The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Little Review, November 1914 (Vol. 1, No. 8), Ed. Margaret C. Anderson

Hauptmann and Rolland have quarreled about the war, Hæckel has repudiated his English honorary degrees, and now Thomas Hardy has placed on Nietzsche the responsibility for the destruction of the cathedral of Rheims. The tragedy of nationalism, it seems, is not content with ruining lives and art; it must also vitiate philosophy and culture.

“Nietzsche and his followers, Treitschke, Von Bernhardi, and others,” writes Hardy. In the next sentence he speaks of “off-hand assumptions.” One is tempted to write, “Christ and his followers, Czar Nicholas, Kaiser Wilhelm, and others!”

Nietzsche has been claimed as a prophet by hereditary aristocrats, by anarchists, by socialists, by artists, and by militarists. There is even a book to prove that he who called himself “the Antichrist” was a supporter of the Catholic Church. One suspects, however, that the Jesuit who wrote it had a subtle sense of truth.

The most fundamental truth about Nietzsche is that the torrent of his inspiration is open to everyone who can drink of it. His value, his quality, consist not in the fact that he said this or that, but that life in him was strong and beautiful. This is true of all prophets; how much more so, then, of the one who threw to the winds all stiffness of orthodoxy and insisted on a transvaluation of all values! “O my soul, to thy domain gave I all wisdom to drink, all new wines, and also all immemorially old strong wines of wisdom,” said Zarathustra.

But even in his teachings we can find no justification of the present shame of Europe. It was Darwin who laid the foundation for the philosophy of the survival of the fittest and the struggle for existence. With the shallow inferences from these conceptions Nietzsche had no patience. If the fittest survives, the fittest is not necessarily the best. The brute force which makes for survival had no attraction for Nietzsche. He called upon man’s will to make itself the deciding factor in the struggle. When he argued for strength, he argued for the strength of the beautiful and noble, not strength for its own sake. Of what avail is a great individual to the world if he makes himself weak and sacrifices himself to an inferior enemy? The French gunners who defended the Cathedral of Rheims might justly claim the approval of Nietzsche. If the Allies had turned the other cheek and allowed their countries to be overrun by German militarism, they would then have proved themselves Christian and truly anti-Nietzschean.

Moreover, Nietzsche uncompromisingly opposed the supremacy of mere numbers, the supremacy of non-spiritual values. He argued after the war of 1870 that the victory of Prussian arms endangered rather than helped Prussian culture. Culture is a thing of the spirit; it was undermined by the tide of smug satisfaction in the triumph of militarism.

“You say that a good cause will even justify war; I tell you that it is the good war that justifies all causes,” wrote Nietzsche. It is the logic of the newspaper paragrapher which makes this statement a justification of militarism. The good war—what is that? It is the quality of heroism, the unreckoning love of beauty, the pride of the soul in its own strength and purity. It is the opponent of mere contentment and sluggishness. It is the militant virtue which has inspired great souls since the beginning of the world; it is the hope of future man. If a cause is not justified by the good war what can be said for it? It is a pathetic absurdity to think that Nietzsche would have found the good war in the present struggle for territory and commercial supremacy. No, gentlemen of letters, fight the Kaiser if you must, but do not aim your clods at the prophets in your hasty partisanship!

For it is in this very Nietzsche and his good war that mankind will now find its spirit of hope. We who see that wars of gunpowder are evil, we who intend to abolish them, cannot do so by denying our own strength and appealing helplessly to some external power in the sky. We must say with Zarathustra,

“How could I endure to be a man, if man were not also the composer, the riddle-reader, and the redeemer of chance!

“To redeem what is past, and to transform every ‘It was’ into ‘Thus would I have it!’ that only do I call redemption!

“Will—so is the emancipator and joy-bringer called: thus have I taught you, my friends!”

Along with the many other regrets over the ravages of war is the sorrow for the destruction of property. As usual, those who have nothing to lose join in the general lamentation. There is enough to mourn about in the great European Holocaust without conjuring up imaginary woes. So far as the vast majority of people is concerned, the destruction of property is not an evil but a good.

The lands and houses, the goods and merchandise and money of the world are owned by a very few. All the rest in some way serve that few for so much as the law of life and trade permit them to exact. At the best, this is but a small share of the whole. All the property destroyed by war belongs to the owners of the earth; it is for them that wars are fought, and it is they who pay the bills. When the war is over, the property must be re-created. This, the working men will do. In this re-building, they will work for wages. Then, as now, the rate of wages will be fixed by the law of demand and supply—the demand and supply of those who toil. The war will create more work and less workmen. Therefore labor can and will get a greater share of its production than it could command if there was less work and more workmen. The wages must be paid from the land and money and other property left when the war is done. This will still be in the hands of the few, and these few will be compelled to give up a greater share. The destruction of property, together with its re-creation means only a re-distribution of wealth—a re-distribution in which the poor get a greater share. It is one way to bring about something like equality of property—a cruel, wasteful, and imperfect way, but still a way. That the equality will not last does not matter, for in the period of re-construction the workman will get a larger share and will live a larger life.

As the war goes on, the funds for paying bills will be met in the old way by selling bonds. These too will be paid by the owners of the earth. True, the property from which the payment comes must be produced by toil, but if the bonds that must be paid from the fruits of labor had never been issued this surplus would not have gone to labor, but would have been absorbed by capital. This is true for the simple reason that the return to labor is not fixed by the amount of production, the rate of taxation, the price of interest and rents, but by the supply and demand of labor, and nothing else.

If labor shall sometime be wise enough, or rather instinctive enough to claim all that it produces, it will at the same time have the instinct or wisdom to leave the rulers’ bonds unpaid.

But all of this is far, far away; in determining immediate effects we must consider what is, not what should be. And the jobless and propertyless can only look upon the destruction of property as giving them more work and a larger share of the product of their labor. Chicago was never so prosperous, or wages so high, as when her people were re-building it from the ashes of a general conflagration. San Francisco found the same distribution of property amongst its workmen after the earthquake and the fire had laid it waste, and her people were called upon to build it up anew.

Carlyle records that during the long days of destruction in the French Revolution the people were more prosperous and happy than they had ever been before. True, the Guilotin was doing its deadly work day after day, but its victims were very few. The people got used to the guilotin, and heeded it no more than does the crowd heed a hanging in our county jail, when they gayly pass in their machines.

After the first shock was over, during the four years of our Civil War, wages were higher, men were better employed, production greater, and distribution more equal than it had been at any time excepting in the extreme youth of the Republic. Then land was free.

Then again, this world has little to destroy. After centuries of so-called civilization, the human race has not accumulated enough to last a year should all stop work. The world lives, and always has lived, from hand to mouth. This is not because of any trouble in producing wealth, but because things are made not to use, but to sell. And the wages of the great mass of men does not permit them to buy or own more than they consume from day to day.

It is for this reason that half the people do not really work; that the market for labor is fitful and uncertain, and never great enough; and that all are poor. After a devastation like a great war, the need of re-creating will turn the idle and the shirkers into workmen, because the rewards will be greater. This will easily and rapidly produce more than ever before. From this activity, invention will contrive new machines to compete with men, going once more around the same old circle, until the world finds out that machines should be used to satisfy human wants and not to build up profits for the favored few.

One may often regret the impulses that bring destruction of property, but before any one mourns over the destruction of property, purely because of its destruction, he should ask whose property it is.

CHARACTERS

SCENE

(The “best” parlor of the Ransomes’ house, in a cheap district of Brooklyn. There is a profusion of pictures, ornaments, and miscellaneous furniture. A gilded radiator stands in front of the fireplace. Table, center, on which are some boxes and silver-plated articles arranged for display. Over the door hangs a horseshoe. White flowers and festoons indicate that the room has been prepared for a wedding. To the left is a sofa, upon which lies the body of a dead man, his face covered with a handkerchief. There is a small packing-case at his side, upon which stand two lighted candles, a medicine bottle, and a tumbler. The blinds are drawn.)

AT RISE

(Janet, dressed in a white semi-bridal costume, is on her knees at the side of the couch, quietly weeping. After a few moments the door opens, admitting a pale flood of sunshine. The murmur of conversation in the passage without is heard. Mrs. Ransome enters. She is an intelligent, comfortable-looking middle-aged woman. She wears an elaborate dress of light gray, of a fashion of some years previous, evidently kept for special occasions. She is somewhat hysterical in manner and punctuates her conversation with sniffles.)

Mrs. Ransome. My dear child, now do stop cryin’. Won’t you stop cryin’? Your Aunt Maud’s just come, and wants to know if she can see you.

(Mrs. Ransome goes to door and holds a whispered conversation with somebody outside. She then returns, closing the door behind her, and sits on chair close to Janet.)

Mrs. Ransome. She’s goin’ to wait for your father. He’s almost crazy with worry. All I can say is—thank God it was to have bin a private wedding. If we’d had a lot of people here, I don’t know what I should have done. Now, quit yer cryin’, Janet. I’m sure we’re doin’ all we can for you, dear. (Janet continues to weep softly.) Come, dear, try and bear up. Try and stop cryin’. Your eyes are all red, dear, and the minister’ll be here in a minute.

Janet. I don’t want to see him, mother. Can’t you see I don’t want to see nobody?

Mrs. Ransome. I know, my dear. We tried to stop him comin’, but he says to your father, he says, “If I can’t come to her weddin’, it’s my duty to try to comfort your daughter”; and that certainly is a fine thing for him to do, for a man in his position, too. And yer father—he feels it as much as you do, what with the trouble he’s been to in buying all that furniture for you and him, and one thing and another. He says that Bob must have had a weak heart, an’ it’s some consolation he was took before the weddin’ and not after, when you might have had a lot of children to look after. An’ he’s right, too.

Mrs. Ransome (Puts her arms around Janet and bursts into sobs). There—you’re cryin’ yer eyes out. There—there—you’ve still got your old mother—there—there—just like when you was a baby—there—

Janet. Didn’t you never guess why we was goin’ to get married—sort of all of a sudden?

Mrs. Ransome. All of a sudden? Why, I never thought of it. (Alarmed.) There wasn’t nuthin’ wrong between you and him, was there? (Janet weeps afresh.) Answer me. There wasn’t nuthin’ wrong between you and him, was there?

Mrs. Ransome. D’ye understand what it means? What are we goin’ to do about it?

Janet (Through her tears). I can’t help it. I’m glad it happened. An’ if I lived all over again, I’d want it to happen again.

Mrs. Ransome. You’d want it to happen? Don’t you see what this means? Don’t you see that if this gets out you’ll be disgraced ’till your dying day?

Mrs. Ransome. Don’t keep on sayin’ you’re glad. Glad, indeed! Have you thought of the shame and disgrace this’ll bring on me an’ your father? An’ after we’ve saved and scraped these long years to bring you up respectable, an’ give you a good home. You’re glad, are you? You certainly got a lot to be glad about.

Janet. Can’t you understand, mother? We wasn’t thinking of you when it happened—and now it’s all I have.

Mrs. Ransome. Of course you wasn’t thinkin’ of us. Only of yourselves. That’s the way it is, nowadays. But me and your father is the ones that’s got to face it. We’re the ones that’s got to stand all the scandal and talk there’ll be about it. Just think what the family’ll say. Think what the neighbors’ll say. I don’t know what we done to have such a thing happen to us. (Mrs. Ransome breaks into a spell of exaggerated weeping, which ceases as the door-bell rings.) There! That’s the minister. God only knows what I’d better say to him. (Mrs. Ransome hurriedly attempts to tidy the room, knocking over a chair in her haste, pulls up the blinds half-way and returns to her chair. There is a knock at the door. Mrs. Ransome breaks into a prolonged howl.) Come in.

(Enter Rev. Mr. Tanner. He is a stout, pompous clergyman, with a rich, middle-class congregation and a few poorer members, amongst which latter he numbers the Ransomes. His general attitude is kind but patronizing; he displays none of the effusive desire to please which is his correct demeanor towards his richer congregants. The elder Ransomes regard him as their spiritual leader, and worship him along with God at a respectful distance.)

Tanner (He speaks in a hushed voice, glancing towards the kneeling figure of Janet). Bear up, Mrs. Ransome. Bear up, I beg of you! (Mrs. Ransome howls more vigorously; Tanner is embarrassed.) This is very distressing, Mrs. Ransome.

Mrs. Ransome (Between her sobs). It certainly is kind of you to come, Mr. Tanner, I’m sure. We didn’t expect to see you when my husband ’phoned you.

Mrs. Ransome. He’s gone to send some telegrams to Bob’s family, sir—his family. We’d planned to have a quiet wedding, sir, with only me and her father and aunt, and then we was goin’ to have the rest of the family in, this afternoon.

Mrs. Ransome. It’s fairly dazed us, Mr. Tanner. Comin’ on top of all the preparation we’ve bin makin’ for the past two weeks, too. An’ her father’s spent a pile o’ money on their new furniture an’ things.

Mrs. Ransome. No, sir, not a penny. That’s why it comes so hard on us just now, havin’ the expense of a funeral on top of what we’ve just spent for the weddin’.

Mrs. Ransome. Thank you, Mr. Tanner. It certainly is fine of you to say so. Everybody’s bin good to us, sir. She had all them presents given her—most of them was from my side of the family.

Mrs. Ransome. Not a soul, poor fellow. He came from up-state. That’s why my husband’s gone to send a telegram askin’ his father to come to the funeral.

Mrs. Ransome. I don’t think he’ll be more than half an hour. He’d like to see you, if you could wait that long, I know.

Tanner. Very well. I have an engagement later, but I can let that go if necessary.

Mrs. Ransome. It certainly is a great comfort havin’ you here, Mr. Tanner. I feel so upset I don’t know what to say.

Tanner. Bear up, Mrs. Ransome. You are not the greatest sufferer. Let me say a few words to your daughter. (He rises, goes to Janet, and places his hand on her shoulder, but she takes no notice of him.) Miss Ransome, you must try to bear up, too. I know how hard it is, but you must remember it’s something that must come to all of us.

Mrs. Ransome. She takes it so bad, Mr. Tanner, that the Lord should have took him on their weddin’ mornin’.

Tanner (Returning to his chair). We must not question, Mrs. Ransome, we must not question. The Almighty has thought fit to gather him back to the fold, and we must submit to His will. In such moments as these we feel helpless. We feel the need of a Higher Being to cling to—to find consolation. Time is the great healer.

Mrs. Ransome. But to expect a weddin’ (Sobs) and find it’s a funeral—it’s awful; (Sobs) and besides—Mr. Tanner, you’ve always been good to us. We’re in other trouble, too. Worse—worse even than this.

Mrs. Ransome. No, sir. It’s—I don’t know how to say it. It’s her and him.

Mrs. Ransome. Yes, sir—I’m almost ashamed to tell you. She’s goin’ to have a baby.

Mrs. Ransome. Yes. (Sobs.) Oh, you don’t know how hard this is on us, Mr. Tanner. We’ve always bin respectable people, sir, as you well know. We’ve bin livin’ right here on this block these last ten years, an’ everybody knows us in the neighborhood. Her father don’t know about it yet. What he’ll say—God only knows.

Mrs. Ransome. I can forgive her, sir, but not him. They say we shouldn’t speak ill of the dead—but I always was opposed to her marryin’ him. I wanted her to marry a steady young fellow of her own religion, but I might as well have talked to the wall, for all the notice she took of me.

Tanner. It’s what we have to expect of the younger generation, Mrs. Ransome. Let me see—how long were they engaged?

Mrs. Ransome. Well, sir, I suppose on and off it’s bin about three years. He never could hold a job long, an’ me and her father said he couldn’t marry her—not with our consent—until he was earnin’ at least twenty dollars a week—an’ that was only right, considerin’ he’d have to support her.

Tanner. I quite agree with you. I’m sorry to see a thing of this sort happen—and right in my own congregation, too. I’ve expressed my views from the pulpit from time to time very strongly upon the subject, but nevertheless it doesn’t seem to make much difference in this neighborhood.

Mrs. Ransome. I know it’s a bad neighborhood in some ways, sir. But you got to remember they was going to get married, sir. If you’d bin here only an hour earlier, Mr. Tanner, there wouldn’t have bin no disgrace. (Points to official-looking book lying on table.) Why, sir—there’s the marriage register—Mr. Smith brought it down from church this morning—all waiting for you to fix it. If you’d only come earlier, sir, they’d have bin properly married, an’ there wouldn’t have bin a word said.

Tanner. That’s true. They might have avoided the immediate disgrace, perhaps. But you know as well as I do that that isn’t the way to get married. It isn’t so much a matter of disgrace. That means nothing. It’s the principle of the thing.

Mrs. Ransome (Eagerly). Oh, Mr. Tanner, do you mean it? Do you mean that the disgrace of it means nothin’?

Mrs. Ransome. An’ would you save her from the disgrace of it, if you could, Mr. Tanner, if it don’t mean nothin’?

Tanner. I’ll do anything I can to help you, within reason, Mrs. Ransome, but how can I save her?

Mrs. Ransome (Eagerly pleading). Mr. Tanner, if she has a child, as she expects, you know that respectable people won’t look at us any more. We’ll have to move away from here. We’ll be the laughing stock of the place. It’ll break her father’s heart, as sure as can be. But if you could fill in the marriage register as though they’d bin married, Mr. Tanner, why, nobody’s to know that it isn’t all respectable and proper. They had their license, and ring, and everything else, sir, as you know.

Tanner (Astounded). Me fill in the marriage register? Do you mean that you want me to make a fictitious entry in the marriage register?

Mrs. Ransome. It wouldn’t be so very fictitious, Mr. Tanner. They’d have bin married regular if you’d only come half an hour earlier. Couldn’t you fill it in that they was married before he died, sir?

Mrs. Ransome. It would be a good action, Mr. Tanner—indeed, it would. Her father an’ me haven’t done nothing to deserve it, but we’ll be blamed for it just the same. It wouldn’t take you a minute to write it in the register, Mr. Tanner. Look at all the years we’ve bin goin’ to your church, and never asked you a favor before.

Tanner. My good woman, I’m sorry; I’d like to help you, but I don’t see how I can. In the first place, don’t you see that you’re asking me to commit forgery? But what’s more important, you’re asking me to act against my own principles. I’ve been preaching sermons for years, and making a public stand too, against these hasty marriages that break up homes and lead to the divorce court—or worse. The church is trying to make marriage a thing sacred and apart, instead of the mockery it is in this country today. I sympathize with you. I know how hard it is. But for all I know, you may be asking me to help you thwart the will of God.

Tanner. Mind you, I don’t say that it is, Mrs. Ransome, but it may very well be the Hand of the Almighty. Your daughter and her young man, as she has confessed herself, have tried to use the marriage ceremony—a holy ceremony, mind you—to cover up what they’ve done.

Tanner. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt her feelings. I’m sorry I can’t help you. It wouldn’t be right.

Mrs. Ransome. But they was goin’ to get married, sir. You got to take that into consideration. My girl ain’t naturally bad. It isn’t as though she’d pick up any feller that happened to come along. Hundreds and thousands do it, sir, indeed they do, and most of them much worse than she and him, poor fellow.

Tanner. Yes, there you are right. Thousands do do it, and I’ve been making a stand against it in this neighborhood for years. I may seem hard, Mrs. Ransome, but I’m trying my best to be fair. I sincerely believe that no minister of the Gospel should ever legalize or condone—er—misconduct—that is, before marriage.

Mrs. Ransome (Pleading hard). You can’t know what this means to us, sir—or you’d pity us, indeed you would. Her father’ll take on somethin’ dreadful when he hears about it. He’ll turn her out of the house, sir, as sure as can be. You know him, sir. You know he’s too good a Christian to let her stay here after she’s disgraced us all. And then, what’s to become of her? She’ll lose her job, and who’ll give her another—without a reference—an’ a baby to support? That’s how they get started on the streets, sir (Sobs), an’ you know it as well as I do.

Tanner. Yes, I know. I wish I could help you. It’s very distressing—but we all have to do our duty as we see it. But I do pity you, indeed I do. From the bottom of my heart. I’ll do anything I can for you—within reason.

Mrs. Ransome (Almost hysterical, dragging Janet from the side of the body). Janet, Janet! Ask him yourself. Ask him on your bended knees. Ask him to save us! (Janet attempts to return to side of the body.) Janet, do you want to ruin us? Can’t you speak to him? Can’t you ask him? (Mrs. Ransome breaks into sobs.)

Tanner. Come, come. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I can’t tell you how sorry I am for you, and your parents, too.

Mrs. Ransome. Janet, don’t speak like that to him. You’re excited. (To Tanner). She don’t mean it, sir—she’s all worked up.

Janet (Her excitement increasing, and speaking in loud tones). All right, mother—I’ll tell him again—I don’t want none of his pity. I c’n get along without it. An’ if you and him think that writin’ a few words in his marriage register—or whatever he calls it—is going to make any difference, well—you’re welcome to.

Tanner. My dear girl. Don’t you understand, if it was merely a question of writing a few words, I’d do it in a minute. But it’s the principle of the thing.

Janet (Bitingly). Huh! Principle of the thing! I heard it all. You preached against it, didn’t yer? It’s a pity you never preached a sermon on how me and him could have gotten married two years ago, instead of waiting till now, when it’s too late.

Janet. We did wait. Isn’t three years long enough? D’ye think we was made of stone? How much longer d’ye think we could wait? We waited until we couldn’t hold out no longer. I only wish to God we hadn’t waited at all, instead of wastin’ all them years.

Janet. I do, an’ I mean it. We waited, an’ waited, an’ waited. Didn’t he try all he could to get a better job? ’Twasn’t his fault he couldn’t. We was planning to go West, or somewhere—where he’d have more of a chance—we was savin’ up for it on the quiet. An’ while we was waiting, we wanted one another—all day an’ all night. An’ what use was it? We held out till we couldn’t hold out no longer—an’ when we knew what was goin’ to happen, well—we had to get married—an’ that all there’s to it!

Tanner (Making a remarkable discovery, supporting all his personal theories on the subject). Ah! Then your idea was to marry simply because you were going to have a baby!

Janet. Of course it was. D’ye think we wanted to marry an’ live here on the fifteen a week he was getting? We’d have bin starvin’ in a month. But when this happened—we had to get married—starve or not. What else could we do?

Tanner. Well, I don’t know what to say. It seems to me that you should have thought of all this before. You knew what it would mean to have a baby.

Janet. D’ye think I wanted a baby? I didn’t want one. I didn’t know how to stop it. If you don’t like it—it’s a pity you don’t preach sermons on how to stop havin’ babies when they’re not wanted. There’d be some sense in that. That’d be more sense than talkin’ about waitin’—an’ waitin’—an’ waitin’. There’s hundreds of women round here—starvin’ and sufferin’—an’ havin’ one baby after another, and don’t know the first thing about how to stop it. ’Tisn’t my fault I’m going to have one. I didn’t want it.

Janet. I can’t help it. People may think it wrong, an’ all that, but it ain’t his fault and it ain’t mine. Don’t you think we used to get sick of goin’ to movies, an’ vaudeville shows, an’ all them other places—time after time? I wanted him to love me, an’ I ain’t ashamed of it, neither.

Mrs. Ransome. Janet, how dare you talk like that in front of Mr. Tanner? (To Tanner.) She don’t mean it, Mr. Tanner. She don’t know what she’s saying. I’ve always brought her up to be innercent about things. She must have got all this from the other girls at the store where she works. She didn’t get it in her home, that’s sure.

Janet. No, that I didn’t. Nor nothing else, neither. You was always ashamed to tell me about anything, so I found out about things from other girls, like the rest of ’em do. I’ve known it for years and years, an’ all the while I suppose you’ve bin thinkin’ I didn’t know anything, I’ve known everything—all except what’d be useful to me. If I’m going to have a baby it’s your fault, mother, as much as anybody. You only had one yourself—but you never told me nothin’.

Tanner. Miss Ransome, this is not a subject I ordinarily discuss, but since you know what you do know, let me tell you that there is nothing worse than trying to interfere with the workings of nature, or—if I may say so—of God.

Janet. Well, Bob said the rich people do it. He said they must know how to do it, because they never have more’n two or three children in a family; but you’ve only got to walk on the next block—where it’s all tenements—to see ten and twelve in every family, because the workin’ people don’t know any better. But I don’t want no pity from anybody. I can take a chance on it. I got a pair of hands, an’ I c’n take care of myself.

Tanner. Mrs. Ransome, it’s no good my talking to your daughter while she’s in this frame of mind. She appears to have most extraordinary views. Mind you, I don’t blame you for it. She seems to be an intelligent girl. There’d be some hope for her if she’d show a little penitence—a little regret for what’s been done and can’t be undone. You know I don’t like preaching out of church, but you’ve often heard me say in the pulpit that God is always willing to forgive the humble and the penitent.

Janet (With fine scorn). “God” indeed. Don’t make me laugh. (Points to body of Bob.) Look at him lyin’ there. God? What’s God got to do with it? (She kneels again at the side of the couch, rigid and silent. After an uncomfortable interval, Tanner rises.)

Tanner. Well, I’m afraid I must be going. I feel very pained by what your daughter has said, Mrs. Ransome. You know I have a deep regard for you and your husband. I’m frank to say that if your daughter had shown some signs of penitence—some remorse for what has happened—I might even have gone so far as to have made the entry in the register—seeing the punishment she’s already had. But as she is now, I don’t see what good it would do. Really I don’t, so I think I’d better go.

Mrs. Ransome (Appealingly). Oh, don’t go, Mr. Tanner. Wait just a minute while I talk to her, please. Janet, can’t you say you’re sorry for what you done? Can’t you see that Mr. Tanner only wants to be fair with you? Come, do it for our sakes—your father and me. You know how hard he’s worked, how he’s keep teetotal an’ everything. You don’t want to ruin us, do you? Can’t you see it isn’t only yourself that’s got to be considered? Think of what we’ve done for you. Tell him you’re sorry for it, do!

Tanner (Rising). It’s no use, Mrs. Ransome. I can see it’s of no use. I really must go.

Mrs. Ransome. Just one minute more. Please wait one minute more. Janet, what’s the matter with you? Can’t you see the disgrace it’ll be to all of us? Can’t you see it will ruin us to our dying days? They’ll all laugh at us—an’ jeer at us. It’ll follow us around wherever we go. You know how the folk round here make fun of your father—because he keeps himself respectable—an’ saves his money. Do you want them to laugh at him? Do you want them to be laughin’ at you an’ talkin’ about you? Do you want them to be making fun of your baby—an’ calling it a bastard—an’ asking who it’s father was?

Mrs. Ransome. Yes, they would. An’ all the time he’s growin’ up, the other children in school’ll be tormentin’ him, and callin’ him names. Didn’t the same thing happen with Susan Bradley’s boy? Didn’t they have to go an’ live out in Jersey, cos she couldn’t stand it no longer? You know it as well as I do.

Mrs. Ransome. Of course he was always gettin’ sick—with all them devils makin’ fun of him—an’ makin’ his life a misery. Didn’t we used to see him goin’ down the block—with the tears runnin’ down his cheeks—an’ all of ’em yellin’ names after him. Just think of the baby you’re goin’ to have. D’ye want that to happen to your baby? D’ye want them to make its life a misery—same as the other one?

Mrs. Ransome. Of course they would. They’ll tease an’ torment it, just like the other—an’ when he’s old enough to understand—who’ll he blame for it? He’ll blame you for it. (Inspired) He’ll blame Bob for it—he’ll hate him for it. D’ye want your boy—Bob’s boy—to be hatin’ his own father? What’d Bob say? What’d he think of you—ruinin’ his baby’s life—an’ all just because you’re obstinate an’ won’t listen to reason. Can’t you see it? Just think—if you’d only say you was in the wrong—an’ do what Mr. Tanner asks you—he’d forgive you an’ make everything all right. Oh, Janet—can’t you see it? Ask him—beg him!

Mrs. Ransome. You know what I mean. Oh, Janet, it won’t take him a minute to write it. If he don’t, can’t you see it’ll ruin us all our lives?

Mrs. Ransome. Oh, Janet, this is your last chance. Tell him you’re sorry. (To Tanner, who has edged towards the door, and is about to leave.) Oh, Mr. Tanner, please don’t go. Just wait another minute.

Mrs. Ransome. Oh, sir! I can see she’s sorry. You won’t go back on your word, sir?

Janet (Unwillingly feigning remorse). Let me think a bit. Oh, Mr. Tanner, I suppose I’m in the wrong—if you say so. It didn’t seem to me to be wrong—that’s all I got to say. I hope you’ll forgive me. I’m sorry for the way I spoke—and what I done.

Tanner (Returning). My child, it’s not for me to forgive you. I knew I could appeal to something higher in you, if you’d only listen to me. Are you truly repentant—from the bottom of your heart?

Tanner. As I said to your mother just now, I don’t like preaching sermons, but I hope this has taught you that there can be no justification for our moments of passion and wilfulness. We must all try to humble our pride and our spirit. I won’t go back on my word, but when you start out afresh you must try to wipe out the past by living for the future.

Tanner. And now, Mrs. Ransome, I suppose I’ll have to make the entry as though it had happened an hour or so ago. I know I may seem soft-hearted about it. But I feel I am doing my duty. This may save your daughter from a life of degradation. I think the end justifies the means. But first, let me ask you, who knows that the ceremony wasn’t performed before he died?

Tanner. Well, you understand this is a very serious thing for me to do. If it becomes public I shall be faced with a very unpleasant situation.

Mrs. Ransome. Oh, I promise you, Mr. Tanner, not a soul will know of it. We’ll take our dyin’ oaths, sir, all of us.

Tanner. All right. But first let me lend your daughter this prayer-book. (Takes prayer-book out of pocket; addressing Janet.) Here’s a prayer-book, Miss Ransome. I’ll go with your mother now into the back-parlor, and meanwhile I want you to read over this prayer. Try to seek its inner meeting. Come, Mrs. Ransome, you can carry the register, and we’ll come back later and discuss the funeral arrangements.

Mrs. Ransome (Takes the marriage register). Oh, Mr. Tanner, I don’t know how to thank you.

Tanner. Well, Mrs. Ransome—I shall expect your husband to send us something for our new mission to spread Christianity amongst the Chinese.

(Exit Tanner and Mrs. Ransome. Janet closes the door. She walks towards the couch, looks at the prayer-book, then at the couch. She flings the prayer-book to the other end of the room, smashing some of the ornaments on the mantle-shelf, and throws herself upon the side of the couch, sobbing wildly.)

In a world where flippancies arrange an effective concealment of beauty there are still major adventures in beauty to be had beneath the grinning surface. One of them is the discovery of those rare persons to whom flippancies are impossible—those splendid persons who take life simply and greatly. Several months ago I tried to write an impression of Emma Goldman, from an inadequate background of having merely heard two of her lectures. Since then I have met her. One realizes dimly that such spirits live somewhere in the world: history and legend and poetry have proclaimed them, and at times we hear of their passing; but to meet one on its valiant journey is like being whirled to some far planet and discovering strange new glories.

Emma Goldman is one of the world’s great people; therefore, it is not surprising to find her among the despised and rejected. Of course she is as different from the popular conception of her as anyone could be. The first thing you feel in meeting her is that indefinable something which all great and true people have in common—a quality which seems to proceed on some a priori principle that anything one feels deeply is sublime. Then a sense of her great humanity sweeps upon you, and the nobility of the idealist who wrenches her integrity from the grimest depths. A terrible sadness is in her face—as though the suffering of centuries had concentrated there in some deep personal struggle; and through it shines that capacity for joy which becomes colossal in its intensity and tragic in its disappointments. But the thing which takes your heart in a grip, and thrusts you quickly into the position of the small boy who longs to die for the object of his worship, is that imperative gift of motherhood which is hers and which spends itself with such utter prodigality upon all those who come to her for inspiration. Emma Goldman has ministered to every kind of human being from convicts to society women. She has no more idea of conservation than a lavish springtime; and where she draws courage and endurance and inspiration for it all will remain one of those mysteries which only the artist can explain. A mountain-top figure, calm, vast, dynamic, awful in its loneliness, exalted in its tragedy—this is Emma Goldman, “the daughter of the dream,” as William Marion Reedy called her in an appreciation written several years ago. “A dream, you say?” he asked, after sketching her gospel. “Yes; but life is death without the dream.” In that rich book of Alexander Berkman’s, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, she is given a better name. “I have always called you the Immutable,” is the way the author closes one of his letters to her. And this is the quality which distinguishes Emma Goldman—a kind of eternal staunchness in which one may put his fundamental trust.

This is the woman America has hated and persecuted, thrown into jail, deprived of her citizenship, and held up as an example of all that is ignorant, coarse, and base. America will recognize its failure some day, after the brave spirit has done its work—after the spasm of the new war has ushered in quite simply some of the changes which Emma Goldman has been pleading for during her years of fighting. But it takes education to produce such awakenings, and there is no immediate hope of such a general enlightenment. The stupidity of the situation regarding Emma Goldman is that other prophets have raised their spears to the same heights and have been misunderstood or ignored but not outraged by the peculiar ignorance which Americans alone seem capable of. Had Ibsen appeared among us to lecture on the rightness of Nora’s rebellion or to denounce the pillars of society as he did in his writing, he, too, would have been thrown into prison for free speech or accused of a president’s assassination. The cruelty of the situation regarding Emma Goldman is that she has so much work to do which so many people need, and that she cannot break through the prejudice and the superstition surrounding her to get at those dulled ones who need it most. Ten years ago she was preaching, under the most absurd persecution, ideas which thinking people accept as a matter of course today. Now the ignorant public still shudders at her name; the “intellectuals”—especially those of the Greenwich Village radical type—dismiss her casually as a sort of good Christian—one not to be taken too seriously: there are so many more daring revolutionists among their own ranks that they can’t understand why Emma Goldman should make such a stir and get all the credit; the Socialists concede her a personality and condone her failure to attach herself to that line of evolutionary progress which is sure to establish itself. “Unscientific” is their damning judgment of her; her Anarchism is a metaphysical hodge-podge, the outburst of an artistic rather than a scientific temperament. And so they all miss the real issue, namely, that the chief business of the prophet is to usher in those new times which often appear in direct opposition to scientific prediction, and—this above all!—that life in her has a great grandeur.

How do such grotesque misconceptions arise? Why should it have happened that all this misapprehension and ignorance should have grown up about a personality whose mere presence is a benediction and whose friendship compels you toward high goals you had thought unattainable? There is no use asking how or why it happened; it is a perfectly consistent thing to have happened, for it happens to everyone, in greater or less degree, who strives for a new ideal. But if I could only get hold of all the people who are unwilling to understand Emma Goldman and force them to listen to her for an hour:—what a sweet triumph comes with their “Oh, but she’s wonderful!”

And now about her ideas. If you have read Wilde’s Soul of Man Under Socialism you know the essence of Emma Goldman’s Anarchism. What is there about it to cause an epidemic of terror? It is merely the highest ideal of human conduct that has ever been evolved. Well, it is possible to get even the prejudiced to admit this much. Nearly everyone can see that government in its essence is tyranny; that one human being’s authority over another is a degrading thing; that no man should have the power to force his neighbor into a dungeon on the flimsy pretext that punishment is a prevention and a protection; that no man should dare to take the life of another man, on any basis whatever; that crime is really misdirected energy and “criminal types” usually sick people who should be treated as such; that “abnormal” people are those who have not found their work; that people who work should have some share of their production; that the holding of property is a source of many evils; that possessiveness and “bargaining” are mean qualities; that co-operation and sharing are splendid ones; that there should be an equality between giving and taking; that nothing worth while was ever born outside of freedom; and that men might live together on this basis more effectively than on the present one. Even your “reasonable” man will grant you this premise; but then he plays his trump card: It may all be very beautiful—of course it is; but it can never happen! Oscar Wilde answered him in this way: “Is this Utopian? A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias.”

Emma Goldman believes this. She does not belong with the rank and file of Anarchists. Cults and “isms” are too restrictive for her. “But you are an extreme Individualist,” the Socialists tell her. “No, I am not,” she answers them. “I hate your rigid Anglo-Saxon individualism. It is just because I am so deeply social that I put my hope in the individual.” It is because she hates injustice of any sort so passionately that she adopted Anarchism as the soundest method of combating it. If you have laws you must accept the abuses of law. Why not be more completely simple—why keep on pretending that we need a machinery which fosters tyrannies instead of giving freedom an unhandicapped path to begin upon its great responsibilities? This was the idealism upon which the American founders built—a minimum of government, at least, when that evil seemed to become a necessity. In her remarkable book that has just been published, Voltarine de Cleyre discusses this phase of the matter brilliantly in a chapter called “Anarchism and American Traditions.” There is no possibility of going into it minutely here, except to ask those who insist upon regarding Anarchism as an unconstructive force to read it.

These are the things Emma Goldman is trying to preach. She does not expect to see a new order spring up in response to her vision; so the facetious ones who poke their stale jokes at the unspeakable humor of a communistic society might save their wit for more legitimate provocations. All she hopes is to quicken the consciousness of those through whom such changes will come—to improve the individual quality. It reminds you of Comte’s suggestion, at the time when he fell deliriously in love, that all the problems of society could be solved on that divine principle. It is like Tolstoy’s dream prophecy—his prediction of the time when there will be neither monogamy nor polygamy, but simply a poetogamy under which people may live freely and beautifully.

And so Emma Goldman continues her work, talking passionately to crowds of people, sickened by audiences who listen merely out of curiosity, disheartened by the vapid applause of those who make their own incapacities the burden of their rebellion, heartbroken by the masses who cannot respond to any ideal, cheered by the few who understand, dedicated to an eternal hope of new values. This is the real Emma Goldman—a visionist, if you will, but at the same time a woman with a deep faith in the superiority of reality to imagination. How she has lived life! How gallantly she makes the big out of the little and accepts without complaining the perverted role which has been thrust at her. To have seen her in her home with its hundreds of books and its charming old pictures of Ibsen and Tolstoy and Nietzsche and Kropotkin; to have seen her friends, her nephews and nieces offering her their high adoration; to have watched her gigantic tenderness, her gorgeous flinging away of self on every possible pretext; to have listened with her to great music in a kind of cosmic hush that music is made by and for such spirits; to have heard her, “the crucified,” talk of the ideal she cherishes and how her expression of it has been so far below her dream; to have compared her, an artist in life, as incapable of spiritual vulgarity as a Rodin or a Beethoven, with a sensitiveness which makes her almost fear beauty, with a sweetness that is overwhelming—to compare her with the vulgarians who denounce her is to fall into a mad rage and long to insult them desperately. I said before that Emma Goldman was the most challenging spirit in America. But she is so much more than that: she is many wonderful things which this article merely touches upon, because it is impossible to express them all.

Expressions of a Child’s Face

Emotions

III

To ——

To Handpainted Chinaware

Study of a Face

An Old Man Humming a Song

The spiritual dangers that beset a struggling poet are almost as numerous as his creditors, and quite as rampant. And woe unto him who falls a prey to any one of them! For poetry, being the immediate reflection of the spiritual life of its author, degenerates more quickly than almost any other form of human expression when this inner life goes astray.

There is first of all the danger of sentimentality, an ever-present, sticky danger that awaits patiently and imperturbably and has to be met afresh every day. True, if the poet yields to this danger and embraces it skillfully enough, the creditors aforementioned may sometimes be paid and much adulation acquired into the bargain—witness Ella Wheeler Wilcox—but it is at the price of artistic death.

There is the danger of giving the emotions too free rein, of producing, as Arthur Davison Ficke has said in a former number of The Little Review, merely “an inarticulate cry of emotion” which moves us like “the crying of a child.” Much of our sex poetry is of this type. On the other hand, there is the equally present danger of becoming over-intellectualized—of drying up and blowing away before the wind of human vitality. Edmund Clarence Stedman went that way. Then there is the danger of determined modernity, of resolutely setting out to be “vital” at all costs and crystallizing into mere frozen impetuosity, as Louis Untermeyer has done—and the other danger of dwelling professorially in the past with John Myers O’Hara. There is too the new danger of “cosmicality,” of which John Alford amusingly accuses our American poets of to-day. And there are many, many other pitfalls that the unsuspecting poet must meet and bridge before he can hope to win to the heights of immortality.

But there seems to be a whole new set of dangers, especially virulent, that attend the writing of vers libre, free verse, polyrhythmics, or whatever else one may choose to call the free form so prevalent to-day. These dangers are inherent in the form itself and are directly traceable to it. For contrary to the general notion on the subject, it takes a better balanced intellect to write good vers libre than to write in the old verse forms. It is essentially an art for the sophisticated, and the tyro will do well to avoid it.

The first of these dangers, and the one in which all the others take root, is a very insidious peril, and few there be who escape it. It is the danger of being obvious.

In writing rhymed or even rhymeless poetry of a conventional rhythmical pattern the mind is constantly obliged to sift and sort the various images which present themselves—to test them, and turn them this way and that, as one does pieces in a mosaic, till they at last fit more or less perfectly into the pattern. This process, although it sometimes, owing to the physical formation of the language, distorts the poet’s meaning a little, has the great artistic advantage of eliminating many casual first associations, which on careful thought are found not worth saying. It is precisely this winnowing, weighing process which the form of free verse lacks. Anything that comes to mind can be said at once, and with a little instinct for rhythm, is said. The result of this mental laziness is that the ideas expressed are often obvious.

But here a curious phenomenon of the human mind comes into play. Just as a physically lazy man will often perform great mental exertions to avoid moving, so the mind will frequently go to quite as great lengths to find unusual methods of expression to conceal, even from itself, this laziness of first thinking. The result is the attempt to cover with words the fundamental paucity of the ideas.

There are several principal effects which may result from this. One is brutality. A conception which, if spoken simply, is at once recognized as trite, may if said brutally enough pass muster as surprising and “strong.” A crude illustration of this is to be found in the recent war poetry of “mangled forms” and “gushing entrails.” Ezra Pound furnishes the most perfect example. Another effect is the tendency to the grotesque. This device is more successful in deceiving the poet himself than the other, though it has less general appeal. For it is possible, by making a thing grotesque enough, to cover almost completely the underlying conception. Skipwith Cannéll runs this danger, along with lesser men. A third peril is that which besets some of the Imagistes—the danger of reducing the idea to a minimum and relying entirely on the sound and color of the words to carry the poem.

Still another result of the complete loosening of the reins possible in vers libre is the immediate enlargement of the ego. It is not so easy to see why this should result, but it almost invariably does, and has since the days of Whitman. It usually goes to-day with the effect of brutality. The universe divides itself at once into two portions, of which the poet is by far the greater half. “I”—“I”—“I” they say, and again “I”—“I”—“I.” And having said it they appear to be vastly relieved.

The next step is to lay about them gallantly at every person or tendency that has ever annoyed them. “I have been abused” they say, “I have been neglected! You intolerable Philistines, I will get back at you!” It is odd that it never seems to occur to these young men that they can only hit those persons who read them, and that every person who reads them is at least a prospective friend. Those who neglect them they can never reach—and slapping one’s friends is an unprofitable amusement.

Examples of these unfortunate spiritual results of abandoning oneself too recklessly to the free verse form are numerous. James Oppenheim’s latest volume, Songs for the New Age—although it is in many ways an excellent work and deserves endorsement by all who really belong to the new age and are not merely accidentally alive to-day—nevertheless shows in places the tendency to obviousness and slack work.

More flagrant examples are to be found elsewhere. Take for instance Orrick Johns. Here are some stanzas from his long poem, Second Avenue, which took the prize in Mitchell Kennerley’s Lyric Year:

The same Orrick Johns wrote this blatant bit of free verse in Poetry a few months later. Both the paucity of ideas and the enlarged ego are very well shown here:

But to see the tendencies of which we have spoken in their most exaggerated form it is necessary to go to Ezra Pound, the young self-expatriated American who wails because “that ass, my country, has not employed me.” His earlier work was clean-cut, sensitive poetry, some of it very beautiful. This for example:

This, from Blast, the new English quarterly, is the latest from the same hand. The capitals are his own. The contrast needs no comment:

To attempt to lay the entire onus of so flagrant a spiritual and cerebral degeneration to the writing of vers libre alone is of course impossible. But the tendency is clear. Fortunately, however, we are not all Ezra Pounds and there are still poets balanced enough to appreciate these dangers and to make of free verse the wonderful vehicle it can be in the hands of a genius.

(Translated from the original Bengali by Basanta Koomar Roy, author of “Rabindranath Tagore: The Poet and His Personality.”)

Beloved, every part of my being craves for the corresponding part of yours. My heart is heavy with its own restlessness, and it yearns to fall senseless on yours.

My eyes linger on your eyes, and my lips long to attain salvation by losing their existence on your lips.

The heart is deep in the ocean of being, and I sit by the forbidding shore and moan for ever.

But to-night, beloved, I shall enter the mysteries of existence with a bosom heaving with love supreme, and my entire being shall find its eternal union in thine.

Anarchism, denying the infinite principle of human evolution, suspends its impulse at the ideal threshold of universal peace, and before the stupid paradise of interlocked embraces in the open fields and midst the waving of palms.

We, the Futurists, on the contrary, affirm as one of our absolute principles the continuous growth and the unlimited physiological and intellectual progress of Man.

We aim beyond the hypothesis of the amicable fusion of the different races, and we admit the only possible hygiene of the World: War.

The distant goal of the anarchistic conception (a kind of sweet tenderness, sister to baseness) appears to us as an impure gangrene preluding the agony of the races.

The anarchists are satisfied in attacking the political, judicial, and economical branches of the social tree. We strive to do much more than that. We want to uproot and burn its very deepest roots; those that are planted in the brain of man, and are called:

The veneration for time, for accumulated years, for the dead, and for the dying.

Have you never seen an assemblage of young revolutionaries or anarchists?... Eh bien: there is no more discouraging spectacle.

You would observe that the urgent, immediate mania, in these red souls, is to deprive themselves quickly of their vehement independence, to give the government of their party to the oldest of their number; that is to say, to the greatest opportunist, to the most prudent, in a word, to the one who having already acquired a little force, and a little authority, will be fatally interested in conserving the present state of things, in calming violence, in opposing all desire for adventure, for risk, and heroism.

This new president, while guiding them in the general discussion with apparent equity, shall lead them like sheep to the fold of his personal interest.

Do you still believe seriously in the usefulness or desirability of conventions of revolutionary spirits?

Content yourself then, with choosing a director, or, better still, a leader of discussion. Choose for that post the youngest amongst you, the least known, the least important; only his role must never supersede the simple distribution of the word, with an absolute equality of time that he shall control, the watch in his hand.

But that which digs the deepest ditch between the futuristic and anarchistic conception, is the great problem of love, with its great tyranny of sentiment and lust, from which we want to extricate humanity.

There is a discovery, by no means pleasing or edifying, that the student makes as he broadly surveys the history of humanity. All the great turning-points of that history seem to be inwardly associated with violent upheavals and fearful revolutions. And of all these revolutions, it may be doubted whether history records any one on so large a scale as that which confronts us under the name of Christianity, in the transition from ancient to mediæval ecclesiastical culture. It was not a single Crucified One that gave Christianity the sacred symbol of its religion; unnumbered thousands—mostly slaves—breathed out their poor lives on martyrs’ crosses. The old culture went down in rivers of blood—not too figuratively meant—and a new arose, or, better, was created. Now, what is true of this most important revolution of our antecedent cultural life is true also, in corresponding measure, of every new “becoming” in the history of peoples. No state, no church, no social form, has ever arisen but that the path of the new life has passed over ruins and graves.

Must this be so? Must it be eternally so? Is it a thing of historical inevitability, is it even a law of the very order of the world itself? The answer—first answer, at all events—is, Yes! To affirm itself, to persist as life,—this belongs as nothing else does to life’s very nature. What newly arises negates what has already arisen. All that is living pronounces a sentence of death upon all that has been alive and that now sets itself against the new life. Accordingly, we are wont to call life a struggle for existence. Old Greeks coined a phrase, Polemos pater panton: war is the father of all things. The right to life is the right of the strong.

In view of these things, may we fairly raise the question as to whether there are exceptions to so universal a rule? Were we to set up a different right, would it not be the right of the weak? Would it not be to make the sick and the infirm masters over the well and the strong? Would it not be to preach a decadent morality as do all the pusillanimous and the hirelings who beg for the protection of their weakness because they do not have the strength to drive and force their way through life?

The man who, for a generation, has been called the prophet of a new culture, this Friedrich Nietzsche, is he not, then, precisely the apostle of this man of might and mastery, of ill-famed Herrnmoral, master’s morality, especially? Napoleon, his Messiah—do you think? Did he not gloat and glory over the time when the wild roving blonde Bestie was still alive in the old Germans? Did he not worship the beast of prey, memorialize the murderer, stigmatize the morality of Christianity as a crime against life, because of its saying, Blessed are the poor and the sick, the peaceable and the meek? If, now, the word of this new prophet should make disciples, should even revolutionize the times, should we close our churches and stop our preaching, as the first thing to be done? For the churches preach goodness and love, not might and dominion; see in man child of God, not beast of prey.

If all this were a partisan matter—for or against Nietzsche—I would have nothing to do with it. To join in the damnatory fulminations against this man, or to advertise mitigating circumstances for his thought, and to re-interpret the whole from such a standpoint, until the whole should seem less brutal and less dangerous—to do either the one or the other is not for me, but for those polemicists and irenicists who are adding to the gayety of nations in these otherwise heartbreaking times, by the high debate as to whether Nietzsche be both the efficient and the final cause of our present world war. Not to defend Nietzsche, not to condemn him, but to wrestle for a firm, clear, moral view of life in our seething times, this alone is most worth while, and this too is my task.

But for all that, I do believe we must penetrate much, much deeper into this new prophet’s spirit than either friend or foe has yet done, if we are to win from Nietzsche a deepening of our own and our time’s moral view of life.

Would that we might forget, for a moment at least, all that partisan praise and blame have scraped together respecting this most modern of all philosophers; would that we might accompany him into the most hidden workshop of his own thoughts and hearken to the personal confessions of his wonderful soul! And what would we hear there? This preacher of crash and catastrophe and cataclysm, temporal and eternal, speaking of “thoughts which come with dove’s feet and steer and pilot the world”; of “the stillest hours which bring the storm.” Zarathustra-Nietzsche hears the Höllenlärm, the hellish alarum, that men make in life, that life itself makes; he observes how men lend their ears to this noise, how they are frightened by it, or exult over it, how they think that the truth is the truer where the noise is the louder, how the howling of the storm signifies to men that something good and great must be taking place, some great event of history must be under way. Then Nietzsche sets himself like a flint against this evaluation of things: “The greatest experiences, these are not our noisiest, but our stillest hours. It is not around the inventor of new noise, it is around the inventor of new values that the world revolves, inaudibly revolves.” I speak for myself alone, but these are words, Nietzsche words, for which I would gladly sacrifice whole volumes of moral and theological works. These words sharpen the eye and the ear for life-values which the majority of men today pass by—pass by more heedlessly perhaps than ever. These great words supply us with a criterion for the evaluation of questions of the moral life, a criterion that no one will cast aside who once comes to see what it means. It is a criterion without which we do not yet comprehend life in its depths, because we so constantly contemplate things from a false angle of vision. Something of the men who are carried away by “hellish alarum” lives in all of us. Let there be stillness without, and we think that there is nothing going on. Let nature peal and groan outside there, so that all gigantic forces seem to be released; then we have respect for her, we discern in such over-power even a divine creative force or a divine destructive will. Let people collide, the earth quake from thunder of cannon, and we signalize such a day in our history, pass it down from child to child, and we call such and such a battle a world-historical event.

But we forget the best. A blustering and brewing pervades nature when Spring comes over the land to conquer Winter. When we hear the conflict we cry: “Spring has come!” Not so. The true, genuine Spring-life, nascent underneath the fury, makes no noise at all, weaves away inaudibly, invisibly, in tiny seeds, and conceals in itself the noiseless new germs of life.

Thomas Carlyle, though a trifle noisy himself at times, could finely write: “Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight of Life, which they are thenceforth to rule.” Wordsworth, not unmindful of

But the chief study of mankind is still man, not nature and the gods. Man’s silences! Yes, amid the smoke of powder and clink of swords, peoples slash each other; and the men who make such uproar the people call great. But the might and work of a people are to be found in that quiet heroism, of which no one can discern anything outwardly—that quiet heroism to which no one can unveil monuments in our cities. It is the inaudible battles of the heart that this heroism fights; and the quieter it is, the more gloriously it shines. Men with big voices and mighty lungs we hear. Their words excite, move to tears, arouse boisterous and voluble antagonisms. These who assemble about them such billowy mobs, we are tempted to think that they are the leading spirits, that a vast power must live in them, since they are so able to move inert men. But another prophet, modern also, has said to these bawlers in market places: “Do you think that he who stirs up scandal moves the world?” Nothing easier than to start a scandal! Also, nothing jollier for numerous men, to say nothing of women. But scandal is a roaring in the ears. It does not reach the heart. It irritates, over-irritates the nerves. It creates no blessings, no life. A tiny word that sinks down into the deep of the soul, and quietly does its work there of germinating and sprouting—this means infinitely more for the world than the “alarum” of all the professional and unprofessional bawlers. Deep rivers make least din. Light cares speak; mighty griefs are dumb. A heart must be profane indeed, in which there is nothing sacred to silence and the solemn sea. Once more, to quote Carlyle: “Under all speech that is good for anything lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as eternity; speech is shallow as time.”

It were well to begin at home, and learn to evaluate experience aright in our own being. There are moments in our lives when everything that we encounter disconcerts us; nay, when our whole being seems to be off the hinges, out of joint. Pain plows up our innermost selves. We could shriek from heartbreak and woe. We stand there undone. And men who see us and hear us moaning so piteously, groaning so painfully, have the feeling: “No pain like this!” But how mistaken they are! For there is a cry of the soul, heard of no one, more painful than all that can be pitied or lamented. There are labors and battles of the soul wherein nothing is hammered and driven, and yet something new is formed. It is never so still in a man as when he makes up his mind to have done inwardly with some experience. As long as there is foaming and blustering within, we accomplish nothing. True work tolerates no tempest. We must be still. And when old values are broken, when we must lead life to new goals, the quiet hour must come in which a divine child of the spirit is conceived by the holy spirit; and the brightest light which we can kindle within will burn so quietly and clearly that no cloud of smoke shall ascend therefrom, and there shall be no flickering to bear witness of contact with the restless world. “There the true Silence is, self-conscious and alone.”

Behold, then, this Nietzsche, who flees all “alarum” and execrates all din as a falsification of the moral values of life; who lives preferably thousands of feet above the world there below, who lingers on the loftiest lands of life whither no whirring rattle of the day could rise! Could this Nietzsche find joy in men mauling and making a mess of each other? Could this Nietzsche preach a culture in which battalions in uniform should line up against those in blouse to see who knew best how to deal the deadly blow? Could he gloat over the field where the thunder of battle thundered the loudest? “Inventor” Krupp’s “new noise”—would that appeal to Nietzsche who wanted all silent save the dripping rain, and who worshipped sunshine alone? One might answer these questions in the light of one’s own experience. Let us suppose that we comprehend the meaning of the stillsten Stunden, the quietest hours, and the worth of those great happenings of which nothing reaches the newspapers, and which no avant-coureur trumpets. Tell me, could we then detect even the slightest inclination to be our own heralds, and to sacrifice our quietest hours to the gaping and squabbling of men? Men—so the old gospels say—ought not to cast their pearls before swine, or give that which is holy to the dogs. But what is pearl, what is holy, if not what the Nietzschean still hour contains and produces? There is something so tender and beautiful in that hour that we shrink from expressing it, from translating it into thought, lest word and thought tincture its best perfume. Silence is sweeter than speech, more musical than song. Whoever has a deep in himself into which he alone descends and penetrates, a plus of his life that remains after we have known and weighed all his words and deeds, protects this deep and this plus from everything that could make a noise, from all mere words, from all intrusive and obtrusive tittle-tattle. Sich eine Oberfläche anheucheln, to feign a surface, to wear a mask, this is the original and fine insight into such psychology. Man envelops himself in unneighborliness, not to hold haughtily other men away from him, but to save himself from them, so that they may not clumsily finger some pearl which could not stand so rude a touch. Why speak in parables? Because it is not given unto them to know the mystery of the kingdom, said the Nazarene. Parables were a protecting shell encasing the most intimate kernel, which ignorance or awkwardness might otherwise corrupt or destroy. Nietzsche and the Nazarene held a deep and a plus so uniquely their own that they intentionally sought, not to be understood, but to be misunderstood, with reference thereto.

Yes, there is a “surface” which only the man knows and uses who bears about a deep in his own being. There, hypocrisy becomes a protection of truthfulness; surface a protection of depth. Whoever “feigns such surface,” wears such mask, is infinitely more honest and veracious than he who has no silence in his deep which cannot be speech on his tongue—a speech which is often only motions and noises of the tongue of him who pries curiously into what he is inwardly incompetent to understand, or offers a superficial and voluble sympathy for griefs of which he is as innocent as a babe unborn, or a jaunty appreciation of values and verities and virtues for which he has never sweat even a drop of blood. To wear a mask, to lie, lie, lie,—that is the truth of the soul as it hides its treasures and its sanctities from vulgarity and volubility!

Thus, it is the Deep, the Unique, the Abyss within, that is the great Isolator. Nietzsche was indeed “the eagle that long, long gazeth benumbed into abysses, into its own abysses!”

And he spoke in parables. Give heed—so Zarathustra counsels his disciples—to the times when your spirits speak in parables, for in these times is the origin of your virtue.

I said I would not vindicate Nietzsche. But what if his deification of force-humanity, of master-humanity, were Oberfläche, “surface,” mask, which he “feigned” or wore, in order to protect his pearls from sows, his holy of holies from hounds? What if this—scandalizing the scandalous!—were but picture and parable which Nietzsche flaunted to the people that they might wreak their vengeance thereupon? And the parable is so pertinently chosen that it says everything to men of sense and seriousness, hides everything from fools; that the pearls can be recognized if right eyes behold, but protectingly concealed from rude eyes and awkward hands.

Of course, Nietzsche was a homicide! So must we be! If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee; if thy right hand offend thee, hew it off, and cast it from thee. And there are things more offensive than an eye or a hand! These are the weaknesses which we pamper and grow in ourselves: thought-lessness which we wink at; old pet habits which have come to be just too dear for anything, especially for us to knife; above all, sickly sentiments, self-pity, from which even all our joys cannot rescue us—so that we do not have the courage to join those warriors who turn their weapons against their own selves, and to swear an “I will,” that is hard as steel, against all these softnesses and humors and self-commiserations. Surely, it were well to be force-men, master-men, so that we would not coddle our impotency or carry on a pleasure-pain play with our weakness.

Yes, in these “stillest hours” there is also a “still” homicide and interment, a plucking out and a hacking off, and the warrior-hero does not betray the least pathos as he does this—there is no plaintive note in his voice. The greatest thing about the dying Socrates, sipping away at his cup of hemlock, was the total absence of pathos and self-pity. Ah, if we but took half the pains to marshal forces of will in ourselves, that we now devote to conserving our weak wills, and to adducing all sorts of plausible reasons for their impuissance! If we but actually learned Herrenmoral, master-morality, that were indeed masterful and understood mastership! We are called to be masters by our creator, not only masters of the earth, but also masters of the spirit. And mastership is a great sacred thing, which we ought to learn from world-masters. We ought to be hammers in life and not anvils. The great calamity among men is that they shrink from being hammers, and call the virtue of the anvil that lets itself be struck by the name of “patience.”

It is just not true that Christianity abhors master-morality and preaches a Sclavenmoral, a slave-morality. Yes it is true of the cowardly and inert thing that men call Christianity, this religion of the study-chair and the barracks which can make use of no master, because it summons just those powers to rule whose whole strength consists only in the weakness of others. But there is a Christianity which has been outright mighty force, outright master-instinct, this kingly Christianity, in whose presence a Pilate, and a Herod, with the entire host of their war-slaves, were feeble folk indeed; a Christianity of love and gentleness and meekness,—aye, aye, sir! But one can have gentleness in the heart,—and yet lay on with a club! That was indeed master-morality when the Son of Man made himself master of the Sabbath; when he with a whip of cords scourged the money-changers and mammonists out of the Temple! That was a force-man and a master-man who hurled his, “Get thee behind me, Satan!” against the weak heart of Peter.

How would it do for our churches to have a new festival, a festival of “the stillest hour,” memorializing the “invention of new values, around which the world revolves, noiselessly revolves”? Noises enough, often enough Höllenlärm, have there been in our churches, are yet, God knows! But it is not noise that rules the world. It is stillness which ultimately is the spiritual and moral might of the men who will possess the kingdom of earth. What if even the history of peoples “feigns a surface,” wears a mask, for those who having eyes see not, having ears hear not? What if men mistake Höllenlärm for messages of great occurrences in history, and on this account hold themselves aloof from those phenomena and experiences in which something new, a life of the heart, presses on to its birth-hour? Yet the human race will not always need or require noise and masks as its history rolls on. The more men kill what is really worthy of death, the less will they set out to kill each other. The more powerfully the will becomes conscious of its calling to master, the more strenuously men strive after greatness, human greatness, the more ridiculous will it come to seem to them in the course of time that the force of man should be sought in the force of his muscles, the mastership of man in the hoarded prerogative of powder and lead. The day will yet come—as come it shall—when we will estimate our life, not according to its noisiest, but according to its stillest hours. And then a great and pure life will be created by what is done in the heart of man.

Editorials

Why Socialists Went to War

We have listened with much interest to the excuses for the German Socialists who went to war, as well as to the attacks on them for doing so. Now, though hesitating to obtrude our ignorance into the muddle of a complicated discussion, we can’t refrain from offering a suggestion.

The bottom reason for sudden activity under the stress of unusual circumstances is to be found, not in a conscious mental decision, but in the previously-formed habits of the individual mind. We are referring partly to the mob-emotion which has swept away so many even of the greatest souls of Europe. We are thinking more of the essence of Socialism, and the sort of emotional method which has been produced among its adherents—the material upon which mob-psychology had to work.

There is no essential difference between the method of German Imperialism and the method of German Socialism; the only difference lies in the objectives. Both insist on the supreme importance of the state, both work through cohesive organization and the almost unquestioning following of leaders. The habit of obedience, the instinct for organization, the gregarious mode of action—these are the very qualities of the individual German which have made it possible for the German Social Democratic Party to grow to such size and strength. What more inevitable, when the mobilization order went up, when flags flew and drums beat, than that the individual German Socialist should in his excitement shoulder his gun and march to war?

Of course, we don’t really know anything about it, and we haven’t the resources to make anything like a scientific investigation. But we strongly suspect that the morals of organized humanity will remain inferior to the morals of the individual until the individual habit of mind becomes one which denies to organized humanity supreme authority over the will.

G. H. S.

Even Galsworthy!

In Scribner’s Magazine for November, Mr. Galsworthy has a stunning article on the War. And then at its close:—“Your Prussian supermen of Nietzsche’s cult...!”

Another New Poet

Mr. Scharmel Iris is a young Italian poet, born in Florence, who at the tender age of ten, and later, was praised by Ruskin, Swinburne, Francis Thompson, Edmund Gosse, and other men who may be assumed to know what good poetry is. Ruskin wrote: “He is a youth of genius and his poems are marvelously beautiful. His heart has felt the pathos of life and he has set this pathos to music.” Swinburne said: “He writes with imaginative ardor, and impassioned is the word which best illustrates his utterance. He is genuine and sincere, and his lovely poems display energy of emotion and a true sense of poetic restraint.” Thompson was more superlative: “I believe Scharmel Iris to be a poet of the first rank,” he stated. “His poems are sublime in conception, rich in splendid imagery, full of remarkable metaphors and new figures, and musical in expression.” Of course it has been difficult for a young man of such talent to find a publisher or a public; but at last a volume of his work is to be brought out by the Ralph Fletcher Seymour Company. The book will be called Lyrics of a Lad, and will be ready about Christmas time. Beside a preface by Maurice Francis Egan and an interesting title-page decoration by Michele Greco, it will have a frontispiece portrait by Eugene R. Hutchinson, the photographer who should never be referred to by any noun except “artist.” Personally, we love Mr. Iris’s work; we use the verb thoughtfully, because his poetry is not merely the sort which interests or attracts; it remains in your mind as part of that art treasure-house which is your religion and your life.

Prizes for Poetry

An interesting announcement comes from Poetry in regard to two prize offers. One—the Helen Haire Levinson prize of two hundred dollars for the best poetry by a citizen of the United States published in the magazine during its second year—has been awarded to Mr. Carl Sandburg for his Chicago Poems. This is a particularly gratifying decision, for Mr. Sandburg’s is a new voice which must be reckoned with in American poetic production. The second is a one hundred dollar offer for the best war or peace poem on the present European situation, and has been given to Miss Louise Driscoll of Catskill, New York, for a poem called Metal Checks, which appears in the November issue.

At dusk I pass an ugly red building with shrieking fat black letters on its façade—Home for Incurables. Shrill grass, narcotic carnations, hazy figures in rocking chairs and on the balconies, melting in the liquid gold of autumn twilight—a harmony of discord that screams for the spiritual brush of Kandinsky. There are no signs of pain or grief on the faces of the doomed: a profound calmness they bear, a resolute quiescence, reminding us of Dante after he had seen hell or of Andreyev’s resurrected Lazarus. “To be sure, they are quite happy,” explained the obliging Doctor. “These men and women have come to be free of struggles, of doubts, and of the anguish of hopes. The knowledge of their fate, the ultimate, irrevocable truth, is a relieving balm for the tired spirits—nay, even for the hopeless bodies, for as soon as they cease fighting their disease they learn to adapt themselves to that disease, to consider it an inseparable part of their existence. I can show you a number of patients who are actually in love with their affliction, who would resent the idea of being turned normal. Look at the hilarious face of that fellow yonder at the fountain; he is intoxicated with sunset, and appears to be the happiest of mortals, despite his terrible disease. A queer case, an un-American case.”

The doctor uttered a fearful Latin term and told me the history of that patient. A European, he has been for many years afflicted with something like “sentimentalomania,” a peculiarly Continental ailment. Skilful physicians had tried in vain to cure him; change of climate and environment had been of no avail: even in Siberian tundras and in foggy London his disposition remained unaltered. In despair he went to Berlin, where, he was advised, the gravest case of sentimentality would be annihilated; the reaction proved almost fatal, for the Spree and the Sieges Allee made such a nauseating impression upon the poor fellow that his illness was complicated by a severe outbreak of Germanophobia. As a last resort, the famous specialist, Herr Dr. Von Bierueberalles, bade him taste the influence of the sanest atmosphere on earth, that of the States. When even the harshest and most practical American treatment had failed to knock out the unfortunate’s folly, he was pronounced hopeless and offered a place among the incurables, which offer he willingly accepted, and acquiesced. He has since become accustomed to his disease and bears it rather with defiant joy.

At times, when I seek relief from practical values and sane standards, I come to have a chat with my friend, the Incurable. Henceforth he will have the floor.

With whom do I side in the War? Why, of course, with Germany! Perhaps my attitude shows that I have not been completely cured from the Prussophobia that I had contracted in Berlin; as it is, I sincerely wish to see the German boot victorious on the whole continent and over the mouldy Britons, a rude, dreamless, wingless Napoleon brooding over old napping Europe. Picture the ruined cathedrals of Belgium and France “restored” into comfortable barracks for the braves of the Fatherland; picture the boulevards of Paris and Brusselles, the quays of the Neva and the Thames, ornated with the statues of the most Christian Wilhelm and of his illustrious ancestors down to the Great Elector of Brandenburg; picture the excellent Schutzman reigning supreme, physically and spiritually, from Vladivostock to Glasgow,—think what an abyss of hatred, of stirring electrifying hatred will arise among the rotting nations, and out of hatred self consciousness, endeavors, cravings, to be crystallized in torrents of new art creations! As for Germany, I have no fear for the duration of her hegemony; she will undoubtedly choke from indigestion. But oh, how I dread the reverse outcome! The victory of the Allies will push Progress a century backward; it will strengthen the tottering absolutism in Russia; it will swell the piggish arrogance of the French bourgeois; it will augment the insular hypocricity of the English Philistine; it will still more, if it is possible, vulgarize international diplomacy and greed, arousing the appetites of the so-called Democracies.

Democracy—who was it that recently stated with charming aplomb that “Individualism and democracy are synonymous terms?” Yes, I recall: it came from the pen of the author of Incense and Splendor and To the Innermost. I confess this statement, especially when considering its authorship, came to me as a revelation. To me the word “democracy,” as many another beautiful word, has lost its original lofty meaning and has come to rhyme with mediocrity, with the strangling of the Few of the Mountain by the Many of the Valley. Could you name many great things that the most democratized countries, like America and Switzerland, have produced outside of Schweitzer-cheese and Victrolas? Has there ever been a great individualist who appeared as a child of his age, as an outgrowth and a reflection of a democracy? I do not know of such instances. Of course, I grant that the writer of that statement put into the word “Democracy” a higher, a more idealistic meaning. Words, like music, like practically every medium of art, express the author’s personality, and, provided he is an artist, he binds us to share his interpretation. Take, for example, that popular song, “Oh, You Beautiful Doll”; apparently there is nothing tragic in it, yet my emotions were stirred when I heard its French interpretation by Olga Petrova (it was before the kind American entrepreneurs had forced her to perform stunts in Panthea). She had managed to put so much sorrow and tenderness into “O Ma Grande Belle Poupée!” that one forgot the triteness of the words and felt gripping sadness. Or take a less vulgar illustration—Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons.[1] It is an exquisite little thing in cream covers, with a green moon in the center, implying the yolk of an egg with which “something is the matter,” and it gave me rare pleasure to witness the first attempt to revolutionize the most obsolete and inflexible medium of Art—words. The author has endeavored to use language in the same way as Kandinsky uses his colors: to discard conventional structure, to eliminate understandable figures and forms, and to create a “spiritual harmony,” leaving to the layman the task of discovering the “innerer Klang.” Both iconoclasts have admirably succeeded; both the “Improvisations” and the little “essays” on roast-beef and seltzer-bottles have given me the great joy of cocreating, allowing me to interpret them in my own autonomous way. Says the Painter:[2]

Gertrude Stein has beautifully followed this recipe. Words, plain everyday words, have lost their “external meaning” under her skilful manipulation, and in their grotesque arrangement, frequent repetition, and intentional incoherence they have come to serve as quaint ephemeral sounds of a suggestive symphony, or, if you please, cacophony. The Tender Buttons arouse in the sympathetic reader a limitless amount of moods, from scherzo to maestoso. I shall recall for you a few lines of one peculiar motive:

Do you not feel the deep melancholy underlying these incongruities? I could quote places that would bring you into a totally different mood, most hilarious at times. These “exaggerated cranberries,” to paraphrase an expression of one of my incurable colleagues, should be chanted to the music of another great iconoclast, Schoenberg. But I observe an indulgent sneer on your face. Of course, I am an Incurable—Adieu!

We are all soldiers now and literature, for the time, has disappeared. The publishing business is at a standstill, reviews are cutting down their size, and all the best poets are sedulously learning to form fours in the squares of London. It is, by itself, a remarkable thing, which will have an effect on all of us when the war stops and we begin to write again. To leave your pens and paper, to know that you have before you in the day, not an endless struggle with rhythm, rhyme, and editors, but a few hours’ drilling that is laborious and terminable—it is a rousing experience for a poet, mentally as well as physically.

Meanwhile the literary result of the war is nothing but disastrous. All our more or less “official” poets—Mr. Bridges, Mr. Newbolt, Mr. Binyon, Mr. Watson, Mr. Phillips, and so on—have come forward with amazing arrays of abstract nouns. Mr. Bridges, who is almost the worst as well as almost the best of living poets, printed a copy of verses in The Times which rhymed far less often than is proper in a ceremonial piece and ended thus:

Mr. William Watson has been prodigal of poetry and has reached his highest level in a poem which contains the following singular lines:—

It is a very sad business. These gentlemen have retired to their studies, determined to feel what is proper, and they come out having done their best; but they will be heartily ashamed of it—I hope—in a few months. Unfortunately, Mr. John Lane has collected their verses in a volume and is selling their shame for charity. Three good poems have come out of the welter, one by Mr. G. K. Chesterton—The Wife of Flanders, a very fine composition—and two by Mr. De La Mare.

The trouble is that a poet does not feel war fever very acutely in a general sense. Patriotic poetry is nearly always bad. If there is a worthy reference to the Armada in Elizabethan poetry, it has escaped me; and the English resistance to Napoleon has never been a very happy subject for English writers. The good poetry that is provoked by war is of a different character: it is personal, visual, and concrete. It never expresses any general aspect of war, but only such subjects as have been personally observed and felt by the poet. I would give as instances Rudyard Kipling and the German poet Liliencron, both of whom have written well about soldiers and fighting, but foolishly about War and Patriotism.

Yet any poet going about the streets today must see and feel a quantity of poetical things. A week or so ago, I saw an endless baggage-train belonging to the artillery, as it passed through Barnet. It had come from Worcester, commandeering horses and wagons on the way; it was going to Brentwood and thence—God knows! It was very long and uneven—the carts had bakers’ and butchers’ names on them—the horses were ridden with halters and sacks for saddles—the men were tired and dishevelled. I spoke to one of them who was watering his horse at a trough, offered to bring him beer from a public-house close by; but someone had given him tea farther back on the road and he would rot. He thanked me and rode away, drooping very much over his horse’s neck. It was all a poem in itself or it gave me the emotions of a poem, because it had none of the conventional glitter of war. It was poetical because it was business-like, just as our khaki service uniforms are more beautiful than the bright clothes the troops wear in peace.

If the war-poets would confine themselves to real and tangible things like this, they might well express the experience through which we are now passing. But they seem unhappily obsessed with the idea of expressing an obstreperous valour and self-confidence and bluster which the nation is very far from feeling. The nation, so far as I can gauge it, is showing an obstinate, workmanlike silence and does not either make light of, or grumble at, the hardships it has to suffer: the baggage-train of which I have spoken was a very adequate symbol of this. But no one is ever so greatly out of touch with the people as a popular poet.

At the beginning of the war, the musical in London were shocked by an announcement that no German or Austrian music would be played at the famous Queen’s Hall Promenade Concerts. We were naturally a little upset, as we depend on these performances for solid and regular entertainment: and it seemed hard and unnecessary to renounce Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, and even Schönberg. Luckily good sense and humour killed the absurd idea, but not before a French and Russian programme had been substituted for the first Wagner night. Now, much as I shrink from the thought of having to hear Tschaikowsky instead of Wagner, I do believe that we have a cause for national resentment against the second of these composers. His ridiculous and windy prose-works have been among the writings which have provoked the war. With Nietzsche, and with the renegade Englishman, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, he has encouraged the notion that there is a special Teutonic culture which is superior to any other and which deserves to be spread at any cost. Such an idea has never appealed to the true Germans (e. g., Goethe, who knew what he owed to France and England), but it has been useful to the Prussian soldiers, who have debased and vulgarized true German culture. Perhaps I am exceeding the duties of a London letter-writer and becoming an advocate; but I think I am giving you an accurate account of the feelings of those here who admire German poetry and music. I am not a Chauvinist in art—few people are. I read Goethe impenitently in the public trains and trams, to the disgust of my neighbours, and I continue to sing German songs, a little out of tune: unless my Territorial uniform is served out to me very soon, I shall probably be arrested as a spy.

Some years ago a good woman, who would like to be foster-mother to all struggling heroes, was sitting at midnight in her down-town flat. Suddenly there was a noise at the front door, someone leapt up the staircases two steps at a time, and rushed into her room shouting “I’ve got it! I’ve got it!” She turned around and saw the dark face of a young actor, shining with excitement. He immediately burst into a superb interpretation of a passage from Hamlet. He had been working over it for two weeks without being able to satisfy himself, but it had come to him that evening. He could not wait to let his good friend know, had jumped on an elevated train, and after being carried two stations too far in his elation, was there with his prize.

No, this is not the beginning of a magazine story, nor is it a passage from the biography of a deceased European celebrity. It is the simple truth about a young American dramatist who is known only to a few;—and he is of New England stock!

Later the young Hamlet, having completed his acting apprenticeship, began to write, and went into the real estate business to support himself. Nobody wanted his plays; they were too “highbrow.” So he began to build a theatre of his own. The managers’ trust put every difficulty in his way, and finally, when the building was nearly done and the company was engaged, succeeded in crushing him. The next attempt was a repertory company on the East side, but this wiped out what little was left of his resources before it got fairly started. One play was produced on Broadway;—it ran two weeks. Last year another was rehearsed for nine weeks, but it was withdrawn on the day of the dress rehearsal, because the author refused to make a change insisted on by the manager. Now the writer has retired to his farm in the Connecticut hills, where he and a companion have with their own hands built a little theatre. In this, on Sunday afternoons during the summer, he reads from his fifteen manuscript plays to such few people as can get there to hear him. And as he reads, there is on his face much the same enthusiasm as on the night years ago when he got his passage from Hamlet.

I visited Butler Davenport for the third time last Sunday. The main house is a rambling mid-Victorian affair, with queer crannies and cupola rooms from which one can look far across the hills to the Sound. On its left is an old farmhouse of the eighteenth century, furnished as Mr. Butler’s grandfather left it, and with a musty smell which no old-furniture shop could counterfeit. Between the two is an old-fashioned garden, in midsummer filled with larkspur, cosmos, and a hundred other flowers which few but our grandmothers could name. At the intersection of walks at its center is a crab-apple tree, surrounded by a bench. A formal garden with high, thick cedar hedges, bird-houses, unsuspected grass walks and an avenue of woodbine arches lies on the other side of the main house. In the rear, stretching out towards the wide valley, is a long, hedged walk ending in an arch, between fields of wild flowers. Down it one could go to any kind of distant mystery.

The theatre is a simple, strong little building behind the old farmhouse. Its most expert bit of carpentry is the balcony, but that is, of course, unpretentious. The seats are ordinary kitchen chairs, and there is nothing on the stage but a reading desk. But the luxury of sitting between wide-open doors in the hill-breeze, full of grass odors and wing sounds, is better than the comfort of plush seats and much gilded fresco.

This time, however, as there were only four of us, we sat out under an apple tree. Except for a moment when a tragic passage was interrupted to shoo away a loud-voiced and ill-mannered hen, it was the most nearly perfect theatre I have known.

And the play? It is impossible to do more than hint at the nature of unpublished plays. This one dealt with the “white slave” question, but in a way infinitely superior to the melodrama of The Lure or The Fight. There was another, of subtler treatment, called Deferred Payment, showing the natural retribution seeking out a man who looked for everything in a woman except companionship. Keeping Up Appearances—the one actually produced—pictures a middle-class family engaged in a tragic struggle with the pocket book on account of the false ideals of the community. Justice, written before Galsworthy’s play of the same name, draws a parallel between society’s persecution of a woman who is consecrated to a fine love without marriage, and society’s punishment of the unfortunate victims of prostitution. Mr. Davenport’s best work is in The Importance of Coming and Going, a satirical tragi-comedy which contrasts the exaggerated emphasis we lay on death with the casual way we regard birth. When a person who never should have come into the world leaves it, perhaps gladly, we weep copiously and buy showy funerals; but mothers let their daughters marry any kind of man of wealth or position, without giving them any insight into the mysteries of birth.

Mr. Davenport’s plays do not rank with Ibsen’s or even with Galsworthy’s. But thousands of worse plays have been produced and have succeeded—simply because they contained no ideas. Mr. Davenport is master of a technique which would make it easy for him to write a popular success if he did not insist on saying something. One manager has told him that he is ten years ahead of his time, but that if he were only European his work could be produced. A publisher wrote him that his plays could be issued in book form if he were only well-known. Mr. Davenport’s question, “My dear Mr. ——, how am I to become well known?” has not elicited a reply.

This man’s spirit will remain just as eager and strong as when he began; he may get before the public eventually. Even this year hopeful new plans are under way. But whether he ever succeeds or not, he will have found in life a thousand times more than the obtuse millions who are deaf to him. It would be an insult to offer him sympathy.

And it would be stupid to place final blame on the managers or the publishers, or to think that such things as drama leagues can furnish a fundamental remedy for the apathy of the public. The whole structure of society must be altered, and the quality of the individual human spirit must be quickened, before our leaders can find any adequate reaction in the crowds. We have denied ourselves the artistic stimulus of a cohesive aristocracy. How shall we vitalize our democracy?

Forbes-Robertson’s Hamlet

One of the noblest things I have ever seen on the stage—or ever expect to see—is the Hamlet of Forbes-Robertson. The poet, the scholar, the philosopher, the great gentleman, the lover, the brilliant talker, the anguished boy—they are all there in the tall man in black with the graven face and the wonderful hands and the voice of surpassing richnesses—the tall, graceful, impetuous, humorous, agonized man in black who reads Shakespeare as if he were improvising and makes a true and charming human being out of a character that has had the misfortune to become a problem. “And please observe,” writes Bernard Shaw, “that this is not a cold Hamlet. He is none of your logicians who reason their way through the world because they cannot feel their way through it; his intellect is the organ of his passion; his eternal self-criticism is as alive and thrilling as it can possibly be.” His moment of expiation, alone at the back of the stage, with his arms raised to the vaulted heavens; and his gallant last moment on the throne with its single silver sentence, “The rest is silence”—these things are too moving to be articulate about. Richard Le Gallienne has expressed it all as well as it can be done: “All my life I seem to have been asking my friends, those I loved best, those who valued the dearest, the kindest, the greatest, and the strongest, in our strange human life, to come with me and see Forbes-Robertson die in Hamlet. I asked them because, as that strange young dead king sat upon his throne, there was something, whatever it meant—death, life, immortality, what you will—of a surpassing loneliness, something transfiguring the poor passing moment of trivial, brutal murder into a beauty to which it was quite natural that that stern Northern warrior, with his winged helmet, should bend the knee. I would not exchange anything I have ever read or seen for Forbes-Robertson as he sits there so still and starlit upon the throne of Denmark.”

“The Yellow Ticket”

A bleeding chunk of reality is not art, but it is a bleeding chunk of reality; your aesthetic emotions may sleep at the sight of a tortured animal, but your humane emotions will roll up to your throat when you witness the simple tragedy of a Jewish girl in St. Petersburg, presented in Michael Morton’s play, The Yellow Ticket. To me such a realistic play in such a realistic presentation has as little to do with dramatic art as a reporter’s story has to do with literature; but I brushed aside my memories of Rheinhardt and Komissarzhevskaya when I went to see a piece of Russian life at Powers’. And I saw it indeed—real, nude, appalling.

Some of my acquaintances have asked me whether the tragedy could be true, whether a Jewish girl has no right to live in St. Petersburg, unless she has bought her protection from the police by selling her reputation—that is by procuring a yellow ticket, the trade-licence of a prostitute. Yes, it is true. A Jew is forbidden to abide outside the Pale of Settlement, with the exception of certain merchants and persons of a university education, and prostitutes. The latter form the most desirable element in the eyes of government officials, since their occupation does not generally presuppose any predilections for revolutionary ideas or free thought. I have known instances where women involved in the Revolution, gentiles as well as Jewesses, obtained yellow tickets which served them the rôle of a carte blanche from the molestations of the police. There are many anecdotic facts in Russian life that seem incredible to the outsider, and Mr. Morton has produced in his play a mass of such facts with photographic verisimilitude. It must be said to the credit of the actors that they have escaped the slippery path of melodramatic overdoing.

“Jael”

“Hosanna!” I felt like shouting, when the curtains slowly concealed the mysterious stage. I am still under the spell of the oriental atmosphere, not yet cooled off for objective criticism. What Florence Kiper Frank has done with the biblical subject may terrify the orthodox student of the Bible, but I greeted her daring heresy and free manipulation of epochs and styles. She has skilfully blended the bloodthirsty, gloating outcries of Deborah’s Song with the idyllic lyrics of Solomon’s Songs, and has presented in Jael a composite type, a mixture of the savage tent-woman, of the passionate yet gentle Shulamite, and of the eternal jealous female. The result, as far as the creation of an atmosphere goes, is a positive success.

A word about the staging. Maurice Browne, on the privilege of a pioneer, may be congratulated on the progress he has made in leaving behind mouldy conventions and approaching the state where he can produce pure aesthetic emotions. The three one-act plays on the present bill, regardless of their merits or demerits, demonstrate the great possibilities of an artistic stage manager, who can do away with elaborate accessories and produce suggestive illusions with the aid of an ultramarine background and calico apple blossoms. Yet, as in all pioneering, there are signs of hesitation and of half-measures. I am sure that the effect of Jael would not in the least diminish (it would rather be intensified), if we were spared the inevitable storm-pyrotechnics. The verses in themselves imply the idea of battle and tempest, and Miss Kiper in the title rôle has the voice and diction to serve the purpose.

There yet remain certain pianists and other opinionated craftsmen in music who will say, when approached on the subject of Harold Bauer’s piano playing: “Oh, yes; but you know Bauer is—well, shall we say?—a monotonist. His playing is all of one style—beautiful tone, to be sure; but, oh, such a sameness! He shades beautifully—yes, surely, but it’s all too colorless.” And it probably never occurs to these critics that a pianist who uses an entirely beautiful tone, who shades delicately, and who is definitely individual in his playing, might not seem monotonous to the admirers of true piano-artistry. And it is quite certain that these carpers failed to attend Bauer’s last Sunday afternoon recital in Orchestra Hall, when and where the above composite quotation was put to shame.

The program was headed by that most unequal set of little pieces—interesting, dull, graceful, and often clumsy:—Brahm’s Waltzes. The Brahms faddists may sacrifice all the credit to their idol, but he deserves only a part of it; for Bauer made these waltzes float as lightly and pleasantly as the material permitted, and invested them with all possible contrast and pulse. There was no lack of what pianists call “point,” either in this opening number or in the remainder of the program; and it is this quality of “point,” which is the season more in evidence in Bauer’s work than ever before, which makes the carpers appear rather uninformed. “Point” is nothing mysterious; it means definite and crisp rhythm, brightness of tone designed to contrast with richness and warmth of tone, sharp shadings artistically brought out, and a deeply satisfying precision in tempi. This man’s work deserves this inclusive term. Whatever lack there might have been in seasons past (there has been a fragile foundation for the criticism mentioned at the beginning of this appreciation, when, as late as three years ago, his tonal ideals apparently did not include great brilliance), this Sunday recital went far to establish the fact that Bauer has a happy variety of tone-colors at his command, which variety includes no little brilliance. Sheer facility and digital expertness have never seemed to occupy the attention of this master-pianist, except insofar as such facility and expertness would give expression to purely musical content; and now if the carpers continue to shrug their shoulders at the praise of Bauer, it will be because they miss the usual bombast and key-swatting of esteemed mediocrity, and certainly not because of any inadequacy of technic for musical purposes, or lack of pianistic lustre. No mediocrity of a technic-worshipper or piano-eater ever gave a performance of Beethoven’s Opus 3 that could compare with that of Bauer on Sunday afternoon; for he then projected a deeply significant art, particularly in the first movement of the sonata, which must be inexplicable in words. Schumann’s Scenes from Childhood were given a highly imaginative treatment—a treatment which penetrated even the academics. And Schumann’s Toccata—that battered veteran of many an ivory struggle—ceased for once to be an endurance stunt, and hummed forth (as the composer hoped and indicated) as a strangely beautiful bit of music. Bauer’s playing of this will remain long in the awakened music-receptacles. So will his interpretation of his own arrangement of César Franck’s Prelude, Choral, and Fugue—which are three movements vieing with each other for supreme religious solidity—and his nonchalant handling of the tricky D-flat Study of Liszt. The Chopin Scherzo in C-sharp minor closed a program which would surely have been sombre and sleepy under the fingers of any less than a pianistic musician. In certain splendid moments Bauer seems like a high priest performing a tonal miracle, or like a potent magician weaving curious and impossible dream-fabrics. And, with all pleasant fancies put aside, he is an exponent of modern pianism at its best.

The Havasupai Indian mother says: “I must not beat my boy. If I do, I will break his will.” Unlike her pale-faced friends, she is not obsessed with the mania for governing. We, in our insane subservience to traditions, continue to train our children to obey. Slaves they shall be; that is the slogan. We no longer whip men; we whip children only because they are weaker than we are. So, a child is the slave in successive stages of home, church, school, government, and either boss or “superior officer.” Could Europe be at war unless its men were made molluscous by discipline and their mental paralysis completed through respectability?

Children are born materialists, poets, and joy-worshippers. We tame them and they grow up philistines, supernaturalists, and respectable believers in the disinterested love of dullness. Instead of teaching them theories and superstitions, we should tell them that they are parts of the universe; that the carbon, iron, sulphur, phosphorus, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, the zero-gases, and the dozen other elements of which our bodies are made are also the main elements of sun, moon, and stars,—of the whole material universe. The next step might be to show the child, through actual experiments, the known physical and chemical properties of these elements, thus preparing its mind for the greatest of all poetries—the poetry of evolution. These things need but be shown, not laboriously learned by rote; they need only to be told, not to be taught; and if the child’s healthy inquisitiveness has not been ruined by repression, it will delight in feeling the pull of the magnet; in watching the electric spark that unites oxygen and hydrogen into water; in drawing the marvelous beauties of snow flakes and other crystal formations; in watching and aiding the growth of birds, beasts, flowers, or fruits; in the thrill of blended voices or in other forms of voluntary co-operation. All these things, all the realities need but be shown to delight the untainted mind of childhood; while daily free association with other children will soon give to each child a practical working knowledge of ethics (quite impossible to attain under the boss-system of the government schoolmistress) from which, as a basis, the errors of our economic and social systems can be pointed out and discussed. In the minds and hearts of these free children, ideals can then be formulated which will tend toward their development into the free society of the future, whose coming their own efforts will hasten. For it is only through the successive enslavement of each succeeding generation that governments can retain their powers.

Such should be some of the activities of a Ferrer or Modern School, free from the noxious taint of authority, superstition, or respectability. If we cannot do better let us begin, at least, with a Sunday school. However that may be, and whatever the future of such a school, all those interested in establishing it are cordially invited to communicate with the editor of The Little Review, with William Thurston Brown, 1125 N. Hoyne Ave., with Anthony Udell, 817½ N. Clark St., or with the writer, 1240 Morse Ave.

Full of visions and ideals and eager to express them in their own way, a group of striving young painters and sculptors in this city is working industriously without regard for applause from either the crowd or the few. Just as there are religious and social rebels—people who refuse to accept the old dogmas and habits merely because they were successful at a certain time and fit for a certain period in human history—these young artists refuse to adopt methods and views of the past for the purpose of expressing their views on modern subjects.

In striving to realize the new idea in form and color they are of necessity passing through that period in which the intellect discerns and style is chosen—the period of experiment. And if they do not achieve as great a success as the old masters, they certainly work in the spirit of a Monet or a Rembrandt. We print this month reproductions of work done by four of these artists. They have nothing in common except that they are all trying to express themselves in their own way.

Jerome S. Blum, the oldest and best known of the group, is an extraordinary painter of the usual. He does not rely on a dramatic subject, or on a sensational technic, to arouse interest in his work. It is his unusual way of looking at people and nature, and his vigorous and interesting color schemes, that have made his paintings notable. Mr. Blum is far too imaginative to be natural, far too poetic to be “real.” All his work strikes one as a spontaneous expression of almost childish delight in color.

The Orator is the work of Stanislaw Szukalski, a boy of nineteen, who comes from Russian Poland. He studied at the Krakau Academy, where he received two gold medals and five other prizes. On entering his studio your amazement grows as you wander from one thought or emotion to another in plaster. Each one grips and holds you vigorously. Impressions of Praying, Sleeping, Hurling, and Bondage, a few very interesting portraits of Max Krammer and Professor Chiio, and also a full figure of Victor Hugo tell of the spiritual insight of this young sculptor—the unexpected in every one. His works are full of life and imagination. The fact that some of our able nonentities have characterized them as caricatures proves how narrow-minded some of our sculptors are today.

C. Raymond Johnson is only twenty-three years old, and in all the work he has done so far purity, brilliance of color and spaciousness predominate. It is the suggestion in his present work of great possibilities in the near future that makes them interesting. The one in this issue shows the highly decorative effects of his ideas. Besides painting Mr. Johnson finds time to experiment with colored lighting and the making of most original posters for the Chicago Little Theatre.

Christian Abrahamsen, the young and independent portrait painter, has done some very remarkable work. His portraits are the result of penetrating study of his subject and adaptation on the part of the painter to the moods of the sitter. He varies his style with his subject. His portrait of Michael Murphy sparkles with life and vigor and holds your attention as few of the portraits of older painters can. Beside portraits Mr. Abrahamsen paints sunny landscapes in the open air and under clear skies. The large canvas filled with the freshness, strength, and beauty of a clearing in northern Wisconsin, reproduced in this issue of The Little Review, represents some of the work done last summer.

Vachel Lindsay’s Books

The Congo and Other Poems, by Vachel Lindsay. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]

It is not too much to say that many of us are watching Vachel Lindsay with the undisguised hope in our hearts that he may yet prove to be the “Great American Poet.” He has come so fast and far on the road to art and sanity since the early days when he drew minute, and seemingly pathological, maps of the territories of heaven, and grinning grotesques of the Demon Rum! He has carved his own way with so huge and careless a hand! And his work, in spite of its strangeness, is so deeply rooted in the crude but stirring consciousness that is America to-day! Surely there is ground for hope.

Like every artist who creates a new form, Mr. Lindsay has had to educate his public. And the task is not by any means accomplished yet. We have had to overcome an instinctive feeling that poetry should be dignified, and to look the fact in the face that it must first of all be telling, and that in cases where these two elements conflict, dignity is a secondary consideration. We have been rudely jostled out of our academic position that poetry must be condensed, poignant, and literary, and we have been shown that by going back to the primitive conception—which included as the principal element the half-chant of the bard—true poetry may be diffuse, full of endless iterations and strangely impassioned over crude and even external objects. So much we have learned, and after the first shock of surprise, learned gladly. It has opened to us whole new reaches of enjoyment. We hope sincerely that we are not yet done with Mr. Lindsay’s educative process.

The Congo is the title poem of his new volume. To describe the poem adequately would require almost as much space as the nine pages it occupies. So it must suffice to say that it is perilously near great poetry, broad in sweep, imaginative, full of fire and color, psychological—and very strange. Much in the same vein are The Firemen’s Ball and The Santa Fe Trail, which appeared originally in Poetry.

Several of the poems in this volume, among them Darling Daughter of Babylon and I Went Down Into the Desert, are already familiar to readers of The Little Review, as they were first published in the June number. The volume contains also a delightful section of poems for children, and a group dealing with the present European war.

Both The Congo and Mr. Lindsay’s earlier volume, General Booth Enters Heaven, are extraordinarily interesting books. Every mind which is truly alive to-day should know at least one of them.

Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty, by Nicholas Vachel Lindsay.

Almost simultaneously with The Congo has appeared a prose volume by Mr. Lindsay, Adventures while Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. It is an account, in the form of a diary, of a walk through Missouri and Kansas, and into Colorado. Its value is almost purely personal. To anyone who is interested in Mr. Lindsay’s striking personality, this book will serve as a spiritual Baedeker. As literature its value is comparatively slight. It contains, however, one of his most striking poems, The Kallyope Yell, which appeared originally in The Forum. This alone is worth the price of the volume.

Pumpernickel Philosophy

Professor Tuerck, a very normal German, has been writing critical essays since the end of the eighties, and he has not changed a bit—the same good old idealist of the sissy category. In this book he makes a study of Genius, and comes to the magnificent conclusion that the chief characteristics of a genius must be goodliness, loving kindness, respect, and loyalty to existing institutions, obedience to the law, objectivity, and truth. Naturally, those who do not possess these delicacies are villains. The professor demonstrates two groups of thinkers, one in angelic white, the other in devilish black. Among the first, the real geniuses, we find beside Christ, Buddha, Shakespeare, Goethe, Byron, also Alexander, Cæsar, and Napoleon. But oh, Mr. Wilson, what German atrocities! Mr. Tuerck mercilessly disfigures his victims and pastes upon them with his saliva accurate, uniform labels. In Hamlet, in Faust, in Manfred, in the mentioned law-givers and warriors, the author manages to discover goody-goody traits of exemplary burghers. In the Black Gallery we face the lugubrious sinners—Stirner, Nietzsche, and Ibsen. “Woe to him who follows these modern antisophers!” cries Mr. Tuerck, for they are enemies of humanity, of the state, of society, of reality, of truth, for they are selfish and subjective. “The Devil, the Father of Lies, is great and Friedrich Nietzsche is his prophet.”

A word of reassurance for Mr. Thomas Hardy. This Sauerkraut-gem, The Man of Genius, has had seven editions in Germany, and has aroused wide enthusiasm there, as witnessed by the numerous press-notices exaltingly praising the great idealist Tuerck, written by professors, Geheimraths, Hofraths, catholics, protestants, and even by socialists! Now, pray, ought there be any fear for the Nietzscheanization of the Fatherland?

Kilmer’s Confession

Mr. Kilmer furnishes the following prose account of his convictions: “I am catholic in my tastes and Catholic in religion, am socially a democrat and politically a Democrat. I am a special writer on the staff of the New York Times Sunday Magazine, the Times Review of Books and the Literary Digest. I am bored by Feminism, Futurism, Free Love.” This is perhaps a more succinct expression of his facility of faith than can be found in his verse. Readers should thank him for it, because it renders unnecessary any further attempt to discover what he believes.

At the opening of the volume, Mr. Kilmer quotes the following stanza from Coventry Patmore:

This, too, is useful, because it frankly warns us against looking in his verse for anything which is not there.

Within his self-imposed limitations, Mr. Kilmer has done good work. The amusing couplets about Servant Girl and Grocer’s Boy have pleased countless newspaper readers, The Twelve-Forty-Five is a graphic description of the feeling produced by a late suburban train, To a Young Poet Who Killed Himself is an obvious rebuke to the small-hearted versifier, and Old Poets is a comfortable exposition of the philosophy of comfort. The religious poems will probably not be moving to anyone who does not share Mr. Kilmer’s creed.

Mr. Kilmer’s work is glossy with a simplicity more easy-going than profound. Though he is young himself, he obviously does not sympathize with young poets, of whom he writes:

Hilarious Iconoclasm

It is an exquisite pleasure to disagree with Clive Bell! Like a fierce Hun he whirls through the art galleries of Europe, and smashes all venerated masterpieces into a heap of rubbish, sparing but the Byzantine Primitives and some of the Post-Impressionists. Between these two epochs he sees a hideous gap; not more than one in a hundred of the works produced between 1450 and 1850 is he willing to accept as a work of art. It naturally hurts to witness the slaughter of your old friends, such as Michelangelo, Velasquez, Whistler; but our Attila performs his massacre so beautifully, with such a charming sense of humor, that you cannot help admiring the paradoxical feats. What but a good-humored smile will provoke in you such a prank, e. g.: “Nietzsche’s preposterous nonsense knocked the bottom out of nonsense more preposterous and far more vile”? The best part of it is the fact that the author does not attempt to convince you in anything, for neither is he convinced in the infallibility of his hypotheses. The book is a relucent gem among the recent dull and heavy works of art.

Comments of an Idler on Three New Books

Eris: A Dramatic Allegory, by Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff (Moffatt, Yard), is, we are told on the cover, “full of vigorous enthusiasm, and embodies the philosophy of Henri Bergson,” to whom on a flyleaf the book is duly dedicated. It is in careful rhythmic blank verse; a dialogue, principally, between “Man” and “Thought,” with “Past” and “Future” now and then interrupting. The allegory is prefaced by a portrait of the author by Helleu; we trust an unfair one. A strangely bovine expression greets us from under a plumed black hat and from over shoulders and arms drawn like a Goops. Helleu made lovely things once; why this?

In Eris we find Man hurling defiance at Thought, who taunts him, “You cannot vanquish me while Life endures.” Discussion between them on this point covers some forty pages of melodious argument. Six of these (and they are consecutive) form a fairly comprehensive guide-book to a trip around the world, as Man, distracted, stops off at many well-known points seeking to escape pursuing Thought.

but “Thought” comes hurrying along, two pages later. Man cries to him desperately:

They struggle together, and Man plunges over the cliff. Thought, “assuming a sudden intenser magnitude, rises out of the dust of Man” (the stage directions seem a little confused here) and shouts:

There are graceful lines and pictures, occasionally a good simile. Technically the lines are too smooth, too neatly finished, each in its little five-iambic jacket. The lyrics lack singing quality. There is a tedious list, two pages, of famous ladies—Helen, Sappho, Salammbo, from Eve to the Virgin Mary—as Man cries to Past, “What woman are you in disguise?” Swinburne did this gorgeously somewhere, making each speak; but these do not—they do not even live.

Totally different is my second volume of verse—The Sea is Kind, by T. Sturge Moore (Houghton Mifflin). A letter from the publishers suggests that “like Noyes and Masefield, T. Sturge Moore may have a message to American lovers of poetry.” I am an American lover of poetry and an eager one; therefore, I was hopeful; but I am oppressed by the obligation of doing justice to the initial poem in the book, viz.: The Sea is Kind, because I cannot tell at all what it is about. Several people, by name Evarne and Plexaura, females, and Menaleas and Eucritos, males, seem to be talking high talk by the edge of the sea—about ships and storms and nymphs and kindred things. Evarne speaks at great length in rough pentameters, quoting others more obscure, if possible, than herself.

The last two-thirds of the volume is taken up with short poems arranged in groups addressed to various persons—Tagore, Yeats, and Moore, among them. There is more clarity here. One discerns an autobiographic wistfulness in these stanzas entitled: A Poet in the Spring Regrets Having Wed So Late in Life.

There seems something strangely improper about this, considering the strict propriety of the theme.

Consider now Sturge Moore, our bewilderment in trying to ascertain what you wish us to think about such things as these, and consider too a transposition of the first line of a well-known poem about a Tiger, to read, “Consider now the Tiger.”

The group to Yeats has one called The Phantom of a Rose. An explanatory footnote tells us that a girl returning from a ball drops a rose from her bosom and dreams that a youth, the perfect emanation of the flower, rises and invites her to dance.

“Her limbs like a sunken ferry-boat.” A happy simile! We recognize the sensation.

In Judith, one of the group to Moore, a vigorous note is sounded. This is good, and maybe the rest is too; I do not know. It rolls above my head.

The Spirit of Life, a series of nine essays by Mowry Saben (Mitchell Kennerley), is the kind of book that makes me savagely controversial and then cross for heeding it at all. Its platitudinous optimism meanders along through some two hundred and fifty pages under various chapter headings: Nature, Morals, Sex, Heroes, etc. The first sentence is: “There are many great Truths that can be expressed only by means of paradox”; and the last, “If life means nothing, if the universe means nothing, then reform is only an illusory word, which has come to confuse us upon the highway of Despair; but if in our highest ideals we may find the real meaning of our personal lines, because they are the quintessence of the spiritual universe, whose avatars we should be, there is nothing too glorious for the heart of man to conceive.” All in between is just like that.

All persons, and there are many, who are determined willy nilly to believe the world a nice place; who, confronted with the unlovely, the stark, gaping and horrid, cast down their eyes exclaiming “It is not there,” will take solid comfort in The Spirit of Life. It is like the millions of sermons droned out one day in seven all over the land to patient folk who no longer know why they come nor why they stay to hear.

The first essay is called Nature. It quotes freely from Peter Bell, and also reprints something about tongues in trees and sermons in stones. Turning the leaves we catch the names of Burroughs, Whitman, and Thoreau. Toward the end is this:

Skipping the rest, we turn quickly to Sex, hoping something from the vitality of the theme, and come to this:

Immortal phrase, “Spiritual diabetes.” Several pages of this essay are devoted to episodes in the life of insects, all pointing a painful lesson to man:

Why quote further? There are indubitably certain good things in the book, but they are by Goethe, Carlyle, Emerson, Dante, Shakespeare, Whitman, et al.

An Unacademic Literary Survey

Modern English Literature: From Chaucer to the Present Day, by G. H. Mair. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]

Good histories of English literature are rare, and Mr. Mair’s book should accordingly be given a warm welcome, for it combines brevity with comprehensiveness of treatment in a very unusual manner. Mr. Mair not only writes well and knows his subject, but he seems instinctively to know what his readers will want—and he supplies it.

For instance, we do not remember that popular histories of English literature bother to tell such a detail as how the chronological order of Shakespeare’s plays is determined, but Mr. Mair’s telling of that will show the layman just what literary scholarship means, and in conjunction with his other remarks on our knowledge of Shakespeare it will rescue the uninformed from the chance of falling into such errors as the Baconian theory.

The book, however, is not one of higher and textual criticism and chronology. It is a work of appreciation, and the appreciation is that of a modern man. It is obvious that Chaucer might be treated in a manner quite alien to the interests of the man of today who is not a scholar, but the treatment of his work which ends in joining his hands to those of Charles Dickens as workers in a kindred quest is one that is well calculated to persuade even the philistine that Chaucer is a figure of passable interest to him.

It is the mark of the live man to recognize genius, and the manner in which Mr. Mair treats the genius of that great poet, John Donne, is in vivid contrast to the way in which it is usually treated in histories of English literature. For example:

Another feature in which this book differs from others of its kind is that the author is not afraid to bring the record down to the work of his contemporaries, and the struggles of Mr. Shaw with the bourgeois world, and the era opened by M. J. Synge and the Irish literary renascence, are here sympathetically dealt with.

Overemphasized Purity

With a somewhat overemphasized regard for purity, Fielding Hall approaches the narration of this honeymoon trip down a Burmese river. The novel—if such a dissertation on the early marriage state could be called a novel—is told in rather peculiar fashion, by the man and woman alternately, at first, and later on with the help of two more people.

The man is prone to burst forth into fairy tales to explain every point of argument to Lesbia. He tells her of a beautiful princess who was blindfolded and kept within an enclosed garden that she might never know the ways of man.

Mr. Hall voices these inanities with the appalling conceit of one who rushes in where even the best of writers tread with circumspection. And the worst of it is, that his rash feet have carried him nowhere, except, perhaps, into a limelight that is likely to prove embarrassing.

Russia: The Country of Extremes, by N. Jarintzoff. [Henry Holt & Co., New York.] A mosaic of essays on various aspects of Russian life, some of them of tremendous interest. Of particular importance are the chapters on “Studentchestvo” and on “Agents Provocateurs,” which deal with the political movements of the country. Although the book lacks unity, the English reader will find in it a wealth of information and a helpful interpretation of Russian misty reality. Reproductions from several great Russian paintings are excellent.

New Songs of Zion; a Zionist Anthology, edited by S. Roth, New York. If this anthology was intended to serve as an echo of the Zionist movement, it will appear as a testimonia pauperitatis. The lofty ideal of forming a cultural center in Palestine for the Wandering Jew is very pallidly reflected in the naive verses of American boys and girls. Israel Zangwill is also represented with a few shallow effusions to the astonishment of those who admire his sense of humor. The translations from Byalik are tolerable, and I heartily recommend the English reader to get acquainted through them with one of the greatest living poets who is known only to readers of Hebrew.

The Two Great Art Epochs, by Emma Louise Parry. [A. C. McClurg & Company, Chicago.] Complete and instructive as a text-book for the history of art from earliest Egypt down to the decline of Renaissance—if there is still need for such text-books. The wretchedness of the reproductions is irritating.

Changing Russia, by Stephen Graham. [John Lane Company, New York.] Sentimental observations of a poetic tramp who bewails the inevitable transformation of patriarchal, agricultural Russia into a capitalistic state. Excellent descriptions of the picturesque shore of the Black Sea; interesting, though often erroneous, notes on the “Intelligentzia.” Mr. Graham has been religiously tramping the globe for many years, and his love for nature and primitive life is manifest in every book of his.

Bellamy, by Elinor Mordaunt. [John Lane Company, New York.] Cleverly written, this chronicle of Walter Bellamy, a dynamic English obviosity, exploiter of silk pajamas, exhibits a man who is sufficiently honest to devote his life to himself.

Hebrew and Babylonian Traditions, by Morris Jastron. [Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York.] An exhaustive, cool, cautious treatment of the much-polemised question as to the primacy of one or the other of the two ancient civilizations. Of great value to the student of comparative religion.

The Rise of the Working Class, by Algernon Sidney Crapsey. [The Century Company, New York.] An optimistic book by an ex-clergyman. Many things are cited as working class gains and benefits which that class would willingly reject. As appendix, there is a long panegyric of that mountebank, Lloyd George, in which he is hailed as a social and economic savior of the “People.”

American Labor Unions, by a Member. By Helen Marot. [Henry Holt & Company, New York.] The first book on the American labor movement which takes tolerant and detailed notice of its later developments. The new Syndicalist tendency in the American Federation of Labor and the rise and growth of the Industrial Workers of the World are both discussed, as are also the much disputed questions of political action, violence, and sabotage. A book that merits the study of those who believe there is no other way of remedying economic conditions except through the periodical dropping of a paper ballot through a slit.

Life’s Lure, by John G. Niehardt. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.] A novel of Western mining life which has the same note of virile realism as has the very worthy verse of the same author. A healthy contrast to the usual Western compound of Deadwood Dick and puling sentimentality. One of the best pieces of red-blooded stuff that has recently been written. Jack London had better look to his laurels.

Change, by J. O. Francis. [Doubleday, Page & Company, New York.] A play to be read. Life here without affection states itself in its own terms. The timid and the frivolous may read this and have their eyes opened. Labor’s struggle for freedom is forcefully depicted. The scene is laid in a little Welsh mining town, and the characters are drawn with simple charm and beauty. A play that breaths life and truth.

Everybody’s Birthright, by Clara E. Laughlin. [Fleming H. Revell Company, New York.] Miss Laughlin has both sympathy and understanding for the ideals of young girls. In this little book she makes clever use of the Jeanne d’Arc story as a means toward helping another Jean to bear the loss of a twin sister.

Myths and Legends of the Mississippi Valley and the Great Lakes, by Katharine B. Judson. [A. C. McClurg & Co., Chicago.] Here are some old friends: Hiawatha, Nokomis, and Minnehaha—also Bre’r Rabbit and the Tar Baby; and some myths of fire, wild rice, and Mondamin the Corn Woman, which furnish a fascinating comparison with Prometheus and Demeter over in the Aegean. A careful arrangement of material overcomes in part the misfortune of fragmentariness.

The Twenty-Fourth of June, by Grace S. Richmond. [Doubleday, Page & Co., New York.] A study of love at first sight—or just before. Rich Kendrick came into the house by the back door and saw a rose-colored scarf on the hatrack; but the poor young millionaire had to wait weeks before meeting its owner, and then months until Midsummer’s Day for his answer. Incidentally he discovered the charms of work, home and good women.

Tansy, by Tickner Edwardes. [E. P. Dutton & Co., New York.] A charming story of the Sussex downs, by a man who lives among them. The background of village characters, of rural incidents, and of the Sussex countryside is exquisitely done. Tansy Firle is not a Watteau shepherdess—quite the contrary; she has a compelling personality and a beauty of the sturdy upland variety.

La Vie des Lettres: Collection anthologique et critique de poèmes et de proven Neuilly, Paris.

The July issue of this important quarterly is both breezy and instructive. Two exotic poems by the Roumanian, Alexander Macedonski; a cycle of poems by Nicolas Beaudrien (who was introduced to English readers by Richard Aldington in the June Egotist); a few dainty-grotesque Images de la Capitale, by Carlos Larronde,—they form what I called the breezy part. Of great charm also are the “ponderous” features. Among others there is an article by William Berteval on Tolstoi et L’Art pour L’Art; an attempt of a modernist to justify the Russian’s point of view on art. In its international review the Quarterly mentions The Little Review, with a “memento” for the poems of Nicolas Vachel Lindsay and Arthur Davison Ficke.

Rev. A. D. R., Chicago:

I earnestly request you to discontinue sending your impertinent publication to my daughter who had the folly of undiscriminating youth to fall in the diabolical snare by joining the ungodly family of your subscribers. As for you, haughty young woman, may the Lord have mercy upon your sinful soul! Have you thought of the tremendous evil that your organ brings into American homes, breaking family ties, killing respect for authorities, sowing venomous seeds of Antichrist-Nietzsche-Foster, lauding such inhuman villains as Wilde and Verlaine, crowning with laurels that bloodthirsty Daughter of Babylon, Emma Goldman, and committing similar atrocities? God hear my prayer and turn your wicked heart to repentance.

A. Faun, Paris:

In one of your issues I read with delight Wilde’s paradox: “There is nothing sane about the worship of beauty. It is entirely too splendid to be sane.” I fear you are getting too sane—you, who some time ago invited us “to watch, in the early morning, a bird with great white wings fly from the edge of the sea straight up into the rose-colored sun.” In my illusion I pictured you enthroned in a tower, high above the street and the crowd, perceiving reality through dim stained glass walls. Alas, there is evidently an accommodating lift that connects your tower with the sidewalk. You have become so sane, so logical, so militant in attacking the obvious.... Oh, Pan and Apollo!

A Proletarian:

Glad to see your magazine getting more and more revolutionary and courageously attacking the rotten capitalistic order. But why not dot the i’s? Why shrink from discussing economic problems? Why not give us the real dope? Go ahead, we are with you!

David Rudin, New York:

Permit me to voice a different opinion from that expressed by Charles Ashleigh in his review of Galsworthy’s The Mob. It is my contention that Mr. Galsworthy has sympathetically and powerfully portrayed the uncompromising idealist, the champion of an unpopular idea in this virile disrobing of the spangled strumpet Patriotism.

In these stirring times of destruction to appease insatiable kaisers, czars, kings and the uncrowned masters of despotism The Mob comes as an opportune declaration of the minority against war, against invasion, and against “Love of country.”

Stephen More, the type of man whose conscience and sense of justice cannot realize that “idealism can be out of place,” makes a brave, aggressive stand against the allied forces of position, friends, love, and the blind hatred of the despicable mob, armed only with an unprejudiced, faithful ideal. Such passion and sincerity of purpose surely should presage victory. The real victory is won at the moment when More dies for his idea at the hands of the very mob that many years later erects a monument to him—and worships. They await the next victim of the crucifix—and it begins again: inflammatory patriotism, destruction, and a chaotic, purposeless Hell on earth.

D. G. King, Chicago:

Your article To The Innermost in the October number is a manly poke at the snug, smug, dead-alive ones, the mollycoddles, the got-in-a-rut-can’t-get-out-without-considerable-effort ones, and others of the won’t-do-and-dare class that this farcical world of ours is plentifully sprinkled with! It’s the best thing I’ve seen yet from your militant pen.

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“First, last and all inclusive in Miss Amy Lowell’s poetic equipment is vitality enough to float the work of half a score of minor poets.... Against the multitudinous array of daily verse our times produce ... this volume utters itself with a range and brilliancy wholly remarkable.... A wealth of subtleties and sympathies, gorgeously wrought, full of macabre effects (as many of the poems are) and brilliantly worked out ... personally I cannot see that Miss Lowell’s use of unrhymed vers libre has been surpassed in English. This breadth and ardor run through the whole fabric of the subject matter.... Here is the fairly Dionysiac revelry of a tireless workman. With an honesty as whole as anything in literature she hails any and all experience as stuff for poetry. The things of splendor she has made she will hardly outdo in their kind.”

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Paul Claudel was for many years in the French Government Service in Cochin, China. “The East I Know” is a translation into English of his “La Connaissance de l’Est.” It is a series of word pictures of life in the Far East written by a poet whose individuality and originality are bound to make a profound impression on American as they have already done on Continental readers. The translators have captured with complete success the author’s exquisitely delicate feeling for words which give the color and soul of the East with poetic modulation yet unmistakable truthfulness.

This is the first of M. Claudel’s work to appear in English and is expressly authorized by him.

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THE FALCONER OF GOD
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Mr. Benét’s sensitive appreciation of human interest, and his ability to frame his thoughts each in the style best suited to convey it, have already made him known to a large public. Readers of the Century, Scribner’s, Harper’s, The Outlook, The Independent, and other magazines are familiar with the appeal of his poetry.

The present volume is a collection of virile and impressive poems enhanced by the fantastic color and charm which Mr. Benét has already made his own. It contains two poems which should be of especial interest in the present European crisis, reflecting as they do the spirit of the Franco-German War of 1870.

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Lyrics of an Italian	Scharmel Iris
Zarathustra Vs. Rheims	George Soule
The Cost of War	Clarence Darrow
Wedded: A Social Comedy	Lawrence Langner
“The Immutable”	Margaret C. Anderson
Poems	Maxwell Bodenheim
The Spiritual Dangers of Writing Vers Libre	Eunice Tietjens
Tagore’s “Union”	Basanta Koomar Roy
War, the Only Hygiene of the World	Marinetti
Noise	George Burman Foster
The Birth of a Poem	Maximilian Voloshin
Editorials
My Friend, the Incurable	Ibn Gabirol
London Letter	E. Buxton Shanks
New York Letter	George Soule
The Theatre
Harold Bauer in Chicago	Herman Schuchert
A Ferrer School in Chicago	Rudolf von Liebich
The Old Spirit and the New Ways in Art	William Saphier
Book Discussion
Sentence Reviews
The Reader Critic

The Little Review

Lyrics of an Italian

The Forest of the Sky

Iteration

April

Scarlet—White

Three Apples

Zarathustra Vs. Rheims

The Cost of War

Wedded:

CHARACTERS

SCENE

AT RISE

“The Immutable”

Poems

Expressions of a Child’s Face

Emotions

I

II

III

IV

To ——

To Handpainted Chinaware

Study of a Face

An Old Man Humming a Song

The Spiritual Dangers of Writing Vers Libre

PICCADILLY

SALUTATION THE THIRD

Union

War, the Only Hygiene of the World

Noise

The Birth of a Poem

Editorials

Why Socialists Went to War

Even Galsworthy!

Another New Poet

Prizes for Poetry

My Friend, the Incurable

London Letter

New York Letter

The Theatre

Forbes-Robertson’s Hamlet

“The Yellow Ticket”

“Jael”

Harold Bauer in Chicago

A Ferrer School in Chicago

The Old Spirit and the New Ways in Art

Book Discussion