The Little Review

Announcement

“The realm of art is prodigious; next to life itself the vastest realm of man’s experience.”

Appreciation has its outlet in art; and art (to complete the circle and the figure) has its source in—owes its whole current—to appreciation. That is, the tides of art would cease to ebb and flow were it not for the sun and moon of appreciation.

This function of the sun and moon is known as criticism. But criticism as an art has not flourished in this country. We live too swiftly to have time to be appreciative; and criticism, after all, has only one synonym: appreciation. In a world whose high splendor is our chief preoccupation the quality of our appreciation is the important thing.

Life is a glorious performance: quite apart from its setting, in spite of the kind of “part” one gets, everybody is given at least his chance to act. We may do our simple best with the roles we receive; we may change our “lines” if we’re inventive enough to think of something better; we may alter our “business” to get our personalities across more effectively; or we may boldly accost the stage manager, hand back the part he’d cast us for, and prove our right to be starred. The player who merely holds madame’s cloak may do it with dignity and grace; and he who changes his role, with a fine freedom and courage, discovers that he’s not acting but living his part! For this reason we feel that we needn’t be accused of an unthinking “all’s-right-with-the-world” attitude when we assert that life is glorious.

And close to Life—so close, from our point of view, that it keeps treading on Life’s heels—is this eager, panting Art who shows us the wonder of the way as we rush along. We may as well acknowledge right here that we’ve never had a friend (except in one or two rare instances) who hasn’t shaken his head at us paternally about this attitude toward art. “It’s purely transitional,” he says, tolerantly; “life is so much more interesting, you see, that you’re bound to substitute people for art, eventually. It really doesn’t matter so much that Alice Meynell wrote ‘Renouncement’ as that Mrs. Jones next door has left her husband.” Well, he’s wrong; at least, he can’t speak for us. Wells said to save the kitten and let the Mona Lisa burn; who would consider anything else? We think it’s rather silly in our paternal friend to argue with us so heatedly—beside the point! It’s not a question as to which is more important—“Renouncement” or Mrs. Jones. We’re merely trying to say that we’re intensely interested in Mrs. Jones, but that Mrs. Meynell has made our lives more wonderful—permanently.

The Little Review means to reflect this attitude toward life and art. Its ambitious aim is to produce criticism of books, music, art, drama, and life that shall be fresh and constructive, and intelligent from the artist’s point of view. For the instinct of the artist to distrust criticism is as well founded as the mother’s toward the sterile woman. More so, perhaps; for all women have some sort of instinct for motherhood, and all critics haven’t an instinct for art. Criticism that is creative—that is our high goal. And criticism is never a merely interpretative function; it is creation: it gives birth! It’s not necessary to cite the time-worn illustration of Da Vinci and Pater to prove it.

Books register the ideas of an age; this is perhaps their chief claim to immortality. But much that passes for criticism ignores this aspect of the case and deals merely with a question of literary values. To be really interpretative—let alone creative—criticism must be a blend of philosophy and poetry. We shall try very hard to achieve this difficult combination.

Also, we mean to print articles, poems, stories that seem to us definitely interesting, or—to use a much-abused adjective—vital. Our point of view shall not be restrictive; we may present the several judgments of our various enthusiastic contributors on one subject in the same issue. The net effect we hope will be stimulating and what we like to call releasing.

Feminism? A clear-thinking magazine can have only one attitude; the degree of ours is ardent!

Finally, since The Little Review, which is neither directly nor indirectly connected in any way with any organization, society, company, cult or movement, is the personal enterprise of the editor, it shall enjoy that untrammelled liberty which is the life of Art.

And now that we’ve made our formal bow we may say confidentially that we take a certain joyous pride in confessing our youth, our perfectly inexpressible enthusiasm, and our courage in the face of a serious undertaking; for those qualities mean freshness, reverence, and victory! At least we have got to the age when we realize that all beautiful things make a place for themselves sooner or later in the world. And we hope to be very beautiful!

If you’ve ever read poetry with a feeling that it was your religion, your very life; if you’ve ever come suddenly upon the whiteness of a Venus in a dim, deep room; if you’ve ever felt music replacing your shabby soul with a new one of shining gold; if, in the early morning, you’ve watched a bird with great white wings fly from the edge of the sea straight up into the rose-colored sun—if these things have happened to you and continue to happen till you’re left quite speechless with the wonder of it all, then you’ll understand our hope to bring them nearer to the common experience of the people who read us.

Written from Taormina, February 23, 1914.

My Dear Madam:

You ask me to bid your magazine good speed; and so far as I have any right, I do indeed. It seems you are setting out to watch the street of Life from a high balcony, where at all events the air should be fresh and sunrise sometimes visible. I hope you will decide to sleep out there under the stars, for what kills most literary effort is the hothouse air of temples, clubs, and coteries, that, never changed, breeds in us by turn febrility and torpor. Enthusiasms are more convincing from those who have not told their loves too often. And criticism more poignant from one who has been up at dawn, seen for himself and put down his impression before he goes on ’Change. There is a saying of de Maupassant about a writer sitting down before an object until he has seen it in the way that he alone can see it, seen it with the part of him which makes him This man and not That. For the creative artist and the creative critic there is no rule, I think, so golden. And I did seem to notice in America that there was a good deal of space and not much time; and that without too much danger of becoming “Yogis” people might perhaps sit down a little longer in front of things than they seemed to do. But I noticed too a great energy and hope. These will be your servants to carry through what will not, surely, be just an exploit or adventure, but a true and long comradeship with effort that is worth befriending.

So all good fortune!

Very faithfully yours,
John Galsworthy.

Arthur Davison Ficke

I KIYONOBU SPEAKS

II FIGURE BY OKUMURA MASANOBU

III PILLAR-PRINT BY KIYOMITSU

IV PILLAR-PRINT BY TOYONOBU

V PILLAR-PRINT BY HARUNOBU

Margaret C. Anderson

The Dark Flower, by John Galsworthy. (Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York.)

A book that has beauty as it’s given to few books to achieve it has been the innocent cause of more ignorant, naïve, and stupid condemnation than anything published for a long time. Even the English critics—who usually avoid these shallows—in several cases hit the rocks with awful force. And all because a man with the soul of the old gods chose to tell, quite simply and with inexpressible beauty, the truth about an artist. The Dark Flower was everybody’s opportunity to deepen his vision, but nearly everybody decided to look upon it as an emotional redundancy. Perhaps this doesn’t do some of them justice: I believe a good many of them considered it positively dangerous!

My quite spontaneous tribute to Galsworthy’s Mark Lennan—before I’d heard anyone discuss him—was that here was a man a woman would be glad to trust her soul to. And, in view of how silly it is for a woman to trust her soul to anyone but herself, I still insisted that one could do it with Mark Lennan: because he’d not take charge of anyone’s soul!—his wife’s least of all. Of course, to love a man of his sort would mean unhappiness; but women who face life with any show of bravery face unhappiness as part of the day’s work. It remains to decide whether one will reach high and break a bone or two over something worth having, or play safe and take a pale joy in one’s unscarred condition. With Mark Lennan a woman would have had—à la Browning—her perfect moment; and such things are rare enough to pay well for, if necessary.

All of which is making a very personal issue of The Dark Flower; but it’s the kind of book you’ve got to be personal about; you revise your list of friends on a basis of their attitude toward Galsworthy.

After I’d finished The Dark Flower—and it had never occurred to my naïve mind that anyone would disagree with me about it—various persons began to tell me how wrong I was. Mark Lennan was a cad and a weakling—decidedly the kind of person to be kept out of a good novel. The very beauty of the book made it insidious, someone said; such art expended in defense of immorality would soon tend to confuse our standards. Someone else remarked patronizingly: “Oh, The Dark Flower may be well done and all that, but personally I’ve always had a passion for the normal!” But, most maddening of all, I think, were those readers of thrillers, of sweet, sentimental stories—those persons who patronize comic opera exclusively because they “see enough tragedy in life to avoid it in the theater”—who asked earnestly: “But, after all, what’s the use of such books? What possible good do they do?”

On another page of this review such questions are answered with a poignancy I dare not compete with. I want to try, instead, to tell why The Dark Flower seems to me an altogether extraordinary piece of work.

In the first place, constructively. The story covers three episodes of a man’s love life: Spring, with its awakening; Summer, with its deep passion; and Autumn, with its desperate longing for another Spring. But the handling of the episodes is so unepisodic that you feel you’ve been given the man’s whole life, day by day, from Oxford to that final going down the years—sans youth, sans spring, sans beauty, sans passion; sans everything save that “faint, glimmering light—far out there beyond....” This effect of completeness is achieved, I think, by the remarkable intensity of the writing, by the clever (and by no means easy) method of sometimes allowing the characters the author’s prerogative of addressing the audience directly. Highly subjective in everything that he does, Galsworthy has reached a climax of subjectivity here: The Dark Flower is as personal in its medium as music.

In the second place—the great matter of style. Every page shows the very poetry of prose writing; there’s an inevitability about its choice of beautiful and simple words that makes them seem a part of the nature they describe. For instance, to choose at random from a multitude of exquisite things: “... under the stars of this warm Southern night, burning its incense of trees and flowers”; or, “And he sat for a long time that evening under a large lime-tree on a knoll above the Serpentine. There was very little breeze, just enough to keep alive a kind of whispering. What if men and women, when they had lived their gusty lives, became trees! What if someone who had burned and ached were now spreading over him this leafy peace—this blue-black shadow against the stars? Or were the stars, perhaps, the souls of men and women escaped for ever from love and longing? ... If only for a moment he could desert his own heart, and rest with the trees and stars!” With a single clause like “for ever part of the stillness and the passion of a summer night” Galsworthy gets effects that some poets need three or four verses for. In one place he defines for all time a Chopin mazurka as “a little dancing dirge of summer”; in another gives you with one stroke an impression of his hero that it’s impossible to forget: “He looks as if he were seeing sands and lions.”

In the third place, Galsworthy’s psychology is profound—impregnable. One simple characterization will serve to illustrate: he describes a man’s face as having the candour of one at heart a child—“that simple candour of those who have never known how to seek adventures of the mind, and have always sought adventures of the body.”

As to the lesson of The Dark Flower—its philosophy, its “moral”—I can only say that it hasn’t any such thing; that is, while it’s full to the brim of philosophy, it doesn’t attempt to force a philosophy upon you. It offers you the truth about a human being and lets it go at that—which seems to be the manner of not a few who have written greatly. For the other sort of thing, go to any second-rate novelist you happen to admire; he’ll give you characters who have a hard time of it and tell you just where they’re right and where they’re wrong. I can see how you feel you’re getting more for your money.

I can’t help feeling that everything Galsworthy has done has had its special function in making The Dark Flower possible. The sociology of Fraternity, the passionate pleading of Justice and Strife, the incomparable emotional experiments of A Commentary, the intellectuality of The Patrician—all these have contributed to the noble simplicities and the noble beauty of The Dark Flower.

DeWitt C. Wing

Mr. Faust, by Arthur Davison Ficke. (Mitchell Kennerley, New York.)

Have you thought there could be but a single Supreme? There can be any number of Supremes.—Whitman.

Mr. Faust is the embodiment of the Nietzschean attitude toward the universe. This characterization consciously ignores the legendary Faust of Goethe as having no vital kinship with his namesake. There is of course a skeletal likeness one to the other, but the hero in Mr. Ficke’s drama is incarnated with modern flesh and endued with a supreme will. His unconquerable spirit is not that of Goethe’s Faust but of Friedrich Nietzsche. Incidentally and singularly it is the spirit of Whitman. And these two men, more than any other two or twenty in the realm of literature, represent the undying god Pan, or the spirit of Youth. Nietzsche and Whitman are the understanding comrades of the young-hearted and open-minded.

Mr. Faust’s creator may have no conscious knowledge of Whitman’s poetry, which is a matter of no moment, but he has read Nietzsche, and that is momentous—indispensable—in relation to this splendid result of white-heat intellection. I say intellection because Mr. Faust is not so much a work of art as a remarkable example of reproduction. I know that, although the thought and feeling of the work rise in places to the power of an inspiration wholly personal to the author, never “Thus Spake Zarathustra.” For that is an original, authentic voice which, like everything else in nature, has no substitute or duplicate.

I can fancy a strong, healthy, organically cultured young man, just beginning to feel his way into the realities that lie outside the American cornbelt, by chance taking a peep into one of Nietzsche’s great books, and, fascinated and quickened by that marvelously contagious god, leaping to new heights of his own manhood. I should guess that in this instance the young man, who happens to be a lawyer, thirty-one years old, living at Davenport, Ia., was temporarily Christianized by bad luck, illness or something of the sort, and in this extremity, kicked by Nietzsche, experienced the feeling of personal adequacy to which Mr. Faust gives utterance. Recovering himself, he avowed his own godhood, even to the last ditch! And that is the triumphant Youth—the Nietzsche—of the thing.

A day or two subsequent to the appearance of Mr. Ficke’s book upon the market I had the pleasure of hearing it read, with well-nigh perfect sympathy and appreciation, by the foremost Nietzschean expositor in this country. Like other listeners I was amazed, charmed and aroused. Were these results referable to the play alone or in part to the reader, or to both? To what extent, I was compelled to ask, was the effect illusory or hypnotic? I had read some of Ficke’s verse, which had given no intimation of anything in its author so heroically Nietzschean as Mr. Faust. I had consequently tabbed Ficke as probably a poetic possibility, provided he lived a dozen years in an involuntary hell, undergoing a new birth. Entertaining the doubts indicated by my questions, I read Mr. Faust to myself, trying it in my fashion by the trees, the stars and the lake. Subjected to this test the play did not have the ring and lift which I had heard and felt when it was read—perhaps I should say given an added vitality—by a Nietzschean philosopher. It now impressed me as an extraordinary tour de force, reaching in some of its passages a species of accidental trans-Nietzscheanism.

Written in blank verse, the superior quality of which is admirably sustained, the style of the drama is undeniably poetical, as Edwin Björkman, the editor of Mr. Kennerley’s Modern Drama Series, states in an interesting biographical sketch; but where there is so much consciousness of workmanship—so much preoccupation with an imported idea instead of sweeping control by an inner, personal urge like that, for example, which produced Thus Spake Zarathustra—poetry is not to be expected. What surprises me is that, despite this restriction, Mr. Ficke strides upward in many lines to the borderland of the gods. In the first three acts he writes as one possessed—as an intellectualist furiously interested in Americanizing, if you please, the racial implications of the philosophy of a superhumanity which will always be associated with the name of his temporary master, Nietzsche. In these acts there is a deal of amazing revealment of insight; of aspiration for transcendent goals; of the spiritual insatiability of man. And there is a cold humor. Underneath the whole thing lies its own by-product: social dynamite!

I think that Mr. Ficke finished his play in three acts, but he added two more—to make it five, I was about to say, but in the fifth he achieves a measurable justification, for the last sentence, “Touch me across the dusk,” is poetry—the wonderful words of the dying Faust, addressed to Midge, the only person who understood him.

Near the middle of the opening act, Faust, roused by an inquiring mind to an analytical protest against things as they are, says,

That is poetical; it is cosmic in its feeling. Looking at a bust of Washington, he enviously—no, compassionately—remarks,

At this juncture Satan appears, gains recognition by recalling an incident involving Faust with a blackmailing woman in a college during his youth, and thereafter tempts him into empty, unsatisfying paradises. In his wandering and winding pilgrimage through the world Faust makes the footprints that we recognize as those of our own humanity, seeking its way—somewhither. He is offered but rejects peace, happiness, salvation and all the rest of their related consolations, knowing that none of them could satisfy his restless heart. To his uncomprehending friends he is lost, and Satan himself, to whom in such circumstances he is obviously resigned by society, fails to claim him. But Midge, the heroine, knew him; she could touch him across the dusk, which was his kind of immortality. And so Faust, with a vague consciousness of his own godhood, a sense of his own supremacy, an unshakable faith in one thing—himself—passed from the earthly freedom of his will into the great release.

It is altogether too early in the morning of humanity to expect to see this play or one like it on the stage. That it should be written by a young American and published by a young Englishman is enough to satisfy those who would enjoy its presentation, and those to whom it would be Greek or “unpleasant,” whether they saw it or read it, must wait for its truth through their children—across the dusk!

Floyd Dell

There was once a lady (I forget her name) who said that love was for women one of the most important things in the world. She made the remark and let it go at that. She did not write a book about it. If she had considered it necessary she would doubtless have written such a book.

Consider the possibility—a book entitled Woman and Love, a book proving with logic and eloquence that woman ought to love, and that, unless she loved, the highest self-development was impossible to her and to the race!

It is not entirely absurd. Such a book might have been necessary. If half of all womankind, through some change in our social and ethical arrangements, refrained from love as something at once disagreeable and ungenteel, and if the other half loved under conditions disastrous to health and spirit, then there might have been need for a book preaching to women the gospel of love. It would have been time to urge that, hateful as the conditions might be, love was for women, nevertheless, a good thing, a fine thing, a wonderful and necessary thing. It would have been time to break down the prejudice which made one-half of womankind lead incomplete and futile lives, and to raise love itself to its proper dignity.

Well, we are in a condition like that today, only it is not love, it is work that has lost its dignity in the lives of women. It is not love, it is work from which one-half of womankind refrains as from something at once disagreeable and ungenteel, while the other half of womankind performs it under conditions disastrous to health and spirit.

There is need today for a book preaching to women the gospel of work. It is time to break down the prejudice which makes one-half of womankind lead incomplete and futile, because idle, lives. We need a book to show women what work should mean to them.

And, curiously enough, the book exists. It is Olive Schreiner’s Woman and Labor. It is a wise book and a beautiful book. There are statistics in it, but there is eloquence flaming on every page. It is a book of the joy and the significance of work for women.

When Olive Schreiner says “work,” she means it. She does not refer to the makeshifts which masquerade under the term of “social usefulness.” She means work done with the hands and the brain, work done for money, work that sets the individual free from dependence on any other individual. It is a theme worth all her eloquence. For work and love, and not either of them alone, are the most important things in the world—the supremest expressions of individual life.

Margaret C. Anderson

I shall keep always, as my most unforgettable memory, the thought of a certain afternoon during Paderewski’s tour this year when he walked quietly back across the stage, in response to an encore, and played Schumann’s Warum. It was somehow heart-breaking. It was a more poignant questioning to me, than Arnold’s

Nothing that I have ever heard or seen has given me so vivid a sense of being in the presence of an art that is immortal.

It seems to have become hideously “popular” to love Paderewski. The critics will tell you that it’s only done in America; that Europeans have any number of idols they put before him; and that we who persist in calling him “the greatest” are simply under the spell of an old hypnotism. There was a time, they’ll concede, when he came like a conqueror, royally deserving the flowers we strewed. But now—there’s Bauer, there’s Godowsky, and Hofman, and Gans, and Busoni! One local critic has even gone to the length of saying that since the American public has sat at the feet of these men and learned sanity in piano playing it has no enthusiasm for Paderewski’s “neurotic, disordered, incoherent” music—“his woeful exaggerations of sentiment and hysterical rhapsody.” I should say some unpublishable things to that critic if we should ever discuss the subject.

The three most interesting human faces I know are Forbes-Robertson’s, Kreisler’s, and Paderewski’s. In the English actor’s there is a meeting of strength and spirituality (not the anæmic “spirituality” of certain new cults, but a quality of soul that makes him “a prince, a philosopher, a lover, a soldier, a sad humorist,” all in the limits of one personality) that means utter nobility. It can be as cold as a graven image, or as hot with feeling as a poet’s. Depth upon depth of subtlety plays across it—not the hypnotic subtlety of the Orientalist, but the austere subtlety of an English scholar and a great gentleman. In Kreisler’s there is a meeting of strength and sensuousness that means utter fascination to the artist who would paint him—utter revealment to the musician who would analyze his art. For the secret of Kreisler’s personality and his music lies in that finely balanced combination of qualities: a sensuousness that would be a little overpowering, a little drugging, without the gigantic strength that seems to hold it in leash. That balance makes possible his little air of military jauntiness, of sad Vienna gayety; it gives him that huge effect of power that always makes me feel I’m watching the king of the forest stride through his kingdom. You need never expect emotionalism from this musician; he’s too strong to give you anything but passion. In Paderewski’s face there is a meeting of strength and two other predominant qualities: sentience, I think, and suffering. It’s difficult to express his great, interesting head in a series of nouns; but there are some that come near to it: mystery, melancholy, weariness, a sort of shattering sorrow; always the sense of struggle and pain, and always the final releasement—in music. For while you can conceive a Forbes-Robertson away from the stage, and a Kreisler apart from his violin, you can never for a moment think of Paderewski without his piano. Not that he’s less of a man, but that he’s the most sensitized human instrument that ever dedicated itself to an art.

To resort to the most overworked phrase in the language, Paderewski has a temperament. Somebody has said that no fat person ever possessed one; and after you’ve speculated about this till you begin to wonder what temperament really is, you can come back to Paderewski as the most adequate illustration. Ysaye is the best example I know of the opposite. When strength turns to fat ... well, we’ll not go into that; but to make my point—and there’s certainly nothing of personal maliciousness in it—it’s necessary to reflect that obesity has some insidious influence upon artistic utterance. (Schumann-Heink is an artist in the best meaning of the word; but no one ever talked of her and temperament in the same breath, so she doesn’t negate the issue.) But Ysaye’s tepid, wingless, uninspired music—his utterly sweet but fat music—that appears to attract thousands of people, is as lazily inadequate as its creator would be in a marathon. It’s as though his vision had dropped slowly away with every added pound of avoirdupois. Or perhaps it’s because vision has a fashion of dropping away with age....

Ah!—but Paderewski has the years, too, now, and his playing is as virile, as flaming, as it ever was. An artist—with a temperament—doesn’t get old, any more than Peter Pan does. Paderewski’s furrowed face shows the artist’s eternal striving; his music shows his eternal youth, his faithfulness to the vision that furnishes his answer to the eternal “Warum?”

This is the secret of Paderewski’s white magic. He’s still the supreme god! Bauer plays perfectly within the rules—exquisitely and powerfully—and misses the top height by the mere fraction of a mood, the simple lack of a temperament; or, as O. Henry might have explained it, by the unfortunate encumbrance of a forty-two-inch belt. Hofman has an impatience with his medium, apparently, that leaves his hearer unsatisfied with the piano; while Paderewski, though he transcends the instrument, does so because of his love for the piano as a medium, and forces his hearer to agree with him that it’s the supreme one. Godowsky forces things into the piano—pushes them in and makes them stay there; Paderewski draws things out, always, and fills the world with them.

I can think of no comparison from which he doesn’t emerge unscathed. If I were a musical reactionary, this judgment would have no value here; but I’m not. Classical perfection is no longer interesting; Beethoven seems no longer to comprehend all music—in fact, the people who have no rebellions about the sterility of the old symphonies are quite beyond my range of understanding. But Paderewski plays the old music in a new way, gives it such vitality of meaning that you feel it’s just been born—or, better, perhaps, that its composers have been triumphantly revalued, rejustified in their claim for eternal life. His Beethoven is as full of color as his Chopin; and who, by the way, ever started the popular nonsense about De Pachmann or anyone else being the supreme Chopin exponent? No one has ever played Chopin like Paderewski; no one has ever made such simple, haunting melodies of the nocturnes; no one has ever struck such ringing Polish music out of the polonaises, or such wind-swept cadences from the Berceuse; no one has ever played the Funeral March so like a cosmic procession—the mighty moving of humanity from birth to death and new life; no one has ever so visualized those “orchestras of butterflies that played to Chopin in the sun.”

I have still one great wish in the world: that some time I may hear Paderewski play on a Mason and Hamlin—that piano of unutterable depth and richness. The fact that he’s never used it is the one flaw in his performances, for no other instrument that I’ve heard gives you the same sense of drowning in great waves of warm sound. The combination would convince even the followers of the new gods. But, old or new, and even on his cold Steinway, no one has ever drawn from the piano the same quality of golden tone or dared such simplicity of singing as Paderewski. To put his genius into a sentence: no one has ever built so strong a bridge across the gulf that yawns between vision and accomplishment.

George Soule

George Burman Foster

A profound unrest tortures the heart of the modern man. The world, slaughtering the innocents, is meaningless; life, bruised and bewildered, is worthless—such is the melancholy mood of modernity. Today life is a burden to many to whom it was once a joy. Decadents, they call themselves, who rediscover the elements of their most personal life in everything that is weary and ailing. We are all more or less infected with this weariness and ennui. The blows which the spirit experiences from opposing sides today are so powerful that no one is in a position to endure them with equanimity. The forces resident within the soul no longer suffice to give support and stability to life. Hence our culture has lost faith in itself. Our civilization is played out. What the Germans call Weltschmerz has come over us. Philosophers have fashioned it into systems; singers, into song—the sad but not sweet music of humanity; sufferers all, into a sharp cry for redemption. Deniers of the malady must have their eyes opened by physicians, scurrying around curatively in this humanity.

First of all, there are those who borrow their panacea from religion. They demand a reform of the ecclesiastical life according to the sense and spirit of primitive Christianity. They propose to recover the religion of Jesus, and to find in it healing for all the diseases of the times. But this remedy is so complicated that it reveals rather than heals the whole disunity and distraction of our present life. It was Tolstoi, in garb of desert prophet, who would restore original Christianity. He preached a radical reversal of our cultural life—a monastic asceticism, a warfare against all life’s impulses, on whose development our culture is founded. And ecclesiastical liberals would do virtually the same thing when they try to extract from the religion of Jesus a food that shall be palatable to modern taste, and then call their ragout, compounded according to their own recipe, “original” Christianity.

There are other voices, noisier and more numerous. These hold Christianity in all its forms to be the hereditary evil of humanity, and see the salvation of the world only in a purification of life from every Christian memory. Owing to the brisk international interchange of ideas today, Buddhism has awakened a momentary hope, as if from the religion of far-off India a purer spiritual atmosphere might be wafted to us, in which we could convalesce from the Christian malady.

Now, what shall we say of all these strivings to heal the hurt of the modern mind?

All of them have one adverse thing in common: They would tear up an old tree by its roots, and put in its place another tree equally as old and equally as rotten. There is something reactionary in all of them. They want to cure the present by the past. It is precisely this that cannot be done. If Christianity was once original, spontaneous, creative, it is so no more. We cannot lead an age back to Jesus, which has grown out beyond him. And the Buddha-religion is no more youthful and life-giving than the Jesus-religion. It is indicative of the depth of the disgust and the extent of the confusion on the part of the man of today that such a hoary thing as Buddhism can make so great an impression upon him. A revived, renascent heathenism, even as compared with Christianity, would mean a reactionary and outlived form of life. That men of moral endeavor and scientific vision could hope for a substitute for Christianity, a conquest over Christianity, in a rebirth of paganism, is a new riddle of the Sphinx.

One way only remains out of the aberration and dividedness of our present life: not backward, but forward! No winning of a religious view of the world in any other way! No pursuit of the tasks of the moral life by those who seek a real part and place in the modern world, in any other way!

Hence, a man is coming to be leader—a man who, as no other, embodies in himself all the pain and all the pleasure, all the sickness and all the convalescence, all the age and all the youth, of our tumultuous and tortured times: Friedrich Nietzsche!

I do not know how many of you know the poet of Zarathustra. But if you do not know him, if you have never even heard his name, yet you do know him, for a part of him is in your own heart and hope. If you have ever thought seriously about yourself, if you have even tried to think seriously about yourself, you have taken up into yourself a part of Nietzsche as you have so thought. Even without your knowledge or intention, you have passed into the world of thought for which the name of Nietzsche stands. It has been only now and then, in quite significant turning points in human history, and only in the case of the rarest of men, that such an influence has gone forth as from this man. Once in the horizon of his power, and you are held there as by magic. And yet not in centuries has a name been so reviled and blasphemed as his. Anathematized from the pulpit, ridiculed from the stage, demolished by any champion of blatant and blind bourgeoisie, refuted regularly by pedants, he is still Friedrich Nietzsche, and, unlike most preachers, his congregation grows from year to year. Newspapers, always sensitive to the pulse-beat of mediocrity, tell us that “the man is dead”; that he belongs to the past; that he is already forgotten. But he is more alive, now that he is dead, than he was when he was living. Dead in the flesh, he is alive in the spirit, as is so often the case. Superficial misunderstandings, transient externals, regrettable excrescences—these were interred with his bones. The real and true Nietzsche lives, and has the keys of death and of hell. Who has the youth has the future—and this is why the future belongs to Nietzsche; for no contemporary so gathers the youth under his shining banner. And it is because the moral seething of our time, our struggle with questions of the moral life, are recapitulated and epitomized in Nietzsche, that he stands out, like an Alpine apocalypse, as the new prophet of our new day. The mysterious need of a man to find himself in another, another in himself, as deep calls unto deep or star shines unto star, is met in the resources of the great personality of Nietzsche.

The new day whose billows bear us afar began with doubt. First, a doubt of the Church and its divine authority. A violent, devastating storm swept over popular life. The storm was speedily exorcised. Again—

A new faith emerged from the old doubt, like sweet waters in a bitter sea, and kept man a living soul.

But the calm proves to be treacherous. The tide of the new faith now in the bible, and in the doctrine derived from the bible, went back to sea, and now I only hear

The human spirit urged a new, mightier protest against the “It is written,” which was said to put an end to all doubt. The new doubt, as free inquiry, as protestant science, flung down the gauntlet to the bible faith. No page of the sacred book remained untouched. Only one certainty sprang from this new doubt—the certainty that the sacred book was a human book. Therefore it had no right to rule over man. Man was its judge; it was not man’s judge. It must be measured by man’s truth, man’s conscience.

How, now, should the timorous heart of man be quieted in the presence of this new doubt? At once new props were offered him—truth and the state. What science recognized as “true,” what morals and bourgeoise customs and civil law sanctioned as “good”—these were now proffered man, that he might brace up his tottering life thereby. “Trust the light of science, and you shall indeed have the light of life; do what is ‘good,’ and you shall be crowned with the crown of life.” This was the watchword. Then there stirred in the womb of present-day humanity the last, ultimate, uncanniest doubt. If we doubt the Church, why not doubt the state, too? If we doubt faith, why not doubt science, too? If we doubt the bible, why not doubt reason, doubt knowledge, doubt morality? Even if what we call “true” be really true, can it make us happy? Can the men who have all the knowledge of our time at their disposal, can the scholars, can the cultivated, really become fit leaders of humanity through life’s little day? Is not that which is called “good” grievous impediment in our pilgrimage? Law, morals—are not these perhaps a blunder of history, an old hereditary woe with which humanity is weighted down?

This doubt—long and ominously maturing throughout the spiritual evolution of our new time—finds its most radical, most conscious, and most eloquent expression in Friedrich Nietzsche. He launches this doubt not only against all that has been believed and thought and done, but against all that men believe and think and do today. He shakes every position which men have held to be unshakable. An irresistible, diabolical curiosity impels him to transvalue all values with which men have reckoned, and to inquire whether they are values at all; whether “good” must not be called evil, “truth” error. As Nietzsche ventures upon this experiment of his curiosity, as he advances farther and farther with it, suddenly he laughs with an ironic, uproarious laughter. The experiment is a success! In the new illumination all the colors of life change. Light is dark, dark is light. What men had appraised as food, as medicine, evinced itself to be dangerous poison, miserably encompassing their doom. And since men believed that all the forces present, dying, poisoned culture, were resident in their “morals” and their “Christianity,” it was necessary to smash the tables of these old values. In full consciousness of his calling as destroyer of these old tables, Nietzsche called himself the immoralist, the anti-Christ. Morals and Christianity signified to him the most dangerous maladies with which men were suffering. He considered it to be his high calling as savior to heal men of these maladies. He sprang into the breach as anti-Christ. Like Voltaire, he was the apostle and genius of disrespect—respectability was the only disgrace, popularity the only perdition.

Nietzsche the Immoralist, Nietzsche the Antichrist! Dare we write his name and name his writings without calling down upon our much-pelted heads the wrath of the gods? Does he not blaspheme what is sacred, and must we not, then, give him a wide berth? There are the familiar words concerning false prophets in sheep’s clothing, but ravening wolves within. Such wolves there are—smooth, sleek men, paragons of “virtue,” and “morals,” and “faith,” but revolting enough in their inner rawness as soon as you get a glimpse of their true disposition. Conversely, might there not be men who come to us in wolves’ clothing, but whose hearts are tender and rich and intimate with a pure and noble humanity? We know such men. Friedrich Nietzsche was one of them. He was a true prophet. All his transvaluations dealt deadly blows at the old, false, man-poisoning prophetism. What if more morals matured in this immoralist, more Christianity in this anti-Christ, more divinity in this atheist, than in all the pronouncements of all those who today still are so swift to despise and damn what they do not understand?

Even Christianity, at its origin, in its young and heroic militancy, was not so amiable and harmless as we are wont to think. It, too, was born of the doubt of that whole old culture; of the most radical protest again status quo. It, too, leagued with all the revolutionary spirits of humanity. And it, too, revalued all the values of “faith” and “morals.” What if this new Nietzschean spirit of life’s universal reform, this creative, forward-striving genius of humanity, be once yet again embodiment and representative of life’s essential element of rejuvenescence and growth? What if true prophets are always men of Sturm und Drang, men of divine discontent, fellow-conspirators with the Future? Anti-Christs? These are they who blaspheme the holy spirit of humanity. Immoralists? These are they who say that life is good as it is, and therefore should stay as it “is” forever. Faith? This is directed, not to the past, but to the future; not to the certain, but to the uncertain. Faith is the venturesomeness of moral knighthood. Nietzsche was a Knight of the Future.

Why, then, should not a magazine of the Future interpret Nietzsche the prophet of a new culture? Man as the goal, beauty as the form, life as the law, eternity as the content of our new day—this is Nietzsche’s message to the modern man. In such an interpretation, Man and Superman should be the subject of the next article.

Nicholas Vachel Lindsay

Being a Reminiscence of Certain Private Theatricals

(Dedicated to Lucy Bates)

Galsworthy as a Greek

Do you read Arthur Guiterman’s rhymed reviews? They are not to be taken too seriously, of course, though they are generally sane; but in the one on The Dark Flower he asks if such things don’t tend to weaken our moral fiber! Wow! Probably Homer might be said to do the same thing; we’d better take it out of the schools, hadn’t we? There’s an episode I recall about a female person named Helen, who was torn from her adoring husband, etc., etc. You know I don’t believe in weakening moral fiber, but beauty is beauty. All I could think of, in reading The Dark Flower, was Greek classics. Do you remember that exquisite thing (is it Euripides?)—

Galsworthy’s hero was just a Greek, swayed by Aphrodite. There’s no question of morals. And besides, he behaved pretty well—for a man!

The Case of Rupert Brooke

I can’t share The Little Review’s estimate of Rupert Brooke. I’m reminded immediately of something I found not long ago by Herbert Trench:

Swinburne’s

I like better so far as the music of it is concerned; and fully as well, perhaps, as far as ideas go. There is something rather conscious and posing in Mr. Trench’s effort. And you see why I think of him when I read Rupert Brooke. There is the same memento mori, the same hopelessness of outlook. It seems a pity to me, when a man can write as well as Brooke does in The Hill and in that exquisite sonnet beginning “Oh! Death will find me, long before I tire of watching you,” that he should waste his time on stupid, unpleasant cynicisms like Wagner and that Channel Passage, in which he doesn’t know which pain to choose—nausea or memory. I believe an Englishman can’t achieve just the right degree of mockery and brutality necessary for such an effort. Take Heine, if you will—(I’m a Heine enthusiast); he could do it with supreme artistry. Do you remember the sea poems—especially the one where he looks into the depths of the sea, catches sight of buried cities and sees his lost love (“ein armes, vergessenes Kind”)? It finishes with the captain pulling him in by the heels, crying, “Doktor, sind Sie des Teufels?” Heine can touch filth and offer it to you, and you are rather amused—as at a child. But Englishmen are too self-conscious for anything of that sort. You are shocked and ashamed when they try it, feeling in a way defiled yourself by reading. It irritates me, and I wish Mr. Brooke would stop it, right away. He’s too worth while to waste himself.

The Feminist Discussions

Do you know the story of the man, elected by some political pull to a judgeship in Indiana, who, after listening to the argument for the plaintiff, refused to hear anything further. “That feller wins,” he said decisively. On being told that it was customary and necessary to hear the defendant’s side also, he duly listened, with growing amazement. “Don’t it beat all?” he said, pathetically, at the close; “now the other feller wins.”

In much the same frame of mind I read the articles that are appearing in the current magazines on the subject of feminism and militancy. Edna Kenton’s in The Century is the only one that is content to give one side of the case. Decidedly, you will say on reading it, “That feller wins.” The Atlantic prints an admirable article by W. L. George on Feminist Intentions, and follows it hastily with a rebuttal by E. S. Martin (Much Ado About Women), fearing, I imagine, lest it would seem to be bowing its venerable head before new, profane altars. Life gets out a really excellent suffrage number, sane and logical and reasonable, and has followed it up ever since with all the flings it can collect against suffrage, militancy, or feminism in any form. A recent amusing instance of this is a letter by one Thomas H. Lipscomb, who signs himself, alack! A Modern Man, and adds that his name is legion. Judging by the terror in the communication Mr. Lipscomb’s modernity goes back as far as the Old Testament Proverbs, and the womanly ideal he so passionately upholds is in all respects the one the writer of this particular proverb acclaims. I have heard it used as a text so often, and have had it grounded into the very framework of my being so consistently, that it seems almost strange and irreverent to regard it with an alien and critical eye. And yet—just see what is expected of the poor thing: She

She

together with a few other airy trifles such as bearing and rearing children, I suppose. But most significant of all—

I should think so indeed! There seems to be little else left for him to do.

I can almost hear the writer smacking his lips over this description, which no doubt tallies closely with Mr. Lipscomb’s own notions.

For all this she is to

Possibly women have tired a little of letting their own works praise them—and nothing else! But I am taking the letter too seriously.

To go back to The Atlantic, I find Mr. George, who is in full sympathy with the movement of which he writes, classifying the demands of the feminists as follows: Economically, they intend to open every occupation to women; they intend to level the wages of women; in general, they wish to change the attitude of those who regard women’s present inferiority to men (they frankly admit that there is inferiority in many respects) as inherent and insuperable, by demonstrating that it is due merely to long lack of thorough training—(an old friend, apparently, in a new dress!) They wish also gradually to modify and change existing marriage laws so that they will be equally fair to both sexes.

A careful re-reading of Mr. Martin’s article fails to reveal much in the way of counter argument to Mr. George’s forcible appeal. There’s a great deal of courteous agreement and some rather good satire, but against the specific counts of the feminists’ intentions Mr. Martin raises no telling argument. We hear that whereas fathers wish all earthly blessings for their daughters, mothers do not, as women are jealous of women; also that mothers fear the modern woman on account of their sons, for whom they in turn wish all possible good: the modern woman will not make a good wife! Angels and ministers of grace defend us! In a double quality as daughter to a devoted and loving mother, and as a devoted and loving mother to a most precious daughter, I throw down my glove.

I am sure Mr. Martin has never acted in either of these capacities, so precious little he knows about it! Besides, I do want my son to have everything that the world provides in the way of blessings and happiness, so I want him to have as a wife a thoroughly modern woman with an awakened soul and a high ideal, to finish the good work in him which I have at least endeavored to begin.

As I read further, however, the cat begins to poke a cautious head out of the bag. Women, Mr. Martin argues, are not responsible for the blessings the feminist movement is trying to bring them. It is men! That is why he is so particular to tell us of the careful solicitude of a father for his daughters. Men, right along, have procured all happiness for women; or, if not men exactly, at least a sort of Zeit Geist—I believe he calls it “necessity.” And the poor deluded feminists are simply the little boys running along by the side of the procession and hollering. The procession is made up of vague forces, “working nowadays for the enlargement and betterment of life for women”—forces, he quaintly complains, that are “making things go too fast their way already.”

So we must take all credit from Luther and Knox and Calvin and the reformers of all times and give it to the Zeit Geist. They, too, are little boys, I suppose, who ran along and hollered. At least they hollered lustily and well, and the feminists are in good company.

And the peroration—every true woman will appreciate this: “What a husband sees in forty years, maybe, of the good and bad of life for a woman; what a father sees in his daughters and the conditions of modern life as they affect girls—those are the things which count in forming or changing the convictions of men about woman’s errand in this current world.”

Well! However far the Zeit Geist has progressed in other directions, it is plain that it has not made inroads on Mr. Martin’s consciousness of the present state of affairs. Who has given men the power and right to decide about woman’s errand in the world? For lo! these many years we have been letting husbands, fathers, and brothers decide for us just what it were best for us to do; and if the new idea has any significance at all it is just this: that we feel able to decide for ourselves what we most want and need.

M. H. P.

Sherwood Anderson

The new note in the craft of writing is in danger, as are all new and beautiful things born into the world, of being talked to death in the cradle. Already a cult of the new has sprung up, and doddering old fellows, yellow with their sins, run here and there crying out that they are true prophets of the new, just as, following last year’s exhibit, every age-sick American painter began hastily to inject into his own work something clutched out of the seething mass of new forms and new effects scrawled upon the canvases by the living young cubists and futurists. Confused by the voices, they raised also their voices, multiplying the din. Forgetting the soul of the workman, they grasped at lines and solids, getting nothing.

In the trade of writing the so-called new note is as old as the world. Simply stated, it is a cry for the reinjection of truth and honesty into the craft; it is an appeal from the standards set up by money-making magazine and book publishers in Europe and America to the older, sweeter standards of the craft itself; it is the voice of the new man, come into a new world, proclaiming his right to speak out of the body and soul of youth, rather than through the bodies and souls of the master craftsmen who are gone.

In all the world there is no such thing as an old sunrise, an old wind upon the cheeks, or an old kiss from the lips of your beloved; and in the craft of writing there can be no such thing as age in the souls of the young poets and novelists who demand for themselves the right to stand up and be counted among the soldiers of the new. That there are such youths is brother to the fact that there are ardent young cubists and futurists, anarchists, socialists, and feminists; it is the promise of a perpetual sweet new birth of the world; it is as a strong wind come out of the virgin west.

One does not talk of his beloved even among the friends of his beloved; and so the talk of the new note in writing will be heard coming from the mouths of the aged and from the lips of oily ones who do not know of what they talk, but run about in circles, making noise and clamor. Do not be confused by them. They but follow the customs of their kind. They are the stript priests of the falling temples, piling stone on stone to build a new temple, that they may exact tribute as before.

Something has happened in the world of men. Old standards and old ideas tumble about our heads. In the dust and confusion of the falling of the timbers of the temple many voices are raised. Among the voices of the old priests who weep are raised also the voices of the many who cry, “Look at us! We are the new! We are the prophets; follow us!”

Something has happened in the world of men. Temples have been wrecked before only to be rebuilt, and destroying youth has danced only to become in turn a builder and in time a priest, muttering old words. Nothing in all of this new is new except this—that beside the youth dancing in the dust of the falling timbers is a maiden also dancing and proclaiming herself. “We will have a world not half new but all new!” cry the youth and the maiden, dancing together.

Do not be led aside by the many voices crying of the new. Be ready to accept hardship for the sake of your craft in America—that is craft love.

Edited, with introduction, by Daniel Gregory Mason. (Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.)

I shall never forget how, at sixteen, I read Stevenson’s letters and thought them the most beautiful things in the world. I shall never forget similar experiences with Keats and Browning, and finally with Meredith; and now comes another volume of letters by the man who might be called the American Henley (though that only does him half justice) to keep one up at night and teach him unforgettable things. People have been saying that this collection doesn’t represent the best letters Moody wrote. Certainly if he wrote more interesting ones the world ought to be allowed to see them, for these are valuable enough to become an American tradition.

The following is typical:

There are over a hundred letters here, written to Mr. Mason, Percy MacKaye, Richard Watson Gilder, Josephine Preston Peabody, Edmund Clarence Stedman, Henry Miller, Robert Morss Lovett, Ferdinand Schevill, and others; and every one of them shows Moody’s remarkable gift of metaphor, his constant striving to “win for language some new swiftness, some rare compression,” his belief in the positive acceptance of life, his paganism, “deeply spiritual, and as far as possible removed from the sensualism the thoughtless have found in it.” Mr. Mason furnishes an introduction that is masterly; and the first and final drafts of Heart’s Wild Flower are included, proving vividly how this poet disciplined his rich imaginative gifts, training away from a native tendency to the rococo to the high, pure dignity that marks his finished verse. This volume is invaluable. Certainly with two such authentic voices to boast of as Whitman’s and Moody’s this young country of ours has reason to be proud.

M. C. A.

Margery Currey

Rahel Varnhagen: A Portrait, by Ellen Key. Translated from the Swedish by Arthur G. Chater; with an introduction by Havelock Ellis. (G. P. Putman’s Sons, New York.)

For certain distinctive women Rahel Varnhagen lived; for the same women Ellen Key has written this appreciation of Rahel. By the woman to whom fine freedom of living and fearlessness and directness of thought are the only possible terms on which she may deal with the social situation in which she finds herself this book will be read and re-read, and pencil-marked along the margins of its pages.

The rare woman, here and there, who worships simple, direct thinking (which, after all, takes the most courage) will know how to value Rahel. Always she thought truthfully. The woman who has been filled with joyful new amazement on finding that her only reliance is on herself—that she may not depend upon this person or that convention to preserve her happiness—will know how to value her. Just so far as any woman of today has become interested in her own thoughts and work, is the originator of ideas, and knows the joy of making or doing something that more than all else in the world she wants to make or do, so far she is nearer to becoming of the size of this great woman.

Such a woman will share with Rahel Varnhagen the certainty that higher morality is reached only through higher liberty; such a woman must demand, as did Rahel, periods of that recuperative and strengthening solitude, both of thought and mode of living, which only the self-reliant and fearless can endure. She knows that she herself, not convention, must furnish the answer to questions of right and wrong by earnest, free inquiry and by testing every experience. The acceptance of no convention was inevitable to Rahel, as she thought of it. She put it to the best of scrutiny. What value was there in it? It was not violating conventions which she set out to do, but meeting them with a quiet, sincere inquiry of the reason and truth they contained.

Rahel Varnhagen lived in Berlin a hundred years ago and was probably the most beloved and much-visited woman of those whose salons attracted the notable men of the day—Fichte, Hegel, Prince Louis Ferdinand, Fouqué, the Humboldts, the Schlegels, Schleiermacher, and other giants of the time. Rahel was a woman—the lamentable rarity of them!—whose influence was not through her literary work (her letters to friends are all that we have of her writing), not through brilliancy of speech alone, nor through her munificent patronage of the artists and literary men of her day (she was not rich, and we read of the garret in which she entertained her friends), but through the richness of her personality, the glowing warmth of her sympathy, her understanding, and the wisdom of her heart.

And the value of Rahel to us lies in the calm directness, the “innocence,” as she herself calls it, of her thinking. To her went the acclaimed wise men of the day for the comfort of her fearlessness and simplicity of thought upon their questions. She was said to be brilliant. She was not brilliant in the sense of being learned, or of being capable of mere intellectual jugglery and fantastic adroitness of thinking; she was brilliant in the crystal clearness and the sure rapidity of her thinking. The unexpectedness and strangeness of the simple truth she spoke bewildered people. For this reason she could say, “I am as much alone of my kind as the greatest manifestation here on earth. The greatest artist, philosopher, or poet is not above me.”

This passion for truth in her own thinking was the origin of her social value. Its stimulus to others was immediate, and her recognition through it of the important things in life made her detect at once those people and things that were original and valuable in themselves.

“Rahel’s most comprehensive significance,” writes Ellen Key, “lay in augmenting the productiveness, humanity and culture of her time by herself everywhere seeking and teaching others to seek the truth; by everywhere encouraging them to manifest their own culture; by imparting to others her profound way of looking at religion, men and women, literature and art; by judging everything according to its intrinsic value, not according to its deficiencies; by everywhere understanding, because she loved, and giving life, because she believed in liberty.”

Think always, ceaselessly!—this was Rahel’s cry. This, she said, is the only duty, the only happiness. To a young friend she wrote, begging that he keep ploughing through things afresh, telling him that he “must always have the courage to hurt himself with questioning and doubts; to destroy the most comfortable and beautiful edifice of thought—one that might have stood for life—if honesty demands it.” And so, having thought out things in the most utter freedom, unhampered by old preconceptions, and finally unafraid of the starkness of the truths which she faced, she let nothing prescribed be her unchallenged guide or stand as a substitute for her own vigor and hardness of thinking. This is why she said that she was revived by downright brutality, after being wearied by insincerity.

A virtue, so called, had to give a very good accounting of itself to Rahel. She demanded that it answer a certain test before it could be called a piece of goodness. For instance, in many cases she recognized in “performance of duty” mere acquiescence—a laziness of mind which does not bestir itself to ask what right this duty has to impose itself. Patience to her was often lack of courage to seize upon a situation and change it to suit the imperative demand to express oneself. “The more I see and meditate upon the strivings of this world,” wrote Rahel, “the more insane it appears to me day by day not to live according to one’s inmost heart. To do so has such a bad name, because simulacra of it are in circulation.” Of these “simulacra” we are familiar in every age—the amazing antics of certain self-styled “radicals,” the unaccountable manifestations of those who, while professing liberality of view, seem to have no standards of values in their extravagances of living. Rahel could understand every nature except the insincere and unnatural.

While we mourn or exult over the eager efforts of women in our day to evolve completely human personalities, it is interesting to read Rahel’s summing-up of the feminist movement: “Has it been proved by her organization that a woman cannot think and express her ideas? If such were the case, it would nevertheless be her duty to renew the attempt continually.” “And how,” exclaims Ellen Key, “would Rahel have abhorred the tyrannical treatment of each other’s opinions, the cramping narrow-mindedness, the envious jostling, the petty importance of nobodies, which the woman’s cause now exhibits everywhere, since, from being a movement for liberty in great women’s souls, like Rahel’s own, it has become a movement of leagues and unions, in which the small souls take the lead.”

Since it is reality and not appearance that alone could stand before Rahel’s devastating scrutiny of human things, and since to her the highest personal morality consisted in being true, coercive marriage seemed to her the great social lie. How could one of her simple clarity of thinking be anything but outraged by the vulgarities of an average marriage? “Is not an intimacy without charm or transport more indecent than ecstasy of what kind so ever?” she demands. “Is not a state of things in which truth, amenity, and innocence are impossible, to be rejected for these reasons alone?” Of the evils in Europe she cries, “Slavery, war, marriage—and they go on wondering and patching and mending!” Rahel believed that in the existing institution of marriage it was almost impossible to find a union in which full, clear truth and mutual love prevailed.

Of Rahel’s nature, warm, richly exuberant with a healthy sensuousness and desire for sunlight, Jean Paul’s letter to her gives us the essence. “Wingéd one—in every sense—” he wrote, “you treat life poetically and consequently life treats you in the same way. You bring the lofty freedom of poetry into the sphere of reality, and expect to find again the same beauties here as there.”

Biographical facts are negligible here. Even comment on the interpretive insight of Ellen Key seems not to be essential, though without it this book could not be. It is the personality of Rahel Varnhagen that matters, and the influence of that personality on the men of her day.

Rahel is distinctive as a challenger of the worn-out social and ethical baggage that somehow, in all its shabbiness, has been reverently, with ritual and with authority, given into our keeping by those who were as oppressed by it as we in turn are expected to be. With the simplicity of her questioning the honesty of these conventions, Rahel has made worship of some of them less inevitable.

Cornelia L. Anderson

Heine said: “I should wear a dog collar inscribed: ‘I belong to Frau Varnhagen.’”

Rahel’s power over the brilliant minds of her day lay in her own wonderful personality. She was unique, knew it and gloried in it. She wrote to Varnhagen, her husband and lover: “You will not soon see my like again.” She understood thoroughly the limitations of her sex. “They are so surprisingly feeble,” she says; “almost imbecile from lack of coherence. They lie, too, since they are often obliged to, and since the truth demands intelligence.” ... “I know women: what is noble in their composition keeps together stupidity or madness.” ... And she speaks of their “clumsy, terrible stupidity in lying.” But, despite Rahel’s opinion of women, or because of her understanding of their needs, she was a true feminist and looked toward their liberation through development and self-expression.

Ellen Key writes: “How Rahel, with her lucidity of thought, would have exposed the modern superstition that it is in outward departments of work that woman gives expression to her human ‘individuality.’ She says by true economy ‘nature keeps woman nearer to the plant’! This ‘economy’ is easily understood; it is because the tender life is woman’s creation and because that life requires tranquillity for its genesis and growth; because a woman taken up by the problems of external life ... no longer possesses the psychological qualifications which are indispensable in order that a child’s soul may grow in peace and joy; because, in other words, children need mothers, not only for their physical birth but for their human bringing-up. Rahel hits the very center of the spiritual task of motherhood when she says that if she had a child she would help it to learn to listen to its own inmost ego; everything else she would sacrifice to this.... The progress or ruin of humanity depends, in Rahel’s prophetic view, upon the capacity of the mothers for performing their task.”

How Rahel had listened to her own inmost ego is shown by the following characterization by Ellen Key. “Rahel probably did not know a single date in the history of Greece, but she read Homer in Voss’s translation; it made her declare that ‘the Odyssey seems to me so beautiful that it is positively painful,’ and she discovered that Homer is always great when he speaks of water, as Goethe is when he speaks of the stars. Probably she could not enumerate the rivers of Spain, but she knew Don Quixote. In a word, she was the very opposite of the kind of talent that passes brilliant examinations and is capable of carrying ‘completely undigested sentences in its head.’ What Rahel could not transform into blood of her blood did not concern her at all. There was such an indestructible ‘connection between her abilities,’ such an intimate ‘co-operation between her temperament and her intelligence,’ that there was no room in her for all the unoriginal ballast of which the views and opinions of most other people are made up: she could only keep and only give what was her own.”

What Rahel’s power over her contemporaries was we may gather from what they say of her who was “Rahel and nothing more:”

Heine describes her as “the most inspired woman in the universe.” T. Mundt calls her “the sympathetic nerve of the time.” The Austrian dramatist, Grillparzer, relates: “Varnhagen went home with me. As we passed his house, it occurred to him to introduce me to his wife, the afterwards so celebrated Rahel, of whom I then knew nothing. I had been strolling about all day and felt tired to death, and was, therefore, heartily glad when we were told that Frau Varnhagen was not at home. But as we came down the stairs, she met us and I submitted to my fate. But now the lady,—elderly, perhaps never handsomer, shriveled by illness, reminding me rather of a fairy, not to say a witch,—began to talk, and I was altogether enchanted. My weariness disappeared, or perhaps, rather, gave way to intoxication. She talked and talked till nearly midnight, and I don’t know whether they turned me out or whether I went away of my own accord. Never in my life have I heard anyone talk more interestingly. Unfortunately it was near the end of my stay, and I could not repeat the visit.”

Margaret C. Anderson

Poems, by Rupert Brooke. (Sidgwick and Jackson, London.)

The unusual thing about Rupert Brooke—the young Oxford don whose poetry is just finding its way in this country—is that he has graduated from the French school without having taken a course in decadence. The result is a type of English poetry minus those qualities we think of as typical of “the British mind” and plus those that stand as the highest expression of the French spirit. There is nothing of self-conscious reserve about Mr. Brooke; and yet it is not so obvious a quality as his frank, unashamed revealment that places him definitely with the French type. It is rather a matter of form—that quality of saying a thing in the most economic way it can be said, of finding the simple and the inevitable word. Mr. Brooke stands very happily between a poet like Alfred Noyes, in whom one rarely finds that careful selection, and the esthetes whose agony in that direction becomes monotonous. For example, in the first sonnet of this collection:

There are about eighteen words in this one sonnet chosen with infinite pains; and yet the effect of the whole is quite unlabored—an effect of spontaneity reduced to its simplest terms.

Perhaps the point can be made more emphatically by a miscellaneous quotation of single lines, because the poignancy of Rupert Brooke’s phrasing leaves me in a torment of inexpressiveness, forced to quote him rather than talk about him. Here are a few: “Like hills at noon or sunlight on a tree”; “And dumb and mad and eyeless like the sky”; “The soft moan of any grey-eyed lute-player”; “Some gaunt eventual limit of our light”; “Red darkness of the heart of roses”; “And long noon in the hot calm places”; “My wild sick blasphemous prayer”; “Further than laughter goes, or tears, further than dreaming”; “Against the black and muttering trees”; “And quietness crept up the hill”; “When your swift hair is quiet in death”; “Savage forgotten drowsy hymns”; “And dance as dust before the sun”; “The swift whir of terrible wings”; “Like flies on the cold flesh”; “Clear against the unheeding sky”; “So high a beauty in the air”; “Amazed with sorrow”; “Haggard with virtue”; “Frozen smoke”; “Mist-garlanded,” and a thousand other things that somehow have a fashion of striking twelve. There’s a long poem about a fish, beginning

that flashes through every tone of the stream’s “drowned colour” from “blue brilliant from dead starless skies” to “the myriad hues that lie between darkness and darkness.” And there’s one about Menelaus and Helen containing this description:

The simplicity of that last line—but what a picture it is!

The important things about Mr. Brooke, however—and of course this should have been said in the first paragraph—are his sense of life and his feeling for nature. Of the first it might be said that he is strong and radiant and sure—and at the same time reverently impotent. The Hill, which I like better than anything in this collection, will illustrate:

Everything in it—with the exception of “kissed the lovely grass,” which might easily be spared—is fine; “with unreluctant tread Rose-crowned into the darkness!” is vivid with beauty; and when the simple dignity of “such brave true things to say” has swung you to its great height, the drop in that sudden last line comes with the most moving wistfulness. There are several poems, too long to quote here, which show Mr. Brooke’s affinity with the outdoors; but perhaps even five lines from one of them will suggest it:

Not long ago I asked a poet in whose judgment I have a profound belief, to read these poems of Rupert Brooke’s and give me his opinion. After looking at two or three he said he was afraid he wasn’t going to like them, but the next day he reported that he wished to retract, making the magnificent concession that “some of Brooke’s moods are healthy!” Of course there are a number of things in this volume that can easily be interpreted as unhealthy or repulsive, like the Wagner:

But it seems something more than that to me. As an attack on German emotionalism—however unjustly, from my point of view, through Wagner—the poem struck me as an exercise of extraordinary cleverness. I don’t know that anyone has ever said so effectively the things that ought be said about that type of emotion which feeds not upon life but, inversely, upon emotion.

Mr. Brooke’s pictures have much of the quality of Böcklin’s. That first sonnet can be imagined in the same tone values as Böcklin’s wonderful Isle of the Dead, and the closing lines of Victory need the same medium:

Seaside needs an artist like Leon Dabo:

How perfect those last three lines are! How skilful, in painting the sea, to concentrate upon something from inland, making the ocean twice as old and vast and unquiet because of that little tinkling tune.

One will find in Rupert Brooke various kinds of things, but never attitudinizing and never insincerity. He is one of the most important of those young Englishmen who are doing so much for modern poetry. He is essentially a poet’s poet, and yet his feet are deep in the common soil. Swinburne would have liked him, but the significant thing is that Whitman would, too. There are several poems I have not mentioned that Whitman would have loved.

George Soule

[We do not agree that Tagore is a dynamic; we find him a poet whose music is more important than his thinking. But we are glad to print this interesting analysis.]

In The Crescent Moon, with its ravishing beauty of childhood, in The Gardener, with its passion of love, and especially in Gitanjali and Sadhana (Macmillan), with their life universal and all-permeating, we have found the poet Tagore and been grateful. It remains to ask: What has Tagore done to us? What is he likely to do for the future? What has been his answer to the promise and the challenge of the world?

Religions have provided one answer. In his zeal of affirmation the prophet has declared that the individual lives after death; that in some unseen world completion shall be attained. Yet increasing millions find this explanation fading into unreality. If one living organism is perpetuated after its physical dissolution, why not another? We can account for every particle of life which the blossom loses by its death. Some has passed to the seed; the rest finds its chemical reaction, which in turn produces other forms of life—in entirely new individuals. To assert that the original blossom lives in an unseen form outside the realm of thought is preposterous. Why should it? Its function has been accomplished. The sentimentality behind this thinking is a weak prop for a vigorous mind. And exactly the same reasoning applies to all living organisms, including man.

The more intelligent part of mankind has also outgrown the conception of a definite heaven. It is impossible to imagine a satisfactory heaven for the individual. A place where there is no strife, where everything is perfection and completion—what joy is to be found there? The essence of life as we know it is growth and survival; its happiness comes from the exercise of a function. Growth and survival postulate extinction; in heaven an individual would evaporate.

Some thinkers have made a substitute “religion of humanity.” They find solace in action tending to make the world a better place; they have been gratified by an imaginative conception of a future heaven on earth. As a religion of morality and action this is magnificent. Yet its dogma does not satisfy. A heaven on earth is no more conceivable than a heaven anywhere else. If we find our happiness in action, how shall our descendants find happiness when there are no more evils to conquer? Though a static condition of blessedness be the goal of humanitarian endeavor, it is the progress toward it which furnishes the joy.

The Oriental thinker has looked for his answer in a different direction. Though the individual is partial and unsuccessful, life as a whole is always triumphant. Cannot the individual by contemplation identify himself with the world-soul? Can he not tack himself on to this all-inclusive life by denial and forgetfulness of himself? Brahmin saints have done so imaginatively. But such an answer is no answer. We are individuals, after all, and thinking of Nirvana will not rob us of our separate bodies and minds. Contemplation is not a substitute for living.

The doctrine of transmigration is equally unsatisfying. If an individual never succeeds in any single life, innumerable chances will be mere repetitions of tragedy. The only hope of such a process would be a final “heaven on earth,” which is just as inconceivable as that of the humanitarians.

We cannot now be satisfied with theological answers. Nor will the world ever find an answer permanently satisfactory. Is not this as it should be? A fixed system of thought which answers every spiritual craving must be a shell around the individual, preventing growth. It finally ceases to be a dynamic and becomes a wall in the way of the feelers which mankind is constantly sending into his spiritual environment. It forces him to rest. It eventually turns all his expansion into the lower planes of life. It is deadening, suffocating, as soon as he reaches its limits.

Of what nature, then, must be the religion of the modern man and woman? First of all, it must not be imposed from without; it must grow through the personality and find its being there. It must not only square with every known fact of science and thought; it must stimulate to a fervent desire for new understanding. It must not deny or destroy life; it must be life’s essence. It must ring with a call to the individual to assume his proper dignity of life. It must harmonize with the laughter of children and with the bitter beauty of a winter sea. It must flame with emotion, yet be keen and hard as a sword. And it must be not a self-constituted standard with which every other thing is arbitrarily compared, but a principle of growth making necessary in us vision, strength, freedom, and fearlessness.

It is my feeling that Tagore will suggest to the modern man such a religion. He gives expression, though not, of course, perfect expression, to a synthesis of many latent instincts of the modern mind. He glories in understanding, not only facts and truth, but emotions and all manifestations of life. He calls us to see vivid beauty wherever it is found. He acclaims the aid of science in extending man’s personality throughout the universe. He sees the oneness of all life, and bids man stand erect on account of this eternal and timeless force coursing through him. He sees the oneness of humanity, and the necessity of perfecting human relations. He depicts purity without asceticism, vigor without brutality. He emphasizes joy and action. He does not blink the fact of death, but robs it of horror by showing it as the natural end of a victorious life. While he encourages by the idea of an ultimate goal, he inspires by the conception of a real connection with infinity here and now. Revering the universal life, he sees that it finds expression only in individuals, and that the law of our being must be to live as completely as possible.

Many before Tagore have said these things partially. But it remained for a poet who combines the intelligence of the Orient with that of the Occident to say them all, and to say them with such beauty and simplicity that a large part of the world listens. If he succeeds in making us conscious of such a religion, he will have quickened life and made it potent as few artists can.

Margaret C. Anderson

Succession: A Comedy of the Generations, by Ethel Sidgwick. (Small, Maynard and Company, Boston.)

Ethel Sidgwick is the world’s next great woman novelist. Though I confess eagerly that I enjoy her novels more than any novels I’ve ever read—I mean it literally—it isn’t on so personal a basis that I offer the judgment. But I’m confident that within ten years the critical perspective will show her on this pinnacle. Since George Eliot and the Brontës, I can think of no woman who has focused art and life so intensely into novel writing—though even as I say this Ethan Frome looms up and leaves me a little uncomfortable. But the important thing is that Ethel Sidgwick is going to count—enormously.

People who aren’t yet aware of her (and there seem to be a lot of them) can be easily explained as that body of the public that neglects a masterpiece until it has become the fashion to acclaim it. But Ethel Sidgwick has written a novel that’s more important than any number of our traditional masterpieces. For instance, it’s a much more important story than Vanity Fair; just as Jean Christophe is more valuable than Ivanhoe. The novel of manners has its delightful place, and so has the historical romance; but the novel that chronicles with subtlety the intellectual or artistic temper of an age is as much more important than these as Greek drama is than the moving picture show.

I know there are people who’ll read Succession and continue to prefer Thackeray’s geniality to Miss Sidgwick’s brilliant seriousness and her humor that’s not at all genial—but rapid, sophisticated, impatient of comedy in the accepted sense. Ethel Sidgwick might write a radiant tragedy, or a wistful satire, or a sad comedy; I can never imagine her being anything so obvious as merely comic—or genial! She doesn’t laugh; she couldn’t chuckle; she has just the flash of a smile, and then she hurries on dazzlingly, as though things were too important to be anything but passionate about. She doesn’t “warm the cockles of your heart”—or whatever that silly phrase is; and she doesn’t do crude, raw things to show you that she “knows life.” She goes down into the darkness rose-crowned, in Rupert Brooke’s gorgeous phrase; when she goes into the sunlight it is always with something of remembered agony. That’s the fine quality of her vitalism. She’s too strong to be hard, too steel-like to be robust. She’s like fire and keen air—to borrow another poet’s phrase. She reflects life through the mirror of a vivid personality—which is one way of being an important artist. She assumes that you’re also vivid, and quick, and subtle, and this gives her writing the most beautiful quality of nervousness—the kind you mean when you’re not talking about nerves. In short, Ethel Sidgwick is the most definitely magnetic personality I’ve ever felt through a book’s pages.

Succession, though complete in itself, is really a sequel to Promise, published a year ago. The sub-title presents the idea, and can be concretely expanded in a sentence: Antoine, child-wonder violinist, and the youngest of the celebrated Lemaures, revolts against the musical ideas of his grandfather. Here it is again—the battle of youth and age, made particularly interesting because it’s a purely intellectual warfare, and particularly charming because its participants are such delightful people.

The first glimpse of Antoine is irresistible. After a series of concerts in England, he is being taken by his uncle to their home in France. M. Lucien Lemaure has chosen the long route because his nephew has an odd habit of sleeping better on the water than in any house or hotel on shore; and while he doesn’t understand this nephew, he has vital reasons for considering him: for upon Antoine’s delicate shoulders rests the musical honor of the family.

In the train, flying toward Paris, Lucien refers to the last London recital, when Antoine had made both his uncle’s and his conductor’s lives a burden by his indifferent rehearsal of his grandfather’s latest composition. Antoine’s outburst had outraged Lucien, to whom faith in his father’s character and genius had, all his life, amounted to a religion.

How I wanted to hug him!

But the first glimpse of M. Lemaure, the grandfather, is reassuring. In fact, he’s almost as irresistible as Antoine, making you realize immediately that the battle is going to be a subtle one, and that it may be difficult to know which side to take, after all.

The old musician asks about the last recital.

There are over six hundred pages in the story, and they cover just a year and a half of Antoine’s life. This appears to be an impossible literary feat; any orthodox novelist will tell you that you can’t hold a reader through six hundred pages with the story of a fourteen-year-old boy. But Miss Sidgwick’s holding power is—well, I read Succession during a brief trip to Boston, and much as I longed to absorb Concord and all its charms, I found I only had half my capacity with me; the rest was with Antoine, and it stayed there till in desperation I shut myself up in a hotel room and saw him safely off to America with his nice, wholesome, inartistic father. Then came the awful realization that I’d have to wait a whole year for the next volume—for surely Miss Sidgwick intends to make a trilogy.

The explanation of this absorption is simply that Antoine is so interesting. His professional life is dramatic; but even in the commonest experiences of every day his world is as vivid as it can only be to a dramatic nature. For instance, in this little scene with his brother:

Of course, most interesting of all is his musical development, in which are involved several personalities of striking character: Duchâtel, the revolutionary, more a son, after the French fashion, than a man or a musician; Savigny, the celebrated alienist, who treats the child hypnotically in his severe illnesses; Lemonski, a rival child wonder, who is like a pig, and vulgar—which it is silly to say, because he is a beautiful artist, according to Antoine; Reuss, the great German conductor, and the boy’s staunch friend, who hates “the cursed French training” of making life weigh so heavily on its youth; Jacques Charretteur, the vagabond violinist, “a man to play French music in France”; Cécile, the aunt, who has the perception to understand the little genius with the dark eyes, whose “expression was so beautiful that she could hardly bear it”; and Ribiera, the famous Spanish pianist, who “warms” the piano, in Antoine’s words, and calls the boy an intelligent ape, by way of expressing his admiration. All these people are drawn with consummate skill.

I think one of the most poignant passages in the book, to me, is Antoine’s description of how he had raté the solo at a London concert. It was at the end of the season, and he had been harassed by a thousand needless frictions:

The book closes on an unexpected and suggestive note. Antoine, who had always realized that his grandfather couldn’t bear his being “different” in music, had taken quietly to composing the kind of things he loved. He “made” a quintet in which Ribiera was given a brilliant piano part, and which he thought beautiful—extremely. But when they played it for him, though he was moved to cry, he found its “ideas” not so good as he had thought. Whereupon he plans to produce better ones in his new overture.

Succession is a masterpiece of art, and Antoine is the most lovable and interesting character in new fiction.

Llewellyn Jones

Bergson’s philosophy is the antithesis of the natural-science view of the universe as mechanism. In that view the laws of nature are fixed sequences controlling matter, or energy, and the more complicated and faultless the mechanism the higher the life. Just how this mechanism became conscious of the fact that it was a mechanism—caught itself at itself, so to speak, and announced the laws of its own being—is a question as puzzling as the old theological one of the aseity of God—which is simply a Latinized way of asking how the deity could, being infinite, turn himself inside out in such a manner as to become aware of his own existence and attributes. In fact, the two questions are one and the same. According to Bergson, mechanism not only cannot explain consciousness, but it is the very antithesis of conscious life. Behind mechanism he places an inextinguishable but not uncheckable vital urge with endless potentialities and with no fixed goal. The progress of this “elan vital” is through resistance to matter, which is simply the reversal of its own movement. The onward urge is what Bergson calls “pure duration” or motion, and its collision with its own reverse movement is what appears to us as space. The actual situation of life at any given time is simply a modus vivendi between this spiritual activity striving to be free, and the reverse movement.

We know, of course, that the physical universe is simply energy running down. Just as a glass of water cools off, so the sun dissipates its heat, and so, we are learning, the elements break up into simpler forms, giving off their contained energy in the forms of heat and electricity as they do so. But on the other hand the plant takes unto itself that energy of the sun, and with it builds up again the inorganic salts from its soil into higher forms with a greater content of stored energy. What the plant does, says Bergson, is typical and symbolical of what all life does at all times: sets up a reverse current to the running-down tendency of the universe of matter.

Life cannot do this easily, but has to adapt itself to the resistance of the downward flow. It does this through its motor reactions, its sense organs, and above all through its intelligence when that is evolved. The evolution of these things gives us our ideas of space. The insect cuts up its environment into spatial forms easy for it to deal with. Man with different sense organs probably lives in a different space world. As “a thing is where it acts,” it is obvious that the boundaries of things in the material realm would be quite different if we had, for example, some sort of sense organ adapted to identify things by their electrical properties. But this identifying of things by spatial and material concepts—the mathematical order—is instrumental to the ends of action, and the original consciousness of life, while it included the potentialities of intellectual knowledge, was instinctive. Instinct, according to Bergson, is first-hand knowledge, but knowledge incapable of conceptual extension. It is therefore no use in the practical affairs of life, but certain and immediate in its apprehension of the actual flow of life itself. In its broadened form of intuition it is responsible for all the valid and original insights of the philosophers and poets. The structural and dialectic forms in which philosophies have been given to the world are simply the intellectualizing process which philosophers have used to buttress—and which they have often thought produced—the insight which was prior to and independent of the system.

Bergson’s doctrine has been seized upon by apologists for every creed and for every iconoclasm. Bergson has been accused of every intellectual crime, from being the intellectual father of syndicalism to being the last rich relative of struggling obscurantism. The protestant theologians talk glibly of Bergson’s idea of God, and use him as a stick with which to beat the hated materialist. Bergson himself would never apply his philosophy to the uses of the syndicalists. The argument of the syndicalists themselves is simply an ingenious parody of the Bergsonian philosophy, as it is so far developed. As mechanism and the mathematical order, they say, do not represent life, we cannot by the means of natural and sociological sciences predict in advance what life will do, and what forms it will take. We cannot base revolutionary action, for instance, along Marxian lines, because the whole Marxist philosophy rests upon the assumption that life is the slave of material forces—chemical firstly, and economical in the human drama—and that it will therefore follow along predetermined lines. If life is an “elan vital,” breaking its path as it goes, and only able to think in terms of the past, then revolutionary activity must cut loose from the reactionary intellect, and trust itself to its instincts; fight its way to that freedom which is impossible in the mathematically determined intellectual realm, and which is equally impossible of achievement by mere intellectual foresight. So the syndicalist in the name of Bergson cuts loose from all theories of the future he wishes to bring in, preaches the “general strike” for its stimulating effect on the emotions of the proletarian constituents of his social “elan vital”—quite careless of whether it would ever be a practical success or not—and deliberately cuts loose from all forms of “bourgeoise culture.”

But the anti-revolutionists point out that Bergson does believe in the intellect as a guide to the practical affairs of life; and industry and production—the field of the syndicalist—are far more mechanical than they are vital. In man’s industrial relations he has to approximate himself as much to the machine as possible, and for Bergson’s anti-intellectualism to be applied to this particular realm of life is as great a calamity as could happen to the doctrine. And then these conservatives proceed, less justifiably perhaps, to train the captured gun of intuition upon the syndicalists. The racial intuitions, they say, are older than the race’s newly-found intellectual conceptions. For generations the race has lived by certain instinctive rules of conduct. Religion, custom, and patriotism, these are all sacred because they are extra-intellectual, and they dare us to disturb these sacred things. It is a strange sight—this most revolutionary philosophical doctrine being used to support all the prejudices that the ages have handed down—but we cannot deny that it is a plausible use of intuitionism, and a more legitimate use than that to which Sorel and his followers have put the teachings emanating from the College of France.

Perhaps the most detailed application that Bergson has yet made of his philosophy to the affairs of life is his application of its principles to the puzzling æsthetic problem of laughter and the comic. His theory is that laughter is a social corrective directed against the man who allows the dogging steps of mechanism to overtake him and imprison his spirit in a web of meaningless action. The man who is walking along the street should be going in a determinate direction with a determinate end in view, and with the ability to get there in spite of reasonable obstacles. So says society. When he becomes abstracted, walks mechanically, and in consequence falls over a brick, we laugh at him. He has permitted himself to become a machine for the nonce instead of a self-conscious spirit, and society cannot afford to have its interests jeopardized in that way.

The International Journal of Ethics for January, 1914, contains an article by J. W. Scott, who accuses Bergson of ethical pessimism on the grounds of his view of the comic. He points out that the psychology of comic action, as Bergson works it out, is precisely that of moral action. For in moral action, too, a man does what is habitual, what is against his own self-conscious impulse, what is mechanical in that it is a fixed course of conduct pursued without reference to the favor or disfavor of the environment. The life impulse must be, he convicts Bergson of saying, adaptable to its circumstances; it must insert itself between the determinisms of matter; it must pursue the crooked path where the straight path is too difficult. It cannot follow its moral ideal without making itself ridiculous, as indeed in real life moral people are always doing.

This criticism hangs on the acceptance of a moral ideal, and if we must have an ideal in the sense of a goal beckoning us from the future, then the criticism is well founded and Bergson is an ethical pessimist. But systematic ethics have been denied by other philosophers before Bergson, and most people of modern temperament are quite willing to let the whole question of a priori ethics drop. They might not be willing to exchange it for the very unpoetic utilitarianism which has so often been offered in its place, but Bergson offers something more than that. If he be an ethical pessimist, he is not a religious pessimist. Of religion he has not yet spoken, except incidentally. Obviously so long as he uses the scientific method in his philosophy, proceeding from facts to their subordination in a picture whose values are given by intuitions, he cannot present a systematic philosophy. But in spite of the fact that pessimism—not only in ethics but in his view of the content of personality and its relations with the universe—is charged against him, Bergson means to be decidedly optimistic in his treatment of personality. In his article in The Hibbert Journal for October, 1911, occur these remarkable words:

On the other suppositions of Bergson’s philosophy this is by no means so far-fetched as are most theories of immortality. For the consciousness which cuts out the patterns of our spatial life here could easily cut out others in the beyond, like enough to our present ones to carry on the continuity of our active existence. The idea of survival, or an idea that may be applied to transmundane survival, is suggested by Laurence Binyon in a recent volume of poems entitled “Auguries.” He writes:

This is quoted not only because it represents the poetical realization of Bergson’s message, but because it points to one reason why the charge of pessimism has been brought against Bergson even in this connection.

If only progress is our home, if there be no stability, how is that permanence of values to be achieved which Höffding declares to be the essential axiom of religion? We may love our faithful dog, but according to Bergson it represents an evolutionary blind alley. We may create as we will, but we shall survive our creations. Here, after all, is at the best a tempered optimism. No reunions are promised in the Bergsonian paradise. Only a perpetual streaming that does not, so far as Bergson has yet told us (and that is an important point) ever wind safely home to sea.

Emerson’s Journals, Volume IX, 1856-1863. (Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.)

At least nine events of permanent historic interest have occurred in American literature within the past few years: they are represented by the publication of nine volumes of Emerson’s Journals. Those who are trying to achieve a personal religion, which acknowledges God as an immanence instead of a proposition, hail with a quiet joy every extraction from the great mine in which Emerson stored the jewels of his life. If we do not recognize them as lapidarious we must perceive them as the better metals of ourselves, for this “friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit” inhumed those spiritual values which all men at some time or another seek as their own. Emerson buoys us up for our common struggles and makes us conscious of that aid which is the awakening of latent power. He composed the bricks which thousands of builders have used in fashioning beautiful personal temples. “I dot evermore in my endless journal,” he wrote to Carlyle; “... the arrangement loiters long, and I get a brick-kiln instead of a house.” Speaking of his philosophical work he confesses a “formidable tendency to the lapidary style,” and adds, “I build my house of boulders.”

Emerson’s published journals are kilns and quarries from which the foundation materials for the edifice of character have been obtained by countless builders. If he could not construct a system of philosophy, as Arnold alleges, he could and did provide the “boulders” and indicate the pattern which others have used. He is a part of every well-read American, and, chiefly through Carlyle, still lives in the land of his forefathers. He was an inspiration to Whitman, one of whose “specimen days” closed with “a long and blessed evening with Emerson.” Such evenings are as real now as in Whitman’s time, and are more commonly experienced, for Emerson is westward-bound. He has traveled slowly in this direction: “boulders” are not carried by exploiters and pioneers who build and live in a world not of “the spirit” but of the senses. With the establishing of easier communication between centers of thought and fields of action in America, New England “boulders” were brought hither, to chink the crude walls of western life; and it is a token of Emerson’s vitality and spiritual universality that his “bricks” and “boulders” are discoverable in all sorts of shacks which men are trying to improve. Lumber decays, but “boulders” remain, and some of them become talismanic.

In reading and re-reading Emerson’s Journals one is impressed with their remarkable quotability, and in this mechanical handiness of his work we have a partial explanation of the slowness with which it has been assimilated. “Boulders” are fated to be knocked about before they are appreciated. We throw them at one another with a sort of physical dexterity until, burnished and transformed, they are recognized as adapted to higher uses. We do not flippantly quote or mention the authors who have become personal to us; I quote Emerson’s Journal as a blessed soliloquy.

D. C. W.

George Soule

The most interesting hours of the last week I have spent in listening to discussions of the futurists. Someone told of a superb incident recently reported of a speech by Marinetti, the enunciator of the futurist philosophy. Marinetti, after denouncing the past in his usual method, proceeded to eliminate women from his world. “But,” said someone, “how will you continue the human race?” “We will not continue the human race,” rejoined Marinetti, with superb éclat. Daring and magnificent utterance! But, after all, perhaps he is the only sane one, and the norm of human intelligence quite insane. That fits in well with the recently reported discovery of a Paris scientist, that all variations in the course of evolution are the result of disease, and that there would have been no man had not some ape had a parasite in his thyroid gland. All of which goes to show that I was right in my statement (which Chesterton probably has said before me) that all logical extremes are illogical, since the world is based on an eternal paradox.

Really it is quite simple to follow the futurist line of thought once you get the hang of it. For instance—two developments of painting predicted at the Troubetzkoys. In the first, each plane in the cubist picture, instead of being colored, is to be numbered, and the numbers printed in a catalogue opposite the names of the colors for which they stand. Thus any approach to the vulgar intrusion of realism would be avoided, and abstract beauty furthered. What chances for the imagination! And think of the subtle possibilities in the mathematics of color! One could surely express by some abstruse quadratic a color quite beyond the realm of visual possibility, and thus man by one gigantic tug at his bootstraps would pull his soul out of its finite limitations.

The second school was aptly named the auto-symbolists. In this school Nietzschean individualism attains its sublime extreme. The artist, instead of expressing his spirit in the vulgar symbols understood by everybody, arbitrarily chooses a symbol known only to himself. If he wishes to depict a determined man going up a mountain on a mule’s back he may paint a mouse-trap. To him the mouse-trap perfectly expresses the particular feeling he has when viewing his own mental image of the picture he has decided to paint. What matter about anybody else? If you ask him cui bono?—he will reply: why any bono at all? And, of course, he is perfectly logical. And the satisfying aristocratic aloofness of his position! If people—as they surely will—study his mouse-trap and discuss in vain what it portends, if they pay vast sums for his pictures and start a literature of criticisms to guess his unguessable riddles, so much the better. He can laugh at them with diabolical glee. Everybody is a fool but himself, and he can go on creating in the seventh circle of his own soul undisturbed by the barnyard cackle of the world.

Has the cubist literature of Gertrude Stein awakened echoes in Chicago? I have read it without understanding before this. But one night my host—a great, strong, humorous, intelligent hulk of a man, himself a scoffer at cubism—read part of her essay on Matisse so that it was almost intelligible. His inflection and punctuation did it. Her chief characteristics seem to be an aversion to personal pronouns and a strict adherence to simple declarative statements, untroubled by subordinate clauses or phrases of any kind. Her thought, therefore, resolves itself awkwardly in a four-square way. The multiplicity of her planes becomes confusing after a page, but each plane stands alone. Thus—(I quote inaccurately)—“Some ones knew this one to be expressing something being struggling. Some ones knew this one not to be expressing something being struggling. This one expressed something being struggling. This one did not express something being struggling.” Which, of course, is the cubist way of saying that “Some thought he was trying to express struggle in an object, others thought the contrary. As a matter of fact, he sometimes did express struggle; sometimes he did not.”

But it seems her early work is now getting too obvious, so she is in the throes of a later phase. In her “Portrait of Miss Dodge” she has eliminated verbs and sentence structure entirely, flinging a succession of image-nouns at the reader. One can surely not accuse her of “prettiness.”

The craze for colored wigs is, of course, an outgrowth of futurism. Why should a man be any color except that which his will dictates? This has long (a few months) been the cry of the painter, and the smart set has echoed: Why should he? Women in green and blue wigs have been seen in New York already. But, of course, it would be senseless to stop there; if one has an orange toupé he should surely have a mauve face. Yellow complexions are worn with indigo hair. We have long been accustomed to blue powdered noses on Fifth Avenue, and the setting of diamonds in the teeth is an old story. The only trouble with this epoch-making idea is that it is old. Phœnician women did it! And wasn’t it Edward Lear who wrote of The Jumblies:

Of course, if one doesn’t believe in this new development of art, but is naturalistic, he should be brave enough to chase his idea to its lair and act upon it, like Lady Constance Stewart Richardson, who is now tripping about the homes of the rich in New York with nothing at all on—or worse than nothing.

Forgive my preposterosities! But the ridiculous seriousness with which everything unfamiliar is taken by a sensation-sated haute monde is such a brilliant target for satire. I think with immense relief of a wonderful bit of sky, and a long stretch of beach, and of all things tangible and—yes, though it may be bourgeois—healthy.

Eunice Tietjens

Henry A. Beers, the author of this dynamic poem from which we quote only a part, is a professor of literature at Yale—a man supposedly conventional and soft spoken!

[Classification in this list implies a review in an early issue.]

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