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Title: The Little Review, May 1915 (Vol. 2, No. 3)

Author: Various

Editor: Margaret C. Anderson

Release date: August 18, 2021 [eBook #66083]
                Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

Credits: Jens Sadowski and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net. This book was produced from images made available by the Modernist Journal Project, Brown and Tulsa Universities.


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LITTLE REVIEW, MAY 1915 (VOL. 2, NO. 3) ***

                           THE LITTLE REVIEW


                   _Literature_ _Drama_ _Music_ _Art_

                          MARGARET C. ANDERSON
                                 EDITOR

                               MAY, 1915

   Poems                                                 Mitchell Dawson
   What We Are Fighting For                         Margaret C. Anderson
   Echo (from the German of Fritz Schnack).                             
   America’s Ignition                             Will Levington Comfort
   Solitude                                                 George Soule
   Remy de Gourmont                                    Richard Aldington
   Who Wants Blue Silk Roses?                               Sade Iverson
   “Mother Jones” and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn                    M. C. A.
   The Poetry Bookshop                                        Amy Lowell
   America, 1915                                     John Gould Fletcher
   Poems                                               Maxwell Bodenheim
   Some Imagist Poets                                        George Lane
   Editorials and Announcements                                         
   The Sermon in the Depths                                    Ben Hecht
   “The Spoon River Anthology”                             Carl Sandburg
   Poetry and the Panama-Pacific                         Eunice Tietjens
   The Mob-God                                           “The Scavenger”
   The Theatre                                                          
   Music                                                                
   Book Discussion                                                      
   The Reader Critic                                                    

                           Published Monthly

                            15 cents a copy

                    MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Publisher
                           Fine Arts Building
                                CHICAGO

                              $1.50 a year

         Entered as second-class matter at Postoffice, Chicago




                           THE LITTLE REVIEW


                                Vol. II

                               MAY, 1915

                                 No. 3

                Copyright, 1915, by Margaret C. Anderson




                                 Poems


                            MITCHELL DAWSON


                                Cantina

   You were the flame of a Pompeian lamp,
   Wavering in the sea-wind,
   Cosima,
   And ever to the gale of me you danced,
   Flickering out of reach....

   I will return to Sorrento,
   To the wine-room under the cliff.


                        Santa Maria del Carmine

   Here by the church door
   A shriveled bat
   Has folded his wings
   And dreams of dead crepuscular delights,
   Bat loves, bat orgies,
   Tarantistic flittings through the dark.

   O fragrant beggar blinking in the sun,
   I will drop three soldi in your hat.


                                 Harpy

   O keen of scent,
   You who have found me in my slough,
   Not your beak, but your green eyes
   Have torn to the center of me.
   Ah, but I shall not slake them with a tremor.


                               Termaggio

   In the asylum at Termaggio
   Reside a dozen poets—
   So many colored balloons bobbing against a black ceiling;
   Will none of them be caught
   By the arm of a strong wind,
   Down and outward through the open window?

   We cannot remove the roof at Termaggio,
   In the sun our balloons would burst....

   Perhaps we had better close the window.


                          Under the Cypresses

   Under the cypresses
   No nightingales will sing this spring;
   For I have strewn the ground
   With the shards of broken illusions,
   And I will build of them a citadel of austerity
   With towers whence I can search the sky
   For a rainbow that is stronger than painted china.

   Dear nightingales,
   There are still the saccharine gardens of Verona,
   Where the moon-moth waves his fragile wings.




                        What We Are Fighting For


                          MARGARET C. ANDERSON

I have been much criticised for an article on Gabrilowitsch in the last
issue. I have been told rather violently that I didn’t know what I was
talking about; that to say Gabrilowitsch had stood still artistically or
that the music critics were deaf because they didn’t like Scriabin’s
_Prometheus_ was simply to brand THE LITTLE REVIEW again as the kind of
magazine which delights in any sort of snap-shot judgment that may sound
startling or “new.” But the fact of the matter is this: if THE LITTLE
REVIEW is ready to stand behind any of its judgments (and it is very
ready), I can think of nothing that has appeared which I will so eagerly
and convincingly defend as that article on Gabrilowitsch or my remark
that _Prometheus_ was extraordinarily beautiful. I can “prove” the first
in at least three ways, and I have some one in mind (a Russian) who will
write a poem on his reactions to _Prometheus_ that will make you all
wish you had imaginations too.

But this is not important. It merely leads me to an announcement of a
series of articles—a sort of campaign—that we have been planning for the
last two months. If we are to prove that we have a real “function” it
will be this of depreciating values that have ceased to be important and
appreciating new ones that have emerged—or, as I should say, values that
_are about to become unimportant_ and those that _are about to emerge_.
In view of such a function I am quite willing to agree with my critics
that the Gabrilowitsch article wasn’t worth anything: it merely stated
things that are already quite well known, and a magazine that means to
announce transvaluations before the approximate ten-year period during
which even the uninspired come to accept them has no business to concern
itself with mere restatements. Of course the most frequent criticism
brought against THE LITTLE REVIEW is that it goes to artistic and
emotional and intellectual lengths no well-balanced person wants to go.
I only wish this were true: I mean, we haven’t gone any real
_lengths_—and that is just what’s the matter with us. We have made
statements that seemed fearfully radical and new to a lot of people who
don’t know what’s going on in the world; and I’m afraid we have listened
to these people and tried to “convert” them. We have wanted to convince
everybody—particularly those who seemed to need it most. And there is
nothing more fatal: because what everybody thinks doesn’t matter; what a
few think matters tremendously. I was brought up with a shock the other
day, at an editors’ “meeting,” when Lucien Cary said that though THE
LITTLE REVIEW had one of the requisites of the ideal magazine,—youth,—it
had the wrong kind of youth: the kind that has not yet caught up instead
of the kind that has gone ahead. After trying to face that squarely for
five awful minutes I was forced to decide that he was right. I mean in
this way: I know the quality of our youth is all right, just as I know
that people who write true things and live false ones are all wrong; but
the wisdom of it is quite another matter. And one of our big mistakes
has been a hope that preaching will help.

There’s nothing pompous in saying that the thoughts of only a few people
matter. This has always been so and always will be. Every new valuation
has come about just that way—championed by a group and then endorsed by
a majority long after it has ceased to matter much. But for a magazine
that means to count—well, I can’t decide whether our predicament of
having got into a sort of Billy Sunday slump is humorous or very sad.
Hereafter we shall pretend that there are no impossibilists in our
audience.

But the announcement: In each of the future issues of THE LITTLE REVIEW,
beginning with June if possible, we shall have a special article
attacking current fallacies in the arts or in life—getting down to the
foundations. Each one will be written by a person who knows thoroughly
what he is talking about, and each will be “true and memorable,” to use
Will Comfort’s good phrase. For instance, suppose we begin with the
modern theatre. It will be interesting to find why Clayton Hamilton
calls a play as false, as distorted, as unwholesome and demoralizing as
_The Shadow_ a great drama, and why Percy Hammond, who is looked upon
even by some of the discerning as a critic worthy to be trusted in the
work of spreading ideas, should have nothing but superlatives for the
same outrage. (To do him justice, Mr. Hammond did modify his praise with
a single naive sentence: “I could find some flaws in _The Shadow_”; and
then, to put his other foot in, “but the playing glossed them over until
they were forgivable”—which is precisely the crime and tragedy of such
productions). This type of intellectual blundering is apparent
everywhere among the critics of literature, of music, of art, of the
drama, and among the strangest of all human creatures—the historians
(“men who reserve their judgments for a hundred years”) and the
philosophers (men whose judgments are good for everything except to live
by). If you happen to be equipped with knowledge of the intricate
hypocrisies of the music schools, or the way the newspapers treat a
competent art critic, or the methods of a manager in making a good play
a bad one, or how dissatisfied the railway employees really are or ought
to be—send us an article on the subject. The conditions of acceptance
are these: You must know English prose; you must write it as though you
are talking instead of writing; you must say quite frankly and in detail
the things you would not be allowed to say in the prostituted,
subsidized, or uninteresting magazines; and you must be true. This
begins our warfare.




                                  Echo


   (_Translated from the German of Fritz Schnack by William Saphier_)

   Into the forest your voice flew
   Clear and light as a bird from its nest.
   From your mouth the sound departed
   Swinging gaily into the black forest.

   It flew
   Through dusky deep solitude
   Mysterious quiet, pale night,
   Gravely-bent tree tops, fairy-tale flowers.
   It danced past
   Queer animals and strange things,
   It touched them with quick moves
   And they were frightened by the gay bird.

   Green looks stared through the night
   And angry phosphor glints pierced the foliage
   Where owls were moving their beaks deceitfully.

   Here your gay bird was frightened
   And fearfully returned
   Beaten by the envy of the black branches.

   Shuddering it fell into the blue day
   Tired, lame-winged, dead.




                           America’s Ignition


                         WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT

... The quickened pulse of America did not appear with the outbreak of
war. It came with the winter cold, like all revival spirit—a strange and
fervent heat, breaking down the old, vitalizing the new everywhere. No
one doubts now—no one who can tear his eyes from the ground even for a
little—doubts now that the new social order is upon us.

America, in opening her breasts to the agony of Europe, in her giving of
solids and sympathy, has stumbled upon the ancient and perfect formula
for receiving the greater good. In forgetting herself a little, her own
human spirit has been ignited.

If someone announced that there lived in the Quattor Islands a man who
knew the exact way to bring into the world, not only the spirit, but the
action of _brotherhood_ and _fatherland_, there would be some call for
maps and steamship passages. If the Quattor Islands were not already on
the maps, they would presently appear, but not before the earliest
pilgrims had set out. And if someone should add that all expression of
the arts so far in the world is wumbled and imperfect compared to that
which is about to be, if a certain formula is followed; and that this
man in the Quattor group has the formula—many more would start on the
quest, or send their most trusted secretaries.

And yet the truth and the way is all here, and has been uttered again
and again by every voice that has lifted itself above the common din.

The wise men carried gifts. You would expect to give something for the
secret. You might expect to be called upon to sell all you have and give
to the poor. You would not be surprised even if the magnetic Islander
said:

“It is not your frankincense and myrrh that I want, though I thank you.
That which I have is for you. I am more anxious for you to know and live
it, than you can be to have and hold it. But the mystery is that it will
not come to abide with you, while you are passionate for possession. The
passion to give to others must be established within you before you can
adequately receive—”

You are beginning to see how ancient is the gospel. It is old, older
than that. It belongs to the foundations. Personally and nationally, the
law works the same way. That which is true, is true in all its parts.
There is an adjustment by which that which is good for the whole is good
for the part; that which is good for the nation is good for the man; but
each, whole and part, nation and man, must have for the first thought
not self-good but the general good. One nation, so established in this
conviction that its actions are automatically founded upon the welfare
of the world, could bring about the true fatherland in a generation; and
one human heart so established begins to touch from the first moment the
profound significances of life.

Personally and nationally, this plain but tremendous concept is
beginning to manifest itself here in America. I do not write as a
patriot. It is not _my country_ that is of interest, but humankind.
America’s political interests, her trade, all her localizations as a
separate and bounded people, are inimical to the new enthusiasm. The new
social order cannot concern itself as a country apart. American
predatory instincts, her self-worship, her attempt at neutrality while
supplying explosives for the European slaughter arenas, her deepening
confinement in matter during the past fifty years, have prepared her for
the outright demoralization of war, just as surely as Europe is meeting
today the red harvest from such instincts and activities. For action
invariably follows the thought.

Yet the hearts of men in America are changing. I do not write as a
religionist, but as one very much of the world. For the hearts of men do
change, and it is only through such changes that the material stagnation
of a people can be relieved without deluges of blood.

The high hope is upon us. In being apart from war, America has been
enabled to see. One must always remove himself from the ruck to see its
movement. In the past six months, within these western shores, the
voices of true inspiration have been heard. From a literary standpoint
alone, this is the most significant fact since Emerson, Whitman, and
Thoreau, took pen in hand forgetting themselves a little while each day.
There is a peculiar strength upon American production of all kinds, as a
result of this very act of getting out from under European influence.

England and France and Germany are merely national voices now. The voice
of the partisan is but a weak treble against the basic rumble of war.
War is a confession, as suicide is a confession, as every act of blood
and rage is a confession, of the triumph of the animal in the human
mind.... If you have received letters from friends in England or Germany
or France since the war; friends whom formerly you admired for their
culture and acumen, you have been struck by the dullness and misery of
the communications, the uncentered points of view, the incapacity of
human vision in the midst of the heaviness and blackness of life there;
if, indeed, you have read the recent newspapers and periodicals of these
countries, you will require no further proof of the fact—that a nation
at war is an obscene nation, its consciousness all driven down into the
physical, its voice tonally imperfect from hate and fear, its eyes open
to red illusion and not to truth.

Even in America the voice of the nationalist is a part of the old and
the unclean. The new social order does not recognize the rights and
desires of any isolated people. Humankind is basically one in meaning,
in aim and in destiny. The difference of one nation from another in
relation to the sun’s rays, in character, country, environment, race,
color and structure of mind—these are primal values, the very values
that will sum up into the essential grandeur of the whole. Personally
and nationally there are no duplicates in the social scheme. The
instruments of this magnificent orchestra are of infinite diversity, but
the harmony is one.

The spiritual source of all human achievement is already a harmonic
whole. That globe is complete. It is our business as men to make a
pattern of it in matter—to make the dream come true in flesh, each man
and each nation bringing his labor, which can only be bent into a
fitting arc, by the loss of the love of self.

It requires but a little vision to observe Nature at work upon this
concept in a thousand ways. She always seeks to preserve her balances.
If a certain plant, or bird, insect, beast, man or nation, rises by
intrinsic force and predation to dangerous increase, a destroying
parasite is invariably fostered within its shadow. In good time these
two growths turn to rend each other, a mutual cleansing. The Prussian
war-office is a counter-growth to British imperialism. That which
survives will be humbler and wiser.

I saw in a doctor’s office in Canada the picture of an English bull-dog
standing large against the background of a British flag, and beneath was
this line:

“What we have, we’ll hold.”

I found that the picture had a national acceptance in the British
colonies and at Home. Yet a child stopping to think would have seen
breakers ahead for a nation so lost in material things, as thus to
challenge the Fates.... There is a fairy-tale of a man building a great
boat for the air. It looked to win, and in the effrontery of
achievement, he set forth to conquer God. Just then a hornet stung
him....

All this to suggest that the new dimension of life must come from
America, if it comes at all; and from this vantage-point, the reality is
mightily appearing—in the new poetry, in the new novels, in music,
painting, and the crafts. The generation just coming into its own,
contains the builders whose work is to follow the destroyers of war.
They are not self-servers. They do not believe in intellect. Their
genius is _intuitionally_ driven, not intellectually. Just as steam has
reached its final limitation as a force, and is being superseded by
electricity, the limitations of which have not been sensed so far even
by the most audacious, so the intellect as a producing medium, has had
its period—a period of style-worship, vanities of speech and action, of
self-service, or parading, of surface show and short-sightedness,
without parallel in the world.

For the intellect is a product of sunlight, its energy supplied by human
blood which dies. The new dimension comes from the fountain-head of
energy, and its first realization is the unity of all nature. The
intellect is as old as your body is; the giant that is awakening from
sleep in the breasts of the rising generation is immortal.

The thing that was called genius in the last generation met a
destructive force in the material world, almost as deadly and vindictive
as that encountered by Copernicus. The voices of the few heralds were
scarcely heard, but there is a battle-line of genius in the new
generation, timed for the great service years following the chaos of
war. They will bring in the liberation of religion from mammon; they
will bring in the religion of work, the equality of women, not on a mere
suffrage matter alone, but in spirit and truth; they will bring in their
children un-accursed.




                                Solitude


                              GEORGE SOULE

   I was fretted with husks of men;
   I cried out to be alone,
   To be free,
   To run in the wind.
   Solitude was to me as the dream of a country well to a fevered man.
   I ran away to be alone.
   And there were the stars, and the sea, and the sun coming up out of the
      sea.
   And I went mad with the wind’s song.

   Then I chanted my ardor to the air—
   But it came back clanging about my ears:
   The stars were too near,
   I was compressed between horizons;
   I choked in the wind and the sun!

   In my wrath I strode back to men
   And smote the husks asunder.
   From them came forth
   The whole of me that I had lacked.
   For the first time I was alone,
   Alone with all of myself,
   In splendid peace.




                            Remy De Gourmont


                          BY RICHARD ALDINGTON

The work of Remy de Gourmont is known and read in all parts of the
civilized world. Yet he has not a large circulation and a purely
commercial writer would probably be disgusted at his profits, but he has
an influence, especially over the younger and more adventuresome
spirits, which few writers today possess. One can—or rather one could in
the days before the war—hardly pick up any French review without finding
some reference to his ideas or some criticism of his work. In Russia he
appears to have a more considerable reputation than anywhere else
outside France. For, though one sees criticism and translations of him
even in languages like Hungarian and Roumanian, it is in Russia alone
that a word of praise from Remy de Gourmont seems to make a man’s
reputation. The English are far slower in their international
appreciations, and the Americans—quick though they are to seize on new
men—do not seem to have taken up de Gourmont with much understanding.
Mr. Ransome’s translation of _Un Nuit au Luxembourg_ was not received
with either appreciation or enthusiasm by English and American critics.
And though a savant like Mr. Havelock Ellis quotes from M. de Gourmont’s
work, and has, I believe, a great admiration for his personal
intellectual qualities; though Mr. Sturge Moore, in his book on Flaubert
and Blake, quotes M. de Gourmont among the great critics of France, it
must be admitted that few English-speaking critics have yet done him
justice. I question if the larger public has heard more of him than a
vague rumour of his name.

It may be that he is thought too “high-brow.” I suppose every man who
gives his life up to the task of expressing his ideas, his character,
and his genius in a purely disinterested manner is liable to this
criticism. But there is so great a fascination in his work, whether it
be criticism or fiction, philosophic dialogue or prose poem, that
whenever he gains a reader it is not for an hour but for life. In
America especially he should find readers, for America, whatever
artistic faults and drawbacks it may have, has not, as England has, a
“ring” of reviewers who unanimously “queer” any book whose originality
or genius is any menace to their own stick-in-the-mud critical methods.

The Symbolist movement in France is now almost ancient history.
Unanimists, Futurists, Paroxysts, Fantasists, and all the other “ists”
so abundantly produced by this century now face the “ists” of Germany on
the battlefield. And while they are there fighting out by bodily force
and not by words the intellectual destinies of Europe we may perhaps
consider with free minds the Symbolist poets and authors who are now too
old to take the field for their country and can only sit at home
“waiting for news.”

Some of the “children of Mallarmé” are dead; others are forgotten; a few
still remain. Maeterlinck, Vielé-Griffin, Jammes, and Remy de Gourmont
occur first to one’s mind as the best living representatives of the
great Symbolist school, and of these the subtlest, the most fascinating,
the most modern is Remy de Gourmont. Along with M. Anatole France,
though very different from him, Remy de Gourmont is an example of the
tradition of European culture. Less derivative than M. France, or
perhaps deriving from less familiar sources, with as great an irony and
with a faith that seems more sceptical than scepticism itself, he has
extracted from the literature of each country and century that part
which helped him to develop and train his own character. He presents in
one person the manifold and often conflicting opinions and ideas of
modern culture. Reading his books one sees that there is a mystical sort
of beauty even in science and under his pen mysticism itself appears
almost as exact as a science.

I said just now that M. de Gourmont was an example of the tradition of
European culture, and since Paris, we are mostly agreed, is the centre
of European culture, and since Remy de Gourmont is a Parisian of
Parisians, we may count him, I think, as one of the best examples of
Latin or West European culture now living. I rather dwell upon this
aspect of Remy de Gourmont as the man of supreme culture since that
quality has so suddenly and so startlingly come into public discussion.
It is extremely difficult to say precisely what culture is; and a
definition of culture naturally varies with differences of race and
temperaments. John Addington Symonds, in his interesting and
illuminating essay on this subject, defines culture as “the raising of
previously-educated faculties to their highest potencies by the
conscious effort of their possessors.” And it might be added to this
excellent definition that the feature of Latin or West European culture
which most distinguishes it from the culture of other countries is a
wideness of interest, a great general “cultivating” of all the faculties
of the mind and character as opposed to the extreme development of one
single faculty.

Remy de Gourmont is indeed so admirable an example of the type of
culture I have briefly indicated that it is difficult to think of any
form of intellectual activity which has not at one time or another
received his attention. He has been a founder of reviews—among them the
famous _Mercure de France_—and an editor of reviews. He has written
prefaces for modern authors and for ancient authors—both poets and
prose-writers. As a literary critic it is perhaps not too much to say
that in his time and generation he ranks as Sainte-Beuve did in his.
Under his name will be found five volumes of _Promenades Littéraires_,
collections of essays dealing with the widest possible range of literary
subjects—from Petronius to Guillaume de Machaut, from the Goliardi to
the latest “roman passionnel.” His _Livres des Masques_ are one of the
most considerable acquisitions to the criticism of French literature
during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In these two books
will be found amazingly penetrating studies of men so diverse as the de
Goncourt brothers and Maeterlinck, while American readers should be
especially interested in his studies of the two Franco-American poets,
Stuart Merrill and Francis Vielé-Griffin. As an admirer of Huysmans, M.
Remy de Gourmont was naturally interested in the mystic, Christian Latin
poets. And the fruit of several years’ study of these authors was that
notable and unique book _Le Latin Mystique_. It is no exaggeration to
say that hardly anyone else could have made these writers interesting to
anyone but the specialist. One can almost imagine M. de Gourmont being
challenged to produce a book which would appeal not only to savants but
to the lover of general culture. This mystic Latin poetry had, until
Huysmans’ day, been almost entirely neglected by students of beautiful
things. But Remy de Gourmont, treating the subject as a poet in love
with poetry—not as a pedant or a professor or a book-maker—has produced
a work which is at once a criticism and an anthology of the literature
produced during those thousand years which we ignorantly call the “Dark
Ages.”

These investigations into an almost forgotten and strangely attractive
literature were not without effect upon his purely creative work. This
effect can be best seen in his _Litanies_, a series of curious and,
verbally, extremely beautiful prose-poems, full of assonances, of
internal rhymes, of strange symbols, of sonorous rhythms and of
fantastic images. Again in his prose, in works like _Le Pèlerin du
Silence_ and _D’un Pays Lointain_; in his poetry—especially in _Les
Saints du Paradis_—this influence is most marked.

In books like _La Physique de l’Amour_, _Le Chemin de Velours_, the
series of _Promenades Philosophiques_ and _Epilogues_, we have an
entirely different kind of intellectual activity—lettered, it is true,
but with that incisiveness and clarity of style and thought which mark
French prose as the finest in the modern world. In these books problems
of philosophy, of morals, of everyday conduct and national and
international affairs, problems of music, of painting, of all the arts
and sciences, are discussed with a brilliance and an originality not
always palatable to the gloomier and duller elements of French society.

One must not ask for too clear a definition of M. de Gourmont’s
philosophy. He is just sufficient of a mystic to enjoy being
misunderstood, and of a nature so ironical that his most
innocent-looking statements are traps for the unwary. He is an
individualist—true to his type of culture. Perhaps if he were very
closely questioned he would smile and say that he belonged to the
“tradition des libres esprits.”

In addition to these many works, of so diverse a character that they
might well be the result of the labours of several men rather than of
one, he has written several novels, one or two of which at their
appearance were the literary sensation of the hour; he has devoted much
time to the study of aesthetic questions and has published two or three
volumes on the subject; beyond all this he has produced a modern French
rendering of Aucassin and Nicolette, a translation from the Spanish and
a couple of original plays! And in his little flat on the rive gauche,
not far from St. Sulpice, among his books, he still writes every day
words of encouragement for anxious Paris, still finds time to observe
and reflect and to let the rest of the world know what is happening in
France.




                          Words Out of Waking


                               HELEN HOYT

   In the warm, fragrant darkness
   We lay,
   Side by side,
   Straight;
   And your voice
   That had been silent
   Came to me through the dark
   Asking, _Do you smell the lilacs?_
   You, half in sleep,
   Speaking softly,—
   Indistinctly.
   Then it seemed to me,
   A sudden moment,
   As if we lay in our graves,
   And you were speaking across
   From your mound to mine:
   In the springtime,
   Speaking of lilacs,—
   With muffled voice through the grass.




                       Who Wants Blue Silk Roses?


                              SADE IVERSON

   The battlefields are very far away:
   No friend of mine fights on them—and no foe.
   I have not sickened at the battle stench,
   Nor seen the tragic trenches where men die.
   I am a woman, walking quietly,
   And fond of peace and place and fireside cheer,
   Yet here, afar from strife, the grey Uhlans
   Have battered down my door, let in the rain,
   And put me out, purse-empty, on the street.

   Strange, say you?
           Chance of war! Samaritans,
   I’m past all succor;—slain in my pocket-book.
   My little shop for hats—chic hats, oddities—
   Is shut as tight as Juliet Capulet’s tomb.
   “Bad times” has stood me up against the wall:
   “Bad times” in Uhlan gear, takes certain aim.
   (And firing squads have always stone cold eyes.)

   All winter long, I’ve peeped out on the street,
   To watch my little customers go by
   In conscious rectitude and home-made hats;
   Home-made to noble ends!
           Not that they’ve less
   Than once they had. They’ve more—a bran new creed.
   Economists approve: the fashion’s set.
   “How fine and sensible the women are,”
   You hear the men commenting on the train.
   “My wife is trimming her own hats.” “And mine.”
   “I like to see the women suit themselves
   To present needs.” “And I. It’s fine, I say.
   Some little good comes out of this sad war.”
   (Ah, yes, but half a sausage and a roll,
   Was all the food I’d had in twenty hours!)

   _Now_ that would seem a feast. The cupboard’s bare.
   Well, here’s a chance to put my luck to test.
   Who goes a-roving when the pot is full?
   Say, comrades, comrades, let’s set out tonight,
   And brew our mulligan behind the ties.
   No more I’ll sit alone to play propriety;
   I sell no more blue roses, hear me swear
   But when the snows are gone, I’ll scent mayweed
   Beside the fences, till some purple noon,
   I find the passion flower, in panoply,
   Awaiting me, and I shall stoop and pick.

   But do not think I am without a friend!
   I have my own familiar Imp for company—
   The secret, mocking creature of my heart,
   Which keeps me laughing when I’m set to cry,
   And fleers the cautions I thought principles.
   He’s captain now. We’ll see how he’ll provide,
   For food and drink and thought, and company.
   Let him advise what lens I’d best look through.
   Nero, they say, chose green; fools like rose-red.
   The Imp and I may stand for sun-bright truth,
   And smoke our glasses if we prove too frail.

   Come hunger, then, and want, or any shame.
   If Chatterton dare starve, why should not we?
   We’ll travel far—though without carfare, dears,
   And with shoe-soles that let in pavement slush.
   But now I shall find out if dry-shod feet
   Discount the wet ones. Live down the superstitions,
   So I say. Ducks think wet feet are best.
   Come, come, my Imp. Let’s start. Our fat landlord
   Has locked the door on us and taken the key.

   (When you are passing by the little shop,
   Remember one who wanted you for friend;
   A victim of the war, without a faith,
   But carrying a banner—a white field,
   And no word written on it.
           Yes, think of one,
   Who lacks a watchword, and wears no disguise,
   And arm in arm with impish laughter, seeks for Life.)




               “Mother Jones” and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn


                          MARGARET C. ANDERSON

Mother Jones and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn have been talking in Chicago and
I went to hear them both, expecting to be captivated by the former and
disappointed in the latter. But it turned out just the other way.

Mother Jones is all the things you have heard her to be—vigorous, almost
sprightly in her eighty-two years, witty, shrewd, kindly, hopeful of
great social changes, with snappy little blue eyes and a complexion like
a girl of eighteen and a tongue like an automatic revolver. You feel
you’d rather have her get after you with fire crackers, as she did to a
man in some Western hotel when she wanted to drive him out of town (and
succeeded), than to have her side against you in an argument. Right or
wrong, she would make you appear to be hopelessly wrong; and certainly
on any practical matter you would have a suspicion that she was right
anyhow. She is consistent and convincing. But there is one thing none of
the magazine articles has said about her: Mother Jones is a completely
simple human being, in the least flattering sense of the word. She
suffers because men are sent to jail and children are killed in strikes,
and she spends every day of her life working toward the prevention of
these things. But she lives on no more subtle plane of adjustments to a
difficult universe. You can’t associate her with any sort of intense
personal struggle. If temperament is the capacity to react, as I heard
some one define it the other day, then Mother Jones is as
untemperamental a person as I’ve ever seen. She acts; she doesn’t react
at all. She has neither a complex nor an interesting mind; she has a
well-informed one. She has read a lot—chiefly history and economics. She
hasn’t read philosophy or psychology, I think. She hasn’t needed to: her
knowledge of psychology is that sweeping and rather crude kind that
comes with years of hard experience in which there has been little time
for observation. If you asked her to sympathize with a man who had
killed himself because he loved too greatly, I can rather hear her say
that if men would keep busy they wouldn’t have time for such notions.
Life to her is reduced to a matter of two antagonisms: the struggle
between Capital and Labor. Other things, such as Art, for
instance,—well, she makes you feel it’s a little impertinent to expect
her to waste time like that; she is too busy trying to outwit the
“damned sewer rats,” as she calls Burns’ detectives or other obstacles
to peace and freedom. Mother Jones has a lot of effective phrases of
that sort; I think she wants to see if she can make you blanch before
she decides really to trust you; and then of course, as she says, “My
boys wouldn’t understand me if I talked nice and ladylike all the time.”
Underneath all this there is a charming old gentlewoman, full of
delicate courtesies that win for her the splendid chivalry of the rough
men she spends her life among.

The man who took me to see her made an unfortunate remark. He told her
that I wanted to write an article about her, and asked if she wouldn’t
tell me how she got started in her work. (I tried to stop him in time,
but it was no use.) She gave me one scornful look and then flashed at
him: “That’s a woman’s question. No man ever asks me such a fool thing,
but women always do. How do I know how I got started? I was always a
worker—that’s all.” Another of her simplifications is that there are two
kinds of people—those who work and those who don’t. She seemed to put me
with the latter, and it was my instinct from the first that she didn’t
approve of me. She just treated me politely, and it was rather awful.
She kept insisting that women know nothing about Labor—which is _almost_
quite true—and of course she didn’t neglect to mention her aversion for
the suffragists. But most of the time she told us stories, chuckling
heartily whenever she could say anything particularly explosive. She
described her recent trip to New York, and I remember her vivid account
of a visit she made the Colony Club. She said all the women came
tripping in on high heels, bent forward at an ominous angle that made
her think of cats ready to spring on a mouse. “I’ve got no time for such
idiots,” she finished. “And look at the crazy ones in this town, walking
in a mayor’s parade and yelling like wildcats instead of staying at home
where they might be reading and learning to educate their children.”

That night we went to hear her talk to an organization of painters and
found her irresistible. But she did little except entertain
them—particularly with stories in which she herself figured as the
white-haired heroine, wading across streams in water up to her waist to
outwit the police, or forcibly throwing a Burns detective out of her
audience. The painters shrieked with joy at that, and it really was good
to hear. She had suspected a certain man who had been going to her
meetings, so one night she asked him to leave. He refused, but she
insisted. He said, “I won’t go and I’d like to see anybody who can make
me.” “Well,” she answered, “we’ll see about that”; and she stepped down
from the platform, took him by the throat, held him so tightly “that his
tongue stuck out,” and marched him out of the hall. He didn’t bother her
any more. These things, told in her blunt, snappy way, are
overwhelmingly funny—and stirring too. But what you like most about her
is her sudden falling into seriousness, and the way she says, “Now, my
boys, _stick together_. Solidarity is the only method by which we can
beat the system.”

Mother Jones has no patience with anarchism: “Don’t talk to me about
philosophies of an ideal society that will happen some time long after
I’m in my grave. What I’m after is to do something for my class while
I’m still alive. I believe in accomplishing things.” She has none of the
anarchist’s hatred of government; she merely wants our present system
humanized. And she has a lot of little prejudices about people and
things: about Bill Haywood, for instance, who “divides Labor against
itself,” as she says—and says untruly.

On the whole she is just what you would have expected—except that she’s
more amusing. There is absolutely nothing of the artist in her. She is
imaginative in the large way a child is; in fact Mother Jones is a child
in the sense a grown-up can’t be without losing a lot.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, “the girl agitator,” has an even more consistent
point of view than Mother Jones, and she has the advantage of being
without prejudices. Her face has more subtlety, more interest for the
analyst, than Mother Jones’s obvious compressed mouth and quick eyes;
but it has little of that stamp of multiple reactions which make Emma
Goldman’s face such a fascinating “subject.” There is a touch of Irish
poetry in it—something wistful and something stern.

Miss Flynn gave three talks—on Birth Control, on Violence in Relation to
the Labor Movement, and on Solidarity: Labor’s Road to Freedom—but I
could only hear the last one, which everyone said was the least
interesting of the three. There was only a handful of workers there, and
she was so informing that the place ought to have been crowded with all
the good people who think the I. W. W. is an organization of
unintelligent outcasts whose only competence lies in throwing hammers
into printing presses, etc., etc. Miss Flynn is more articulate than any
I. W. W. I have heard, and she is freer from the stock phrases that give
so many of the very earnest young workers in the movement something of
pathos. I like these I. W. W. people a lot. They are not only offering
an efficient program of labor; they are getting close to a workable
philosophy of life. They are even capable of a virtue no working-class
organization is supposed to be overburdened with: hardness of thought.
As Miss Flynn said: “Don’t pamper yourselves. It’s not a _sacrifice_ to
fight for your own freedom!” Of course this group has its camp followers
who do it no end of damage; but then the Socialists have their
“practical” fanatics who are so awfully practical they always look at
the trees instead of the forest, and the Anarchists have their soulful
members who yearn for martyrdom and blubber about the duty of suffering
for a cause. The best of the Industrial Workers are neither visionless
nor sentimental. They have no interest in being martyrs; they are
workers. Miss Flynn is of the best of these.




                          The Poetry Bookshop


                    (_35 Devonshire Street, London_)

                               AMY LOWELL

I well remember the first time I went to the Poetry Bookshop. It was in
July, 1913. I had read of it in a stray number of _The Poetry Review_
that had drifted my way. The idea attracted me at once, and I determined
to have a look at it during the summer. There was something alluringly
crazy about anyone’s starting a bookshop for the sale of poetry alone.
Poetry is at once my trade and my religion. All decent poets worship
their art and slave at it, and I am no exception to the rule. But I have
my “afternoons out” with their temptations, and the greatest of these is
a bookshop. Here was the combination: a poetry bookshop. I turned to it
as inevitably as a magnet to the pole.

It was after a visit to one of those large and flourishing
establishments where every sort of book is sold that you do not want to
read; where rows and rows of the classics you wish you could read again
for the first time flaunt from the shelves in gaudy leather bindings,
and a whole counter labours to support the newest and dullest novels,
and another is covered with monographs which instruct you minutely as to
how to grow fruit-trees, catch salmon, handle golf clubs, or bicycle
through the home counties. It was in one of these “emporiums,” after the
usual “We can get it for you, Madam,” that I broke into open revolt and
started off to The Poetry Bookshop.

I knew it was somewhere near the British Museum. “Off Theobald’s Road,”
I told the taxi driver, and settled down to looking out of the window,
for London, whether on foot or driving, is a never-ending interest to
me. Theobald’s Road is one of those large, busy thoroughfares, which cut
across London in all directions, and off it, to the left in my case, we
turned into a quiet, rather run-down little street, Devonshire Street. A
swinging sign about half-way down it attracted me. It was shaped like a
shield and blue, if I remember rightly, and on it were painted three
torches. All this was determined as the taxi approached. That must be my
place, I thought, and it was.

We drew up at the door of a shop—unmistakably a shop, because it had a
big shopwindow. It did not need the name, “The Poetry Bookshop” in
excellently designed, big, black letters over the window, to tell me
that I had arrived.

I did not go in at once. I like to take my temptations gradually,
nibbling at them bit by bit and tasting, before gulping them down as
full-fledged crimes. I nibbled at that window. It was broad and high,
and the books were displayed in it in the singularly fascinating manner
which American booksellers jeer at and call “English window dressing.”
All these books were poetry, or about poetry; that is, of course, all
the ones that were not plays. There were long strips of ballads hanging
down, like 18th century broadsides, each one topped by a crude woodcut
in glaring reds, and blues, and yellows. The nibbling was so delightful
that I collected quite a crowd of street urchins about me, wondering
what the lady was looking so long into the window for, before I had
done.

Then I went in, but even the window had not prepared me for the shop
inside. It was a room rather than a shop, for there was a smart fire
burning in the grate, and there were chairs, and settles, and a big
table covered with the latest publications. The walls were lined with
shelves, and under the window was a little ledge entirely filled with
reviews from all over the world. The familiar cover of _Poetry_ made me
feel quite at home, but the eclecticism of the proprietor was at once
evidenced by the presence of _The Poetry Journal_ and _Poet Lore_,
periodicals of whose existence I should not have expected him to be
aware. There was also _The Poetry Review_, from which I knew he had
severed himself, so it was obvious that the proprietor cared very much
to be fair.

I turned to the shelves, and my surprise was even greater. There were a
lot of shelves, all round the room and even over the chimney-breast.
Every volume of poetry recently published was there. That I had
expected, but what I had not expected was that all the classics were
there too. Not bound into mausoleums, “handsome editions in handsome
bindings, which no gentleman’s library should be without,” but readable
volumes, for the reader who wants to read.

There was not a bit of glass in the shop, all was open and touchable. Of
course I touched, and opened, and browsed. There were French books, too,
and Italian. It goes without saying that the book I wanted was there. I
know I bought it, and others, and came out laden and happy.

I did not meet Mr. Monro on this first visit, and I do not now remember
exactly when I did meet him. My sojourns in the shop were many, and at
this distance have become confused. But I did meet him sometime, and
found an earnest, quiet gentleman, the very opposite from the crank. But
even at the first visit I had felt the bookshop to be not “crazy” at
all, but an answer to a very real need.

It has been my experience that people who really do things (in
contradistinction to talking about them) are very straightforward,
sensible persons, without sentimentalism in the pursuit of their ideal.
Mr. Monro was exactly this. He was spending his energy to give poetry
the dignity and charm of presentation it had lost at the hands of the
commercial booksellers; he was encouraging poets and allowing their
books a chance; but he did not talk ideals, nor dress like a combination
of a fool and a wild animal. He was too busy to pose, he was just “on
the job.” And what “on the job” meant and means is best told by giving
the history of his enterprise.

For some years Mr. Monro had lived abroad, in Switzerland and Italy. But
the nostalgia of home took possession of him, and he returned to
England. Shortly after his arrival The Poetry Society asked him to edit
a magazine for them, and he consented, and _The Poetry Review_ began in
January, 1912. Mr. Monro not only edited the _Review_, but paid for it.
Now the Poetry Society, like all such bodies, is conservative, and Mr.
Monro is sown with the seeds of radicalism. So differences of policy
began, and at the end of a year, Mr. Monro seceded from _The Poetry
Review_ and founded another review, _Poetry and Drama_, to be published
quarterly.

But I am anticipating. While editing _The Poetry Review_ Mr. Monro
conceived the idea of having a bookshop, which should be at once the
office of the review and its various publications, and a shop. An old
house in Devonshire Street was leased and everything “en train,” when
Mr. Monro found that the inevitable breach with The Poetry Society on
matters of policy was imminent. He announced in _The Poetry Review_ the
foundation of a new magazine, a quarterly, and relinquished _The Poetry
Review_ into other hands after having founded it and edited it for
twelve months.

On January 8th, 1913, The Poetry Bookshop opened its doors to the
public, and the public, always caught by novelty, flocked in. Professor
Henry Newbolt gave the opening address. The first publication of the
Bookshop, _Georgian Poets_, an anthology of the work of Lascelles
Abercrombie, Rupert Brooke, W. H. Davies, Walter de la Mare, James Elroy
Flecker, Wilfred Wilson Gibson, D. H. Lawrence, John Masefield, James
Stephens, Harold Monro himself, and others, had already appeared. This
book has been extraordinarily successful, and, in two years, has gone
through ten editions.

Of course the book helped the bookshop, and the bookshop helped the
book. So delighted were the amusement hunters with the idea, that there
was some danger of the venture being swamped in the tide of fashion. But
Mr. Monro was too genuinely in earnest to be elated by his success, or
depressed when it calmed down to a normal interest. The bookshop pegged
away at its work and in March, 1913, the first number of _Poetry and
Drama_ appeared. This little quarterly is indispensable to anyone
wishing to keep abreast with what is being done in poetry abroad. The
articles on French poetry by F. S. Flint alone are worth the cost of
subscription. But _Poetry and Drama_ also publishes original poetry,
critical reviews, and English, French, Italian, and American chronicles.
It is an interesting paper, and if I easily see how it could be
bettered, that only means that I am an enthusiastic reader. Was anyone
ever sincerely devoted to a paper without feeling that with a grain of
his advice it could still be improved?

Yet I have a sneaking feeling that Mr. Monro runs his paper better than
I should, better than any of us would. It requires a singularly
unselfish and dispassionate devotion to run a paper and have it favor
all schools, and criticise all cliques, equally. Nobody is quite pleased
by that method, but the public gets what it pays for, and I, for one,
admire a man with this quality of justice in him. _Poetry and Drama_ ran
until December of this year, when it was suspended during the
continuance of the war, and the lack of it is so noticeable that it
shows very well what a position it had already achieved.

The Poetry Bookshop publishes as well as sells. _Georgian Poetry_ was
followed by _Anthologie des Imagistes_, _Poems_ by John Alford,
_Anthology of Futurist Poetry_, and various small ventures such as _The
Rhyme Sheet_ (the broadsides I have spoken of before), and a number of
little chap books called _Flying Fame Publications_, of which one I have
seen, _Eve_ by Ralph Hodgson, is enchanting.

Many though Mr. Monro’s activities were, the house was too big for them.
So Mr. Monro fitted up some of the attic rooms as bedrooms, and there
his clientele of poets hailing from the country find a welcome and
inexpensive lodgings. Other rooms are used as reading rooms, for
readings are held every Tuesday and Thursday at 6 P. M. Sometimes the
poets read their own poems, sometimes other people read them. Verhaeren
and Marinetti have read there and many other poets, well-known and still
unknown. Mr. Monro invites those he desires, and as he runs his readings
as he runs his shop there is great and stimulating variety. The
difficulty with this sort of thing is the hangers-on, the horde of the
sentimental of both sexes who fasten upon an artistic endeavor and
seriously hurt it. It is inevitable that some of these parasites should
drift into the readings, as I noticed on one occasion that I was there.
But time will weed them out, for such people can never bear to realize
that art is as hardworking as, say, stonecutting.

Since the war The Poetry Bookshop has been printing chap books,
published at sixpence. Among them are Maurice Hewlett’s _Singsongs of
the War_, _Antwerp_ by Ford Maddox Hueffer, _The King’s Highway_ by
Henry Newbolt, _The Old Ships_ by James Elroy Flecker; and for unmartial
relief, _Spring Morning_ by Frances Cornford, _Songs_ by Edward Shanks,
_The Contemplative Quarry_ by Anna Wickham, and _Children of Love_ by
Harold Monro.

Mr. Monro is so stern in his idealism that, although a poet of
originality and feeling, he willingly minimizes his own production for
the sake of advancing poetry “en masse.” That is remarkable, and his
enterprise deserves all the success which the poets and the general
public can give it.




                             America, 1915


                          JOHN GOULD FLETCHER

From the sea coast, from the bleak ravines of the hills that lift their
escarpments towards the sky that pours down pitiless threads of
sunlight, whirls over chill, clinging tentacles of rain, smashes hard
buffets of huge wind, sifts fine, quivering drifts of snow, thrashes
with thunder and with hail, uncurls its great sodden, flapping curtains
before the gale—from the marshlands, from the banks of slow rivers, from
the still brown plateaus, from the midst of steaming valleys, from the
wide bays ringed with peaks, a thousand cities reek into the sky.
Through a million vents the smell of cookery overflows. It rises upward
day and night in strange, tragic black rows of columns that glow and
make the stars quiver and dance and darken the sunlight.

Green rivers of corn, golden seas of wheat, white lakes of cotton meet
and fuse and inter-cross. Cattle string across in frightened procession:
multitudes on multitudes of horses, black, dun, grey, gallop away after
them, jarring the earth with their hoofs, beating up dust in heavy,
fluffy masses. Far away the sun lies still over broad patches of
silence, sparsely green, where an eagle hovers, or an antelope starts
up, or a sly, half-starving coyote is seen. The sun looks into yellow
castles wedged in the cliff that were old when the first explorers saw
them, and on white bulging palaces tinselled with marble and gold. The
sun sees engines that rattle and cough, black derricks that wave their
arms in arcs aloft, crazy log cabins that topple into the marsh. On
every side are symbols of man’s desire, made with his hands, hurried,
glorious, sordid, tragic, clashing, insane; the sun looks and does not
understand but pours over them its heat and cold, and rain and light,
and lightning, always the same.

Immense machines are clamoring, rattling, battling, wheeling, screaming,
heaving, weaving. The wheels bound and groan and roar and waver and
snap—and go on as before. Between the cities, over plain and hill, reel
double paths of shining steel, where screaming locomotives pass like
black shuttles leaving great trails of smoke amid the wheat, the cattle,
the corn, the cotton, the sordid, hideous factory shafts, the fleet
masses of plunging and galloping stallions. Their forces are never spent
or tired, for, nervously above them, earth is laced and wired with
crackling, chattering, singing, whispering electricity. They fly from
city to city, and the sky is scribbled above them with childish grey
gigantic scrawls, amid which the sun wabbles and crawls. And over all
shoot backward and forward words that walk in air, and perhaps not long
will the upper spaces be still, but soon be filled with racing lines of
strong black bird-machines bearing men on their backs. Purring autos
squawk and squeal, and spray and flutter, pale flashes through the rack.
Red, and black and yellow, the earth takes on its coat of colors, from
the struggle of a hundred million hands. It is a palimpsest which no one
reads or understands, which none has time to heed, a loom-frame woven
over with interspersed and tangled threads of which the meaning is lost,
from which the pattern hangs in shreds.

Amid all this, men struggle, surge, call out, fall choking, toil with
backs bent over the earth in black arcs. Crowds of them clatter,
scramble, bustle, push, and drift away. They creep, black, greasy
masses, out of the earth like ants; they swing out on great frozen
blocks of steel or marble; they saunter in some forgotten place; they
yawn with the weariness of little towns. Men, brown, black, yellow,
pallid with fatigue, ruddy with gluttony, blotched with disease, swarm
and waver back and forth, east, west, south, north. Crackling twigs of
dripping forests mark their feet. Red wet furrowed plains receive their
pains. Grey, hungry factory towns bellow out through steam-filled lungs
for them each morning. Prison gates grate slowly, hospital beds spread
stateliness, insane asylums gibber through their windows. They hustle
and shovel, piling heaps of hovels, and now and then, as if in mockery,
some coppery tower that seems as if it would split its sky with its
majesty. They are in a great shallow sea, crinkling uneasily as if some
giant’s body were wallowing beneath. Some single impulse creaks through
them, pouring out its breath through the chimneys, scattering itself
over the fields, closing itself in behind the doors. It is one great,
vague, inchoate organism, scarcely feeling its pulse as yet, rolling in
the belly of the world, waiting its hour of birth. Earth is heaped about
it; still it eats the earth away, red covering after red covering, day
on day. Now it half timidly peeps out, now withdraws itself again. And
ever the sky pours on it heat and rain, and wind, and light, and
lightning, and hail, shaping it, making it less frail, more fit to wake
and take its place in the world.

But over there, beyond the seas, where for years the war flags have been
stacked and furled, comes the crack of a pistol followed by faint
cheers. And now a smeary gloom appears; it seems to swell from out the
earth; it bulges in greenish folds above the horizon, and in its depths
are flashes from far-off guns. Suddenly from the heart of the cloud,
which the cowed world watches, holding its breath, come thick insensate
hammer-blows that split the core of earth asunder—the iron cannon
unleashed for the dance of death. Deeper and deeper the noise unrolls in
a vast salute to the new world from the old. It rises higher and higher,
covering the sea with its tumult, and filling the sky with gouts and
spatters of crimson fire. North, south, east, west, all the craters are
emptying out their vitals on earth’s breast. But the immensity of the
troubled continent stirs not, nor gives to the world the life that is
restlessly heaving beneath it.

The centuries sit with hands on their knees, wearing on weary foreheads
their iron-crowned destinies. The sun glares, the rain spatters, the
thunder tramples his drums, the wind, rushing, hums its scorn; but the
being—the thing that will master all the ages—still hesitates to be
born. The great derricks, black and frozen, lift their arms in mid air;
the locomotives hoot and mutter in despair; the shuttles clatter and
clamor and hammer at the woof day and night. The black flight of
priceless instants reels and rebounds and shivers and crawls, while
without the uproar of the cannon calls like black seas battering the
earth, grinding, sweeping, flickering, pounding, pounding, pounding, in
the increasing throes of birth. But still the thing will
not arrive. Still it refuses at the very gates of life.
America—America—blood-stained and torn with choked, convulsive sighs,
perhaps too late thou shalt arise, perhaps in vain shalt seek to rule
the earth!




                                 Poems


                           MAXWELL BODENHEIM


                                Silence

   The wordless dream of the fire;
   The white clock dropping gray minutes from its placid lips;
   The breathing of women, like the birth of little winds;
   The muttering of the man in the next room, painting a landscape;
   I threw them together with a jerk of my soul-wrist,
   And had silence—a swaying sound
   Made of the death of the others.


                                 A Head

   Her head was a morning in April.
   Loose, livid mist arose from cold ground
   And revealed two tired shepherds with lanterns,
   Standing above the wrinkled red blankets they had lain on...
   Then came the morning light—her smile.


                             The Operation

   With eyes of radium, and beard the color of wet sand,
   The doctor unlocked his instrument case as carelessly
   As a child opens an old box of blocks,
   And almost silently whistled something out of “Aida.”
   And the nurses—bits of sky with thick clouds—
   Chattered about patients and hummed frayed songs.
   But when the still body on the little cart came,
   The lips of the doctor became stiff and trim
   (Bows of ribbon turning to circles of stone)
   And the nurses were no longer women:
   Were sexless, with tapering fingers and metal eyes...
   The doctor made the incision and checked the blood:
   And I thought of a miner, half-reverently, half-wearily cutting soft
      earth,
   Picking out lumps of dead silver...
   But the picture changed when the doctor sewed up the wound,
   And I saw a middle-aged woman gravely mending a limp rag...
   The little cart disappeared,
   And the doctor locked his instrument case as carelessly
   As a child closes an old box of blocks:
   And the nurses were once more bits of sky with thick clouds.




                           Some Imagist Poets


                              GEORGE LANE

Some months ago, in these pages, Mr. Witter Bynner pointed out that
“Imagism” was derived from a Japanese poetical form, the name of which
Mr. Bynner regretted that he had forgotten. This name is “Hokku,” and
undoubtedly the Japanese Hokku poetry was the model upon which much of
the work in the first Imagist Anthology was formed, notably the
contributions of Mr. Ezra Pound. There was Greek influence, too, in that
first collection. But the whole volume showed a remarkable desire
towards perfection and clarity of utterance, and a delicate perception
of beauty.

There were few poetry lovers who did not taste its fine, astringent
flavour, but its qualities were at once its faults. It was beautiful
work, but too tenuous ever to become a great art, said the objectors. It
was incapable of embracing many of the elements of life and poetry. The
Imagists must remain side-tracked, and therefore, clever though they
were, they could not be of real importance.

But it seems that Imagism was more virile, more capable of growth, than
was supposed. The jejune maledictions and assertions of their chief
spokesman, Mr. Pound, have done so much to make the group ridiculous
that it is with a feeling of surprise that we find this volume a great
advance upon its predecessor.

Here is the work of six poets, four of whom were represented in the
first anthology. In an interesting preface they state their poetical
theories, which are much the same as those printed so often in _Poetry_.
But here the tenets are soberly and sensibly presented, and the whole
preface is dignified and worthy of consideration. Clearly the Imagists
are growing up.

It is hardly necessary to rehearse here the Imagist creed. It has been
discussed, with more or less hostility, in many reviews. But certainly,
in reading this preface, the hostility suddenly vanishes, and the
reviewer finds himself wondering if perhaps, after all, this movement is
not one of most unusual significance.

Briefly, these poets call themselves Imagists because their object is to
present an “image”; they believe “that poetry should render particulars
exactly and not deal in vague generalities, however magnificent and
sonorous”; they desire “to use the language of common speech,” and “to
employ always the _exact_ word, not the nearly exact, nor the merely
decorative word.” They wish “to produce poetry that is hard and clear,
never blurred nor indefinite”; and, finally, they are convinced that
“concentration is of the very essence of poetry.”

Brave words, excellent aims and hard enough of attainment. Again, these
poets agree to allow absolute freedom of subject, and, with a little dig
at some of their contemporaries, they say, “It is not good art to write
badly about aeroplanes and automobiles; nor is it necessarily bad art to
write well about the past. We believe passionately in the artistic value
of modern life, but we wish to point out that there is nothing so
uninspiring nor so old-fashioned as an aeroplane of the year 1911.”

That is a wholesome point of view, but indeed the Imagists have hardly
erred on the side of too great a preoccupation with modern life. In fact
this volume is noteworthy as showing a more personal, a less literary,
outlook on life.

The first Imagist Anthology contained the work of ten poets. Some were
represented by a number of poems, some by only one. In this new volume
only four of those poets are represented. But what is remarkable is that
they are not all the one poem authors. On the contrary, Richard
Aldington and H. D. had more poems in the first anthology than anyone
else in the volume, yet here are Richard Aldington and H. D. subscribing
to an arrangement which gives each poet approximately the same amount of
space. “Also,” says the preface, “to avoid any appearance of precedence,
they (the poets included) have been put in alphabetical order.” So art
is to come before self-advertisement. Happy omen! With such ideals the
group should go far. Six young poets with so much talent, devotion, and
singleness of purpose, is a phenomenon to be noticed.

Perhaps this is the key to the “differences of taste and judgment” which
have divorced these poets from the others of the first anthology. They
go on to say that “growing tendencies are forcing them along different
paths.” We can only guess at the tendencies, as the poems in this book
show them, and it is not our business to probe farther into a schism
which is touched upon so lightly and quietly in this admirable preface.

The six poets of this little anthology are: Richard Aldington, H. D.,
John Gould Fletcher, F. S. Flint, D. H. Lawrence, and Amy Lowell. It is
quite easy to see why “mutual artistic sympathy” binds these young
people together. But how extraordinarily individual they are, just the
same! From the exquisite, gem-like poems of H. D., to the organ music of
Amy Lowell in _The Bombardment_, with the graceful, tender, often
humorous work of Richard Aldington and the tragic earnestness of D. H.
Lawrence, set off by the rich imagination of John Gould Fletcher, and
the poetic realism, touched with a charming intimateness, of F. S.
Flint.

Richard Aldington’s contributions begin with _Childhood_, a study of a
lonely little boy in a horribly dull English town. It is full of
wistfulness, for the little boy is very real, and the detail is
admirably managed. The little boy is shut up in the ugly town, like a
chrysalis in a matchbox:

      I hate that town; ...
      There were always clouds, smoke, rain
      In that dingy little valley.
      It rained; it always rained.
      I think I never saw the sun until I was nine—
      And then it was too late;
      Everything’s too late after the first seven years.

That is very vivid. So, too, is the description of the contents of the
large tin box in the attic. But Mr. Aldington never allows the
descriptions to usurp the poem; he keeps them properly subordinated to
his theme, the loneliness of the child.

Fine as this poem is, it seems more experimental than Mr. Aldington’s
shorter work. Long poems require a different technique from short poems,
and perhaps Mr. Aldington has not yet become quite master of it. It is
in the short poems that he is so eminently successful.

_The Poplar_ is an almost perfect poem of its kind. A complete “image,”
and with that fine, poetic imagination which is the hall-mark of Mr.
Aldington’s best work. What could be more beautiful than this:

      I know that the white wind loves you,
      Is always kissing you and turning up
      The white lining of your green petticoat.
      The sky darts through you like blue rain,
      And the grey rain drips on your flanks
      And loves you.
      And I have seen the moon
      Slip his silver penny into your pocket
      As you straightened your hair;
      And the white mist curling and hesitating
      Like a bashful lover about your knees.

_The Poplar_ is, on the whole, the best poem of Mr. Aldington’s in the
book, but _The Faun Sees Snow for the First Time_ runs it close. And
here we have that divine gift of poetical humor which is another of Mr.
Aldington’s rare qualities. Space alone prevents me from quoting it. But
if I put these two first, where shall I put _Round-Pond_, with its sun
“shining upon the water like a scattering of gold crocus-petals”?

Mr. Aldington has advanced in his art. In spite of the _Faun_ and
_Lemures_, he has sloughed off much of the Greek mannerism which marred
his work in the first anthology. The training which his Greek studies
have given him, is here put to excellent and individual use. One looks
for much from him in the future.

H. D.’s poems are undoubtedly the most perfect in the book. There is
nothing broad, nothing varied about her attempts, but what she tries for
she succeeds in doing, absolutely. But in her work, too, we find a
grateful change going on. The stage properties are no longer exclusively
Greek. In fact, only one poem of her seven has anything obviously Greek
about it. There is nothing specifically inartistic in this transplanting
of the imagery of another place and time into one’s work. But when an
English poet fills every poem full of Greek names and Greek devices, the
result is intense weariness on the part of the reader. The poems may be
beautiful, but this foreign flavour gives them a sort of chilling
quality. One cannot help feeling that the poet is straining after a
poetical effect, and that stands in the way of a complete sympathy
between poet and reader.

H. D. is too much of an artist not to have realized this, and in these
new poems (with the exception I have mentioned), there is no hint of
direct preoccupation with the Greek in title or text. Yet the poems are
so completely Greek that they might be translations from some
newly-discovered papyrus. And still, in reading them, one feels that the
sincerity of the artist is not to be questioned. Here is no striving
after effect, but a complete saturation of a personality in a past mode.
If one believed in reincarnations, one could say, and be certain, that
H. D. was the reincarnation of some dead Greek singer. The Greek habit
sits upon her as easily as a dress, loosened by constant wear. It is
undubitably hers. To adopt another speech would be an unpardonable
artificiality. Realizing this, and not making the mistake that so many
reviewers have done in considering her a copyist, we must admit that H.
D.’s poems attain a perfection which is not to be found in the work of
any other modern poet. This garland of sea flowers is a masterpiece of
pure beauty. I have only space to quote one of these poems, but it shall
be quoted entire.


                                Sea Iris

      Weed, moss-weed
      root tangled in sand,
      sea iris, brittle flower,
      one petal like a shell
      is broken,
      and you print a shadow
      like a thin twig.

      Fortunate one,
      scented and stinging,
      rigid myrrh-bud,
      camphor-flower,
      sweet and salt—you are wind
      in our nostrils.


                                  II.

      Do the murex-fishers
      drench you as they pass?
      Do your roots drag up colour
      from the sand?
      Have they slipped gold under you;
      rivets of gold?

      Band of iris-flowers
      above the waves,
      you are painted blue,
      painted like a fresh prow
      stained among the salt weeds.

H. D. has her limitations, as I said before. They are the most obvious
thing about her, except her perfection. But it is so ridiculous to cavil
at them, as it would be to deny the loveliness of one of the sea flowers
she writes about, because it is not a forest of lofty trees.

To pass from H. D. to Mr. John Gould Fletcher is something in the nature
of a shock. It is a good deal like plunging into the ocean from a warm,
sunny cliff. One’s ears, and nose, and mouth, are filled with rushing
water. One feels in the grasp of an overwhelming power, and one
struggles to the surface, breathless, half-drowned, but wholly
invigorated.

To drop the figure, these two poems of Mr. Fletcher’s are so full of
potentialities, so large in suggestion, that one hardly knows what to
say about them. Does _The Blue Symphony_ mean life? I confess I do not
know. Is it merely a series of pictures? No, there is a vague
undercurrent to the poem which makes that impossible. It is the sort of
poem which a mystic might ponder over indefinitely and find new meanings
every hour. And yet it is all done with the precision and clearness of
the Imagist theory.

It is impossible to give any idea of the poem as a whole by quoting bits
of it. But little pieces, even divorced from their context, have that
succinct epigrammatic quality which is the stamp of genius. Here are
three lines:

      I have heard and have seen
      All the news that has been:
      Autumn’s gold and Spring’s green!

It is evident in this poem that Mr. Fletcher has been much influenced by
the Japanese.

      And now the lowest pine-branch
      Is drawn across the disk of the sun.

is absolutely Japanese. But strangely enough it is a technique got from
a study of Japanese painting rather than from Japanese poetry.

Mr. Fletcher’s versatility is shown by turning from _The Blue Symphony_,
to his other poem, _London Excursion_. Here the note of mysticism of
_The Blue Symphony_ is entirely abandoned, and there is no hint of
Japanese influence. If _London Excursion_ follows any lead, it is the
lead of the new schools of poetry and painting in France. But I will not
insult Mr. Fletcher by suggesting that he is, in any way, a disciple of
Marinetti and the Futurists. It is nearer the truth to say that he has
realized the vividness of some of their methods, and modified them to
his own use.

_London Excursion_ is one of the most interesting poems in this volume.
It is a poem of a man going into London in the morning by ’bus, spending
the day walking about the streets and going into shops, and coming home
at night by train. It sounds simple, but it is really the most amazing
expression of light, color, and unrelated impressions that one can
conceive. This is his impression of a street from his ’bus-top:

      Black shapes bending,
      Taxicabs crush in the crowd.

      The tops are each a shining square
      Shuttles that steadily press through wooly fabric
      Drooping blossom,
      Gas-standards over
      Spray out jingling tumult
      Of white-hot rays.

      Monotonous domes of bowler-hats
      Vibrate in the heat.
      Silently, easily we sway through braying traffic,
      Down the crowded street.
      The tumult crouches over us,
      Or suddenly drifts to one side.

Mr. Flint’s work is always delightful. He has a winning way of taking
his reader into his confidence. This, and his love of nature, which he
paints with real affection, gains our sympathy at once. It must be
admitted that none of Mr. Flint’s seven poems quite equal two of his in
the first anthology, _London My Beautiful_ and _The Swan_. One feels in
these two poems a groping quality, as though the poet were not quite
satisfied with them himself. As though the first _élan_ with which he
adopted the _vers libre_ medium were passing away, and he were beginning
to realize that the form has its limitations.

If there is any truth in this, it is evident, however, that Mr. Flint
has not yet made up his mind to try anything else. It would be almost a
pity if he did, for few _vers librists_ understand the manipulation of
cadence as he does. Perhaps the following is the one of these poems
which has most of his characteristic charm:


                                 Lunch

      Frail beauty,
      green, gold and incandescent whiteness,
      narcissi, daffodils,
      you have brought me Spring and longing,
      wistfulness,
      in your irradiance.

      Therefore, I sit here
      among the people,
      dreaming,
      and my heart aches
      with all the hawthorn blossom,
      the bees humming,
      the light wind upon the poplars,
      and your warmth and your love
      and your eyes ...
      they smile and know me.

_Malady_ strikes a stronger note than anything of Mr. Flint’s that I
have read before. It is excellent psychology, and steadily, astringently
done.

It is this constant change and growth which makes the progress of this
little group so interesting to watch. Mr. Flint’s work in the first
anthology seemed quite successful and finished. He had done what he had
done excellently, and he would go on doing it to the end of the chapter.
But here we see Mr. Flint, dissatisfied with mere success, daring a
wider horizon. From the point of view of adequacy of technique, his
poems suffer, as is natural; but the technique is sure to follow the
widened thought, before long. _Malady_ and the poem called _Fragment_
show the direction in which Mr. Flint is moving. His next work will be
interesting to see.

Mr. D. H. Lawrence is the best known of the poets in this book, although
a newcomer to the anthology. No modern writer is more vigorous than he,
and none is more entirely, almost brutally sincere. In Mr. Lawrence’s
novels this brutality is sometimes excessively evident, but always one
feels that the author inflicts pain upon himself as well as his readers;
that he says what he sees and is concerned not to shirk and be a coward
for his own comfort.

In his poetry, Mr. Lawrence seems to be more lenient with himself. It is
as though he allowed the moralist in him a day out. Not that he ever
ceases to be a moralist, really. But he permits himself to lay a slight
covering over the stark nakedness of disagreeable facts. This covering
is poetry, and very beautiful and original poetry it is.


                                 Green

      The sky was apple-green
      The sky was green wine held up in the sun,
      The moon was a golden petal between.

      She opened her eyes, and green
      They show, clear like flowers undone,
      For the first time, now for the first time seen.

Mr. Lawrence has solved the problem of _vers libre_ for himself, by
writing in a rhymed metre which usually defies all scansion, but which
gives a queer, and most satisfactory effect, of elasticity and strength.
For this reason, and for its novelty, Mr. Lawrence’s manner is very
interesting, but his matter is still more so. Read _The Mowers_, a
common tragedy, but put so newly and strikingly that it comes upon one
with all its original force.

_Fireflies in the Corn_ and _A Woman to Her Dead Husband_ are new in
subject as well as in presentation, and they have a bald reality about
them which I have never met in any other poem. But never once does Mr.
Lawrence make the mistake of being only a realist; he never ceases to be
a poet. In _Fireflies in the Corn_ there are these lines:

      And those bright fireflies wafting in between
      And over the swaying cornstalks, just above
      And all their dark-feathered helmets, like little green
      Stars, come low and wandering here for love
      Of this dark earth.

The _Ballad of Another Ophelia_ is probably his best poem. In it we see
his peculiar style at its very best.

Mr. Lawrence is the singer of truth, the lover of humanity. His
inclusion into the Imagist group shows that the school is broad and real
enough not to desire to shut itself up in the cupboard of precocity, as
in the beginning there was some fear of its doing.

Where Mr. Lawrence gives us the broadest view of Imagism from an English
standpoint that this newer, more vital group has offered us, Miss Lowell
does the same service for the American side. The qualities that make her
work noteworthy are first, a virtuoso command of language that fits
itself to the most diverse themes, and second, a sort of fantastic,
curious irony that is essentially American. This irony is perhaps at its
finest in _The Traveling Bear_ and _The Letter_, but these are too long
to quote. I choose instead _Bullion_, which may be taken for a very
modern type of love poem, in which love itself becomes a burden:

      My thoughts
      Chink against my ribs
      And roll about like silver hail-stones.
      I should like to spill them out,
      And pour them, all shining,
      Over you.
      But my heart is shut upon them
      And holds them straitly.

      Come, You! and open my heart;
      That my thoughts torment me no longer,
      But glitter in your hair.

Miss Lowell always looks at things from an angle. Her mind reflects the
unusual aspect and that most vividly. As she says of herself:

      When night drifts along the streets of the city,
      And sifts down between the uneven roofs,
      My mind begins to peek and peer.
      It plays at ball in old, blue Chinese gardens,
      And shakes wrought dice-cups in Pagan temples,
      Amid the broken flutings of white pillars.
      It dances with purple and yellow crocuses in its hair,
      And its feet shine as they flutter over drenched grasses.
      How light and laughing my mind is,
      When all the good folk have put out their bed-room candles,
      And the city is still!

Miss Lowell has the ability which is rare among present-day poets of
recognizing that beauty does not belong to an epoch or a period, but is
always the same, under whatever strange form it may present itself.

Doubtless her most remarkable poem is that called _The Bombardment_.
Whether the technique adopted here by Miss Lowell is destined to work a
revolution in verse-writing remains for the future to settle. But here,
at least, it perfectly justifies itself. No one should permit, however,
a question of technique to obscure the deep tragedy, the splendid
humanity, of this poem. War has only one beauty: that of its terrible
destructiveness of all beauty. _The Bombardment_ is the best statement
of this aspect of war I know. It must be read in its entirety, and so I
will not attempt piecemeal quotation of this most fitting conclusion to
the volume.

This book is so provocative of thought, the poets in it are so
suggestive, each one by him—or herself, that each really requires a
separate review. But I have said enough to show what an important volume
this little book is. We are told that it is to be an annual, and
certainly we shall watch its succeeding appearances with great interest.


   It is certainly best to separate an artist so far from his work
   as not to take him as seriously as his work.—_Nietzsche._




                      Editorials and Announcements


                         _The Murder of a Poet_

It is reported that Rupert Brooke died of sun-stroke last month in the
Dardanelles. There is nothing to be said in the face of such monster
horrors.... And it is also reported that Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson
has burned up his production of Shaw’s _Caesar and Cleopatra_, not being
able to bear the strain of acting in a play written by his unpatriotic
countryman who protested against such horrors.


                    _Emma Goldman’s Lectures in May_

At a recent meeting of the Chicago Woman’s Club, when all the editors of
Chicago magazines explained the virtues of their respective journals,
Lucien Cary said, politely but in effect, that THE LITTLE REVIEW was no
good. “The only striking thing it has done (beside coming out at all) is
to discover Emma Goldman, a nice woman with views less radical than
Emerson’s and certainly far less well expressed.” I quote this because
it is so exhilarating to catch Mr. Cary in a half-truth—the kind of
thing that makes for the confused thinking he is so valiantly in arms
against. If THE LITTLE REVIEW had been alive about twenty-five years ago
I hope we would have had the sense to discover that a great woman was
beginning to work in this country. As it is, we could only try to point
out how difficult and how fine has been Emma Goldman’s living of the
things Emerson thought it would be good to live. It was not for the
people who know their Emerson that we tried it, but for those who have
forgotten him, like Mr. Cary.... Since we failed so miserably we shall
have to try again. But in the meantime you may hear Emma Goldman herself
and discover just how she is helping to make Emerson’s essays livable.
She is to lecture for a week in Chicago, in the most delightful lecture
room in the city—the Assembly Room in the Fine Arts Building. Her
subjects are as follows, at 8:15 in the evening:

   _Sunday, May 9_:
   “Friedrich Nietzsche, the Intellectual Storm Centre of the European
      War.”

   _Monday, May 10_:
   “Is Man a Varietist or Monogamist”?

   _Tuesday, May 11_:
   “Jealousy” (Its Cause and Possible Cure).

   _Wednesday, May 12_:
   “Social Revolution vs. Social Reform.”

   _Thursday, May 13_:
   “Feminism” (A Critique of the Modern Woman’s Movements).

   _Saturday, May 15_:
   “The Intermediate Sex” (A Study of Homosexuality).

   _Sunday, May 16_:
   “The Limitation of Offspring” (A Discussion of How and Why Small
      Families Are Desirable).


                             “_Dionysion_”

One of the most stirring things that has come to this office lately is a
small journal with the word “Dionysion” on its cover. It is the first
volume of a magazine for the furtherance of Isadora Duncan’s work in
America, and the committee that has helped make this rather amazing
thing possible includes such names as John W. Alexander, Percy MacKaye,
Theodore Dreiser, Will Levington Comfort, Max Eastman, Robert Henri,
Edith Wynne Mathison, Julia Culp, Witter Bynner, John Drew, Walter
Damrosch, and many others. On the first page is Whitman, then Nietzsche
on Dionysian Art, and then Robert Henri with a little article on the new
education in which he says: “I was tremendously impressed one day in
Isadora Duncan’s studio, by the look in the faces of the children. As
they passed by me in the dance I saw great dignity, balance, ease. I was
impressed, too, throughout the entire time by the fact that they seemed
absolutely secure in their happiness. They appeared to know
unconsciously that they would receive a full measure of praise and that
in no case would there be blame or punishment. In each little upturned
face was a rare look of freedom—the look of people on a higher plane of
self-consciousness, an aloofness from the common thought. I saw in their
expression the impress of the measures of great music.” And he goes on
that “to inspire courage in children, to stimulate them with the work of
those who have the courage to create, to make of them frank facers of
the emotional problems of life, to start them on the way toward a great
constructive life, we must take care not to impose our wisdom and our
ignorance on them, but to give them the benefit of the best we have
through a frank response to their natural interrogation.” Isadora
Duncan’s idea is that “the expression of the modern school of ballet
wherein each action is an end, and no movement, pose, or rhythm is
successive or can be made to evolve succeeding action, is an expression
of degeneration, of living death. All the movements of our modern ballet
school are sterile movements because they are unnatural; their purpose
is to create the delusion that the law of gravitation does not exist for
them.” I know a man from Russia who came to this country knowing only
two words of English: “Isadora Duncan.” He had seen Miss Duncan dance
once in St. Petersburg and from that moment he looked forward to America
as the country of “highest intelligences in the freest bodies.” We may
sometime become worthy of this remarkable woman. _Dionysion_ ought to
help....


                          _Isaac Loeb Peretz_

Last month, under the strain of relief work for the Jewish families
driven from the war zone, there died in Warsaw a great poet, Isaac Loeb
Peretz, almost unknown to the English reader, if we do not count one
volume of his _Tales_, issued by the Jewish Publication Society. His
poetry, written in Hebrew and in Yiddish, may be compared to that of
Heine in its gracefulness, but it bears in addition the melancholy of
Polish skies. His sketches in prose and his dramas are too subtle in
their profound symbolism to be appreciated by the Jewish masses, who
nevertheless, worship him as one of the few great artists who had not
gone over to till strange fields, richer and more remunerative. The
Jewish stage in America flourishes on Gordin’s melodramas and on cheap
farces; the theatrical managers are too business-like to produce such a
high play as Peretz’s _Golden Chain_.


                       _The St. Patrick’s Affair_

Emma Goldman sent me this letter about the two Italian boys, Abarno and
Carbone, who have been found guilty of trying to blow up St. Patrick’s
Cathedral: “Our efforts for the Italian victims were in vain. They were
found guilty, although every bit of evidence brought out how the
provocateur induced, urged the act, bought the material, made the bombs,
and placed them in the cathedral. But the judge said that an officer has
the right to do all this since he does it not out of criminal intent but
‘out of duty.’ Imagine what sort of sentence the boys will get from this
cruel machine! I was in court all day until ten that night. I was near a
collapse, so terribly had the day impressed me. At midnight they
telephoned to tell me of the verdict. The horror of it all to me is the
material which Polgnani chose—two typical proletarian slaves, one a boot
black, the other a cobbler, both underdeveloped from malnutrition,
irresponsible in their youthful inexperience, like two frightened deer
driven at bay. To hear the lawyers refer to them as ‘fools,’
‘degenerates,’ ‘ignoramuses,’ without a sign of protest on their part,
almost drove me crazy. I had to restrain myself from pulling them to
their feet to cry out against the cruelty and humiliation of it all.
Life is terrible....”


                           _More Censorship_

A book called _Fewer and Better Babies: The Limitation of Offspring by
the Prevention of Conception_, by William J. Robinson, has just been
published by the Critic and Guide Company of New York. In looking
through it I came upon several mysterious blank pages, and then found a
foot-note explanation to the effect that the chapters on preventives had
been completely eliminated by the censorship: “Not only are we not
permitted to mention the safe and harmless methods,” says the poor
author; “we cannot even discuss the unsafe and injurious methods.” But
it probably won’t be long before Mr. Comstock is suppressed....




                        The Sermon in the Depths


          (_Phosphorescent Gleams of Spiritual Putrefactions_)

                               BEN HECHT

Since reading the recent translation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s book which
is called _The House of the Dead_[1] I have suffered from a distressing
ambition. I would like to go to Russia and there commit some naive
atrocity and be sent to a Siberian prison for at least ten years. I have
an unpatriotic prejudice and a lack of illusion concerning American
criminals or I would commit my atrocity on American soil. They, American
criminals, are as a rule a petty lot given to sentimental regrets and
griefs and reforms and periodicals. There is nothing which reflects the
smugness of a people so much as the manner and temperament of its vice.
And the temperament of American vice is more distinctly and monotonously
bourgeois than any of its virtues. The American citizen even when about
to be hanged is unable to rise above the commonplace reactions
“imagined” for his predicament by such authors as belong to the Indiana
Society.

I have hunted the American criminal with the police, been present at his
confession, watched him at his trial, sat with him in his death cell and
listened to him recite psalms and sermonize as the nervous sheriff
adjusted the noose around his neck. He is an artificial and
uninteresting disappointment. It would be as extreme a punishment to
spend ten years in his society behind the bars as to live in a State
Street Studio Building or join the Y. M. C. A. for a similar period.

But the “prison that stood at the edge of the fortress grounds close to
the fortress wall” and the primitive, debauched children who inhabited
it! The swaggering monstrosities that swilled on vodka and wept at the
stars. The bestial grotesques who delighted in the murder of infants for
the sake of the warm blood that bathed their hands. The filthy saints
and nonchalant parricides. The Herculean villains, the irritable
gargoyles innocently steeped in insatiable perversion and dripping with
infamy. The arrogant, sadistic artists of torture, human as children,
with their pitifully crippled souls; praying before the prison ikons,
stealing their comrade’s clothes and washing his feet; hating and loving
with the simplicity of Pagan gods and the ramified cunning of
continental diplomats. The nerveless flagellants, the heartbreaking
humorists, the fierce, fanciful executioners. There’s a company for you!
A purifying company in the very dregs of its depravities.

They stand alone in literature. Only Christ could have written of them
as well as Dostoevsky. Was Dostoevsky dreaming of a new religion when he
filled the pages with his human crucifixions? Probably not. But his
artistry and his painstaking, searching minute psychology have illumined
_The House of the Dead_ so that for him who is not afraid it is as holy
and human a source of inspiration as the loving sacrifices of the
Nazarene Thaumaturgist.

And yet it is a simple book. There are very few writings so direct and
simple, so easy to read and to understand. The terrifying lusts and
passions and distorted rages make the mind quiver, but they never
mystify. The harrowing morbidities pierce the intelligence like hot
lances, but they never blunt or deprave the moral senses. The fierce
pathos so exquisitely written, the blood-soaked restraints, the
consumptive dying in his iron fetters too weak to support the weight of
the little cross on his chest, the wild, inhuman humanness—they sizzle
away the nerve cuticles and burn the emotions with a strange fire.

It is the peculiar paradox of reaction. I visited once a Home for
Crippled Children and came away happier and cleaner. There the little
misshapen bodies and the unconscious holiness of their suffering
suddenly revealed to me things I had scoffingly overlooked in the
popular words of accepted divines. And it is the same way with the
company that writhes through the pages of Dostoevsky’s book. A more
material illustration of this paradox is the very rhapsodics I have
indulged in to convey what I have read. There are no rhapsodies in the
book. There is no “dramatic action” at all in the book. It is the most
inactive book I ever have read, barring not certain memoirs and diaries.
Nothing happens in the book, yet from its start a demoralized pageant
marches thunderingly across the pages, and somehow, by a psychological
process it would take Dostoevsky again to reveal, lifts the spirit to
heights as lofty as its itinerary is low. As for the style of its
writing, there are no secrets in the art for the great Russian. And here
he chooses the grim, gripping reiteration, the tragic calm and human
poesy of simple words to build up his staggering effects.

What will Americans think of the book providing it becomes popular?—and
it may. (The idolatrous regard born in this country for Russian art
instances the possibilities of American hysteria directed in the proper
channels.) The great majority of them, however—particularly those with
whom I have mentioned my horror of spending ten years—will feel it
incumbent upon them to be outraged, none more so than the criminal
fraternity. It is perhaps stretching a point to say that even so were
the highly and lowly estimable backbones of an earlier period of less
comparative moribund piety outraged by the Sermon on the Mount. But
there is a promising likelihood that their ectypes will never read the
volume and will thus be saved or lost or whatever you will. And those
who see the light from this Sermon in the Depths can effect an
exclusiveness which will merit them the flattering curses and derisions
of their fellow men for many sweet years to come.

The translation is by Constance Garnett and is excellently done. Mrs.
Garnett, more than any linguist, has in her work conveyed the atmosphere
and idiom and temperament of the Russian into English. She is
responsible for the remarkable translations of Turgeniev which have
carried his art unchanged into another tongue, as well as for the
Dostoevsky novels. For the benefit of readers who will be puzzled by her
footnote on page 11, the “Green Street” which she is unable to define is
the avenue formed between two ranks of prison soldiers through which the
condemned convict is wheeled and beaten. The soldiers stand armed with
fresh, green sticks which flash brightly in the sun as they swish down
on the naked back—hence the jocular name.

   [1] _The Macmillan Company, New York._




           Notes For a Review of “The Spoon River Anthology”


                             CARL SANDBURG

    _The Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters. (The Macmillan
                          Company, New York)_

I saw Masters write this book. He wrote it in snatched moments between
fighting injunctions against a waitresses’ union striving for the right
to picket and gain one day’s rest a week, battling from court to court
for compensation to a railroad engineer rendered a loathsome cripple by
the defective machinery of a locomotive, having his life amid affairs as
intense as those he writes of.

At The Book and Play Club one night Masters tried to tell how he came to
write the Anthology. Of course, he couldn’t tell. There are no writers
of great books able to tell the how and why of a dominating spirit that
seizes them and wrenches the flashing pages from them. But there are a
few forces known that play a part. And among these Masters said he
wanted emphasis placed on _Poetry_, voices calling “Unhand me,” verses
and lines from all manner and schools of writers welcomed in Harriet
Monroe’s magazine.

Once in a while a man comes along who writes a book that has his own
heart-beats in it. The people whose faces look out from the pages of the
book are the people of life itself, each trait of them as plain or as
mysterious as in the old home valley where the writer came from. Such a
writer and book are realized here.

Masters’ home town is Lewiston, Illinois, on the banks of the Spoon
River. There actually is such a river where Masters waded bare-foot as a
boy, and where the dead and the living folk of his book have fished or
swam, or thrown pebbles and watched the widening circles. It is not far,
less than a few hours’ drive, from where Abraham Lincoln was raised.
People who knew Lincoln are living there today.

Well, some two hundred and twenty portraits in free verse have been
etched by Masters from this valley. They are Illinois people. Also they
are the people of anywhere and everywhere in so-called civilization.

Aner Clute is the immortal girl of the streets. Chase Henry is the town
drunkard of all time. The railroad lawyer, the corrupt judge, the
prohibitionist, the various adulterers and adulteresses, the Sunday
School superintendent, the mothers and fathers who lived for sacrifice
in gratitude, joy,—all these people look out from this book with
haunting eyes, and there are baffled mouths and brows calm in the facing
of their destinies.

When a few of the pieces in this book reached Ezra Pound, the judgment
he passed upon them was that they are real and great poetry from the
hand of a new and a genuine American poet. It was Alice Corbin Henderson
who was the first American critic to seize upon some of these poems as
they were running in _The St. Louis Mirror_, and put them forward in
_Poetry_ as striking, indigenous, out of the soil of America as a
home-land. William Marion Reedy, editor of _The St. Louis Mirror_, is
accredited by Masters for the keen enthusiasm with which he helped him
carry along the work of writing.

In the year 1914 Masters not only handled all of his regular law
practice, heavy and grilling. Besides, he wrote _The Spoon River
Anthology_. There were times when he was clean fagged with the day’s
work. But a spell was on him to throw into written form a picture
gallery, a series of short movies of individuals he had seen back home.
Each page in the anthology is a locked-up portrait now freed.

The stress of this bore down on Masters. Just before the proof sheets
for his book came to his hands, he went down with fever and pneumonia
and a complex of physical ills. It was the first time in his life he was
willing to admit he was “sick abed.”

There is vitality, drops of heart blood, poured into Lee Masters’ book.
He has other books in him as vivid and poignant. Let us hope luck holds
him by the hand and takes him along where he can write out these other
ones.




                     Poetry and the Panama-Pacific


                            EUNICE TIETJENS

Has poetry, as an art, any meaning whatever for the American people, or
has all the recent ink which has been spilled in proclaiming a
renascence of American poetry gone only to water the roots of the
publishing business? These are questions which will be forced upon the
mind of every admirer of the lyric muse in contemplating the
Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. For in spite
of the millions of money and the acres of ground at the disposal of the
American sections there is nowhere, except in the commercial exhibits of
the publishers, any recognition of the existence of contemporary poetry.

When taxed with the fact that the art is unrepresented the heads of the
departments point deprecatingly to the fact that as a decorative feature
of certain architectural archways poetical quotations are used. There is
a quotation from Confucius, one from the Kalidasa, several from Edmund
Spencer, and one (O Triumph of Modernity!) from Walt Whitman. As no
commercial exhibit is accepted which was in existence at the time of the
St. Louis Exposition this answer is doubly enlightening.

All the other arts are here. Architecture, music, sculpture, mural and
easel painting, drawing, prints and etching, landscape gardening,
together with the so-called “Liberal Arts” are adequately represented.
But not poetry. A perusal of the “P’s” of the official list in an
attempt to discover it is significant. “Poultry” is there with a large
exhibit, so is “Plumbago,” “Plumbers’ Implements,” “Pomology” and
“Ponies.” Excellent exhibits all, but hardly lyrical.

It may be urged, of course, that other arts, such as the arts of the
theatre, acting and stagecraft, and the literary art of prose writing,
are also omitted. But although exhibitions of these things would be
eminently desirable they present great practical difficulties. And these
arts have, after all, a commercial side which is more or less adequately
suggested. But with poetry the case is different. The mere fact that
commercially poetry is, like Perlmutter’s automobile, a liability and
not an asset, ought in our practical age to prove that it is a “fine
art!” And the practical difficulty of providing a set of bookshelves and
a competent jury to pass on admissions need hardly stagger the directors
of so colossal an undertaking. Add to this daily, or even bi-weekly,
readings of contemporary poetry and the result would be a representation
in proportion to the attention paid the other arts.

It would be useless to urge that this Exposition is a private, or even a
local enterprise. It cannot stand as such. It represents in the face of
the warring world the development of our country, culturally as well as
commercially. And the fact that one of the oldest and most reverenced of
the arts is totally unrepresented must inevitably redound to the
discredit of the executive officers, and through them of the people at
large.

For the root of this cavalier treatment of poetry is, after all, in the
American people. As a nation, in spite of our complacency in the present
world crisis, we are still in the stage of culture in which we believe
that man can live by bread alone. And we can scarcely hope for more
adequate recognition of the art until those of us to whom poetry is a
living fact, and not an academic perception, have battled at greater
length and with greater self-sacrifice in the eternal struggle through
commercialism to beauty.




                              The Mob-God


The seats creak expectantly. The white whirr of the movie machine takes
on a special significance. In the murky gloom of the theater you can
watch row on row of backs becoming suddenly enthusiastic, necks growing
suddenly alive, heads rising to a fresh angle. Turning around you can
see the stupid masks falling, vacant eyes lighting up, lips parting and
waiting the smile, mouths opening waiting to laugh. A miracle is
transpiring. A sodden mass inclined toward protoplasmic atavism, a smear
of dead nerves, dead skin, fiberless flesh is beginning to quiver with
an emotion. Laughter is about to be born. The lights dance on the screen
in front. Letters appear in two short words and a gasp sweeps from mouth
to mouth.

The name of a Mob-God flashes before the eyes. Suddenly the screen in
front vanishes. In its place appears a road stretching away to the sky
and lined with trees. The sky is clear. The scene is cool and healthy.
The leaves of the trees flutter familiarly. The road smiles like an old
friend. And far in the distance a speck appears and moves slowly and
jerkily. Wide open mouths and freshened eyes watch the speck grow
larger. It takes the form of a man, a little man with a thin cane. At
last his baggy trousers and his slovenly shoes are visible. His thick
curly hair under the battered derby becomes clear. He walks along
carelessly, quietly, with an infinite philosophy. He walks with an
indescribable step, kicking up one of his feet, shuffling along.

Laughter is born. The vapid faces respond magically to His presence.
Pure, childish delight sounds. The faces are bathed in a human light. A
noisy, wholesome din fills the theater. And the little man comes down
the road with his calm and solemn face, his sad eyes, his impossible
mustache, his ridiculous trousers, and his nervous, spasmodic gait amid
the roars and wild elation of idiots, prostitutes, crass, common churls,
and empty souls converted suddenly into a natural and mutual simplicity.
The stuffy, maddening “bathoes” that clings to the mob like a stink is
dispelled, wiped out of the air. Laughter, laughter, shrieks and peals,
chuckles and smiles, the broad permeating warmth of the simplest,
deepest joy is everywhere.

Charlie Chaplin is before them, Charles Chaplin with the wit of a vulgar
buffoon and the soul of a world artist. He walks, he stumbles, he
dances, he falls. His inimitable gyrations release torrents of mirth
clean as spring freshets. He is cruel. He is absurd; unmanly; tawdry;
cheap; artificial. And yet behind his crudities, his obscenities, his
inartistic and outrageous contortions, his “divinity” shines. He is the
Mob-God. He is a child and a clown. He is a gutter snipe and an artist.
He is the incarnation of the latent, imperfect, and childlike genius
that lies buried under the fiberless flesh of his worshippers. They have
created Him in their image. He is the Mob on two legs. They love him and
laugh.

“Fruits to Om.”

“Glory to Zeus.”

“Mercy, Jesus.”

“Praised be Allah.”

“Hats off to Charlie Chaplin.”

                                                      “THE SCAVANGER.”




                              The Theatre


                             “ROSMERSHOLM”

                     (_The Chicago Little Theatre_)

I don’t want to write about _Rosmersholm_ or about Ibsen now. I want to
write about Mme. Borgny Hammer, who is great in the manner of the great
Norwegians.

There is a lot of talk about the Russian soul just at present. I wish
the Norwegian soul might come in for its share of analysis and
appreciation. It is interesting not because of its dark shudderings but
because of its intense light and its clearness. It is like the sun; it
is like wild flowers—not the delicate but the hardy ones.

Mme. Hammer is this sort of person. She is an actress because she must
act or die. She is so intense that the air about her is always
“charged”; and she is so natural and simple that you know right away she
must be great. There wasn’t a particle of difference between her
presence on the stage as the Ibsen heroine and her manner when she meets
you on Michigan Avenue and stops to say that Ibsen is so wonderful it’s
impossible to cut a line of his dialogue. In both situations she is the
genius. Mrs. Fiske’s Rebecca West was a stunningly-worked-out idea; Mme.
Hammer’s was just—Rebecca West. Mrs. Fiske had a theory of the character
and presented it in a series of subtle and powerful designs. But what
did this wonderful woman do? She didn’t act Rebecca West at all: she
just gave you the impression that she is Rebecca every day of her life.
She made _Rosmersholm_ a natural scene in the life of some modern
family, instead of making it a “study”—an effect in a rather strained
psychology.

I wish I could describe Mme. Hammer’s stage conversations—especially the
parts where she listens. She is so busy feeling Rebecca West that she
has no time to waste in managing her eyes and voice and hands. They take
care of themselves just as they would in her own library. When our best
actresses “listen” they keep their eyes on the person who is talking
with the kind of look that says: “I know it would be bad art now to look
at the audience out of the tail of my eye. I must pay close attention to
what this actor is saying to me.” Mme. Hammer looks at Rosmer with the
same expression she would wear if he were about to say things she hadn’t
heard him rehearse every day for six weeks. If she should break out with
some dialogue of her own it couldn’t sound any more spontaneous than her
reading of the lines Ibsen gave to Rebecca. I know Rebecca’s lines, and
yet I forgot them and decided she must be making things up as she went
along. What richness of simplicity, and what a sturdy beauty!

I have never seen an actress who cares less about herself than Mme.
Hammer and cares so deeply for the character she is presenting. The
expressions of her face are marvelous.... She said to me once that she
disagreed with critics who thought Hedda Gabler had nothing to give.
“She had so much, so very much to give,” she said passionately. No
wonder she thinks so: she is a big woman who herself has an infinity of
things to give.

                                                              M. C. A.


                           “THE TROJAN WOMEN”

Of the production of _The Trojan Women_ of Euripides by The Little
Theatre Company, at the Blackstone Theatre, Sunday, April 11th, one
might waste many, many words and much good space. One might make merry
over the quaint little mannikins trying their hardest to look like
Spartan soldiers. Or again, a whole column might be devoted to the
insipid posturings of the saintly-pretty lady who played Helen. Much
sarcasm might be expended on the flops done, in the approved
French-tragedy style, by the lady who played Andromache. A whole thesis
might be written by an enterprising student at some correspondence
school on the use of the Vaudeville Spotlight in Classic Greek Tragedy.
And Hamlet’s advice to the players might be quoted with some profit to a
few of the company: pointed emphasis at the “do not _mouth_ your words”
part of the advice, to the lady who speaks the speech beginning:

      Lo, yonder ships: I ne’er set foot on one,
      But tales and pictures tell, when over them
      Breaketh a storm not all too strong to stem,
      Each man strives hard, the tiller gripped, the mast
      Manned, the hull baled, to face it, till at last
      Too strong breaks the o’erwhelming sea: lo, then
      They cease, and yield them up as broken men
      To fate and the wild waters.

And last of all one might say unkind things about the blending of the
voices in the chorus.

All the above points, however, I know are very debatable. There are two
that cannot be debated. Two that outbalance by far all the other defects
of the production.

If all the cast had voices like corncrakes, and used them after the
manner of country-town amateurs, the production would still be worth
seeing for the thrilling pictures of colour and line presented by
individuals and the ensemble. And rising, soaring away above all the
petty little defects is the wonderful, majestical verse of Euripides.
What could be more beautiful than the lyric:

      Even as the sound of a song
      Left by the way, but long
      Remembered, a tune of tears
      Falling where no man hears,
      In the old house as rain,
        For things loved of yore:
      But the dead hath lost his pain
        And weeps no more.

It is greatly to be regretted that it has been thought fit to cut that
lyric, Cassandra’s Hymn to Hymen, and many of the other beautiful parts
of the play.

The whole thing might have been better in a hundred ways—then again it
might have been worse in ten hundred ways. Let us be glad that we had an
opportunity of seeing the wonderful thing, even though the Carnegie
Peace Foundation is backing it up.

                                                                    D.




                                 Music


                                 BUSONI

Busoni—prophet. Where Bauer is a priest, Hofmann a wonder-child, Bachaus
a poet, Ganz an efficient, Paderewski a magician, and Samaroff a
failure—Busoni is a prophet. His voice arrests the senses, throws a
silence over them. At first, the world is obscured; later the last trace
of it is gone. The song of the prophet vibrates through new spaces.
Listening ones follow without restraint, so great is the magnetic pull
of it; they follow, enchanted, through new spaces to new and miraculous
realms of life, where music is more real than ivory or pine.

With one paragraph’s deference to the clay-members, let them be informed
that Ferruccio Busoni is a composer and concert-pianist, almost fifty
years old, who began his study and piano-practice at a most tender age,
and who is now considered to be something of an artist—that is, when he
isn’t off pursuing some new notion about quarter-tones, or his one
hundred and thirteen new scales for the pianoforte. He has these
aberrations. But then, musicians are crazy anyway. At a recent concert
with the Chicago Symphony Mr. Busoni played one concerto by Saint-Saëns
and another one which he himself composed. Incidentally, Mr. Busoni’s
composition was based on North America. It is the least bit regrettable
that we are so busy and hurried that Mr. Busoni could introduce us,
through a work of art, to the country we hurry over. He played these
works on an inferior piano and did several questionable things in his
playing, such as let his wrist sag, etc. His personal friends insist
that he hates to play the piano. Let the clay-members join the blessed
minority in silent thanksgiving that he has hated it hard enough to have
scornfully brushed aside the limitations of wood and wire, that his
hatred is greater than a world of near-love.

On his recent appearance here, at the very start, Busoni passed above
the norm of virtuosity in piano-manipulation, and the tonal explorations
began. It was quite bewildering. The mob thought it was fine. The
authorities had to admit that it was good. Young ladies considered it
divine. Professional musicians—always self-appointed and astute
critics—were prevented from indulging in their customary snap-judgments
while the artist played, and were held, opinionless, to the music. The
listeners who possessed not only sensitive ears but also receptive minds
and fluent imaginations were swung clear of earth, were lifted into a
region where no dead wall separated them from the strong voice of the
prophet. He was saying tremendous things. He forced upon smaller minds
the rush, the splendor, the glittering plunge of tones, such as they had
never dreamed of before. He gave them the dream. And this was what the
yet smaller and the very smallest minds, down between the dead walls,
admired, but sanctioned grudgingly, as brilliant style. There were noisy
hands and exclamations, as at a cock-fight. But the blessed minority
heard and recognized the piano-playing of today, tomorrow, and the
future. The instrument had at last shaken off the curse of apartment
houses, and had come into its own.

Wilhelm Bachaus sings the fancies of a dreamy young poet; Paderewski
thrills his audience whether he smiles or sulks at the keyboard; Bauer
intones the affirmation of a lovely faith in tonal beauty; Godowsky
presents necklaces of perfectly carven gems to the subtly responsive
ones; these men and a few others justify their own uses of the
pianoforte. They are strongly individual, and are not to be balanced,
one against another. Ferruccio Busoni, however, would cast a shadow if
he traveled earthward from his altitudes. He is solitary and unique.
Others work up through human difficulties in order to perfect their
means of expressing tonal ideals. Busoni takes their goal as a fresh
starting-point, and tonal ideals become a further means, to voice the
surge of strength which he essentially is, to express the resistless,
flashing drive of the universe. His flying clusters of notes are the
tail of a comet, of some swift participator in cosmic rhythms. The swirl
of his music-fire is a glorious something for which the pianoforte must
providentially have been created—a genuine offering to the vigilant
keepers of Beauty.

                                                     HERMAN SCHUCHERT.


                          TWO CHICAGO PIANISTS

I have not heard all the young Chicago musicians play, but of those I
have heard there are two who stand out as musicians and pianists instead
of merely good players of the piano. They are Carol Robinson and James
Whittaker.

Miss Robinson is an Illinois girl who came to Chicago to be Fannie
Bloomfield Zeisler’s “artist pupil” (or something like that) and chief
assistant. A year ago she was playing the piano efficiently; this year
she is using that as a starting-point and proving that she has a real
right to the instrument. She has a technical foundation that cannot fail
her; it is already equal to practically all the tests she may need to
put it to, and she uses it as surely and unconsciously as one uses his
feet to walk with. Her playing at present has the clearness and
innocence of a brook; if she can get something of the sea into her
feeling she will be big. The music Carol Robinson gives is not so far
the expression of some incredible longing to make the piano serve as an
outlet. It is natural and beautiful—and absolutely untroubled. It is
articulate and yet it has not acquired a meaning. It is without a hint
of intensity. Carol Robinson has the most interesting part of the
struggle before her—the part for which her genius for hard work is
merely a preparation: what does she want to say through the piano?

James Whittaker’s music is very personal, very sensitive, very charming,
and very marked by good taste. It is by far the most musical playing I
have heard in Chicago. Mr. Whittaker went to Berlin to study and then to
Paris, where he finished and became an ardent exponent of the French
school. His technical equipment is not the perfect tool that Carol
Robinson’s is; by which I don’t mean that it is at all inadequate, but
somehow you feel that he is always conscious of the demands he puts upon
it and that it sometimes leaves him unsatisfied. His theory is that most
of the methods taught outside the French Conservatoire are “short cuts”;
but his work suggests that he succeeds in spite of his theory. For he
does succeed in the one great essential: in making music. His relation
to the piano is a dedication, and his music is vibrant with feeling. His
tone production is a pressure with a fine nervousness in it, and he has
the real “pearl” quality in his scales. His Chopin is perhaps, as he
himself says, a little “scientific.” His César Franck just misses being
deep _enough_. He is at his best in quite modern French music, or in a
thing like Grieg’s Cradle Song which he plays very, very beautifully.
Brahms he doesn’t want to play, I imagine; but the breadth that Brahms
requires and gives is the very quality that would make what James
Whittaker has to say (and is saying very charmingly) a bigger and deeper
thing.

                                                              M. C. A.


                             WITH KREISLER

      _Four weeks in the Trenches, by Fritz Kreisler._ [_Houghton
                       Mifflin Company, Boston._]

I had a big day with Ruby Davis, our Chicago little violinist, out in
the country, roaming, climbing, racing, conversing, but not talking.
Talk we left behind us, in the city drawing-rooms. Between pranks and
escapades we found rest in sitting side by side and reading Kreisler’s
war impressions. I knew that Ruby worshipped Fritz, but his reflections
on the book of the violinist have shown me that in addition to
admiration he possesses critical perception. We delighted in the pages
written with spontaneous beauty, without pose, without the banal
superstructure of sentimental colors, but revealing a tense, vibrating,
virile artistic heart, reservedly sensitive to bloody horrors as well as
to imperceptible impressions of human emotions concealed beneath the
dehumanizing military uniform. Ruby called my attention to the fact that
only such an artist as Kreisler could have had a broad non-professional
outlook on men and things, an artist of unusual versatility, of a wide
education, of rich experiences in various fields of life. Yet, he added,
only the keen, delicate ear of a musician could have perceived the
symphonic sounds on the battle-field and in the trenches, as, for
instance, in this passage:

   My ear, accustomed to differentiate sounds of all kinds, had some
   time ago, while we were still advancing, noted a remarkable
   discrepancy in the peculiar whine produced by the different
   shells in their rapid flight through the air as they passed over
   our heads, some sounding shrill, with a rising tendency, and the
   other rather dull, with a falling cadence. A short observation
   revealed the fact that the passing of a dull sounding shell was
   invariably preceded by a flash from one of our own cannon in the
   rear on the hill, which conclusively proved it to be an Austrian
   shell. It must be understood that as we were advancing between
   the positions of the Austrian and Russian artillery, both kinds
   of shells were passing over our heads. As we advanced the
   difference between shrill and dull shell grew less and less
   perceptible, until I could hardly tell them apart. Upon nearing
   the hill the difference increased again more and more until on
   the hill itself it was very marked. After our trench was finished
   I crawled to the top of the hill until I could make out the flash
   of the Russian guns on the opposite heights and by timing flash
   and actual passing of the shell, found to my astonishment that
   now the Russian missiles had become dull, while on the other
   hand, the shrill sound was invariably heralded by a flash from
   one of our guns, now far in the rear. What had happened was this:
   Every shell describes in its course a parabolic line, with the
   first half of the curve being ascending and the second one
   descending. Apparently in the first half of its curve, that is,
   its course while ascending, the shell produced a dull whine
   accompanied by a falling cadence, which changes to a rising
   shrill as soon as the acme has been reached and the curve points
   downward again. The acme for both kinds of shells naturally was
   exactly the half distance between the Austrian and Russian
   artillery and this was the point where I had noticed that the
   difference was the least marked. A few days later, in talking
   over my observation with an artillery officer, I was told the
   fact was known that the shells sounded different going up than
   when going down, but this knowledge was not used for practical
   purposes. When I told him that I could actually determine by the
   sound the exact place where a shell coming from the opposing
   batteries was reaching its acme, he thought that this would be of
   great value in a case where the position of the opposing
   batteries was hidden and thus could be located. He apparently
   spoke to his commander about me, for a few days later I was sent
   on a reconnoitering tour, with the object of marking on the map
   the exact spot where I thought the hostile shells were reaching
   their acme, and it was later on reported to me that I had
   succeeded in giving to our batteries the almost exact range of
   the Russian guns. I have gone into the matter at some length,
   because it is the only instance where my musical ear was of value
   during my service.

Ruby kept on explaining Kreisler while we were making our way through
picturesque ravines. Then we stormed a steep bluff that made a difficult
climb, and I had to pull and push my gentle co-adventurer. “Be brave,
little Kreisler!” He turned to me with serious eyes, and proceeded to
point out the greatness of his god, who throughout the book does not
even once show any national narrowness or hatred for the enemy, who
speaks with equal sympathy of the Russians and of the Austrians, who
relates his terrible experiences in the swampy trenches in such a calm,
modest tone, making your heart bleed with sorrow for the hardships and
suffering of the belligerents. What a terrible calamity it would have
been had the Cossack slashed Kreisler’s hand instead of his leg! Ruby
smiled with joy reading the last page in which the violinist regrets
that he had been pronounced “invalid and physically unfit for armed
duty” and had “to discard his well-beloved uniform for the nondescript
garb of the civilian.” Ruby does not share his big brother’s regret.

                                                                    K.




                            Book Discussion


                     QUASI-RATIONALISTIC MORALIZING

      _Criticisms of Life, by Horace Bridges._ [_Houghton Mifflin
                           Company, Boston._]

Some time ago, at a meeting of the Book and Play Club, Mr. Bridges
complained against THE LITTLE REVIEW wherein a certain book was
criticised and labeled “naive and dull as the sermon of an Ethical
Society preacher.” “Ladies and gentlemen, _I am naive and dull_!”
protested Mr. Bridges. The reviewer of that unfortunate book, who
happened to be present, expressed his surprise at the complainer’s
unmodest assumption that those epithets were meant for him, as if he had
monopolized the characteristic features of all ethical preachers. Now
that Mr. Bridges’ book is out, the reviewer wishes to make amends and
apologize; verily, the distinguished preacher was justified in claiming
the honorary titles.

The author analyzes his problems through the prism of empirico-pragmatic
rationalism, if such a combination is thinkable. Whether it be
Chesterton’s theological views, or Ellen Key’s marriage theory, or
Maeterlinck’s mysticism, or Sir Lodge’s ideas on immortality—the author
applies to them the same apparatus for testing their validity and truth:
Are they provable? Are they workable? Are they in harmony with Mr.
Bridges’s ethical standard? A few citations will illustrate the critic’s
method and sense of humor.

He takes Gilbert Chesterton very seriously, and indignantly reproves him
for such typically Chestertonian offences as misquoting his opponents,
as paradoxical buffooneries, “unpardonable tricks” and “inexcusable
mistakes”; he offers him a few lessons in theology, explains to him in
an earnest tone the meaning of miracles, the Fall of Man, and finally
comes to the astounding discovery that the readers “will see in Mr.
Chesterton’s amateur apologetics nothing but a psychological curiosity,
to be read, like his novels, for amusement, in some slight degree
perhaps for edification, but not at all for instruction.” Horribile
dictu!

Mr. Bridges’s heaviest cannon are directed against Ellen Key. He totally
destroys her and Shaw’s opposition to marriage with one humorous stroke,
arguing that if that institution were really bad it would either have
destroyed humanity, or the revolted conscience of mankind would have
“risen and annihilated the abominable thing.” This optimistic argument
needs as little comment as the author’s logical conclusion that “free
love” is equivalent to prostitution and that free divorce is synonymous
with adultery, or as these pearls:

   I am decidedly of opinion that in a more enlightened age divorce
   will be as completely obsolete as duelling is to-day in England.

   I am opposed to divorce on this ground (incompatibility of
   temper) for two reasons: first, because if people’s tempers are
   really so incompatible as to make their lifelong companionship
   intolerable, they can, and therefore ought to, know this in time
   to prevent their union. And, secondly, because such
   incompatibility as can remain entirely concealed before marriage
   cannot possibly be so great but that it may be overcome and
   harmonized after marriage by means of proper self-discipline and
   true grasp of the idea of duty.

   No soldier would be pardoned for deserting from the army on the
   ground that he found his temper hopelessly incompatible with that
   of his comrades and his officers. No party to a business contract
   would be absolved from observing its terms upon any such
   consideration.

   The right to renounce marriage because of unhappiness would
   logically involve the right to commit suicide for the same
   reason.... Who are we that we should repudiate the universe
   because it will not devote itself to securing our petty pleasures
   and happinesses?... Marriage, like every other great social
   ordinance, is instituted not primarily to secure our happiness,
   but to enable us to discharge our duty, in the matter of the
   perpetuation and spiritual development of the human species.

I am confident that the reader will appreciate the reviewer’s gallantry
in not taking issue with the quoted statements: it would be too easy a
task to exercise one’s humor over such threadbare niceties. My only
apology for devoting so much space to Mr. Bridges’s book is the fact
that Mr. Bridges is one of the moulders of public opinion in Chicago,
hence ... I shall owe one more apology for my unrestrainable desire to
quote the closing lines of the author’s sermon on the War:

   May she (this country) preserve her unity, and that nobly
   disinterested foreign policy manifested, to the admiration of all
   Europe (indeed!!) in Cuba and Mexico: so that, when the vials of
   apocalyptic wrath beyond the seas are spent, she may enter to
   motion peace—the welcome arbitress of Europe’s dissensions, the
   trusted daughter, first of England, but in lesser degree of all
   the nations now at strife, called in to cover their shame and to
   mediate the purgation of their sins.

Hm—but I promised to refrain from comments.

                                                                    K.


                         SOPHOMORIC MAETERLINCK

     _Poems, by Maurice Maeterlinck._ [_Dodd, Mead and Company, New
                                York._]

The publisher of Maeterlinck’s _Poems_ states apologetically that there
has been a demand for a complete edition of the Belgian’s works, hence
his justification in publishing a translation of the poems that
originally appeared twenty years ago. The service rendered thereby to
the author is of doubtful value: great writers are inclined to forget
their youthful follies; as far as the English reading public is
concerned the little book may be of some interest as a pale suggestion
of an early stage in the development of Maeterlinck’s talent. I say a
pale suggestion, for with all the conscientious labor of the translator
the poems Anglicised have lost their chief, if not sole value—their
Verlainean musicalness. If as a verslibrist Maeterlinck was obviously
influenced by Whitman, his rhymed verses bear the unmistakable stamp of
the poet who preached: “De la musique avant toute chose.... De la
musique encore et toujours!” Back in the eighties Maeterlinck belonged
to the Belgian group of Symbolists, who, like Elskamp, Rodenbach, van
Lerberghe, Verhaeren, reflected the French school which began with
Baudelaire and culminated through Rimbaud and Verlaine in Mallarmé. Yet,
unlike his great friend, Verhaeren, the Mystic of Silence directed his
genius into a different channel and abandoned verse as a medium of
expression. In the collected poems, the _Serres Chaudes_ and the
_Chansons_, despite the mentioned influences, we discover the
Maeterlinckian key-note—the languor of the oppressed soul, helplessly
inactive in “a hot-house whose doors are closed forever.” We are dazzled
frequently with such beautiful lines as “O blue monotony of my heart!”;
“Green as the sea temptations creep”; “the purple snakes of dream”; “O
nights within my humid soul”; “My hands, the lilies of my soul, Mine
eyes, the heavens of my heart.” A friend confessed to me that these
similes reminded him of Bodenheim; to be sure, this compliment should be
laid at the door of the translator.

                                                                    K.


                      “THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL.”

   _The Harbor, by Ernest Poole._ [_The Macmillan Company, New York._]

In America today, other things being equal, that novelist first achieves
success who writes—let us say—of the social fabric, rather than of the
eternal verities. Thus, in the case of two undoubtedly great artists,
John Galsworthy and Joseph Conrad, the former had to wait but half the
latter’s time before he came to enjoy real popularity.

And so it is not difficult to understand the noteworthy and deserved
success of _The Harbor_—a book so good that one would be inclined to
wonder if it _could become popular_. Mr. Poole writes with charm and a
passionate earnestness of the growth through young manhood of his hero.
He knows the New York water-front well and it furnishes an original and
interesting background. The boy goes through college, to Europe for a
happy year or two and returns to become a successful magazine writer—a
worshipper at the shrine of “big” men. Gradually his social conscience
is awakened and his entire life is transformed—his allegiance is
transferred from the presidents of the corporations who own the steamers
to the striking stokers and their fellows. On the whole the picture is
impressively convincing and Mr. Poole has caught in his pages much of
the most glowing thought of idealistic youth.

His work is so very good that criticism may appear ungracious—still, if
one may be allowed: some of the young men at college speak Mr. Poole’s
thoughts and not their own. College men do not think as Mr. Poole would
have you believe they do—at least not until a year or two after they
have graduated. And isn’t Eleanore, the hero’s wife, just a little too
perfect—even for the role she has to play? How well an amiable weakness
would become her! Finally, _The Harbor_ has the commonest fault of
almost all first novels that have for their subject the social fabric:
there is too much thought (or too little action)—the author wants to
give his opinion on all the things he has ever seriously thought about.

When Mr. Poole has tempered his fine seriousness with just a little more
of the creative artist’s austerity he will produce a greater novel than
_The Harbor_, and one that will fulfill the splendid promise of this
first book.

                                                      ALFRED A. KNOPF.


                            THE $10,000 PLAY

   _Children of Earth: A Play of New England, by Alice Brown._ [_The
                     Macmillan Company, New York._]

Frankly, I do not like the spectacle of a collection of New Englanders,
well past middle age, splashing about in a puddle of sex. And that is
what _Children of Earth_ is. Of course sex is interesting—most of the
time; New Englanders are interesting sometimes (especially when as
skilfully drawn as Miss Brown draws them); but the combination is rather
too much.

In the first place what happens to these people of Miss Brown’s play
never seems of any real importance—it isn’t simply that they are
unsympathetic. Nor need one believe for a moment in the old idea that in
true tragedy the great must suffer. But at least either the great or the
typical must, and I cannot feel that these children of earth are either.
The play is well enough done; it may be compounded of fact; but I doubt
if it exhibits that finer thing by far—truth. How much better work might
Winthrop Ames’ money have purchased.

                                                      ALFRED A. KNOPF.

       _American Thought, by Woodbridge Riley._ [_Henry Holt and
                          Company, New York._]

A historical analysis of American philosophical theories, from
Puritanism to New Realism, through the stages of Idealism, Deism,
Materialism, Realism, Transcendentalism, Evolutionism, and Pragmatism.
The work lacks the strict impartiality of a text-book, which it
evidently intends to be. The author reveals a tendency to prove that
American thought has developed independently of European influences;
this appears to be true to a certain extent in regard to Pragmatism, as
the philosophy of practicality.


                          THE POETRY OF A. E.

    _Collected Poems, by A. E._ [_The Macmillan Company, New York._]

A friend of mine once expressed pained surprise on hearing that A. E.
was among the poets I delighted to read. Having just heard me dissent
from occultism, he could not understand how one who did not believe in
theosophy, esoteric Buddhism, or any of the many modern forms of
Mumbo-jumboism could possibly take delight in a poet who, according to
him, was a theosophist, or revere poems which had first appeared in a
theosophical journal.

Poetry, however, is not a record of one’s beliefs; it is a record of
one’s experiences; and while the existence of God may be asserted and
just as easily disproved, in the medium of rhyming language, there is no
question of poetry involved. But it is equally true that when a poet
describes a spiritual experience, though he may draw his images from
Neo-Platonic philosophy, Christian tradition or even the animatism of
the primitive poets, there is no question of theological belief implied.

When, therefore, we open Mr. Russell’s book at random, as I actually did
when this volume reached me, and come across the following lines, we
must be blind to a wide-spread experience of mankind if we cannot see
that it expresses poetic truth as well as poetic beauty:


                              Unconscious

      The winds, the stars, and the skies, though wrought
      By the heavenly King, yet know it not;
      And the man who moves in the twilight dim
      Feels not the love that encircles him,
      Though in heart, on bosom, and eyelids press
      Lips of an infinite tenderness,
      He turns away through the dark to roam
      Nor heeds the fire in his hearth and home.

But Mr. Russell’s mysticism—and mysticism, being an attitude rather than
an intellectual belief, is something that is legitimately expressible in
poetry, and is moreover something that Mr. Russell constantly and
beautifully expresses—is no mere world-flight. Even the Beatific Vision
he would only accept on terms becoming a man whose life is implicated in
humanity. Hence, under the title of _Love_ we find him singing:

      Ere I lose myself in the vastness and drowse myself with the
         peace,
      While I gaze on the light and beauty afar from the dim homes of men,
      May I still feel the heart-pang and pity, love-ties that I would not
         release;
      May the voices of sorrow appealing call me back to their succor
         again.

      Ere I storm with the tempest of power the thrones and
         dominions of old,
      Ere the ancient enchantment allure me to roam through the star-misty
         skies,
      I would go forth as one who has reaped well what harvest the earth
         may unfold;
      May my heart be o’erbrimmed with compassion; on my brow be the crown
         of the wise.

      I would go as the dove from the ark, sent forth with wishes
         and prayers,
      To return with the paradise blossoms that bloom in the Eden of light:
      When the deep star-chant of the seraphs I hear in the mystical airs,
      May I capture one tone of their joy for the sad ones discrowned in
         the night.

      Not alone, not alone would I go to my rest in the heart of the
         love:
      Were I tranced in the innermost beauty, the flame of its tenderest
         breath,
      I would still hear the cry of the fallen recalling me back from
         above,
      To go down to the side of the people who weep in the shadow of death.

One of Mr. Russell’s poems suggests in its very first line a lyric from
Shelley’s _Hellas_, and the two poems form an interesting contrast
between the temperaments of the poet of sentimental Platonism and this
later singer who adds to Shelley’s lyric vision a firmer stationing on
the substance of earth. While Shelley began on a high note of joy that

      The world’s great age begins anew,
        The golden years return, ...

but ends on the note of disenchantment:

      O, cease! must hate and death return?
        Cease! must men kill and die?
      Cease! Drain not to its dregs the urn
        Of bitter prophecy.
      The world is weary of the past;
      Oh, might it die or rest at last!

—while Shelley thus descends, Mr. Russell in _The Twilight of Earth_
begins more or less where Shelley left off with:

      The wonder of the world is o’er,
        The magic from the sea is gone;
      There is no unimagined shore,
        No islet yet to venture on.
      The Sacred Hazel’s blooms are shed,
      The Nuts of Knowledge harvested.

      Oh, what is worth this lore of age
        If time shall never bring us back
      Our battle with the gods to wage,
        Reeling along the starry track.
      The battle rapture here goes by
      In warring upon things that die.

      Let be the tale of him whose love
        Was sighed between white Deidre’s breasts;
      It will not lift the heart above
        The sodden clay on which it rests.
      Love once had power the gods to bring
      All rapt on its wild wandering.

But while

      The Paradise of memories
      Grows fainter day by day ...

there is no need to cease from life or from aspiration on that account:

      The power is ours to make or mar
        Our fate as on the earliest morn,
      The Darkness and the Radiance are
        Creatures within the spirit born.
      Yet, bathed in gloom too long, we might
      Forget how we imagined light.

      Not yet are fixed the prison bars;
        The hidden light the spirit owns
      If blown to flame would dim the stars
        And they who rule them from their thrones:
      And the proud sceptred spirits thence
      Would bow to pay us reverence.

      Oh, while the glory sinks within
        Let us not wait on earth behind,
      But follow where it flies, and win
        The glow again, and we may find
      Beyond the Gateways of the Day
      Dominion and ancestral sway.

While in few or none of these poems is mystic thought absent it is never
present at the expense of poetry, and many of the poems find in nature
both their occasion and their material. A. E.’s vision is preeminently
for the evanescent aspect of things, especially for the colors of the
changes that come over earth and firmament. The poem beginning

      When the breath of twilight blows to flame the misty skies,
        All its vaporous sapphire, violet glow and silver gleam,
      With their magic flood me through the gateway of the eyes;
        I am one with the twilight’s dream.

is typical of his response to the vision of the outer world.

The same sturdy sense of actual values that leads Mr. Russell to write
prose works on co-operation and nationality, seeing in these matters no
less than in religious ecstasy the ground for the free life of man, is
evident in the poem _On Behalf of Some Irishmen not Followers of
Tradition_. But lest sturdy commonsense be thought a grotesque piece of
praise for a poem, let me add that it is a commonsense illuminated by
the purest idealism. How close to earth this idealism moves is shown in
the little sketch _In Connemara_ describing the peasant girl:

      With eyes all untroubled she laughs as she passes,
          Bending beneath the creel with the seaweed brown ...

and enmeshing her in the nature mysticism of her race and country.

William Morris somewhere speaks of the cultured man as one who is in
sympathy with past and present and future—a contrast indeed to much
latter-day doctrine—and one is reminded of the phrase by this poet who
with such lyrical skill not only embodies all three for us, but knits
them together in that unity which alone can bestow on man the values of
life which are timeless.

                                                      LLEWELLYN JONES.




                           The Reader Critic


_A Chicago Reader_:

I don’t like what THE LITTLE REVIEW or any one else I have read says
about Sanine. Too analytic, too professional.... Whatever all the
worthies say about the book being dangerous, it will not affect any soul
a jot if he is not already afflicted.

What I can say is very inferior critically—only a hurried resume of
images after I had finished:

A garden like a dull green cloud descended to earth, twilight skies with
supple moving figures, gardens kaleidoscopic, hills covered with woods,
odors of leaves and grasses, a dark abandoned slimy wolf cavern of
counterfeiters, dew-laden grass, shadows, dusk, whispers, eyes in the
gloom, skies pale green with faint silver stars and dark birds, night
fluttering bats, gardens filled with the melody of nightingales, a
little dying frog, lush river banks with wet reeds bending, mysterious
wood nymph smiles, mystic rays of sunlight illuminating frail flowers,
crimson morning-starred heavens, woods and streams with lithe shining
bodies of humans transformed into nymphs and satyrs—a storm that almost
breathes of the one in the Pastoral Symphony and Sanine in a flash of
lightning is revealed apostrophizing it.

It hurts and one shrinks into one’s skeleton to think that perhaps a
setting is obviously made in order to be to the spirit of voluptuous
indulgence. But that feeling goes, because it is the objective thing
after all—the colors and odors and atmosphere remain.


                              THREE WOMEN

_F. Guy Davis, Chicago_:

There is one kind of worker active in the life of today whose work is
not often regarded in the light of art. There is a good reason for this
in the fact that the work they are attempting is so vast and vague in
character that many people do not even know it is being undertaken. They
cannot understand effort on such a scale that the final completed work,
if it is ever to be completed, will be nothing less than a new social
order, a new conception of social values, actualizing itself in the
shape of finer cities and grander and braver citizens on a world scale.

There are various groups of men and women in this work of
reconstruction, some compactly organized, others not, some more militant
in their attitude and some less so, but all tending in the same
direction toward a better, freer, and fuller social life. This movement
is confused and uncertain as far as a definite structural goal is
concerned because of the contradictory and sometimes seemingly
antagonistic elements that go to make it up. Some of the groups have
specific architectural plans which they defend with the artist’s passion
against all other plans, or against no plan; but the movement as a whole
is pragmatic and makes its plans as it goes along, and whatever may be
the outcome the aim is at a better world, a world of beauty and goodness
in the deepest meaning of those terms.

If the modern feminists understood great women, which they do not often
do, they would contend that there is a great significance in the fact
that three women stand out prominently in this movement and in a measure
at least are representative of three groups which more or less dominate
the whole. Listing them according to age,—for on any other basis
comparisons are difficult, each being effective in her own
sphere,—Mother Jones, Emma Goldman, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn are
social artists, working in different directions, yet in the same
direction, now seeming to exclude each other entirely, and now, no
doubt, sustaining each other in spirit across the separating gaps in the
common purpose, just as old age, middle age, and youth do sometimes in
life, or just as three mountains may have separate and distinct
characters and yet be a part of the same range.

Old Mother Jones is a “character.” In her eighty-two years she has seen
life’s storm, has lived its hope, fear, love, and hate, and has mastered
it. She will die happy with the knowledge that she did her part in the
fight for better things, which she may not see but which she believes
are coming.

Emma Goldman is at the height of her creative effort, breaking down the
stone walls of prejudice and superstition, freeing minds from the grip
of the past, preparing the soil for new harvests of life and beauty. She
sees mankind on the rack in the agony of a herculean struggle. Giant
social forces jostle each other in their efforts for recognition in her
consciousness. Her attitude toward the revolutionary movement reminds
one of the picture of the Earth in Meredith’s poem _Earth and Man_—“Her
fingers dint the breast which is his well of strength, his home of
rest.” She senses the stirring of new life in the race’s womb and she
fears a bit, for she sees clearly the possibilities of a tragic
miscarriage or a premature birth.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn is the young Diana of the labor movement. Strong,
full of hope, past the fear which accompanies all beginnings, facing the
future with the courage and confidence of a youth fully launched on its
career and enjoying the sense of growing understanding and power.

The redeemers of life are those in whose natures this spirit of the
creator lives, whether it expresses itself in the labor movement or in
the studio; and there is a significance in the fact that all three of
these leaders come from one class, the workers. The interest in the
movement is not by any means confined to the laboring classes,
so-called, but the real dynamic power back of the movement, the steam
which drives it on, does come from this class; and it is more than a
coincidence that these three women should all belong to it, for the
vital power, the staying quality which is the condition of real
leadership, seems to have been nearly cornered by the laboring elements.

Mother Jones has broad organizational affiliations. The great massive
groups which go to make up the American Federation of Labor are with
her, generally speaking, and lend her moral support and financial aid.
Her own age and the splendid organization of her mentality are in
keeping with the corresponding qualities in the A. F. of L.

Emma Goldman stands alone as far as organizations are concerned, like so
many great artists in other fields, always an isolated figure of heroic
beauty, always the creator, lifting the world in spite of itself.

Miss Flynn is a part of the Industrial Workers of the World, that body
of roughneck rebels which carries such promising seeds in its
revolutionary young heart. Her youth and promise symbolize the
possibilities of the I. W. W.

But to return to the idea of the social artist. What splendid
compensations there must be in their work! To feel that they are part of
an historic movement for a new world of beauty and harmony, such as the
utopians have dreamed of through all history from Plato to Bellamy and
Howells, a work which accelerates its speed and power as it draws more
and more to its ranks the idealists of all countries and all classes. Is
it not better for them that they know they will probably not see its
completion, that it may take centuries? They will never be disillusioned
as long as they hold to the inner faith. “To travel hopefully is better
than to arrive”—and here surely is a journey, the end of which will not
be reached tomorrow. As to the ultimate outcome, why doubt it? The race
has millions of years ahead of it.

On the personal side each one of the three has her own unique charm.
Mother Jones is a mother indeed. Her attitude toward “her boys” is more
than motherly; it is grand-motherly. The sweetness and childishness of
age, however, a sort of a sunset glow of real warmth and virility
radiates from her. She enjoys the privileges of age, and they are many
to those who know how to accept them gracefully as she does. Miss Flynn
enjoys the privileges of youth, which she likewise accepts with a poise
and an ease all her own. Emma Goldman has neither the privileges of
youth nor those of age. She is at that point in her development when in
the nature of life she must meet the challenge of the outer world alone,
when “the soul is on the waters and must sink or swim of its own
strength.” And yet, no doubt because of this very fact, she craves
companionship with a passion that sometimes has a quality of blue flame.
Middle age has few privileges and many responsibilities. Life is fair,
however, to the normal individual. It pays in advance to youth and
afterward as well to age, but it demands service of those who are in
their prime.

To understand these personalities and others of their kind is to
understand much of life, possibly as much as the individual
consciousness in its present form can ever understand. To know of their
struggles is to feel that one knows history in the making. It is not
necessary to endorse, but to fail to catch the spirit of their work is
to be unprepared for the possible changes which seem to be more or less
imminent in the social and industrial U. S. A. as in the world at large.




                           By FRITZ KREISLER


                       FOUR WEEKS IN THE TRENCHES

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                         SPECIAL IMAGIST NUMBER
                               May, 1915

   This Number will be entirely devoted—apart from the Editorial—to
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   A History of Imagism by F. S. Flint.

   A Review of “Some Imagist Poets, 1915,” by Harold Monro.

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                          Transcriber’s Notes


Advertisements were collected at the end of the text.

The table of contents on the title page was adjusted in order to reflect
correctly the headings in this issue of THE LITTLE REVIEW.

The original spelling was mostly preserved. A few obvious typographical
errors were silently corrected. All other changes are shown here
(before/after):

   [p. 8]:
   ... being superseded by electricity, the limitations of which has
       not been sensed ...
   ... being superseded by electricity, the limitations of which
       have not been sensed ...

   [p. 22]:
   ... at sixpence. Among them are Maurice Hewlet’s Singsongs of
       the ...
   ... at sixpence. Among them are Maurice Hewlett’s Singsongs of
       the ...

   [p. 27]:
   ... thy desire “to use the language of common speech,” and
       “to employ ...
   ... they desire “to use the language of common speech,” and
       “to employ ...

   [p. 47]:
   ... she disagreed with critics who thought Hedda Gabbler had
       nothing to give. ...
   ... she disagreed with critics who thought Hedda Gabler had
       nothing to give. ...

   [p. 54]:
   ... for instruction.” Horrible dictu! ...
   ... for instruction.” Horribile dictu! ...

   [p. 56]:
   ... van Lerbergh, Verhaeren, reflected the French school which
       began with ...
   ... van Lerberghe, Verhaeren, reflected the French school which
       began with ...

   [p. 56]:
   ... friend confessed to me that these similies reminded him of
       Bodenheim; to ...
   ... friend confessed to me that these similes reminded him of
       Bodenheim; to ...

   [p. 62]:
   ... movement reminds one of the picture of the Earth in
       Meridith’s poem Earth and ...
   ... movement reminds one of the picture of the Earth in
       Meredith’s poem Earth and ...



*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LITTLE REVIEW, MAY 1915 (VOL. 2, NO. 3) ***


    

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