order was recalled. The
fact that he was recently removed from his post and exiled to Caucasia
shows the growing fears of the Czar, who has lost his head and is hewing
the branch on which he is still seated. The Grand Duke had performed a
difficult, although not very spectacular task—that of saving the
_unarmed_ army from the iron grip of the Germans. Petrograd demanded
“action,” as it did ten years ago from Kuropatkin. Now that the Czar has
assumed the commandership of the army one may expect rapid “actions,”
Sedans and Tzusimas and an early peace treaty as honorable as that of
Portsmouth.

The sentiments of the population were characteristically voiced by the
Jewish member of the Duma, Friedman. In his speech he recounted the
unbelievable atrocities of the Russian authorities performed over the
Jews in the war-zone. Yet he said: “It is true we are without rights, we
are oppressed beyond endurance. But we know the foundation of the evil.
It emanates from these benches (pointing to the Ministers). We are
persecuted by the Russian government and not by the Russian people. It
is not to be wondered at, therefore, that we are content to bind our
fate loyally and faithfully with the fate of the Russian people,
whatever may be done to us by the Russian government.” The best of
Russia are unanimously determined that “the foundation of the evil” must
go. In the last few weeks various bodies of the Russian commonwealth
have issued grave resolutions condemning the government and demanding
democratization of the state. A revolution seems inevitable, but, to
repeat, a military revolution is most likely to take place. The bulk of
the virile population is within the fighting ranks, and it is there, in
the army, that the national nerve pulsates at present. Whether it be
Grand Duke Nicolas, or another capable and popular leader, it is to be
expected that this time the army will pronounce the verdict over the
imbecile Czar and will cleanse the Augean stables of the corrupted
bureaucracy.

Sophomoric Epigrams

There is no wisdom but youth. There is no vision but the unafraid
impulse of unfettered nerves. The follies of youth are the enduring
expressions of art. Man loses his Ego at thirty and becomes conceited.
He becomes conscious of others. Life becomes a quibble. But youth!
Youth, the flower before it has decayed into the mellow moss of age.
Youth that knows not itself or the world. Youth that laughs at tears and
weeps at laughter. Youth that paints queer pictures at which the critics
smile. Illogical youth; arrogant youth; forever annoying the world’s
stagnation. Youth capering like a fawn in the altar places of the holy.
Ho! you with the pedantic whiskers and the ossified serenity lurking
like a fog in your eye—there is no wisdom but youth. Ho! you with the
murk of maturity thick upon your tongue—will you shape morals? I will
unshape them. Will you rear dogmas? I will upset them. Will you burden
the world with your heavy sagacity? I will ignore it. Ho, you didactic
formulator, debauched with facts, man is born a butterfly and crawls to
his grave a worm. Man is born young and dies old. Man is born wise and
dies a fool. The ideas of youth are his wings. Do you see the lightning
maze of colors forever flashing over your head? It is youth.

Ah! old Ossifus, your erudition is but the husk of my spirit. And my
spirit is the shop-boy whistling on his way to work, joyous without
reason for you have proved him an economic slave, stunted and damned
forever to rot in chains. My spirit is the lover going to his
ruin-woman, and tumbling out of heaven with a laugh. Ho! ho! old
Petrifus, you have proved her the root of evil, the despoiler of
greatness, the velvet vandal of illusions, and yet and yet....

And he is the artist running wild in the china-closet of the past. Have
you anything sacred, old whiskers? Have you something labelled right and
something labelled wrong? Show it to him. He will do for it. He is the
eternal monster killing the dead.

There is no beauty but youth. There is no beauty in age. Ho! you
doddering banality with the superior tolerance in your stutter, you are
decomposing on your feet. Age is soiled. Age is dirty. Age drips with
the phlegm of life. Age is the unclean residue in the cup.

Ho!—there is no tomorrow.

Blessed are the young in heart for they shall be God.

“A. E. D.”

Henri and Manship

One grows weary of the quibbling, the petty running about in circles of
critics, would-be-critics, and students with the eyes of their teachers
disputing “techniques,” values, and standards in regard to paintings
that somehow seem to live outside any limits pedants have placed. Out
from the noise the voice of the artist arises with a strength and
clearness in words similar to the quality of his paintings. Writing in
the February _Craftsman_ of this year, telling of his work, his ideas,
and his “people,” Robert Henri has this to say:

“My love of mankind is individual. I am patriotic only about what I
admire, and my devotion to humanity burns as brightly for Europe as for
America. It flames up swiftly for Mexico if I am painting the peon
there; it warms towards the bull fighter of Spain if in spite of its
cruelty there is that element in his art which I find beautiful; it
intensifies before the Irish peasant whose love, poetry, simplicity, and
humor have enriched my existence just as completely as though these
people were of my own country and my own hearthstone. Everywhere I see
at times this beautiful expression of the dignity of life to which I
respond with a wish to preserve this beauty of humanity for my friends
to enjoy.... The Chinese American girl who has found coquetry in new
freedom; the peon, a symbol of a destroyed civilization in Mexico, and
the Indian who works as one in slavery and dreams as a man in still
places ... all their lives are in their expression, in their eyes, their
movements or they are not worth translating into art.”

He very simply tells what he feels about technique, which ought to quiet
the objection to his or any individual’s methods:

“Technique is merely a language, and as I grow older and see more and
more clearly I have but one intention and that is to make this language
as clear and simple and sincere as is humanly possible.... It is a
language of no value for its own sake.... It must be so translucent that
it can be forgotten, the value of the subject shining through it.”

A woman who sat for Henri last year for her portrait has this to say of
him in a recent letter:

“To me he is quite the most wonderful man among American artists; so
very big yet simple as a child; so very human yet utterly unconscious of
his humanity. He is much like Whitman only more tender, more subtle. To
Henri life is his art. That’s what makes him truly great. That’s what
made him go to the Ferrer School and awaken talent and even genius where
no one else would have seen anything to awaken. As a teacher Henri is
perhaps even greater than as a painter. I heard him explain things to
his class only twice, but I have never heard anything more fascinating
and vivid. His greatest worth, however, is his sense of freedom, his
fervent belief that only freedom can bring out the best in the
individual. He is really an anarchist though he does not label himself
one.”

And thus the exhibit of twenty-five paintings at the Art Institute takes
on a broader and more beautiful air. It becomes human and alive even
though the noise from the studios is confusing.

* * * * *

Paul Manship also has a room at the Art Institute: Greek, Assyrian,
Japanese, Chinese, Egyptian, Italian, Roman, Gothic, and what not; but
where, oh where, is Paul Manship—“foremost American sculptor”? The
incongruous and nerve-racking thing about the collection is that besides
merely exactly reproducing all the above mentioned periods and styles he
goes so far as to use two or three in one piece of work. The _Infant
Herakles: fountain and bowl_ is a terror of complications, with gothic
gargoyles as the high points of one’s discontent. The American Indian
(with the African animal skin and the Egyptian hair and Roman face) and
pronghorn antelope (Egyptian bronze of Alpine antelope) is the property
of the Art Institute, having been purchased by the “friends of American
Art”.... The conventionalized Roman busts with the Greek lettering were
so top-heavy in appearance that I grew quite dizzy....

I found relief in the sculptor of the Ancient Greeks,—peace in the
simplicity of a strange inspired beauty that intricate handling which
draws on past glories can never produce.

C. A. Z.

Fairy-Tale Mysticism

_Jerusalem, a Novel by Selma Lagerlöf_ (_Doubleday, Page & Co., New
York_).

Those Scandinavians! I have often wondered at the combination of grim
strength with childlike imaginativeness that we find in the artists of
those pale cold lands. In the winter, at twilight, I like to sit with
closed eyes and to relive old and new Norse sagas, the unbelievable
wonders told or sung or painted with the perfect earnestness of absorbed
children; I like to dream then to the accompaniment of the not-smiling
music of the sad child, Edward Grieg.

_Jerusalem_ is not a novel, not according to the terminology accepted
_heretofore_. For—may I reveal a secret _en passant_?—we are on the eve
of the publication of a novel by a Chicagoan who will revolutionize the
prevailing literary classifications. Another thing which is not! Selma
Lagerlöf is _not_ a mystic, some of her friends want us to believe; not
in the Maeterlinckian sense. The book is a series of tapestries to be
hung in an ideal children’s-room; a web of fairy-tales told in the
Scandinavian, unsmiling, earnest way. Mystic? Yes, as much as all
fairy-tales are mystic, as much as all not “clever” and “wonderful”
children are mystic. A mysticism which instead of lifting us up to the
clouds brings the clouds down to us; instead of lending us wings and
making us soar in imperceptible intangible regions, anthropomorphosizes
gods and spirits and drags them down to terra firma. So convincing! We
actually see the dead Ingmarssons gathered in a large farm house up in
heaven; we see their ruddy hard faces, sandy hair, white eyes; we hear
their slow, heavy, laconic talk. We are not surprised at meeting Christ
among the pines in the glow of the autumnal sunset. The opening of
heaven on a winter night before the eyes of the two Ingomars appears as
ordinary reality. We are in a world where everything is simple,
believable, possible. And you cannot smile; you are in an earnest
childlike atmosphere.

Those Scandinavians!

The Reader Critic

_UNWORTHY!_

_Rev. W. D. J., Riverside, Ill._:

I used to have great expectations for you. But, pardon the frankness of
one who has watched the careers of many writers in the past fifty years,
you are headed now either for _the lake or a padded cell_. God forbid
you reach either. Let an old man say that the only way to find life is
to lose it. Forget it and reach out a hand to the poor, the sick, the
suffering, and the sinning. Happiness comes only in forgetfulness of
self and ministering to others. It is never the result of a theory but
of action. I have seen so many wrecked on the reefs toward which you are
drifting that I am fain to call out and entreat you to find happiness
where alone it can be found, not in fleeing from the world or cursing it
but in thanking God you were born into a world where you can be of some
use to your fellows. Those lines of yours in the September issue might
have been written by a Heine, a Byron, or a Walt Whitman. But they are
unworthy of you. You were born to bless your fellows. Be true to your
vocation.

_AN EXAMPLE!_

_R. C. Smith, Chicago_:

Inspiration will never take the place of intelligence, nor enthusiasm
that of cerebration. Your magazine will die,—as a steam engine would
grow useless in which no direction toward any cylinder was given to the
indubitable forces generated in the boiler. For your pages are as a rule
careless, unconsidered, and inept. Let me give you an example:—

Mr. Huntley Carter, in your September number, wrote on “Poetry versus
Imagism.” I happen to consider his article an ill-digested congeries of
vague views; but other persons may feel differently about it. What,
however, can be the estimation in which every sane and intelligent and
decently responsible man will hold your magazine and Mr. Carter when he
has the effrontery to present to us such an example of ineptitude and
carelessness as this:—

“Browning ... 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 capitals are
mine.)

May I ask—must an enthusiasm for or against the new movements obliterate
all sense of accuracy, all love of clear and rational communication, all
fidelity to honest statement, and all interest in truth? Your Mr. Carter
and his extraordinary indifference to the workaday obligations of
literary criticism have considerably discouraged my interest in the new
forces. I can imagine Mr. Carter writing—“Since, as Nansen says, ‘The
natives of the polar regions are coal-black,’—(_I quote from memory_),
it must be hotter there than at the equator.”

You have printed many encomiums of your magazine: I shall watch with
curiosity to see if you print this.

_THE WEAKNESS OF REVOLT_

_Dr. Weil, New York_:

The spirit of revolt is compounded from many causes. Even in the average
young girl of whom Mr. Hecht writes in the August LITTLE REVIEW it
arises as much from her digestion as from her incomplete physical
functioning, as much from her work as from her leisure, as much from her
friends as from her freshness. Mr. Hecht would be the first to admit
that; would he be equally willing to admit that it meets death
variously?

He talks only of the family as the snuffer for the flame. This does not
mean that he excludes other causes, but it does mean that he has
overemphasized one.

It is true, as Mr. Hecht insists, that the American family tends to
quell revolt. The battle of the generations is as old as the race; the
family has always struggled to bring the rebel into line for its own
preservation. But that struggle in all its various shades of acuteness
has become a truism of modern thought, thanks to a multiplex modern
drama, a scientific sociology, and even the daily press. Why discuss the
subject only to dwell again heavily on the obvious?

The problem is far more complicated. The verdict of guilt against the
family grows monotonous when returned at every inquest. To place a
single responsible cause for any tremor to revolt that dies abortive is
to lack subtlety.

Along with each verdict against the family there is also a verdict
against the individual. One is not to blame if she is not a genius, but
if even her greatest emotions are somewhat lacking in poignancy, the
fluctuating spirit of restlessness in her never reaches the heights
which demand action.

Along with each verdict against the family there is also a verdict
against the quality of the revolutionary spirit. Not only are its causal
factors weak and fluctuating, but the very vagueness which to Mr. Hecht
constitutes its charm spells also its damnation. A spirit of
restlessness is, in itself, nothing about which one can go to the
hilltops and shout, and when it crystalizes in some particular issue,—a
book, a picture, a small individual right,—the object often seems too
trivial to struggle for. To be sure the principle is not a small thing,
but a principle is abstract and when it confronts a concrete bit of
suffering, it fades by contrast.

The sordid bread and butter difficulties to be faced by one standing
wholly alone, the scathing force of public opinion, the pain of others
which, when you love them, is pain to you,—these are realities which
only the truly big souls dare to face. For most of us the spirit of
revolt is too diffuse even to demand action, and for most of the rest
action is too divine a consummation to be compassed by our weak human
spirit. Not to any external cause really, but to an inherent lack in us,
is it due that we slowly grow complacent, instead of crusading worthily
in behalf of liberty.

_Alice Groff, Philadelphia_:

The most of you publishers are such unspeakable Kaisers of Kultur that
you treat the geniuses who make you what you are as insignificant
privates in a literary army, which you deploy; keeping them dangling
upon your critical pleasure, or blowing them to pieces because they do
not happen to walk the line _you_ mark out.

I suppose this is inevitable, however, in the present social order and
that there will never be free literary expression until there is
publishing organization on the part of the whole people for the benefit
of the whole people. May the universe speed the day of such
organization.

Have You Read—?

(_In this column will be given each month a list of current
magazine articles which, as an intelligent being, you will not
want to miss._)

Gaudier-Brzeska’s Art, by John Caurnos. _The Egoist_, September 1.

Havelock Ellis on Birth Control in _Physical Culture_ for September,
October, November.

The Literature of a Moral Republic, by H. L. Mencken. _The Smart Set_,
October.

The Undergraduate. _The New Republic_, September 25.

Can You Read—?

(_In this column will be given each month a resume of current
cant which, as an intelligent being, you may wish to be diverted
or angered or stimulated by._)

International Duty and Hyphenated Americans, by Theodore Roosevelt. _The
Metropolitan_, October.

In Memory of Lieutenant Rupert Brooke, by Joyce Kilmer. _The Bookman_,
September.

Llewellyn Jones on New Tendencies in the Arts, in any issue of _The
Chicago Evening Post Friday Review_.

THE EGOIST

An Individualist Review

Subscribe to THE EGOIST and hear what you will get:

Editorials containing the most notable creative and critical
philosophic matter appearing in England today.

Some of the newest and best experimental English and American
poetry.

A page of current French poetry.

Reviews of only those books which are worth praise.

News of modern music, of new painting, of French literary and
artistic life.

A series of translations of Greek and Latin poetry and prose,
done by young modern poets (began September 1st, 1915).

PUBLISHED MONTHLY

Price—Fifteen cents a number
Yearly subscription, One Dollar Sixty Cents

Buy some of the back numbers. They are literature, not
journalism.

OAKLEY HOUSE, BLOOMSBURY STREET, LONDON, W. C.

Sleep Outdoors All Winter with the
Hold-Heet Health Blanket

Reserve Force—health—virility of mind and body—clear eyes—brain
power—these are considerations, aren’t they? Keep them up to 100%
by cashing in on Nature’s richest offering—FRESH AIR.

The Hold-Heet Health Blanket solves the problem of outdoor winter
sleeping. Endorsed and used by over three thousand eminent
authorities, doctors, lawyers, bankers, business men. It makes
the modern fresh air bed room far more comfortable than the old
stuffy one and a thousand times more healthful.

Built the same and is, in many respects, like a regular blanket.
Specially wound, protected asbestos covered heating element
distributes an even degree of heat to every part of the blanket.
Connected with the nearest lamp socket—consumes about 1c worth of
current a night. Equipped with 3-heat control—cannot overheat.
Very light, soft and flexible and weighs less than half as much
as the ordinary comforter. Covered with a beautiful soft, navy
blue sateen. Complete in leatherette case. Delivered prepaid at
the following prices:—

Size 36×36 inches, 3-heat Special Infants’ $10.00
Size 36×72 inches, 3-heat Single Width 14.00
Size 54×72 inches, 3-heat Double Width 20.00

Obey that impulse—NOW. It’s the cheapest health insurance you can
buy. Every Hold-Heet Blanket is guaranteed for two years. They
last a life time. Send your order now—and get winter health and
comfort.

National Electric Company, Chicago, U. S. A.

A group is being formed for the study of Russian language.

A group is being formed for the study of Russian literature.

For information inquire at the

LITTLE REVIEW
834 Fine Arts Building

EMMA GOLDMAN

will lecture at

The Fine Arts Theatre

from Nov. 21 to Dec. 5

Subjects to be announced later. All information may be had at the
office of The Little Review, 834 Fine Arts Building, Chicago.

Tchai-na-ya

Russian Tea Room

Luncheons, Dinners
Afternoon Tea

116 S. Michigan Blvd.
R. 300, Lake View Bldg.

Russian Art Store

Peasant Handicraft
Linens, Laces
Antique Jewelry

730 Sheridan Rd.
M. R. POLAKOPF & SON

Statement of Ownership, Management,
Circulation, Etc., required by the Act of
August 24, 1912

of _THE LITTLE REVIEW_ published monthly at
_Chicago, Ill._ for _Oct. 1st, 1915_.

Editor, _Margaret C. Anderson, 834 Fine Arts
Building, Chicago_ Managing Editor, _Same_
Business Manager, _Same_ Publisher, _Same_

Owners: (If a corporation, give its name and
the names and addresses of stockholders holding
1 per cent or more of total amount of stock. If
not a corporation, give names and addresses of
individual owners.)

_Margaret C. Anderson_
_834 Fine Arts Building, Chicago_

Known bondholders, mortgagees, and other
security holders, holding 1 per cent or more of
total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other
securities: _None_

_MARGARET C. ANDERSON_,

Sworn to and subscribed before me this _23rd_
day of _Sept., 1915_.

_MITCHELL DAWSON, Notary Public._
(My commission expires _December 20, 1917_.)

THE DRAMA

for August Contained This Interesting Material

A LETTER CONCERNING AUGIER, by _Eugene Brieux_ 353
THE MARRIAGE OF OLYMPE, by _Emile Augier_ 358
EMILE AUGIER, by _Barrett Clark_ 440
PARSEE DRAMA, by _George Cecil_ 459
THE EVOLUTION OF THE ACTOR, by _Arthur Pollock_ 468
FRANK WEDEKIND, by _Frances Fay_ 479
DEPERSONALIZING THE INSTRUMENTS OF THE DRAMA, by _Huntley 495
Carter_
JAMES SHIRLEY, DRAMATIST, a review by _Charlton Andrews_ 506
PLAYING HAMLET AS SHAKESPEARE STAGED IT IN 1601, by _Charlotte 511
Porter_
CHIEF CONTEMPORARY DRAMATISTS, a review by _Alfred K. Eddy_ 527
THE SHAKESPEARE TERCENTENARY, _Percival Chubb_ 531
RECENT MAGAZINE ARTICLES ON THE DRAMA 537
A SELECTIVE LIST OF ESSAYS AND BOOKS ABOUT THE THEATRE AND OF 538
PLAYS published during the second quarter of 1915, compiled
by _Frank Chouteau Brown_

_The Drama_ for November will be a notable number. Rabindranath
Tagore will contribute an article on the stage that crystallizes
much of the present diverse generalization, especially in
discussions of stagecraft. Julius Brouta, perhaps the most
celebrated drama critic of Spain, will write of the work of
Benavente, a brilliant Spanish playwright of today. A puppet play
of Benavente, the popular _Los Interessos Creados_, will be
printed in its entirety. _The New Stage Art in its Relation to
Drama_ will be considered from a new point of view by Alice
Corbin Henderson. The articles begun in the present number,
_Playing Hamlet as Shakespeare Staged It in 1601_, by Charlotte
Porter, and _The Evolution of the Actor_, by Arthur Pollock, will
be concluded.

In November also will appear what promises to be one of the most
important pieces of dramatic poetry ever written in America,
Edwin Arlington Robinson’s _Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from
Stratford_. In beauty of verse, in poetic vision, and in its
appreciation of the fine human quality of Shakespeare the poem is
a leading feature of the Shakespeare Tercentenary Celebration.

_The Drama, a Quarterly_
_$3.00 per year_

_736 Marquette Building_
_Chicago_

THE
SEXUAL
QUESTION

Heretofore sold by subscription, only to physicians. Now offered
to the public. Written in plain terms. Former price $5.50. _Now
sent prepaid for $1.60._ This is the revised and enlarged
Marshall English translation. Send check, money order or stamps.

Ignorance Is the Great Curse!

Do you know, for instance, the scientific difference between love
and passion? Human life is full of hideous exhibits of
wretchedness due to ignorance of sexual normality.

Stupid, pernicious prudery long has blinded us to sexual truth.
Science was slow in entering this vital field. In recent years
commercialists eyeing profits have unloaded many unscientific and
dangerous sex books. Now the world’s great scientific minds are
dealing with this subject upon which human happiness often
depends. No longer is the subject tabooed among intelligent
people.

We take pleasure in offering to the American public, the work of
one of the world’s greatest authorities upon the question of
sexual life. He is August Forel, M.D., Ph.D., LL.D., of Zurich,
Switzerland. His book will open your eyes to yourself and explain
many mysteries. You will be better for this knowledge.

Every _professional man and woman_, those dealing with social,
medical, criminal, legal, religious and educational matters will
find this book of immediate value. Nurses, police officials,
heads of public institutions, writers, judges, clergymen and
teachers are urged to get this book at once.

The subject is treated from every point of view. The chapter on
“love and other irradiations of the sexual appetite” is a
profound exposition of sex emotions—Contraceptive means
discussed—Degeneracy exposed—A guide to all in domestic
relations—A great book by a great man.

GOTHAM BOOK SOCIETY, DEPT. 564.
_General dealers in books, sent on mail order._
142 W. 23d St., New York City.

In answering this advertisement mention THE LITTLE REVIEW.

DAVID HOCHSTEIN

Violin Recital

FINE ARTS THEATRE
410 S. Michigan Blvd.

SUNDAY AFTERNOON
December 5

Program to be Announced Later

Books to Rent and Sell

All the latest fiction available as soon as published at moderate
rental fee. Most efficient and satisfactory book renting service
in Chicago.

Those wishing to purchase new or second hand books are invited to
send us their want lists. Quotations submitted before purchases
are made. We can save you money. Send for catalog.

Venetian Library and Book Shop
215 VENETIAN BLDG.
15 E. WASHINGTON ST. CHICAGO
Opp. Marshall Field’s

FINE ARTS THEATRE

For TWO WEEKS, Beginning
January 17, 1916

TWO PRODUCTIONS
by
THE CHICAGO PLAYERS
with
MME. BORGNY HAMMER

EVENINGS
“AGNETE”
by
AMALIE SKRAM
(First Time in English)

SPECIAL MATINEES
“THERESE RAQUIN”
by
EMILE ZOLA

Prices 25c to $1.50

CLARENCE THOMAS
Manager
925 Fine Arts Building

FINE ARTS THEATRE

Gift Books

The Song of the Lark

By WILLA SIBERT CATHER

The story of a prima donna’s career. “A story of something better
than suggestiveness and charm—a thing finished, sound and
noble.”—_The Nation._

“A distinct improvement on her previous novels, ‘O Pioneers,’ and
‘Alexander’s Bridge.’”—_New York Herald._ $1.40 net.

David Penstephen

By RICHARD PRYCE

David is the most lovable of all the author’s creations, a boy
who grew to manhood under conditions that might have warped a
soul less noble. $1.35 net.

The Little Book of American Poets

Edited by JESSIE B. RITTENHOUSE

This book, a companion volume to “The Little Book of Modern
Verse,” gives a bird’s-eye view of the 19th century, beginning
with Philip Freneau and ending with the period of Madison Cawein,
Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey. 140 poets are represented and the
book includes 230 poems. Cloth, $1.25 net; limp leather, $1.75
net.

The Log of a Noncombatant

By HORACE GREEN

An absorbing narrative of the adventures and experiences of an
American correspondent and dispatch bearer who saw fighting both
with the Germans and Allies and who, as messenger for the
American Embassy at Berlin, had exceptional opportunities for a
glimpse behind the scenes in war-time Germany. Illustrated. $1.25
net.

The Greatest of Literary Problems

By JAMES PHINNEY BAXTER

This work meets a long-felt need for a complete presentation of
the Bacon-Shakespeare question, and will prove as useful to
students of Shakespeare as of Bacon. It presents an exhaustive
review of Shakespearean authors from Rowe to Lee, as well as a
bibliography covering all printed works upon the subject in
English, French, German, Spanish, Scandinavian, Italian, and
Russian, articles in periodical literature, and a wealth of
illustrations of great value to students and collectors.
Illustrated. 8vo. $5.00.

Red Wine of Roussillon

By WILLIAM LINDSEY

“A really good romantic drama, one of the best that has been
produced in a generation.... Compact and well made, developing
swiftly and logically a tragic love story of uncommon
interest.... Genuinely poetic.... A remarkable work, both in the
literary and dramatic sense.”—_The Nation._ $1.25 net.

Affirmations

By HAVELOCK ELLIS

A discussion of some of the fundamental questions of life and
morality as expressed in, or suggested by, literature. The
subjects of the first five studies are Nietzsche, Zola, Huysmans,
Casanova and St. Francis of Assisi. $1.75 net.

The New Poetry Series

This series aims to produce artistic and inexpensive editions of
representative contemporary verse.

The new volumes added this fall are:—

Stillwater Pastorals and Other Poems

By PAUL SHIVELL. With a Preface by BLISS PERRY.

The Cloister: A Verse Drama

By EMILE VERHAEREN.

Interflow

By GEOFFREY C. FABER.

Afternoons of April

By GRACE HAZARD CONKLING.

Each, boards, 75 cents net

4 Park St.
Boston

16 E. 40th St.
New York

Houghton Mifflin Co.

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. 4]:
... me from the golden toombs of youth, from the scarlet graves
of love, I will ...
... me from the golden tombs of youth, from the scarlet graves of
love, I will ...

[p. 10]:
... under the distinction of being a maniacle sensualist, a
libidinous ruffian, a ...
... under the distinction of being a maniacal sensualist, a
libidinous ruffian, a ...

[p. 14]:
... “Peddlars are not allowed on the grounds. He must have
sneaked in.” ...
... “Peddlers are not allowed on the grounds. He must have
sneaked in.” ...

[p. 22]:
... my countrymen the value to them of Memoiren einer Idealisten. ...
... my countrymen the value to them of Memoiren einer Idealistin. ...

[p. 27]:
... Grune Heinrich.... I have lived more intensely with Jean
Christophe ...
... Grüne Heinrich.... I have lived more intensely with Jean
Christophe ...

[p. 34]:
... faced a Herculian task. The government was confronted with a
double ...
... faced a Herculean task. The government was confronted with a
double ...

[p. 37]:
... the verdict over the imbecile Czar and will cleanse the
Aagean ...
... the verdict over the imbecile Czar and will cleanse the
Augean ...

*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Little Review, October 1915 (Vol. 2, No. 7)" ***

Home