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Title: The Little Review, October 1914 (Vol. 1, No. 7)

Author: Various

Editor: Margaret C. Anderson

Release date: January 18, 2021 [eBook #64333]

Language: English

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


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LITTLE REVIEW, OCTOBER 1914 (VOL. 1, NO. 7) ***




                           THE LITTLE REVIEW


                      _Literature Drama Music Art_

                          MARGARET C. ANDERSON
                                 EDITOR

                             OCTOBER, 1914

       Poems                                       Witter Bynner
       To the Innermost                     Margaret C. Anderson
       A Letter from London                           Amy Lowell
       Cause                                          Helen Hoyt
       New Wars for Old                         Charles Ashleigh
       Ante-Bellum Russia                      Alexander S. Kaun
       The Silver Ship                          Skipwith Cannéll
       The Butterfly                                 "          
       The Tidings                                   "          
       Longing                              George Burman Foster
       The Wicked to the Wise               Arthur Davison Ficke
       The Viennese Dramatists                     Erna McArthur
       Editorials                                               
       New York Letter                              George Soule
       Book Discussion:                                         
         George Cronyn and James Oppenheim                      
         An American Anarchist                                  
         The Growth of Evolutionary Theory                      
         Emma Goldman and the Modern Drama                      
         The Whining of a Rejected One                          
         A New Short Story Writer                               
         A New Study of William Morris                          
         Exaggerated Mushrooms                                  
       Sentence Reviews                                         
       The Reader Critic                                        

                           Published Monthly

                            15 cents a copy

                    MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Publisher
                           Fine Arts Building
                                CHICAGO

                              $1.50 a year

         Entered as second-class matter at Postoffice, Chicago.




                           THE LITTLE REVIEW


                                 Vol. I

                             OCTOBER, 1914

                                 No. 7

               Copyright, 1914, by Margaret C. Anderson.




                                 Poems


                             WITTER BYNNER


                         Two Churches on Sunday

   They stand and bark like foolish dogs,
   "O notice us! O notice us!"
       And then they stand and whine....
   As if to say, "The good kind God
   That made the world made even us,
       All in the scheme divine."
   And then they bark like foolish dogs,
       And then they stand and whine.


                       The Last Words of Tolstoi

   Awhile I felt the imperial sky
   Clothe a sole figure, which was I;
   Then, lonely for democracy,
   I hailed the purple robe of air
   Kinship for all mankind to share;
   But now at last, with ashen hair,
   I learn it is not they nor I
   Who own the mantle of the sky,--
   Silence alone wears majesty.


                              Apollo Sings

   Here shall come forth a flower
       and near him ever grow.
   But his ear heeds me not,
       and my hot tears mean nothing
       to him who was dearer to me
       than Daphne, he whose clear eye,
       that dazed the sun, now droops near earth....
   O hyacinthine flower, grow here!

   Sweet were his lips as a flower touching
       the feet of a bee in Spring, his lips
       would repeat the word, "Love, love,"
       all that was sweet in the world was reborn.
   Death could not defeat him,
       for his young lips, completing love, were eager.
   His youth shall ever be fleet, evading death....
   O hyacinthine flower, be sweet!




                            To the Innermost


                          MARGARET C. ANDERSON

The popular translation of that dangerous term, individualism, is
"selfishness." Self-dependence is a pompous phrase, and self-completion
a huge negation. The average mind seems never to grasp the fact that
individualism and democracy are synonymous terms; that self-dependence
is merely the first of one's intricate obligations to his universe, and
self-completion the first step toward that wider consciousness which
makes the giving-out of self valuable.

I am always feeling that some one will point out to me, with the most
embarrassing justice, the obviousness of observations like these. But
invariably, after a resolve to keep to those high levels which stretch
out beyond the boundaries of the accepted, some one engages me in a
discussion--some one who still believes in the antique theory that life
proceeds for the sake of immortality, or that a woman must choose
between her charm and the ballot; and I emerge therefrom convinced that
the highest mission in life is the dedication of oneself to the obvious,
and that a valiant preaching of truisms is the only way to get at the
root of intellectual evils. It has its fascinations, besides: to
convince a reactionary (not that I've ever done it) that renunciation is
not an ultimate end, or that truth is a good thing for all people, is
better than discovering a kindred soul. And so I proceed, without
further apology: that human being is of most use to other people who has
first become of most use to himself.

It is the war that has emphasized so overwhelmingly the triviality of
trivial things. Out of such utter dehumanization one has a vision of the
race which might emerge--a race purified of small struggles, small
causes, small patriotisms; a race animated by those big impulses which
have always made up the dreams of men. And then would come the more
subtle personal development: a race of human units purged of small
ideals and ambitions, cleansed to the point where education can at least
proceed with economy--that is, without having to destroy two ounces of
superstition to produce one ounce of knowledge. And at the foundation of
such a race structure, I believe, will be a corner stone of
Individualism--or whatever you may choose to call it. What it means is
very simple: it is a matter of heightened inner life.

Our culture--or what little we have of such a thing--is clogged by
masses of dead people who have no conscious inner life. The man who
asked, "Did you ever see an old artist?" put a profound question. People
get old because they have no vision. And they have no vision because
they have no inner life. Of course, any sort of inner life is impossible
to the man or woman who must be a slave instead of a human being.
And this brings us, of course, to a discussion of economic
emancipation--which I shall not take advantage of; because I want to
talk here not of what the individual should have done for him, but of
what he might very well do for himself. There are so many slaves whose
bondage can be traced to no cause except their refusal or their
inability to come to life; and the significance of the fact that
spiritual resourcefulness is most rare among those persons who have the
most leisure to cultivate it need not be emphasized even in an article
devoted to the apparent.

Human weakness is reducible to so many causes beside that much-abused
one of "circumstance." We talk so much nonsense about people not being
able to help themselves. The truth is that people can help themselves
out of nine-tenths of all the trouble they get into. (We'll leave the
other tenth to circumstance.) If they could only be made to realize
this, or that if they are helped out by some one else they might as well
stay in trouble! To be dragged out is more desirable than starving to
death, because it is more sensible, and because people are so
sentimental in their attitude toward receiving that one welcomes almost
any emergency which drives them to accepting aid with grace and honesty:
_anything_ to teach a man that he need not smirk about taking what he
himself would like to give without being smirked at! But in spite of
this, one must help himself to anything which is to be of positive value
to him; and must learn that personality gets what it demands. However,
this begins to sound like a pamphlet from East Aurora....

As a result of our shabby thinking on the subject of self-dependence we
have lowered our standards of the exceptional to an alarming degree. We
call that person exceptional who does what almost any one might do--but
doesn't. For instance:

The average girl of twenty in a conventional home hates to be told that
she must not read Havelock Ellis or make friends with those dreadful
persons known vaguely as "socialists," or that she must not work when
she happens to believe that work is a beautiful thing. She is submerged
in the ghastly sentimentalities of a tradition-soaked atmosphere--and
heaven knows that sentimentalities of that type are difficult to break
away from. It takes not only brains, but what William James called the
fundamental human virtue--bravery--to do it. And so the girl gives up
the fight and moans that circumstances were too much for her. The next
stage of her development shows her passing around gentle advice to all
her friends on the noble theme of not being "hard" and living only for
oneself; how one must sacrifice to the general good--never having had
the courage or the insight to find out what the general good might
really be. Thus are our incapacities extended. The girl who did break
away she regards secretly as remarkable--which is not necessarily true.
It is not that the second girl is remarkable, but that the first one is
inadequate.

The average man of thirty-five slaves all day in an office and comes
home at night to wheel the baby around the block and fall asleep over
the newspaper. He has lost any feeling of rebellion, simply because he
feels that he must. His permanent attitude is that all men are more or
less in the same condition (or should be, if they're well-behaved), and
that to part with a vision after college is what any man of sense must
do. His neighbor with an eye on something beyond an office desk and a
go-cart is a dreamer or a fool; if the neighbor makes good with his
dream, then he is a remarkable man of extraordinary capabilities. Which
is not necessarily true, either; the dreamer has simply scorned that
attitude which has been so aptly epitomized as "the second choice."

There are as many phlegmatic radicals as there are conservatives; and
there is no type among them more exasperating than the one that is
content to sit around and _be_ radical--and be nothing else. The lazy
evasiveness of the "revolutionary" with his the-world-owes-me-a-living
air positively sicken me. Why should the world owe anybody anything
except a protection against that _lack of struggle_ which cramps one's
intellectual muscles so hideously?

And then there is that most unpleasant type of all--the man who boasts
of how he will use his chance when he gets it. He always gets it, of
course; but he doesn't know it. And when it comes out boldly and takes
him by the ear he becomes terrified and slips back under the cover of
things as they are. His is the most unattractive kind of intellectual
cowardice, because it involves so many lies; it is simply a rapid
sequence of boasting and fright and refusing to meet the truth.

Here they all are--the uncourageous company of the second choice: the
half-people, the makeshifts, the compromisers, the near-adventurers. How
pale and ambling they look; how they crawl through the world with their
calculating side looks, ready to take any second-rate thing when the
first-rate one costs too much. Oh, it is a sad sight!

We must be more brave! We must be more fine! We must be more demanding!
The saddest aspect of the whole thing is that choice is such a tiny
element in the process of becoming. It is after one has chosen highly
that his real struggle--and his real joy--begins. And only on such a
basis is built up that intensity of inner life which is the sole
compensation one can wrest from a world of mysterious terrors ... and of
ecstasies too dazzling to be shared.

   Souls are weighed in silence, as gold and silver are weighed in
   pure water, and the words which we pronounce have no meaning
   except through the silence in which they are
   bathed.--_Maeterlinck._




                          A Letter from London


                               AMY LOWELL

                                                    _August 28, 1914._

As I sit here, I can see out of my window the Red Cross flag flying over
Devonshire House. Only one short month ago I sat at this same window and
looked at Devonshire House, glistening with lights, and all its doors
wide open, for the duke and duchess were giving an evening party.
Powdered footmen stood under the porte-cochère, and the yard was filled
with motors; it was all extremely well-ordered and gay.

I watched the people arriving and leaving, for a long time. It was a
very late party, and it was not only broad daylight, but brilliant
sunshine, before they went home. They did have such a good time, those
boys and girls, and they ended by coming out on the balcony and shouting
and hurrahing for fully ten minutes. How many of those young men were
among the "two thousand casualties" at the Battle of Charleroi, of which
we have just got news?

Devonshire House is as busy this afternoon, but it is no longer gay. In
the yard is a long wooden shed, with a corrugated iron roof; there are
two doors on opposite sides, like barn doors, and black against the
light of the farther door I can see men sitting at a table, and boy
scouts running upon errands. The yard is filled with motors again, and
there is a buzz of coming and going. Yesterday a man brought a sort of
double-decked portable stretcher, with a place above and below, and a
group stood round it and talked about it for a long time. For this is
the headquarters of the Red Cross Society. So, in one short month, has
life changed, here in London.

A month ago I toiled up the narrow stairs of a little outhouse behind
the Poetry Bookshop, and in an atmosphere of overwhelming
sentimentality, listened to Mr. Rupert Brooke whispering his poems. To
himself, it seemed, as nobody else could hear him. It was all artificial
and precious. One longed to shout, to chuck up one's hat in the street
when one got outside; anything, to show that one was not quite a mummy,
yet.

Now, I could weep for those poor, silly people. After all they were
happy; the world they lived in was secure. Today this horrible thing has
fallen upon them, and not for fifty years, say those who know, can
Europe recover herself and continue her development. Was the world too
"precious", did it need these violent realities to keep its vitality
alive? History may have something to say about that; we who are here can
only see the pity and waste of it.

So little expectation of war was there, so academic the "conversations"
between the powers seemed, that on the Friday, preceding the declaration
of war, we went down to Dorchester and Bath for a week-end outing. It
was rather a shock to find the market-place at Salisbury filled with
cannon, and the town echoing with soldiers. The waiter at the inn,
however, assured us that it was only manoeuvres. But the next day our
chauffeur, who had been fraternizing with the soldiers, told us that it
was not manoeuvres; they had started for manoeuvres, but had been turned
round, and were now on their way back to their barracks.

As we came back from Bath, on Monday, we were told that gasolene was
over five shillings a can. That was practically saying that England had
gone to war. But she had not, nor did she, until twelve o'clock that
night. When we reached our hotel we found a state bordering on panic.
There was no money to be got, and all day long, for two days, people
(Americans) had been arriving from the Continent. Without their trunks,
naturally. There was no one to handle trunks at the stations in Paris.
These refugees were all somewhat hysterical; perhaps they exaggerated
when they spoke of disorder in Paris; later arrivals seemed to think so.
But we are untried in war--war round the corner. It is a terrifying
nightmare which we cannot take for reality. Or could not. For it is now
three weeks since the war burst over us, and already we accustom
ourselves to the new condition. That is perhaps the most horrible part
of it.

But that first night in London I shall never forget. A great crowd of
people with flags marched down Piccadilly, shouting: "We want war! We
want war!" They sang the Marseillaise, and it sounded savage,
abominable. The blood-lust was coming back, which we had hoped was gone
forever from civilized races.

But the Londoners are a wonderful people. Or perhaps they have no
imagination. London goes on, and goes on just as it did before, as far
as I can see. I understand that the American papers, possibly taking
their cue from the German papers, say that London is like a military
camp, that soldiers swarm in the streets, and that its usual activities
are all stopped. It is not true. "Business as usual" has become a sort
of motto. And it is as usual,--perhaps a bit too much so. The mass of
the people cannot be brought to realize the possibility of an invasion.
In vain the papers warn them, they believe the navy to be invincible.
And Heaven grant that it is!

When, that first week of the war, bank holiday was extended to four days
instead of one; when the moratorium was declared, which exempted the
banks from paying on travellers cheques and letters-of-credit; and when,
to add to that, so many boats were taken off, and there were no sailings
to be got for love or money, something closely approaching a panic broke
out among the Americans. And what wonder! They felt caught like rats in
a trap, with the impassable sea on one side and the advancing Germans on
the other. For Americans have not been brought up with the tradition of
England's invincibility at sea. They have heard of John Paul Jones and
the "Bonhomme Richard." And they have imagination. I was told that one
woman had killed herself in an access of fear, and I have heard of
another who has had to be put in an asylum, her mind given way under the
strain. Many of these people had no money, and they could not get any;
they came from the Continent and had to find lodgings, and they could
offer neither money nor credit. The Embassy had no way of meeting the
strain flung upon it. The Ambassador is not a rich man, and the calls
for money were endless. Finally some public-spirited American gentlemen
started a Committee, with offices at the Hotel Savoy, to help stranded
Americans. And the work they have done has been so admirable that it is
hard to find words to describe it. The Committee cashes cheques, gets
steamship bookings, suggests hotels and lodgings, provides clothes,
meets trains. I cannot write the half it does, but it makes one
exceedingly proud. I do not believe that there is an American in London
who has not helped the Committee with time or money, or been helped by
it.

Perhaps the panicky ones have all been cared for and gone home, or
perhaps man is a very adaptable animal. But we who are still in London
have settled down and accepted things. The town is not like a camp, but
still regiments of soldiers in khaki pass along fairly often. And during
the few days when it was my duty to meet trains at Victoria Station, no
train from the South Coast either arrived or left without its quota of
soldiers. We motored down to Portsmouth last Sunday, and we were stopped
at the entrance to the town and asked to prove that we were not Germans.
It was not a very difficult task. Portsmouth is swarming with soldiers,
but until we reached it, the only evidence of changed conditions was the
strange absence of cyclists and motor-cyclists on the roads.

The other day I was waiting on a street corner. I was going to cross
over and buy a paper. (The papers bring out new editions all day long,
and in taxis, on buses, walking along the street, every one is reading a
paper.) Suddenly I heard someone shout my name, and there were Richard
Aldington and F. G. Flint. They were in excellent spirits; Richard
Aldington had just been down to put his name on the roster of those
willing to enlist. Flint cannot enlist; he is already serving his
country in the Post Office, and sits all day long in the most important
and most dangerous building in the world next to the Bank of England. It
is guarded by soldiers and surrounded by bomb-nets, but London is full
of spies! I thought of the exquisite and delicate work of these two men
in the _Anthologie Des Imagistes_, and it seemed barbarous that war
should touch them--as cruel and useless as the shattering of a Greek
vase by a cannon ball. I remembered the letters of Henri Régnault I had
read, long ago. I remembered how he gave up his studio in Algiers and
came back to fight for France, and died in the trenches. We read of
these things, but when we find ourselves standing on a street corner
talking to two young poets who are preparing to face the same
experiences--Well! It is different!

This is one side. There is, unhappily, another. Something that one
feared, and is not glad to see. There is not that realization that there
should be of the danger England is in, nor that rush to defend her that
one associates with the English temper. They are not enlisting as they
should, and that is the bare truth of the matter.[1] And there is a
certain hysteria beginning to show, which is terribly un-English, as
"English" has hitherto been. The appeal to men to enlist has become
almost a scream of terror. The papers are full of it, in editorials, in
letters from private persons. And still the Government delays to declare
general mobilization. Instead, it adopts measures which seem positively
childish. Lord Kitchener asks the taxi-cabs to carry placards urging
enlistment, and when some of the union cab-drivers refuse, the papers
solemnly urge a patriotic public to boycott the placardless cabs. And
all England is supposed to be under martial law! Could anything be more
miserably humorous? It is hard to imagine Wellington asking favors of
cabmen, and, when he was refused, begging the populace to punish the
offenders. The following advertisement in this morning's _Times_
illustrates the enthusiasm and the apathy which are rife at the same
time:

   Doctor's wife, middle-aged, will undertake to perform the work of
   any tramway conductor, coachman, shop-assistant, or other married
   worker with children, provided that worker will undertake to
   enlist and fight for his country in our hour of need. All wages
   earned will be paid over to the wife and family.--Apply Mrs.
   Lowry, 1, Priory-terrace, Kew Green, S.W.

Perhaps one of the saddest evidences of a changed England is Mr. H. G.
Wells's letter to Americans in _The Chronicle_ of August 24th. For an
Englishman to _implore_ a foreign country to do or not to do anything,
is new. Englishmen have not been used to beg weakly, with tears in their
eyes. Whatever one may think of Mr. Wells's contention in this letter,
the tone in which it is written is a lamentable evidence of panic. Panic
has never been an English trait, and neither has whining servility. And
the Americans are the last people in the world to be moved by it. We are
a just people, and we admire valor. I think Mr. Wells need not have
_stooped_ to ask us for justice or sympathy.

After all, it purports little to point out the spots on the sun. England
is still the mother-country of most Americans, even if that was a good
while ago. And we love her. She has given us not only our blood, but our
civilization. Since this war broke out she has harbored us and kept her
ships running for us. In Paris, one must get a permit from the police to
stay or leave. In England, one is free and unmolested. England has
always been the refuge of oppressed peoples. Does she need to ask our
sympathy now that she is, herself, oppressed? Neutral we must be, and
neutral we shall be, but we are not a military nation, and despotism can
never attract us.

Every American would rather a bungling democracy than the wisest despot
who ever breathed.

   [1] This condition has somewhat improved since above was written.




                                 Cause


                               HELEN HOYT

   As the surprise of a woman
   When she knows that she is pregnant,
   Is the surprise of a murderer
   Beholding that he has killed.

   That so small a moment of time,
   That so slight an act should suffice!

   No plan, no purpose, ordained what befell,
   Only the wild urging blood and muscle
   And swift desire.

   These,
   In an instant,
   Beyond retraction,
   Could set in motion all the long inexorable processes of life:
   All the long inexorable processes of death.
   Could establish that which may not be effaced,
   Which alters the world.




                            New Wars for Old


                            CHARLES ASHLEIGH

   _The Mob_, by John Galsworthy. [Charles Scribner's Sons, New York.]

I confess to a certain disappointment at this play. Not that it is a bad
play. It would be hard for Galsworthy to write badly. But, both
dramatically and philosophically, it might have been better, and,
judging by Galsworthy's previous work, could easily have been better.
_Justice_, _Strife_ and _The Pigeon_, for instance, are immeasurably
superior to this play.

The theme of the play is the protest of an upper-class statesman against
a war of conquest with a small nation in which his country is engaged.
His wife and family are all normally patriotic and his stand estranges
them. His governmental position is lost, as is also his parliamentary
membership. Sir Stephen More makes a magnificent stand for his ideal.
His courage and consistency result in his death at the hands of the
victory-drunken mob. And yet,--I was left cold.

It must have been my realization of the futility of his cause which
killed my warmth; and yet I am an admirer of forlorn hopes and their
leaders. It was, perhaps, more the artificiality of his espousement of
peace, and the grounds for this espousement, which failed to move me.

To begin with, More belongs to the class which really benefits by war:
the monied, aristocratic and governing class. To such people patriotism
is a natural and inevitable source of action, as it is rooted in their
very substantial stake in the country. Love of the fatherland, which has
given them so much, and the duty of fighting its wars, or of encouraging
others to fight them, is a very vital and vigorous thing in them.
Against this, More had nothing to advance but a very negative
propaganda: an appeal to the strong to act "honorably" by pitying and
sparing the weak (a perfectly sickening reason); and the invoking of a
hazy abstract idea of "justice" which has about as much power to
influence men's actions as a policeman has to maintain morality.

More was a member of the imperial class; and he became a "Little
Englander." He was a member of a soldierly class; and he became an
advocate of peace for peace's sake. He opposed a cloudy concept of
conduct,--utterly unrelated to the facts of life,--to a deep-rooted
instinct founded on the material benefit of his own class. And this was
the reason of his failure. He had nothing grippingly affirmative to give
the people, and he should have realized that to appeal to the rulers was
hopeless.

A great, popular, full-blooded thing like war must have a great,
popular, full-blooded thing to counteract it. Also, we must remember
that the life of the masses of people is not such a beautiful and
colored thing that death on the battle-field is such a very dreadful
alternative. Painting the horrors of war,--its sordid and unheroic
side,--is not enough. Nothing could be more sordid and unheroic than the
gray existence of the factory hand. A new, full gospel of affirmation,
revolt, and militancy must be set against the war-passion. The spirit of
conflict is good; it is essential to continuity; it is the breaker of
old forms and the releaser of new life. It can, however, be directed
along newer and more gainful channels than that of international
market-struggles.

The people who can stop wars are the people who fight wars. And they can
stop them by the divinely simple method of refusing to fight; and by
refusing to provide food, clothing, and transportation to any that do
fight. The worker operates industry and can shut off supplies if he
will. Anyone who preserves a faith that the governors may end war is
sustaining himself with a straw.

But if the people, the mass of producers, are to stop war, they must
first be stirred; and a negative pacific preaching will never stir them.
Only a call to a greater and more vital war can move them.

Such a war exists. It is the hand-to-hand struggle against exploitation,
against the economic bondage which has fettered the minds and bodies of
the larger portion of the race for ages past. This conflict is
affirmative: it calls for courage, endurance, and comradeship. Also it
is true, because it has its roots in the biological basis of life--love
and hunger. The stir of passion is in it: the passion of hate and the
passion of love, and also the love of a good fight; and without these
elements there is no war worth the while.

But all this, it seems, More did not realize. And, had he realized it,
he could have done but little. He was too removed from the "mob" to
speak their tongue, too far from them to share their feeling, too alien
for his words to gain a foothold in the crannies of their being.

The mob that killed More had made More, and all others of his kind. The
despised mob had fought his battles on the field of war and on the field
of industry. For the one they killed they had nurtured thousands.
Inchoate and all but inarticulate, in this mob is the divine stuff out
of which shall be formed the master-people to come, when once they
decide to fight their own war instead of that of their task-masters.

   Nothing, not even conventional virtue, is so provincial as
   conventional vice; and the desire to bewilder the middle classes
   is itself middle-class.--_Arthur Symonds._




                           Ante-Bellum Russia


                           ALEXANDER S. KAUN

The effects that the European War will have--and is having already--on
the internal conditions in Russia are merely conjecturable, considering
the fact that since the first week in August we have had no sterling
news from the embroiled countries. I believe that a study of the pre-war
situation in Russia, of her recent moods and aspirations, will enable us
to venture a guess or two as to the potential results of the present
imbroglio. The forthcoming is by no means an attempt to exhaust the
problem: it is barely a bird's-eye view of contemporary Russian reality
as reflected in life and literature.


                                   I

In a recent article an eminent Russian publicist thus characterizes the
modern literature of his native land:

   It is quite clear: With the death of Tolstoy our literature also
   expired. Not orphaned, bereaved; it died, came to an end,
   perished....

   In fact, what does our modern literature teach us? It positively
   preaches all the instincts, the complete "credo" of the
   bestialized criminal. Self-despite, sacrilege, sexual
   licentiousness, political mutiny, commendation of crime,
   hooliganish all-negation, stalest individualism, morals of an
   outlaw, the ideology of fratricide-Cain, the codex of an apache
   and Jack-the-Ripper.

Taking the above philippic _cum grano salis_, we must, however, consider
it as a characteristic phenomenon illustrating the contemporaneous moods
of Russian society in the process of its prolonged morbid crisis. For if
literature is supposed to be the mirror of life; if in literature we
find the true reflection of a people's feelings, cravings, ideals,
struggles,--then Russia presents the most vivid demonstration of this
truth. In no other country has literature reflected real life with such
a consequential and accurate preciseness as has that of the land of the
Czar in all its epochs and stages. If, therefore, the modern Russian
literature has a morbid aspect; if its heroes preach adultery, crime,
free love, and praise the lowest mob instincts; if it does, and to a
large extent it unquestionably does represent a base degradation, then
we must needs look into the very life of that unhappy country in search
for the causes of its mental affliction, then "something is the matter"
with holy Russia.


                                   II

As a pendant to the quoted jeremiad, I shall cite another distinguished
Russian publicist, whose keen observation equals his absolute
truthfulness:

   A filthy torrent flows over wide Russia--a torrent of savageness,
   bloodthirstiness, cruelty, sexual wantonness, intoxicated
   cynicism. The torrent overflows and deluges and infects all spots
   of life and ruins the soul of the nation.... The man, the person
   is of no value or consideration. There is no self-respect nor
   respect for others. The provoked instincts know of no hold-back.
   The sexual passion intermingles with the passion to torture and
   to tyrannize. The atmosphere is veiled in a bloody fog. The venom
   has penetrated all over, through all ranks of the population.
   Bloody and shameful deeds have become an every-day occurrence not
   only among the higher society--army officers, bureaucrats,
   noblemen, cultured and uncultured capitalists; you meet with the
   same crimes likewise among the poor urban populace, among the
   lower strata, the so-called "masses"; similar dramas occur also
   in the village.... The same all over. Everywhere the nonchalance
   disposition. Everywhere the morbid passion in the first place. "I
   want--and I must. And to the devil with the whole world and with
   myself."

Exaggeration? Hardly.

The Russian dailies give amazing material for the student of sociology.
The impartial chronicling of daily events tells us a dreadful story of a
people that have lost every sense of moral sensitiveness and value of
life. Facts of wildest debauchery and corruption, murder and suicide,
defloration and parricide, to the accompaniment of governmental
executions, hanging and shooting, fill up column after column of the
periodical press. A Russian journalist remarks:

   And this is our every-day life. This occurs every day, every
   hour. It is not any more a sensation or a crying extraordinary
   occasion that awakens general attention and astonishment. It
   is--daily happenings. It is the general tone of our life.
   Oftentimes one does not notice such items of news--so trivial
   have they become. "Ah, another bloody drama! How tedious, by
   God!" And the "citizen" lays aside the paper with a dull yawn.

Such is life in that strange country, and consequently such is its
literature, life's mirror, its product and interpretation.


                                  III

The definition of Russian literature as Heroic was perfectly true until
a few years ago. The literature, like the life itself, had been a
continuous heroism. The harder the oppressions from above, the more
resolute was the fighting spirit below; the wilder the reaction that
raged over the throbbing country, the loftier were the ideals of the
struggling people; the more acute the sufferings of the gloomy present,
the brighter and the more attractive appeared the perspectives of the
future.

Ever since the first revolutionary outbreak in 1825, the so-called
Insurrection of the Decembrists, the Russian populace has had one great
ideal, one ardent all-embracing aim--the overthrow of the autocracy, the
impersonification of evil, injustice, and tyranny. This goal has been
the sense of life, the justification of man's existence, the holy spirit
elevating and purifying the miserable subjects of the Czar, the solace
for the eternal humiliation, the compensation for the unique martyrdom
of that unfortunate nation.

A great, an inestimable rôle has been played by Russian literature in
the education of the public. Though restricted by draconic rules of the
bigoted state censorship, it succeeded in speaking to the public in an
Aesopic tongue, training the readers in the gentle art of understanding
between the lines. It preached idealism, self-sacrifice, unbounded
devotion and love to their suffering compatriots, and unlimited deadly
hatred for the common foe--the Tyrant.

The elevating influence of that idealistic literature has been displayed
most manifestly upon Russian youth, particularly upon university
students. The susceptible young souls followed the call of their great
teachers and guides, and plunged with zeal and ardor into the battle.
Selfishness, life's diversions and conventionalities had no place in
their puritanic minds. To fight for freedom was their only "sport"; to
enlighten the masses, their sole "amusement"; to die on the scaffold for
the Ideal, the climax of happiness.

In that enduring bitter struggle there have been but two sides, two
antagonistic camps--the government and the people. On one side
rude force, violence, and outspoken retrogression; on the
other--notwithstanding minute differences in party platforms and
theoretical principles--an all-uniting ocean of lofty ideals, spiritual
forces, great hopes, boundless altruism.

_Noblesse oblige._ The great common cravings and aims must needs have
cultivated a high standard of morals and intercourse among the people.
The able correspondent of _The London Daily Chronicle_, Henry W.
Nevinson, who had had the opportunity of closely observing Russian life
during the unforgettable red years of 1905-1906, justly remarked:

   To have a cause like that (the Revolution), to dwell with danger
   for the sake of it every day and night, to confront an enemy,
   vital, pitiless, almost omnipotent, and execrable beyond
   words--what other cause can compare to that, not only in
   grandeur, but in the satisfaction of intellect and courage and
   love and every human faculty? So tyranny brings its
   compensations.


                                   IV

The general strike and uprising of October, 1905, compelled the
obstinate Czar to "grant" a tolerable constitution. It seemed that the
long struggle had come to an end, that the desired goal having been
reached, the bitterly fought-for concession having been attained, there
was no reason for continuing the bloody war between the government and
the people. The Manifesto of 30 (17) October, 1905, pledged liberty of
speech, press, and public meetings, equal rights for all, and a
representative government with a comparatively liberal election-system.

Only those who happened to abide in Russia during the autumn months of
1905 are able to comprehend the indescribable joy of the population at
the announcement of the Manifesto. An intoxication of happiness reigned
all over the country, strangers embraced and kissed each other, everyone
was addressed with the hearty "comrade," a sincere feeling of
brotherhood and mutual love overfilled all hearts, and from Finland to
farthest Siberia, from the polar regions to the Black Sea, over the
entire vast empire thundered the exalted cry: "Long live liberty!"

The enchantment, however, was of a short duration. The people soon found
out that they had put too much confidence in the paper pledge of the
Czar, and that they should not have laid their weapons aside. The solemn
promise declared from the heights of the throne was broken. One after
one the pledged liberties were taken away, and a wave of brutal
repression and massacre swept over the tormented land. Only too late one
could recollect with the American Russologue Joubert, the ever-new
aphorism of Bertrand: "The tree of liberty can grow only when it is
watered with the blood of the tyrants."

The government recovered its senses after the first collapse, and
decided to play its game on the obscurity and ignorance of the army. The
simple-minded soldiers, themselves miserable peasants or workingmen,
were ordered to shoot and flog their fathers and brothers, their friends
and defenders; and they fulfilled their official duty with incomparable
brutality. The revolution was betrayed and strangled. Its leaders were
shot, hanged, or banished; the free press shut up, liberal parties and
meetings forbidden, and once more the monster-bureaucracy held in its
claws the palpitating unhappy land.


                                   V

Let us return to the problem: What is the matter with Russia? What is
the cause of its general decay and demoralization? The revolution proved
a failure. The masses--the army particularly--were unprepared for
carrying out the long cherished ideal. But that was not all. The Russian
revolutionary movement has been used to failures and temporary
collapses, the organizations have been destroyed and abolished many a
time, and yet like a Phoenix they would arise from out the ashes and
manifest their significant existence again and again. The cause, to all
appearances, lies with the modernized system applied by the bureaucracy
in its war with the people--the demoralization of the people. What
Nicolas I. could not attain through his iron despotism; what Alexander
III. failed to accomplish by means of crudest oppressions and
restrictions carried through by such arch-tyrants as Pobyedonostzev, D.
Tolstoy, Muravyov, etc.; what had been beyond the reach of Nicolas II.
during the dictatorships of his genial assistants of the type of Plehve,
the hero of Kishinev, or General Trepov, the man of Bloody Sunday
(January, 1905),--this important point was won by the gentleman-butcher,
the hangman in the frock-coat, the late premier Stolypin. The credit for
having succeeded in breaking the spirit of the nation and for having
brought it to the verge of demoralization is largely due to his policy.

To accomplish a _coup d'état_, to abolish the Douma and reinstall the
old order of things, was the easiest attainable measure for Stolypin at
the time of his appointment to the highest post in the state. The
opposition was silenced by military force, the servile European
financiers renewed their enormous credit to the "pacified" Czardom which
had been on the brink of bankruptcy, and it seemed an obvious step to
declare _urbi et orbi_ the successful restoration of the ancient
autocracy. But Mr. Stolypin was a politician of Bismarck's school. He
loathed the laurels of a Pyrrhic victory. The rich experience of his
ill-famed predecessors had taught him that the more harshly he
suppressed the opposition the deeper it would grow and develop in the
"Underground"; that the closer he stopped up the yawning crater the more
intense and terrible would be the inevitable explosion. A complete
return to the old regime would again unite the entire nation within and
the civilized world from without in common hatred for the outworn
Asiatic despoty. Instead the shrewd premier chose the old Cæsarean
maxim, _Divide et impera_.

To incite racial hatred among the heterogeneous strata of the one
hundred and thirty millions population; to provoke the meanest mob
instincts and to flatter the lowest chauvinistic sentiments; to create
mutual ill feelings in all ranks of society by various provocative
means; to incarnate espionage in the national life as a virtue; to
corrupt and prostitute all state institutions, so as to kill every sense
of confidence in the mercenary justice and respect for all authorities;
to arrest intellectual progress by barring and banishing the best
professors, by forbidding enlightenment organizations, by distracting
young minds from social problems through unscrupulous patronage of
nationalistic societies in the high schools and universities, of "easy
amusements" and all but clean sports; to augment crude force to the
degree of absolute right and sole law,--these have been the chief
strategic measures of the modernized absolutism.

It is true that a similar course, although on a considerably smaller
scale, has been pursued by the Russian government all through the
nineteenth century. The originality of Stolypin's methods and of those
of his less original successors lies in their up-to-dateness, their
quasi-modernism, their pseudo-constitutionalism, their hypocritical
jesuitism. Actually Russia represents the same old Asiatic despotism as
of olden days. Officially, however, it wears with a clumsy awkwardness
the European frock-coat of parliamentarism. It is a modern Janus, with
an artificial human expression towards the outside world, and with its
natural primitive bestial front at home.

The Douma, the long-cherished ideal of the people, was transformed from
a house of representatives into an ante-room of the government, into a
shameful profanation of parliamentarism. The first two Doumas gave an
overwhelming opposition to the government, and the latter found an easy
way to get rid of its disagreeable opponents by dissolving the
Assemblies and suing the deputies as rebels. The unscrupulous Senate
issued a series of "modifications" to the electoral laws, and thus
insured for the later Doumas a "desirable" element. Having deprived the
majority of the populace of voting rights, giving all means of
assistance and protection to the "Black Hundreds"--criminal societies
flourishing under the standard of patriotism, terrifying the average
voter and driving him into political absenteeism, the government
succeeded in gaining a majority of obsequious manikins who have sold the
people for a pottage of lentils and have debased the Douma to a purely
instrumental force in the hands of Stolypin & Co.

Even the moderate liberals of the type of Professor Paul Milyoukov or
Prince Eugene Troubetzkoy, who have been ardent supporters of the Douma
as a means of educating the people on constitutional ideas,--even they
are gradually losing their rosy expectations. Representative Maklakov, a
man to whom even the late Stolypin, his bitterest antagonist, paid the
highest respect, in his report on the Douma cried in despair: "One could
have hoped that the Douma was useless. Alas! It is getting harmful."


                                   VI

About a year ago the writer of these lines thus summarized the
"Contemporaneous Russian Nihilism":

   The bureaucracy celebrates its victory over the people. The
   heretofore united forces are divided, the sacred ideal polluted,
   the bitterly-fought-for constitution brought down to a mocking
   buffonade, and the "Mighty Ham," whose coming was predicted a few
   years ago by the illustrious Merezhkovski, has his day in the
   degradated country. The Russian giant who had temporarily
   awakened after a slumber of centuries, snores again hopelessly.
   Over the vast continent reigns a suffocating atmosphere of
   despair, decay, and demoralization. A thick fog of nihilism, not
   the Nihilism of Turgenyev's times, but nihilism in its direct
   negative meaning, enwraps the martyred land of the Czar, and one
   can hardly discern a bright spot on the cloudy horizon.

In the past year the "cloudy horizon" has slightly brightened. Grave
symptoms have appeared in the seemingly calm atmosphere which suggested
Vereshchagin's _All is Quiet on Shipka_. Notwithstanding the strict
censorship of dispatches one could easily discern from the news items
that the volcano has not been extinguished yet. True, the orgy of the
reactionary forces has not abated; freedom of spoken and written word is
still a myth; the majority of the Douma is "a trillion times blacker
than black"--to use a Bodenheimesque figure; the revolutionary
organizations are dragging a pitiful existence in the underground, and
the average citizen is still seeking safety from the cossack's knout in
phlegmatic splein. Yet signs of gratifying unrest have been manifestly
displayed of late in various camps of the Empire. The rapidly developing
capitalistic class has come to realize the deadening effect of the
bureaucratic regime on industry and commerce, and resolutions have been
passed at numerous conventions of manufacturers, bankers, and other big
business-men, condemning the stifling policy of the archaic government.
The tragicomedy of the Beilis process which revealed the puerile
helplessness of the rotten State justice, has united all cultured Russia
in a tremendous protest against the existing order; lawyers,
journalists, physicians, artists, teachers, and men of other liberal
professions, signed fiery resolutions whose _leit-motif_ was Chekhov's
sad verdict--"Such life is impossible!" The unrest among the army, and
particularly among the navy, has had a great symptomatic significance.
Multitudinous arrests among soldiers and sailors, sporadic trials of
revolutionary military organizations, frequent transportations and
transfers of regiments and vessels, declaration of martial law in some
important ports,--such have been the albatrosses of the oncoming storm.
After the crash of the proletarian uprising of 1905 the remnants of the
revolutionists have concentrated all their forces against the stanchest
citadel of Czardom--the army and the navy, justly considering that only
a military _coup d'état_ could change things in present day Russia. The
situation became definitely threatening last July, during the visit of
President Poincaré, when the Russian proletariat, defying all manners
and _bon ton_ towards "allied France," suddenly and unexpectedly marred
the display of friendly demonstrations by an epidemic outburst of
general strikes in St. Petersburg (or _must_ we, by order of Nicolas
II., say--Petrograd?) and in other metropolises.

Amidst these pregnant preludes burst out the war bomb. For the tottering
absolutism it came most timely as the saving trump. Whether we believe
the press informations about the mad wave of patriotism overflowing
Russia or not, there can be no doubt that in view of the threatening
national catastrophy internal differences will lose their keenness and
will give way to easily drummed-up imperial solidarity, as far as the
average citizens are concerned. The uncompromising revolutionists will
hardly have a considerable following, especially when we consider the
fact that the Czar has been showing surprising tact and foresight of
late by granting concessions to his subjects and lavishly extending
tempting promises to the oppressed nationalities. The constantly
humiliated and insulted citizen; the empoverished overtaxed moujik; the
flogged workingman; the bleeding, robbed, deprived-of-rights Pole, Finn,
Armenian, Caucasian, Jew, Lithuanian, Little-Russian,--all these
elements that make up the abstraction "Russia" would have to possess a
great deal of optimism in order to take seriously the spasmodic
ejaculations of the drowning "Little Father" who has beaten the world's
record as a perjurer. Yet one need not be a specialist in mass
psychology to predict the success of Nicholas's bait. We may further
prophesy that, whatever the outcome of the war, Russia will emerge
purged and electrified, stirred and volcanized. Surely, "such life,"
pre-war life, will be "impossible."




                            The Silver Ship


                            SKIPWITH CANNÉLL

   A silver ship with silken sail
   Fled ghost-like over a silver sea,
   Swift to an island leper pale
   Where dead hands furled the silken sail.
   Then to the island bore they me,
   And left me, stricken, there to see
   My silver ship with silken sail
   Fade out across a silent sea.




                             The Butterfly


                            SKIPWITH CANNÉLL

One day in the lean youth of Summer, a butterfly was born upon the
earth. To a brief day of beauty she was born, and to a long night.

Timidly her purple wings unfolded in the kind warmth of the sun. When
they had grown strong, she began to flutter hither and thither, from
flower to flower, a wingéd dream flitting as perfumes called her, from
dream to dream.

At last, when the dark fingers of the night were clutching at the
fields, from the brief stillness of twilight arose a brief summer storm.
Only a few puffs of wind ruffled the grass, only a few growls of thunder
silenced the birds, only a few warm drops of rain pattered among the
trees. Then the storm passed and the sun shone over the wet earth as a
sweetheart shines through her tears with promise of pardon.

But the warm wind had blown the butterfly against a twig, so that her
wings were broken; and the soft summer rain had crushed her to the
earth, so that she died. But there had been one passing, whose dreams
were in music, and he had felt her beauty in his own. And he spun a web
of harmony from the rainbow of his sorrow and the skeins of her beauty,
so that men who had lost their dreams were snared in his net, and women
whose hearts were buried wept for the death of a butterfly....




                              The Tidings


                            SKIPWITH CANNÉLL

Once upon a time, in a certain secret city of the East, lived a woman
who was a sorceress. And she awaited tidings of great joy or tidings of
terrible sorrow.

All day long, from her housetop, she had peered across the desert,
seeking the messenger who did not come. At nightfall her servants
returned to her with rumors gathered in the market place. With rumors of
sorrow they returned and stood in a row before her with averted faces.

When she had heard their fears, she thanked them, and going down from
the housetop, she sought a hidden chamber where she could be alone and
silent. When she had pondered for awhile, she piled rare herbs in a
brazier, and wet them with strange liquors, and touched fire to them.
The flames flickered and smoked, singing a soft happy little song all to
themselves. But she could read no answer in the singing, and no meaning
in the coils of smoke; and she was very sad. At last, with a despairing
gesture, she took certain secret things from the chest whereof she alone
had the key, and those things she laid upon the fire and watched until
they were consumed.

As soon as the embers were cold and gray, she took from the carven chest
a vial of jade and a jade cup. From the vial she poured out a pale green
potion, and raising the cup in her hands, she drank it to the end. Then
she lay down upon the marble couch. In a little while she slept.

A sweet, heavy vapor rose from the cup, filling the room with perfume.
The dregs glowed with dull evil light, for the potion had been poison,
and her sleep was death.

In the morning came a messenger, bearing tidings of great joy.




                                Longing


                          GEORGE BURMAN FOSTER

It was indeed a world-historical movement, that old reformation of the
Sixteenth century, snapping as it did the fetters of a Church that
arrogated to itself all power in heaven and on earth, and defiantly
asserting supremacy over the papacy. But the reformation of our day is
much more radical and universal. Ours ends what that began, destroys
what that established. The critical spirit of our time, this nothing can
withstand unless it is in a position to justify and verify itself to the
moral and rational judgment of mankind. In our time of day, what is
church, what is state, what are society and law and sanctified
custom--things that the old reformation partly inherited, partly
organized, and wholly bequeathed to us? At best, tones for the
musician's use, clay in the hands of the potter, or stuff for the
sculptor's shaping, materials all, ductile or refractory, to be kneaded
into forms for the habitation of man's free spirit, man's soul, man's
life. This critical spirit of an all-inclusive reform of life, to which
everything belonging to life is subject, for which science works and art
as well, living and active in the heart of modern humanity in countless
problems, like the woman problem, the labor problem, like national and
international social problems, with all their subdivisions,--this
critical spirit gives our time a prophetic character. It summons all
progressive spirits to the great struggle against a common foe, against
all those forces which have banded together for a standstill of life and
have made a lucrative and social-climbing business out of retrogression.

Can there be any doubt as to the stand we ought to take with reference
to these great movements? May we not greet them as a new spring-time of
humanity whose light and warmth shall vanquish winter, and bring life,
joy and peace into the land? "When the Day of Passover was fully
Come"--may we not see this day in these movements, when a spirit of
truth and soul and freedom shall brood over men, and lead them to higher
goals and greater tasks of human being?

To be sure, our era is not arbitrarily made, not excogitated and
invented by man. To be sure, great elementary forces of life will come,
must come, to their unfolding in these movements. To be sure, the matter
of real concern is a new structure of humanity, new cultural and social
forms, new world-views, new life-views. No doubt these forces of life
will carry the individual along with them, will come upon him and coerce
him when he does not so will, will not at all even ask him what he
wills, what he has to say to them, or how he regards them. But on this
very account, in surveying the great whole of our life development we
easily lose sense for what is individual and special. Where classes and
masses of men encounter each other, where world-moving thought jolt and
undermine thousand-year-old traditions and customs, removing their very
foundations, there the individual human soul suffers abridgement, there
we forget that even the largest number consists of units, and that the
greatest numerical worth is judged according to the worth of these
units.

Therefore a great social thinker must reflect ever anew that _man_ is
the significant thing in every new social culture--is beginning and
goal. To understand how to trumpet a word respecting _man and his
personality_ into this social movement and seething, this is to do an
essential service to the modern way of viewing life, this is to warn us
that we are not entirely impersonal in the presence of pure objectivity.

No one has done such service to our age in so signal a manner, as
_Friedrich Nietzsche_. He is not the preacher of _social_, but of
_personal_, man. However, fundamental hater of socialism that he was, he
yet became a mighty moving and impelling force for socialism. He, too,
wills a new culture, _but he wills it through a new man_. Therefore, he
shows us the way to this new culture in that which is most _personal_ to
man, in man's _Longing_, or yearning, or craving,--in man's
_Sehnsucht_,--a word of profound import to which none of these English
words does justice.

To many ears that program does not sound provocative, promising,
alluring. _Sehnsucht_ is not a feeling that makes one happy and
blissful--not a feeling to which one would like to accord a constant and
abiding possession of one's heart. "Only he who knows _Sehnsucht_ knows
what I _suffer_"--so sighed Goethe's Mignon, one of the most impressive
and marvelous characters the poet-genius ever created, an Incarnate
Yearning, self-consumed in unquieted longing of soul, in _Heimweh_ for a
dreamily visioned distance, to walk in whose sunny beauty her feet were
never destined. To preach _Sehnsucht_ is to preach hunger. To hunger is
to ache. The gnawing of a hungry stomach--but what is that compared with
the gnawing of a hungry heart, when everything that seems good and great
and worth striving after becomes elusive, unattainable, unintelligible,
to passionate longing? _Sehnsucht_ is not anxiety, it is worse than
anxiety. Anxiety is petty; _Sehnsucht_ is great and deep. In anxiety,
life is dark, and darkness terrifies and distresses man. In _Sehnsucht_,
life is luminous, but the light blinds the soul. _Sehnsucht_ sees all
light in a magical radiance, yet cannot clasp it; feels its overpowering
attraction, yet cannot satisfy the eye with it. Prometheus chained to a
rock, after he had filched the celestial spark from the gods! Tantalus,
the luscious fruit just over his head, but wafted away as soon as he
longs to grasp it with greedy hands! Yes, all the human heart's deepest
pain, this is _Sehnsucht_. Whoever names a pain that is not _Sehnsucht_
has not peered to the bottom of pain's chalice.

"Woe to that man through whom _Sehnsucht_ comes!" we might almost cry.
If you love me, do not stir up this yearning for the impossible that is
in me, this hot, fervent craving, which can never find satisfaction,
which can never enjoy the pleasures of life, or its own self. If you
love men, save them from their very youth up in the presence of that
tempestuous storm and stress into the Afar, where all solid shores
vanish, all safe harbors are closed--save men, trembling, untranquil,
from the everlasting question: Knowest thou the land? Knowest it well?
Leave men their peace of mind, add no fuel to the flame of their
discontent. Do not wrong them by letting them eat of the tree of
knowledge. Do not show them the infinite expanse unrolling behind and
beyond the narrow confines of their petty lives, thus spoiling the
pleasure of their contentment, the joy they have in their limited and
longingless life. Paradise is better than Wilderness. The familiar
murmur of the brook in the meadow by the old home is more restful than
the roar of the cataract or than the eternal haunting mystery and melody
of the great sea. Such is the common cry of the lackadaisical, the
longingless, the _laissez-faire_ people to all of us who "turn the world
upside down."

Yes, we make all men sufferers--we who pilot their minds to what is not
yet there, and to what they not yet are--we who show them a land lying
undiscovered in mist or azure ahead of them. We make man seekers, we
become disturbers of the peace--this is what they call our crime and
blasphemy. Therefore, men give us a wide berth, warn others against our
society, afraid of the yearning and hot hunger of soul which would come
over them, were they once to hanker after a different fare from what
they light upon in their troughs every morning, gorging themselves to an
easy satiety--a different fare that would make them hunger ever anew,
and arouse them to new longings. No, comfort men; free them from their
painful Sehnsucht; teach them the foolishness of hitching their wagons
to stars; tell them that all is well with them and make them content
with any lot in life that may by chance be theirs! Then you will be
their true benefactors; then you will heal the wounds from which the
heart would otherwise so easily bleed!

Really? That is a good thing to do for men? The wise thing to say to the
heart is: Break your wings in two, so you will not be tempted to brave
the blue, to keep company with "the distant sea," to explore the Afar?
The comforting thing to do for the slave is to gild his chains, so that
he may have joy in their glittering splendor and show them off as worth
their weight in gold? How easy it would be then for the Czar of all the
Russias "to go to Berlin if it costs me my last peasant!" How easy for
the Vatican to silence the modernist! Throne and altar, an _entente
cordiale_ indeed, could then enjoy by "divine right" an unmolested and
unworried repose upon a world of dumb, blind, brute peasants. But--

      If I'm designed yon lordling's slave--
          By nature's law design'd--
      Why was an independent wish
          E'er planted in my mind?

Why did God implant _Sehnsucht_ in the heart of man? "Thou hast made us
for Thyself and the heart is restless until it rests in Thee," said
Augustine long ago. Indeed, God is but another human name for Eternal
Yearning.

All yearning is love--love that silently and secretly celebrates its
triumphal entry into the soul. If you stood at the grave of a joy and
felt pain over that which was lost, would not the pain of yearning be
the measure, the consciousness, of your newly-awakened, ever-waking
love? Would you like to calculate this yearning and exchange therefor
coldness and indifference of heart? And if you felt a love so full and
deep that moments had eternities concealed in them, even so, on the
basis of this love yearning would live more than ever, it would open up
to the soul new vistas, new goals, it would give love her life; and a
love without yearning, which did not see beyond itself, did not love
above itself, finished in that which it was, or it called its own--would
quickly cease to be love. Yes, yearning redoubles all genuine love to
man; it involves something becoming, something greater, purer, for which
love lays the foundation and gives the impulse. Only he who knows
yearning, knows what I _love_, so Mignon might have also said. There is
something unslaked, unslakable, in every love, an insatiable hunger for
more love, for better and purer love.

It is this yearning that saves love from being blind; it gives love the
strength and courage of veraciousness; it plunges the heart into a
struggle of desperation when a man of our love does not keep his
promise, when he becomes pettier and baser than we had believed of him;
and yet in this struggle it achieves the victory of faith which mounts
above all the pettiness and baseness of the man, to the certainty of its
strength, that love faileth never. In every love we love something
higher than itself, something for which the heart is destined and
endowed. This is the yearning in our love, _a will_, which stirs in all
deep feeling of the heart, and guards against the death which every
moment, sufficient only for itself, harbors. Every love, therefore, is
itself a yearning: love for truth is the power to grow beyond _a_ truth;
love for righteousness is hunger and thirst after righteousness. In all
the beauty that greets the eye and awakens exultation and joy in the
heart, the soul ripens new sensitivity for new visions of the wonders of
life, the heart widens so that it absorbs strength for new beauty and
sees new beauty even in the darkness and dust of earth. A man without
yearning is a man without love. And if one would guarantee man that
satisfaction which one prizes as the most beautiful and most blissful
lot on earth, then one must first stifle his heart or tear it from his
breast; for as long as this heart still beats, and announces in every
beat its insatiable hunger for love, so long will the man harbor and
feel his yearning, which will not let the beating heart be satisfied.

But yearning is therefore not simply suffering, not simply love--of
these we have been thinking--it is also life, the true life of man. The
man who lives only for himself, and for the passing moment, does not
live at all. And this is what Nietzsche says of man--man a transition
and an end--yearning always interring an Old, always swinging a bridge
across to a New--love loving the most distant and most future--vision
sweeping up the ages to higher man. This, then, is man's hour of great
self-contempt. All his happiness, his wealth, his knowledge, his virtue,
seems too little to fill his soul. There is insufficiency, nausea, as to
all that he esteems, a cry of wrath from the deep of his being, a cry
that sounds like madness to all who call themselves good and righteous,
to all who call their execrable smugness a delight.

But this is the great tumultuous yearning, the thunder of whose soaring
wings is forever in modern ears. It proffers man a new table of values;
forward, not backward, shall he look; love _Kinderland_, the
undiscovered land in distant oceans, that he may make amends to the
children for their being the children of their fathers!

In this song of jubilee of yearning, who does not hear the old ring,
which was once preached as glad tidings, as gospel of humanity! There,
too, it was the seeking that were saved, the hungering and not the
sated, the starving and not the full. And they, too, had their Higher
Man--the Christ they called Him, their Yearning, their Love, their Life.
They sang: For me to live is Christ; I live, yet not I; Christ lives in
me. And as long as this Yearning lived in them, they were creative
spirits. They put a new face upon the world. They transformed the world
after the image of their Higher Man. A living, a socially organized
Yearning, this is what the whole Middle Age was, with its Below and its
Above, where each lower man had in each higher man a rung of the
heavenly ladder on which he should climb to a higher existence. A
yearning hewn in stone, that was their dome; yearning they sang in their
most impressive hymns and masses; and yearning breathed all those
celestial figures as they lifted their glorified eyes to the Higher Man
of Heaven, the Man Thorn-crowned, Crucified and Risen.

Then the glow of this yearning was cooled by the cold north wind of
reality. Yearning petrified. There was no inclination to keep it from
dying. They were swift to deal it a deadly blow. They thought they had
accomplished marvels to have torn themselves loose from it. "No more
_Sehnsucht_ now," they said, "for we have found happiness!" They smirked
and they blinked. Their Higher Man died along with their yearning. The
scholars indeed had discovered that this Higher Man was only "man," a
Jewish rabbi whom the people of his day mistakenly held to be a Higher
Man, a Messiah, but who now to them themselves and to all moderns
belongs to Lower Man, to Past Man. To be sure, it goes against the grain
of all of them for their Higher Man to vanish from life, from the
yearning of man. Therefore, they seek painfully and anxiously for a
"Dignity" which they may still claim for their _human_ Jesus. Above all,
they thus forget that the Higher Man can never lie behind us, but only
before us, not beside us, on a level with us, but only above us.
Therefore, all their scholarship cannot rescue the Higher Man for us,
and cannot give us back the Great Yearning. Only the living heart can do
this, the heart that creates out of its own mystery a yearning. That
heart with this yearning will overcome and retire the man of today--all
who play the game as lords of today. The modern man of yearning looks
beyond himself, works beyond himself, for a Man as high above
present-day man as once the _Christusbild_ was above the men of the
long-lost past--a Man who will bear all the deeps of the world and all
the deeps of its woes in his heart, while at the same time thirsting in
its deepest depths for the eternities. This great yearning, this
suffering and loving yearning, this is more than all the wisdom of the
scribes, all the subtleties and hairsplittings of the theologians, this
is the sacred womb from which a Christ life is born ever and ever again.
"Only he who knows yearning, knows what I _live_!"--so might Mignon's
dear words be changed yet again. To save the Sehnsucht is to save the
soul. _Also sprach Goethe--Nietzsche!_




                         The Wicked to the Wise


                          ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE

           "A brilliant mind, gone wrong!" ...
   O tell me, ye who throng
   The beehives of the world, grow ye not ever weary of this song?

           "The way our fathers went." ...
   Yes, if our days were spent
   Sod-deep, beside our fathers' bones, wise, needless were your argument.

           "The wisdom of the mass." ...
   Thank God, it too shall pass
   Like the breathed film hiding the face grayly within the silvered glass.

           "All's surely for the best!" ...
   Aye, so shall be confessed
   By your sons' sons, marking where down we smote you as we onward
      pressed.




                        The Viennese Dramatists


                             ERNA MCARTHUR

One does not know quite how the modern literary movement in Vienna
arose. Suddenly, some twenty years ago, there were some active young
writers called "Young Vienna," in a collective way, who were supposed to
be revolutionary and bent on originality. In reality these young people
had no definite literary program such as had been issued in Berlin by
the leaders of the new naturalist movement. They were a circle of
friends, who had heard of the new and wonderful things that had been
done. They came to know Ibsen and the great Russian and French
novelists; they were of the generation which was to be moved to the
utmost by the philosophy of Nietzsche. Of course these influences had
been working in the whole German-speaking world. Art was being taken
seriously again and the young people were yearning to produce something
new and original of their own.

Hauptmann had started a kind of revolution in Germany by his first play,
_Before Sunrise_, and the Viennese, who lived a little isolated in their
town, grew excited and enthusiastic over these doings.

A young writer, Hermann Bahr, was a kind of apostle for the new art in
Vienna. He was a man of agility, capable of unbounded enthusiasm, who
could go into ecstasy for all kinds of movements--for realism as well as
neo-romanticism, for Ibsen and Zola, for Maeterlinck and d'Annunzio. He
had been traveling about in Europe, had come in touch with all the
leading personalities, and had brought the news home to his Viennese
friends; he wanted to make a new Vienna in every way. A few years later
he was active in organizing the young painters, sculptors, and
architects, who evolved a very original and striking art.

So it came to pass that Hermann Bahr was considered the leader of
everything modern--which meant "crazy" to the good citizen of the day.
It was this same milieu of the citizen, the bourgeois, that produced all
the young writers. In consequence, they were absolutely anti-bourgeois
in their way of looking at things, in the very natural contrast of
fathers and sons. Hence, too, they had a certain culture, good manners,
and a predominant interest in æsthetic questions, as there had been no
occasion for them to know the primitive cares of life. But they were
tired of the narrowness and tastelessness of their milieu; they wanted
to do things differently--to live and love differently; to put art into
their surroundings, their dwellings, their dress; good taste--this had
been a tradition of the old Vienna, lost in the transition-state when
the middle-class element obtained its precedence over the old
aristocracy--was now to take its place again.

Apart from the dislike of these Viennese young men for the bourgeoisie
there were really very few positive tendencies that could join them into
a group. Consequently very different artistic individualities developed.
Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the two most
representative, have very little in common in their work. But there was
a spirit of friendship among all of them; they liked to meet in the
cafés, which had always been Vienna's center of social life, and to talk
things over--the lightest and the deepest. A certain café used to be
famous as the center of the young literary world. The old people who
didn't like the whole business called it the café of the crazy
self-worshippers (something to that effect), and this title has stuck to
it since. Today, the house has been demolished, its glory has passed,
but there are still legends and stories told of the wonderful talk, the
hot and breathless debates that once filled these rooms from morning
till night--and till morning again.

In all this there was no real rebellion against any local literary
tradition. The great Austrian writers of the past always held their own
places; but the great dramatists did not reign on the stage of that day.
It was nearly exclusively devoted to the French salon-play--Dumas,
Augier, and their German imitators. Naturally a generation which looked
for the true and real in art could not have much in common with these.

But there were certainly some features in Grillparzer and Anzengruber
felt as congenial by the moderns. Grillparzer had possessed a sensuous
softness, a musical beauty of language foreign to the contemporary North
German. Thus an element of color and light--the soul of modern
impressionism--entered in his creations, breaking through the severe
contours characteristic of his generation, though in general he set
great value on the strict architectonic upbuild of his dramas. In his
tragedy of _Hero and Leander_ perhaps the warmest love tragedy ever
written in the German language, a strongly realistic description of
Viennese type is hidden among the Greek clothing. Hero, consecrated
priestess, who forgets her vows when she sees Leander, first full of
reserve, then letting herself go in a full passion, might be the
grandmother of Schnitzler's sweet girl out of the suburb. Here she wears
a charming Greek dress, her lonely tower stands on the seashore, and her
lover, Leander, must swim through the whole Hellespont to reach her. The
modern poet makes it easier for his heroes; the tower gets to be a
little room in a Viennese suburb and a walk in the twilight through a
few quiet streets brings him to his goal without much exertion. (And so
you might find other parental traits between the two Austrians.)

There is a melancholy strain in Grillparzer's personality and work which
Schnitzler seems to have inherited. Side by side with the
light-mindedness and ease of the Austrian, a certain tired melancholy
and resignation seem to dwell. This sounds through many creations of
Austrian artists. We hear it in Schubert's music and feel it in the
charming plays of Ferdinand Plaimund, who saw the harmony only in an
upper sphere of fairies and magicians, whereas the life of the human
beings seemed tumultuous and disordered to him.

Austria did not make it easy for her gifted children, and Grillparzer
suffered all his life in his official career. It oppressed him and
warped his creative power. Ludwig Anzengruber had to suffer under the
same disadvantages, but he had a greater fund of good humor to set
against it. He was a man of vigor and _lebensbejahung_ (affirmation of
life). Anzengruber was called the herald of naturalism and the Berlin
people counted him as one of their number, producing his plays together
with those of Ibsen and Hauptmann on the Berlin Free Stage.

Anzengruber applied the heightened sense for reality characteristic of
modern art--be it called naturalistic or neo-romantic--to his own work
and introduced a new material to the drama. The peasant story had been
treated up to now in a moralizing way. The idyl of country innocence was
to be shown and towns-people were to see the purer heart's sentiment
under the dirtier shirts. Anzengruber showed the peasants in their
reality, neither better nor worse. His fingers are unnatural and stiff
in representing types of the cultured classes speaking the literary
German; his peasant types are of wonderful vitality. There is the old
stone-cutter who has thought out a deep pantheistic philosophy. He
relates it in his simple way: how it all came to him--how he was lonely,
poor, lying in his cottage up in the mountains, how he saw the sun lying
on the meadow and wanted to live in the sunshine, not in his miserable
hut when he felt near dying. And then, out in the sunny meadow, it comes
to him like a revelation that he is not really ill, not really poor,
because nothing can happen to him--because everything around belongs to
him and he belongs to everything. This deep pantheistic feeling
expressed in this unpathetic way gives him from now on a perfect good
humor not to be disturbed. He goes among the peasants looking on at
their quarrelings and grumblings and helps them out of their worst
plights in a good-natured way, but without bothering them in the least
with his philosophy or any tendency toward improving them or the world
in general.

Anzengruber, with such religious views as he expressed here, had to be
opposed to the Catholicism in which he was brought up. He fights against
the clericalism which was weighing so heavily on the peasants. He could
feel their needs, for, though he was born in Vienna and lived there
nearly all his life, there was more country than town blood in his
veins. This connects him closer with Hauptmann, the Silesian, so deeply
influenced in his art by home environment, than with any of the young
Austrian writers who were all born in the big towns and did not know
what firm rooting in the soil means. Anzengruber's traditions could not
be followed by them and there is the greatest contrast between his
strong energetic work and the dainty, tender, delicate things produced
by Schnitzler as the first product of the young Viennese school just a
year after Anzengruber's death. This was _Anatol_, a little work full of
grace, charm, and playfulness. The loose way in which the seven scenes
were connected only by Anatol's figure was perfectly original. It was
really nothing but little sketches put into dialogues characteristic of
Vienna, the town whose special glamour consist in the dialogue of
ordinary conversation; the pretty chat of the drawing room, the café
raised to the dignity of a fine art; and with all this, having a
lightness, a delicacy, a frothiness, a wit, and a quality of sadness not
found anywhere else.

Women's influence penetrated this art--in Austria just as in the Latin
countries the cult of women had always been a factor of culture and with
this generation of poets her triumphal epoch started. She was put into
the center. It was written around her and it was written for her.
_Anatol_ belongs to those, for our days, improbable beings who only live
for love; erotics are his sole occupation, his only profession. But he
is not the victorious Don Juan full of self-confidence; he is rather
quiet, with a shade of agreeable modesty,--a melancholic of love, he
calls himself.

The young Hofmannsthal wrote an introduction to the work of his friend
in dainty verses. They expressed the spirit of this art extremely well,
so I will quote them partly, though it would require an artist to
translate them in good form. He says:

      Well, let's begin the play,
      Playing our own piece
      Early matured, sad and tender,
      Our own soul's comedy;
      Our feelings past and present,
      Dark things lightly said,
      Smooth words, joyous pictures,
      Vague emotions, half experienced,
      Agonies and episodes.

The sense of reality, which had been acquired in the school of Zola and
Ibsen, was used here to make travels of discovery into the most
interesting and unknown land of all--the over soul. And here the
complicated, the unusual inmoods and feelings and emotions fascinated
the young artists. Personality itself, though the center, took rather a
passive part,--it simply came to be the scene of action, the
meeting-place of all different impressions. People of the earlier time
had been expressionists who projected their own ego into the outward
world, whereas now they held themselves open to new impressions,
observed them and their effect on the _I_ and then reproduced their
observations in artistic form. Impressionism, predominant in painting at
that time, had taken hold of literature. Of course, this passivity could
only be a stage of transition, because each artistic individuality tends
from the passive to the active; but this impressionism was a good means
of assimilating all the new possibilities in the inside and outside
world.

Schnitzler, born as the son of a famous Viennese physician, and prepared
to be a physician himself, was trained to observe. He had a sure
scientific eye for human problems, a kind, objective benevolence, and
tender forbearance for all sides of human life.

_Anatol_, his first work, is typical of all the following. Here we see
the principal figures, the complicated lover as hero, a friend as the
_raisonneur_,--a remembrance of the French play,--and seven different
types of womanhood. Here they all are--the simple sweet girl, loving
with her whole heart; the woman, who loves to play with men; the lady of
the world, she who would like to love, but has not courage to do it.

The long line of his dramas, novels, and novelettes--for he tried to
express himself in all these forms--all speak of love and death. For the
pathetic element soon creeps into Anatol's frivolousness. The
presentiment of the transitory dwells in his creation--the end of love,
the end of enjoyment and of passion, the end of life itself. But this
permanent thought of death, not searching beyond the limits of this
earth, gives a new intensity to the enjoyment of this life while it
lasts. This feeling for life, for the simple joy of breathing, of seeing
the spring once more, is one of Schnitzler's most elementary
conceptions. You may look at any of his plays and find this true--the
call of Life, expressed with the utmost intensity. A young girl hears
the call of life--she is fettered to the bedside of her ill father who
never lets her out of his sight. She must stay with him--always--without
the smallest pleasure, and suddenly she hears that the man she loves, a
young officer whom she has seen only once, when she has danced in his
arms a whole night long, must away to the war never to return. She can
stand it no longer; she gives her father poison, the whole sleeping
potion, and rushes away to him who is her only thought. And now events
go in a mad rush; she in his room, unknown to himself, hidden behind a
curtain, she sees the woman he loves, the beautiful wife of his colonel,
come to him. She wants him to stay away from the war, save his life for
her sake, and then suddenly the colonel stands between the two and
shoots down his wife. The officer he leaves to judge himself. Over the
corpse of the other woman the girl rushes into the arms of the man, who
can belong to her for the few hours left to him. And after all these
breathless events, she remains alone, bewildered, as if after a heavy
dream. She lives on and cannot understand that there is still room for
her in the world, with all her crime and grief and joy. But a wise and
kind friend explains the connection and wins her over to life once more.
These are his words--the drama's conclusion: "You _live_, Marie, and it
was. Since that night too and that morning, the days and nights go on
for you. You walk through field and meadow. You pluck the wayside
flowers and you talk with me here under the bright, friendly, midday
sky. And this is living--not less than it was on that night when your
darkened youth beckoned you toward gloomy adventures, which still today
appear to you to be the last word of your being. And who knows, if
later, much later, on a day like today, the call of the living will not
cry within you much deeper, and purer, than on that day in which you
have lived through things which are called by such terrible and glowing
names as murder and love."

The whole play seems to be written for the sake of the last beautiful
words. It is Schnitzler's greatest art to lift us to a sphere where
everything seemingly important is solved, where tragedy and melancholy
and sadness melt together into a wonderful serenity. His technique is
full of subtlety; every little word and gesture has its place, its
importance; we feel the weight of the smallest happening, the reality of
a seemingly unmeaning fact, the deep consequence of a hasty word.

The milieu was nearly always Vienna. Here his over-cultivated, refined
men were at home, here his soft and loving women. All the several
circles, aristocrats, artists, physicians, business men, furnished
material for his work; and even more than the people, the town itself
grew to life. The elegant vivaciousness of the inner city, where the
fashionable society meets at certain hours and fashionable little shops
line the streets, the lonely little streets of the suburb, the wonderful
charm of the Wiener Wald embracing the town with its soft rounded
lines--all this rich flowering beauty that had surrounded him from
childhood he gathered in his work. Perhaps more forcibly than any one
else he brought Vienna's charm to our consciousness. And so he returned
to Vienna what he had received from her.

Only two of his plays are outside the Viennese milieu--_The Green
Cockatoo_, a grotesque that puts us marvelously well in the Parisian
atmosphere shortly before the outbreak of the French Revolution; and
_Beatrice's Veil_, a Renaissance drama which tempted almost every artist
in those days. This epoch's refinement, the powerful personalities
peopling it, the intensity concentrated on the enjoyment of their
life--in all this they saw something akin to their own life's ideal.

Schnitzler's plays have nothing of the fresco; they are more like
Manet's small landscapes with their richness of color and their soft
contours diffused in light.

He made one attempt at a drama in big, unusually big, dimensions. It
takes about six hours to perform on the stage, longer than the second
part of Goethe's _Faust_; it is a historic play of the Napoleonic time
called _The Young Medardus_, but the Emperor himself remains in the
background and only his shadow lies on the events. These take place in
Vienna at the time that Napoleon had reached Austria on his triumphal
march and resided for the time in Schonbrun, the Hapsburg's castle near
Vienna. The Viennese people as a mass are characterized--these people so
easily moved, so easily influenced, growing enthusiastic now for
Napoleon, now in a hasty patriotic emotion for their own Emperor,
principally wanting one thing: to see some exciting spectacle, to hear
news, to speak over interesting happenings. The broadest part of the
drama is occupied by a love episode between the hero Medardus--a cousin,
if not a brother of Anatol, only about a hundred years back--and the
beautiful, proud, cold Duchess of Valois, who is in Vienna to intrigue
against Napoleon, claiming the right to the French throne for herself
and her own family. The work is full of beautiful and interesting
episodes, but there is not enough architectonic power to join them
together to a unity.

It is too early to view Schnitzler in a historic way--he is fifty years
old and in the middle of his work; certainly he signified much for his
own generation, for they felt themselves understood by him and he
influenced and even formed their attitude and feeling. Whether his
figures have enough of the timelessness, of the deep, full-rounded
humanity which will give them power to speak to future generations I do
not know. In a mood of paradoxical humor, Schnitzler himself criticised
his own creation more severely than any critic could. We see a
marionettes' theater on the stage; the public there, eager for the play;
the marionettes appear--all Schnitzler's own figures: the complicated
hero, the sweet girl, the demonic woman, and so on. The poet is there,
full of excitement. The marionettes are to give his new play, but there
is a rebellion. The marionettes want to do what pleases them, live their
_own life_. In the midst of confusion, a mysterious man appears on the
stage with a long naked sword in his hand; he cuts through the threads;
the marionettes fall in a heap. The poet asks, half grateful, half
bewildered, "Who are you?" But the unknown man cannot tell him; he is an
enigma to himself. He wanders through the world and his sword makes it
apparent who only is a doll, who a man. Schnitzler doomed his figures
with more severity to the fate of dolls than is due them.

The second Viennese writer whose name became known beyond the town's
limits is Hugo von Hofmannsthal. He is a very different person from
Schnitzler; both have the sensitive, refined, exclusively aesthetic
valuation of things in common. But what was expressed more naively in
Schnitzler came to be a program with Hofmannsthal. He joined a group of
men with a strict "Art for Art's sake" program, exclusive and intended
only for the few. The principal of this group was Stefan George, a lyric
poet who had fashioned the German language into poems of such beauty of
form as to rival the poetry of the French lyricists, like Baudelaire or
Verlaine. It was an art that irritated people somewhat, like that of the
Cubists and Futurists. It was extremely hard to understand; the sense
organs were mixed up, as he spoke of sounding colors, fragrant tones,
and colored sounds. Hofmannsthal, with a great feeling for language and
form, grew to be his follower.

These poets called themselves Neo-Romanticists, because their art was
crowded full of symbols. The older Ibsen, with his symbolic world,
Maeterlinck, with his mysterious little plays, were their models; with
these the great artists of form, Swinburne and d'Annunzio. It was an
eclectic, much-traveled type, assimilating old and modern cultures
equally well.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal is characteristic of the type of the aesthete,
with a rather priestly, exclusive bearing still found today frequently
in Germany. These were no more the old Bohemians with a preference for a
deranged toilette and way of living, but elegant young gentlemen who
liked to appear in frock coats with ties and waistcoats fabulously gay
of color. Also, in their surroundings their liking went to the utmost
refinement and luxury. They loved the dignified, the sensational, the
sonorous. Hugo von Hofmannsthal certainly blessed his parents for giving
him a well-sounding, sonorous name.

He had a great talent as a lyricist, and as an essayist, with the finest
understanding for all foreign cultures as long as they responded to
something in his own soul. His dramas are not in any way related to
Vienna. He perused all history's epochs and took the material for his
dramas from the Orient, out of the Italian Renaissance (his favorite
epoch), and the classic art of the Greek. Many of his plays are not
intended as original creations, but arrangements of older works. So he
did with an old pre-Shakespearean English play by Thomas Otway and with
the old mystery play _Everywoman_. Some of his little plays are
lovely--the death of Titian gives a vision of the dead extravagance of
Venice equalled by few modern productions. His most interesting attempt
is an arrangement of _Elektra_ for the modern stage. His Greeks are
barbarous, wild, full of unbroken primitive instincts. They are under
the influence of an extreme nervous hysteria. Nietzsche had spoken of
the Greek hysteria, which slumbered under their apparent serenity.
Hofmannsthal put a picture of horror on the stage that keeps the
spectator spellbound from the first to the last minute. Through the
concentration in one act this intensity is still increased.

Since Richard Strauss put _Elektra_ into music, Hofmannsthal has devoted
his art entirely to this composer. His last works are written as
libretti for Strauss operas, and go through the world now in the wake of
his music.

Finally, I would like to tell of a strange Viennese personality, no
dramatist, but just as little a novelist, epic or lyric poet. The name
of this man, who cannot be put into any of the ordinary literary
compartments, is Peter Altenberg. He thought that most of the things
told in dramas of five, or three, or only one act, were superfluous; the
essential could be told in three lines as a rule. He wishes to give the
extract and the reader might work it out for himself. He only writes
very short sketches, apparently perfectly usual things, out of every-day
life. But he discovered a little secret, namely, that the ordinary is
really the most wonderful. Miracles do not exist any more, but the
miraculous is there, everywhere. _Fairy Tales of Life_ he calls one of
his books (in which he collects a number of sketches); but he might call
them all by the same name. As in Maeterlinck's _Blue Bird_ the wonderful
is everywhere, but we have not the eyes to see it. Well, Peter Altenberg
has these eyes. His little sketches would seem untranslatable. They
might seem, in a different language, perfectly banal little things, not
worth the relating,--but suddenly a veil is removed and we see the world
and things in a new light.

Peter Altenberg uses the most original style--one might call it a
telegram style; it is very abrupt without any endeavor at a connected
literary form. He wants, as he says himself, to describe a man in one
sentence; an event of the soul on one page; a landscape with one word.

Everybody in Vienna knows Peter Altenberg. He is a poet of the street,
who goes around and writes down his little sketches wherever he may
be--principally in the cafes.

All the women must love him--for he has sung their praises all his life,
like a minnesinger of the Middle Ages.




                               Editorials


                 Some Emma Goldman Lectures in Chicago

Beginning October 25, and continuing for three weeks, Miss Goldman is to
give a series of new lectures in the Assembly Hall of the Fine Arts
Building--an event which has already filled us with the keenest
anticipations. There will be three on the war:--_Woman and War_, _War
and Christianity_, and _The Sanctity of Property as a Cause of War_.
There will be a series on the drama, as the mirror of rebellion against
the tyranny of the past:--an introductory one on the significance of art
in its relation to life, and others on the new Scandinavian, Italian,
German, French, Russian, Yiddish, American, and English drama. These
will be given on Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday nights, and
offer sufficient richness for one season. But there is even more. On
Monday and Wednesday nights, at East End Hall on Erie and Clark Streets,
Miss Goldman will deliver six general propaganda lectures, all dealing
with the labor problem and the sex question. Tickets will be on sale at
the office of THE LITTLE REVIEW; at The Radical Book Shop, 817½ North
Clark Street; and may be had also from Dr. Reitman, 3547 Ellis Avenue.
How interesting it will be to watch that part of the audience which
attends the war and the drama talks as perfectly "safe" subjects making
its discovery that the lecturer is a woman of simple nobility and
sweetness, and that her propaganda is a matter of truth rather than of
terror.


                The Philistinization of College Students

A very interesting correspondent sends us the sort of letter we should
rather have received than any other sort we can conceive of. It is
quoted in full on another page of this issue. In it he asks if THE
LITTLE REVIEW will not succeed in creating a _Drang und Sturm_ epoch; if
it will not "stir the hearts of college men and women--those who have
not yet been completely philistinized by their 'vocational guides';
college men and women who in other countries have always been the
torch-bearers, the advance-guard and martyrs in the fights for truth and
ideals." It was a definite impulse in this direction which gave birth to
THE LITTLE REVIEW; and while, after seven months, we cannot hope to have
turned the world inside out the way it should be turned, we are
sufficiently sanguine to believe that we have made a beginning. We are
so close to the _Drang und Sturm_ ourselves that perhaps we cannot see
clearly. But we can hope, with that intensity which makes THE LITTLE
REVIEW our religion, that these things will come to pass. Incidentally,
we believe in colleges on the same general basis that we believe in many
other disciplines: it is impossible ever to learn too much on any
subject. But we know there is something seriously wrong with the
colleges; and a far graver danger than philistinization seems to us to
lie in that hysterical confusion of values which causes our college
students to see small things as big ones and to let the big ones slip
by.


                     Witter Bynner on the Imagists

In sending us _Apollo Sings_, Mr. Bynner remarks that it is more fun,
for the moment to take a classic theme and mix it, with a little
Whitman, into an anagram of rhyme than to imitate the Japanese and try
to found a school. He goes on: "In spite of several lovely attempts,
Pound's chiefly, the rest seeming to me negligible, they've not
approached the poetess Chiyo's lines to her dead child:

      I wonder how far you have gone today,
      Chasing after dragonflies--

or Buson's

      Granted this dewdrop world is but a dewdrop world,
      This granted, yet--

I'm ungrateful to look critically toward an attempt to plant in English
these little oriental flowers of wonder. If only they would acknowledge
the attempt for what it is and not bring it forward with a French name
and curious pedantries! Isn't the old name for this sort of poem
_Haikai_ or something of that sort? At any rate, there is a name. I
ought to know it. And so ought they."


                           A Rebel Anthology

William D. Haywood, veteran of many labor battles and foremost exponent
of the militant unionism in America, is adding to his manifold
activities that of compiler and editor. He purposes the formation of an
anthology of poems by social rebels, principally of those who have been
connected with the activities of the Industrial Workers of the World. In
the book will be included poems by Arturo Giovannitti, Covington Hall,
Francis Buzzell, George Franklin, Charles Ashleigh, and others. Mr.
Haywood wishes to show, by this publication, the spirit of art which is
manifesting itself in the working-class movement. He maintains that the
heightened consciousness of the workers is beginning to express itself
through an adequate and distinctive poetical medium.




                            New York Letter


                             GEORGE SOULE.

Eastern publishers have been much amused by the advertising of _The Eyes
of the World_ spread over full pages of the recent magazines. The burden
of the appeal to the public is, first, that we have been overrun with
immoral books; second, that clergymen, editors, and all other forces of
decency are powerless to stop the flood; third, that Mr. Harold Bell
Wright has sprung to the front as the great leader against the vicious
influence of the other writers by the production of his latest novel;
and fourth, that the whole battle will be won if the public will step
into the nearest bookshop and pay $1.35 net for Mr. Wright's book. From
the glowing moral tone of the advertisement one might think it the work
of an uplift committee; but in small type at the bottom is a copyright
notice bearing the name of the president of Mr. Wright's publishing
house. This gentleman is undoubtedly deeply sincere in his admiration of
Mr. Wright's work and its influence, but in this case his admiration has
led him to a somewhat ingenuous confusion of moral and business motives.
It reminds one of the tactics of the billboard advertising men who, when
they discovered that billboard advertising was being strongly attacked
by those who object to the disfigurement of our countryside, put up a
large number of biblical posters to curry favor with simple religious
souls--and were afterwards so injudicious as to boast of their
cleverness in _Printer's Ink_.

The effectiveness of Mr. Wright's plea is somewhat prejudiced by his own
case. His novel sets forth the thesis that in order to make an artistic
or literary success it is necessary only to resort to flattery and
corruption. But his own novels have for some years been far more popular
than those of most competitors. Is it pure perversity that makes his
hated rivals reject his obviously successful methods in favor of the
despicable ones which he so vehemently attacks?

We wish only that someone with an equal enthusiasm for artistically
moral literature would try a similar advertising campaign for a genuine
artist. Such advertisements might set forth the facts that the bookshops
are being overrun with mediocre novels which make successes by pandering
to untruth and public prejudice, that the work of genius is in danger of
being choked out by the insincere product of commercial writers, and
that the best way to promote the interests of good literature would be
to buy in large quantities the novels of John Galsworthy or Romain
Rolland! But, alas, such a campaign is impossible in a commercial
democracy--it wouldn't pay!

A respectable number of the best publishers have already aroused
themselves to the impropriety--or at least to the eventual
ineffectiveness--of announcing extreme praises of their own publications
even in the critical vein. Surely the book-reading public can't be made
to believe that four or five "great novels" are issued every year.
Surely they would be grateful for a little genuine information about the
books they are asked to buy. And so these publishers have issued for two
years a monthly circular entitled _New Books_, which contains
descriptions of important new publications without praise of any kind.
It would be telling tales out of school to say how carefully the
publishers' copy-writers must be watched in order to prevent them from
slipping dubious phrases into their notes. Some advertising men seem to
have principles against giving any candid information about what they
have for sale. But the task has been accomplished so far, and it remains
to be seen whether this civilized form of advertising can make much
progress against the advertising vandalism which destroys the
effectiveness of all publicity by extravagant statements. One begins to
suspect that the effort is pitifully Utopian in a state of economic
savagery like the present, where every man's attention is more naturally
directed to his profits than to the honesty of his work. The chances
would be better if the majority of the public knew what intellectual
honesty is and really wanted it.

There is hope among the magazines in the form of _The Metropolitan_.
That is making a commercial success and is also attempting to publish
genuine work--not necessarily "highbrow," but at least genuine. An
expert on an important subject recently wished to write a magazine
article. The first editor he approached recast the material to suit his
own ideas. A second and a third told him that his message was good, but
over the heads of the public; they ordered "popular" and ephemeral
trivialities. _The Metropolitan_ is the only magazine that wanted him to
write, in his own way, what he really had to say. Another writer
submitted the outline of an article to a _Metropolitan_ editor. It was
on a subject ordinarily considered somewhat "dangerous." The editor
said: "That is new, and interesting. It ought to make a good article.
You must be careful of only one thing. Be absolutely frank. Don't try to
gloss over anything that is a plain matter of fact." Such directness is
astounding to one accustomed to the ways of editors.

An editor has recently confessed to me that now for the first time he
begins to believe that the popular magazines may have a really good
reason for existence, aside from furnishing amusement in hours of train
and family boredom. He thinks that the tremendous events in Europe are
likely to bring forth literature of worth and quickened emotion which
nevertheless cannot wait for book publication, and that so we shall find
use for the more ephemeral medium. It certainly is true that the keen
public interest in the war is likely to decline even before the war is
over. We are bound to experience a reaction in favor of reading matter
at the opposite pole of thought.

An incredible rumor that Hearst has bought _The Atlantic Monthly_ is as
startling as many of the war headlines which occur when no authentic
news is available. In spite of the absurdity of the idea, it has
possibilities of momentary amusement. What a retribution to overtake the
spinsterly Bostonese journal which tries with such a brown and wren-like
conscience to be judiciously radical!




                            Book Discussion


                               Two Finds

   _Poems_, by George Cronyn. [The Glebe. Albert and Charles Boni, New
                                 York.]

I am very sorry indeed that this book arrived when most of our space was
pre-empted. I need room for the sort of appreciation that I feel for
these poems.

That extraordinary, delightful, and Quixotic institution, _The Glebe_,
which insists on publishing stuff on its merits, apart from
considerations of popularity, has had divine luck in finding
Cronyn,--whoever he is.

For Cronyn is a poet. Not just a versifier, but a poet. His verse has a
facility which does not detract from its beauty. I have encountered
sheer beauty more often in his book than in any volume of modern poetry
that I have read for some time.

Here is a sample:


   Clouds

      Whence do you come, oh silken shapes,
        Across the silver sky?
      We come from where the wind blows
        And the young stars die.

      Why do you move so fast, so fast
        Across the white moon's breast?
      The cruel wind is at our heels
        And we may not rest.

      Are you not weary, fleeing shapes,
        That never cease to flee?
      The forkéd tree's chained shadows are
        Less weary than we.

      Whither do you go, O shadow-shapes,
          Across the ghastly sky?
      We go to where the wind blows
          And the old stars die.

This is just a short and rather exuberant message to LITTLE REVIEW
readers, because I think they really deserve the pleasure of discovering
Cronyn for themselves.

                   *       *       *       *       *

   _Songs for the New Age_, by James Oppenheim. [The Century Company,
                               New York.]

One of the phenomena of the evolution of man is the constant broadening
of consciousness. We become accustomed to the sharing of our feelings
with larger and larger numbers of people; our identity with the
race,--and even with inanimate things,--becomes increasingly plain to us
through both the findings of science and heightened emotional
receptivity.

And yet this wider consciousness by no means lessens the value or
quality of personality. By a splendid paradox, the more we realize our
inseparability with all life the more does our selfhood become
accentuated. Thus is achieved the marriage of Democracy and
Individualism. We find that, in the end, the cultivation of one is the
nourishing of the other. I need hardly mention that I am not alluding to
that similacrum of equality: political democracy.

This must be known to appreciate the message of James Oppenheim. For it
is pre-eminently as a message that these poems should be treated. They
are of essential value as one of the most articulate efforts to
translate that which in most people is mute.

There is an unmistakable kinship with Whitman in this work; not merely
in the form,--which is here termed "polyrhythmic,"--but in the spirit,
without hint of plagiarism or of abject imitation. Also we have the same
breezy contempt for the petty trappings of civilization.

Here is an extract from the poem, _Tasting the Earth_, which has beauty
as well as truth:

      O dark great mother-globe so close beneath me....
      It was she with her inexhaustible grief,
      Ages of blood-drenched jungles, and the smoking of craters, and the
         roar of tempests,
      And moan of the forsaken seas,
      It was she with the hills beginning to walk in the shapes of the
         dark-hearted animals,
      It was she risen, dashing away tears and praying to dumb skies, in
         the pomp-crumbling tragedy of man....
      It was she, container of all griefs, and the buried dust of broken
         hearts,
      Cry of the christs and the lovers and the child-stripped mothers,
      And ambition gone down to defeat, and the battle overborne,
      And the dreams that have no waking.

      My heart became her ancient heart:
      On the food of the strong I fed, on dark strange life itself:
      Wisdom-giving and somber with the unremitting love of ages....

      There was dank soil in my mouth,
      And bitter sea on my lips,
      In a dark hour, tasting the Earth.

This is enough to make one grateful to Mr. Oppenheim. But not always
plays the cosmic symphony; sometimes the spheric strains relax for a few
slender lyrics to a moving-picture lady or for the tender song to Annie,
the working-girl. We leave the book with the conception of a manly and
impressionable personality with a healthy lust for life, a deep insight
into the world-soul and his own soul (which, after all, are the same),
and great power to communicate his findings to us through a plastic and
peculiarly individual medium.

                                                     CHARLES ASHLEIGH.


                         An American Anarchist

   _Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre._ [Mother Earth Publishing
                        Association, New York.]

Into every generation are born certain personalities that have the gift
of attracting vast multitudes within their orbit, dominating them,
animating them with a single purpose, directing them to a common goal.
There are other personalities more richly gifted, of more extended
vision, who nevertheless live and die unknown to the greater number of
their contemporaries. Aristocrats of the mind, these latter disdain to
practice the arts by which popularity is gained and held. They attract,
but do not seek to dominate. They persuade, but never command. Their
passion is without hysteria; their moral indignation is without personal
rancor. They cherish ideals, but harbor no illusions. They will gladly
surrender life itself for an idea, but they will not shriek for it. Our
popular leaders are not seldom led by those who seem to follow. These
others advance alone. If they are followed it is without their
solicitation. To say that the individualist writer and lecturer whose
collected writings are now before us was such a personality may seem
exaggerated praise. If so, I have no apology to offer. I only ask that,
until you have read the lectures, poems, stories, and sketches which
this book contains you will suspend judgment.

Voltairine de Cleyre belonged to the school of thinkers that has
suffered most from the misrepresentations and misunderstanding of the
unthinking crowd; the school which numbers among its adherents men like
Stirner, Ibsen, and, in some aspects of his teaching, Nietzsche; the
school that sees hope of social regeneration only in the sovereignty of
the individual and the total abolition of the state. She belonged to it
because she was at once logician and poet, with a temperament abnormally
rebellious against tyranny and an imagination abnormally responsive to
every form of suffering.

It has often been remarked that anarchism takes root most readily in
those minds that have endured most oppression. Thus Russia, the home of
absolute political despotism, is also the birthplace of Bakunin,
Hertzen, Kropotkin, and Tolstoy. In America, where what Mencken calls
"the new puritanism" operates more oppressively than political
government, it is in behalf of sex freedom that most frequent and
vehement protest is heard.

In the case of Voltairine de Cleyre this reaction declared itself
neither because of political nor of sexual restraint. It came about in
the realm of religion. It began from the moment when, at the age of
twelve, the sensitive gifted girl was placed in the hands of a Roman
Catholic sisterhood, presumably that her education might be safe. For
four years the young Voltairine lived at the convent of Our Lady of Lake
Huron at Sarnia, Ontario, heartsick with loneliness, writhing under the
padded yoke of conventual discipline, gathering within her soul that
flame which was never destined to be quenched save in death. Out of that
experience she came with a mind wholly emancipated from the dogmas of
religion. Not long afterward she entered upon what promised to be a
brilliant career as a secularist lecturer.

That a nature like hers would long confine itself to labor in the barren
field of theological controversy was not to have been expected. She was
too vital, too human. It is possible that the delicacy of her own health
intensified her sense of the world pain. Her sympathies are not alone of
the intellect but of the nerves. One feels the nerve torture of an
imaginative and poetic invalid in her confession of the reasons which
had drawn her to adopt the anarchist propaganda. She pictures herself as
standing upon a mighty hill from which she writes:

   I saw the roofs of the workshops of the little world. I saw the
   machines, the things that men had made to ease their burden, the
   wonderful things, the iron genii, I saw them set their iron teeth
   in the living flesh of the men who made them; I saw the maimed
   and crumpled stumps of men go limping away into the night that
   engulfs the poor, perhaps to be thrown up in the flotsam and
   jetsam of beggary for a time, perhaps to suicide in some dim
   corner where the black surge throws its slime. I saw the rose
   fire of the furnace shining on the blanched face of the man who
   tended it, and knew surely, as I knew anything in life, that
   never would a free man feed his blood to the fire like that.

   I saw swart bodies, all mangled and crushed, borne from the
   mouths of the mines to be stowed away in a grave hardly less
   narrow and dark than that in which the living form had crouched
   ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day; and I knew that in order that
   I might be warm--I and you, and those others who never do any
   dirty work--those men had slaved away in those black graves and
   been crushed to death at last. I saw beside city streets great
   heaps of horrible colored earth, and down at the bottom of the
   trench from which it was thrown, so far down that nothing else
   was visible, bright gleaming eyes, like a wild animal hunted into
   its hole. And I knew that free men never chose to labor there,
   with pick and shovel, in that foul, sewage-soaked earth, in that
   narrow trench, in that deadly sewer gas ten, eight, even six
   hours a day. Only slaves would do it.

   I saw deep down in the hull of the ocean liner the men who
   shoveled the coal--burned and seared like paper before the grate;
   and I knew that "the record" of the beautiful monster, and the
   pleasure of the ladies who laughed on the deck, were paid for
   with those withered bodies and souls. I saw the scavenger carts
   go up and down, drawn by sad brutes and driven by sadder ones;
   for never a man, a man in full possession of his selfhood, would
   freely choose to spend all his days in the nauseating stench that
   forces him to swill alcohol to neutralize it. And I saw in the
   lead works how men were poisoned, and in the sugar refineries how
   they went insane; and in the factories how they lost their
   decency; and in the stores how they learned to lie; and I knew it
   was slavery made them do all this.

And against such slavery this young Amazon of the spirit (for at this
time, 1887, she was only twenty-one) declared a life-long warfare. In so
doing she separated herself from those who would otherwise have been her
natural allies and cut off those opportunities for worldly success which
must in the ordinary course of things have come to her.

Finding the cause of economic slavery not in capitalism, as do the
socialists, but in the government of man by man through which capitalism
is made possible, she was isolated still further from her
contemporaries. Hence the obscurity in which her life was passed. Hence
the fact that until her death in 1912 she lived quietly, teaching
English to the newly-arrived immigrant, scattering about her the
treasure of a richly-stored mind as freely as the south wind scatters
the perfume it has gathered from the garden in its path. If she had
lived nearer to the plane of the generally-accepted culture Voltairine
de Cleyre might have gained a recognized place among the foremost women
of her time.

As it was she gave us in her lectures, now for the first time offered to
the public, the most comprehensive exposition of philosophical anarchism
that has appeared since the days of Proudhon and Stirner.

                                                  LILIAN HILLER UDELL.


                   The Growth of Evolutionary Theory

      _Evolution Old and New_, by Samuel Butler. [E. P. Dutton and
                          Company, New York.]

When _The Origin of Species_ was published the world grouped itself into
two main camps. By far the larger of these took the attitude that Darwin
was an impious propounder of disgusting and dangerous heresy. The
smaller group hailed him as the bringer in of a new era.

Samuel Butler allied himself with neither group, but took the attitude
of a constructive critic. In these pages he attacks contemporary
Darwinism--using the term in the narrow sense--on two grounds. That it
is not the novelty it is generally supposed to be, on the one hand, and
that the mechanism implied by its theory is not true, on the other hand,
are his main points.

In so far as Butler treats the first contention, his book is even today
of value. He describes the pre-Darwinian theories of evolution,
especially those of Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, and he strives to show
that their explanations or provisional explanations were sometimes more
near the truth than was Darwin's over-emphasis upon the struggle for
existence as the controlling factor in the evolution of species.

Butler's own point of view is that evolution takes place in accordance
with a design, and it is this part of his book that will be of least
importance at the present day. He quotes Paley, the celebrated English
theologian and advocate of the deified architect idea of God, to show
that animal organisms do show evidences of what is, strictly speaking,
design, and which cannot be referred to the ordinary Darwinian
explanations.

Butler differs from Paley, however, in placing the designer not outside
the cosmic flux of his working materials, but within the organism. Not
God, he says, but the ancestral memory of man is the designer. The
individual perishes, but his memory endures in his offspring and alters
them in accordance with the lessons of ancestral experience.

We have said that this is the least valuable part of the book, and it is
so for the reason that later biologists and philosophers with the
biological approach have considerably enlarged the field of speculation
in this particular realm. The theory of "entelechies" of Hans Driesch
practically does for organisms what Butler does in his idea of
unconscious memory. On the other hand, the new "imminent teleology" of
Bergson gives us a new angle on the whole question of design in nature.

At the same time, however, the majority of biologists are harking back
to a conception of evolution as a kind of mathematical proposition in
which all is given to start with, and in which the new is neither a new
design nor a spontaneous creation, but is simply a liberation from
inhibition of what was always implicit in the old. And the men of this
school would never consent to write a book like this of Butler's. "To
the seed pan and the incubator" is their cry. The time is not here when
synthesis is either advisable or even possible, they tell us. And until
we hear further from these modern experimenters the wise man will read
Butler for his history and prospective,--and for his humor,--but will
not be guided by his theories, which are the work, indeed, of a
brilliant intellect, but one working without our new data, and without
experimental backing.

Of course, the style of the book is delightful, and all who enjoy
controversy and the play of dialectic should read it. Another class to
whom it can be recommended is that large class of people who accept
their view of evolution in the same spirit that an old lady accepts the
Episcopalian creed and are twice as dogmatic over it.

                                                         ILLIAM DHONE.


                   Emma Goldman and the Modern Drama

    _The Social Significance of the Modern Drama_, by Emma Goldman.
                      [Richard G. Badger, Boston.]

   [_The points in which we disagree with the reviewer will be
   discussed in a coming issue.--The Editor._]

There is an element of the keenest adventure in one's first meeting with
a great personality, whether that encounter be in body or through the
medium of the written word. In the case of Emma Goldman I should judge
the latter to be the severer test, for on the printed page she must
stand and fall by the content of her message, unaided by the glamor of
personal magnetism and eloquence of the lecture platform. For my own
part, I should have preferred to have met her as the fiery orator than
as the purveyor of academic wares. And yet in this present performance
she comes forward not in the guise of the accustomed critic--on the
contrary she is very often quite uncritical--but rather as the social
interpreter. In other words, Emma Goldman is here what she has always
been: the propagandist, with the modern drama as her latest text.

And she has a mighty text! Because "any mode of creative work, which
with true perception portrays social wrongs earnestly and boldly, may be
a greater menace to our social fabric and a more powerful inspiration
than the wildest harangue of the soapbox orator," she has chosen the
drama as the fittest medium "to arouse the intellectuals of this
country, to make them realize their relation to the people, to the
social unrest permeating the atmosphere." The great iconoclasts of our
time who have spoken through the drama--Ibsen, Strindberg, Sudermann,
Hauptmann, Wedekind, Brieux, Shaw, Galsworthy, Tolstoi, Tchekhof,
Gorki--she has gathered together within one pair of covers to show us
that their message is her message:--Change not Compromise.

As she puts it in her foreword:

   They know that society has gone beyond the stage of patching up,
   and that man must throw off the dead weight of the past, with all
   its ghosts and spooks, if he is to go foot free to meet the
   future.

Again and again she returns to her theme. In summarizing Ibsen's stand:

   Already in _Brand_, Henrick Ibsen demanded all or nothing,--no
   weak-kneed moderation, no compromise of any sort in the struggle
   for the ideal.

In praise of the author of _Damaged Goods_:

   Brieux is among the very few modern dramatists who go to the
   bottom of this question by insisting on a complete social and
   economic change, which alone can free us from the scourge of
   syphilis and other social plagues.

In connection with Yeats's _Where There is Nothing_:

   It embodies the spirit of revolt itself, of that most
   constructive revolt which begins with the destruction of every
   obstacle in the path of the new life that is to grow on the
   débris of the old, when the paralyzing yoke of institutionalism
   shall have been broken, and man left free to enjoy Life and
   Laughter.

Those who are a bit dubious of the "Life and Laughter" that will follow
the wholesale destruction of the past will have no difficulty in
discovering the shortcomings of Miss Goldman's method. They are the
obvious ones which of necessity befall the single-minded
propagandist:--the intrusion of dogma and platitude into the discussion,
the wearying insistence upon "the moral" of each play, the uncritical
attitude of too-ready acquiescence in the veracity of each dramatic
picture of life, etc. Such critics might point out that the artist, in
spite of Strindberg's dictum, cannot be a mere "lay preacher
popularizing the pressing questions of his time"; that insofar as he
approaches art, he does not preach; that it is by virtue of this power
that Hervieux, for example, is a greater artist than his better-known
contemporary, Brieux. (By the way, why did Miss Goldman omit the
greatest of the French social dramatists?) These critics might even
throw in a word for the institutions of the past which Miss Goldman
believes can be as easily shed as an outworn cloak.

But one must not be an orthodox Anarchist to recognize the
superficiality of these shortcomings which are the inevitable luggage of
the preacher. For Miss Goldman is a preacher. Any interpreter works in
accordance with his creed. Having taken to heart the fate of Lot's wife,
Miss Goldman has turned her back fiercely upon the past. Grant her this
hypothesis and she is always logical and coherent and never irrelevant.
And why shouldn't we encourage her to forge boldly ahead, disdainful of
the old bondage? We need her courage, her single-mindedness, and the aim
to which she has vowed them. She is not alone, for many who know her not
chant the same litany. As for the danger to society that lurks in her
philosophy, we must not forget that the great conservative mass is
leavened slowly. And in the end it is time alone who can give the
verdict--whether we shall patch up the old fabric, or destroy and begin
our weaving anew.

                                                   MARGUERITE SWAWITE.


                     The Whining of a Rejected One

    _Oscar Wilde and Myself_, by Lord Alfred Douglas. [Duffield and
                          Company, New York.]

Emma Goldman gave this laconic epithet to this latest pearl of
scandal-literature. Mylord is very much in earnest, hence his pitiful
failure to see the humorous side of his pathetic self-spanking. The
modest title of the book obviously suggests the two-fold purpose of the
titular harlequin--his own aggrandizement and the dethronement of the
Prince of Paradoxes. He excellently succeeds in obtaining the reverse
result of his first endeavor; not even his pugilistic father, the
Marquis of Queensbury, could have given him a more thorough boxing than
the one he so earnestly performs over his own ears. As to his other
ambition, that of vying with the laurels of Herostrates in his attempt
to belittle the dead lion, we must admit his success in one point, in
proving the morbid vanity of Wilde. What but the passion for titular
acquaintances could have induced the author of _Salome_ to chum with
Bosie Douglas, this burlesque snob, so utterly shallow, petty, so
hopelessly stupid and arrogant?

I don't know what to admire more: the "ethics" of the publisher or the
sense of humor of the author.

                                                                    K.


                        A New Short Story Writer

   _Life Is a Dream_, by Richard Curle. [Doubleday, Page and Company,
                               New York.]

It is to be hoped that Richard Curle will not long remain a name
unfamiliar to American readers, for he is a writer of marked and unusual
talent. _Life Is a Dream_ is the first of his books to be published in
this country, and, consisting as it does of short stories, it can
scarcely find as large an audience as it deserves. For there can be no
doubt that volumes of short stories have only a modest sale--Kipling and
O. Henry to the contrary notwithstanding.

In Curle's case this is a great pity, for the stories in _Life Is a
Dream_ are every one of them remarkable and they have not been printed
elsewhere. They are not what we are accustomed to; almost any magazine
editor would reject them, if only because they have none of that "punch"
which so largely characterizes the work of Kipling and O. Henry, not to
mention the other and far smaller people. It is difficult for the man
who writes stories without "punch" to procure a hearing; the great
popular magazines will have none of him; style, craftsmanship, subtle
psychology, exquisite color--none of these (and Curle is a master of
them all) can quite atone for lack of that predominant American quality.
And that is why Richard Curle, working as he has thus far in a genre
that appeals, however strongly, still to only a few, may be long in
securing the recognition that is already quite his due.

There are nine stories of varying length in the present volume. They
take you to the corners of the earth--London, Damascus, Spain, the West
Indies, the high seas, Central America--and their spirit is well
suggested in the title of the collection--_La Vida Es Sueno_. Truly they
are such stuff as dreams are made of. Curle's feeling for the colorful
word, the precise phrase is remarkable; in a moment one feels almost
bodily transported to a strange and fascinating land. And then the story
is unfolded--for these are real stories and never mere impressionistic
sketches. They may not be about the sort of people you are likely to
number among your friends, but they are about very human folk just the
same. They have a subtlety that is never too involved and an engaging
frankness which is one of Curle's greatest charms.

_Old Hoskyns_, almost homely in its simplicity, is a very touching tale.
_Going Home_ is an exquisite bit of irony. _The Look Out Man_--slight
though it is--is profoundly tragic. In _A Remittance Man_, little by
little, like a mosaic, a shrewd, penetrating, and very convincing
picture is built up of a man who has lost his grip on life. And so they
go--Curle knows the people of his tales so well! He is careful never to
tell you too much about them--there is ample opportunity after each
narrative for pleasant speculation--but one never feels that the real
story he set out to tell has not been fully told.

It is equally important that Curle knows intimately the places he
chooses as settings for his stories. Most of this knowledge he has
gained in his amazingly extensive travels. Aside from North America he
has visited almost every corner of the earth. And yet it is none the
less very remarkable--this curious ability to paint atmosphere--a talent
not too often associated with those who write in English. Conrad has it,
and the greater continental writers--and Curle has studied them to
advantage. I should have myself to possess this same ability to make you
realize the peculiar fascination of such a story as _The Emerald
Seeker_. It is a fine and thrilling yarn; no matter that--there are many
who can tell a rattling tale. But I doubt if any could approach Curle's
masterly sketching of his milieu--a page or two, and in a very real
sense you feel yourself in the heart of tropical Central America.
Finally and best of all, you know that the color is never there merely
for its own sake; there is always a real story to be told and to its
telling the background merely adds distinction. It is difficult--trying
to show the peculiar charm and interest of Curle's work. But once you
read him, it becomes very apparent.

Richard Curle is only thirty years old. If the promise of _Life Is a
Dream_ is fulfilled, he should be one of the really significant writers
of his day. He has traveled widely and is widely read; he knows not only
men and places, but books as well--particularly the works of the great
Russian and Frenchmen. Among living writers he admires especially Joseph
Conrad, with whose work his own has a certain kinship. Curiously enough
he has written the first adequate book on Conrad and it is shortly to be
published in America. It will reveal Curle as a critic of sympathy,
insight and independence. Meanwhile every lover of good fiction,
everyone who cares for skillful craftsmanship in literature, and all
those adventurous persons who would see strange lands and people should
read _Life Is a Dream_.

                                                      ALFRED A. KNOPF.


                     A New Study of William Morris

   _William Morris_, by A. Clutton-Brock. [Henry Holt and Company, New
                                 York.]

I dislike that method which many historians pursue, treating the past as
a matter of death instead of life. For a baggage of rags and a jumble of
bleached bones I have no concern. Yesterday is a thing I will not
consider. History is a proof of one thing only:--that circumstance is a
fraud, and that personality is a durability with eternity. The soul
writes its autobiography, and those used for the syllables survive the
seasons and the years. Rule and custom and people who are no more than
these are for the scrap heap. Night comes and swallows the dead. History
is nothing except for its exceptions. Nature's royal men we discover
despite their uniforms. We note not their habiliments; they have a
natural tongue and true approach and are masters of the seconds. They
breathe life lustily still. These are the verities. They are descriptive
not of antiquity but of the mind which is now. They show us who we are.
We love them because of this. Every time we read them we embark on a new
voyage, and discover to ourselves a treasure island of which hitherto we
had not the slightest knowledge. Trojans of truth, they lift their
spears to the central sun, to proclaim the splendor of the individual,
the great reality of the Now. Through them we are made aware how rich we
are, we begin to realize somewhat of our depths; they provide a new
courage, give a new hope, and inspire us for the struggle ahead with the
quality of an unwonted self-reliance.

I have probably gone beyond my office in making these remarks, but the
temptation provided by the biography of William Morris proved so strong
that I could not forego them. Here is a man of whom we cannot know too
much. An artist who gave his life for art--what shall we say of him?

Mr. Brock has told a little of the man, sometimes in an interesting way,
but he does not make us intimate with him. However, as he tells us in
his preface, he had no pretensions. He is lucid and thoughtful, he is
excellent in his criticism of Morris's poetry, and on the whole gives us
a book well worthy of an hour's quietude. The facts given are good by
way of an introduction--sufficient to send one in quest for greater
knowledge of the man.

One of Nature's henchmen, fresh, bold, Viking in the marrow, with a
spirit of steel, a man for whom the sea would smile, poet, painter,
stainer of glass, weaver of carpets, spinning a world with the strains
of his song, socialist and revolutionist, Morris comes as a teasing wind
through the dank atmosphere of nineteenth-century commercialism, daring
conventions and going his way a body all soul, a majesty supreme to the
last.

We get a little of the air of the man when we read these lines from the
_Sigurd_. I quote from the biography:

      There was a dwelling of Kings ere the world was waxen old,
      Dukes were the door wards there, and the roofs were thatched with
         gold;
      Earls were the wrights that wrought it, and silver nailed the doors;
      Earls' wives were the weaving women, queens' daughters strewed the
         floor.
      And the masters of its song craft were the mightiest men that cast
      The sails of the storm of battle adown the bickering blast.

One cannot but remark the manhood and courage of this. A Luxury of Life.
A freedom here that would fill the winds. It is not to be wondered that
such a man should chafe under the tyranny of skin-girt stupidity, and
feel a loathing toward the flannel-souled people who in his time were
already making machines of men and building a world around them of
ugliness,--cities without bearing, without character, without mirth,
without life. Cities of the dead, where ghosts might abide.

It is in the realm of art, however, that we must look for Morris would
we view him in the light. Art gave the world a child who would lead it
by the hand to the Princess Beautiful that the maiden should have a
lover to woo. A child--yes; and a warrior too, who would do battle with
any of her enemies. I would not say that he knew more of art in its
relation to life than did Ruskin, Wilde, and Whistler; he was, however,
far more active of the purpose. He saw that art was not a mere thing for
the galleries, where Mediocrity can sniff and vaunt its conceits; for
him it was serious of all nature, of the whole circle and the endless
series of circles.

That which gives ear to the tongues of stones and from marble delivers
its soul, he wanted Life to seek. There was a spice in art for Morris
which made it dangerous for milk-sops. Art for him was a Reality; the
existence around him a fraud, and Life a cowardice. He had Truth on his
side; he hated shams and he joined the socialist movement because he saw
here a means for their overturning. In a very interesting chapter Mr.
Brock tells how Morris, after breakfasting with Burne-Jones, would go
out to some street corner and lecture on socialism to a throng of
workingmen, some dirty and in rags. He had his courage--this man.

There dwells in each of us a heroism of which the last has not been
spoken. Carlyle was drunk with it, Emerson wrote it, Morris lived it. A
great artist, but a greater man. Life for him was a cavalier
extravagance--thus would he have all men live. To make the world live,
we must give of our living. Breathe life into all things that they too
will have manners and extend a friendship's greetings.

For practical people Morris is still anathema; for human beings,
however, he is yet a comrade in the struggle. Mr. Brock's study of him
is therefore welcome, coming as it does with fresh intelligence of his
nature. His book most certainly is a thing to be read.

                                                                 G. F.


                         Exaggerated Mushrooms

      _Minions of the Moon_, by Madison Cawein. [Stewart and Kidd,
                              Cincinnati.]

At a glance the book seems merely a collection of unusual
nursery-rhymes, but after a careful reading one finds little glimmers of
poetry, like faded flowers touched with sulphur and pressed between the
leaves of a very inane volume. If you have the sublime suggestion of
patience necessary to turn the leaves of the book you will rather
delight in fingering the flowers. They are moon-light flowers. Mr.
Cawein is at his best when he goes into his usual tremulous raptures
over moon-light. His moon-light poems actually drip with slim, wistful
(to use a much-abused word) color. If he could forget elfs, fairies, and
mushrooms for more than a moment, Madison Cawein would reach the
plateaus, if not the mountain-tips of poetry. But he can only cast out
the trite child which has taken possession of him, now and then. Strange
to say, though three or four of the poems in the volume are good, they
do not contain a line worth quoting. Their halfbeauty lies in the
ensemble. As for the rest of the book, I can best describe it by saying
that one feels inclined to turn over the page.

                                                                 M. B.




                            Sentence Reviews


   (Inclusion in this category does not preclude a more extended
   notice.)

_The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd_, by D. H. Lawrence. [Mitchell Kennerley,
New York.] A three-act drama, by a young English poet, that feels into
new recesses of the problem of sex relationships. Clear thinking, acute
analysis, and provocative criticisms of life make this a notable
addition to _The Modern Drama Series_.

_An Island Outpost_, by Mary E. Waller. [Little, Brown and Company,
Boston.] "I respect the clam," says Miss Waller; "it has certain
reserves." She also says: "Liberty is the restraint of controlled
intelligence," and she tells us that a million ideas unloaded on an
unwarned public will cause befogment of its reasoning powers. Miss
Waller in her _Island Outpost_ has not shown the reserve of the clam,
nor the restraint of controlled intelligence, but has unloaded her
"million ideas on a million subjects unannounced and uncatalogued."
Socrates, Swedes, and Simians, Hull House and Helsingfors, Praxiteles
and Plum Jelly, Clucking Hens and Chemistry, Philanthropic Frenzies,
Psychiatry Astigmatic, Outlooks, and Intellectual Miasma overlap each
other in "indecent haste"--and to cap all comes an analogy taken from
old "turned carpets," suggestive of prehistoric methods of sanitation to
a mere "Westerner."

_Gillespie_, by J. MacDougall Hay. [George H. Doran Company, New York.]
A big story of heroic Scotch life by a new writer who has tremendous
power. It makes that kind of profound personal impressions which a
well-bred man refuses to discuss.

_Songs and Poems_, by Martin Schütze. [The Laurentian Publishers,
Chicago.] The discriminating reader who is a bit wearied of the "free
verse" of "free poets" will find refreshing contrast in this slender
volume of Mr. Schütze. Here there is beauty combined with delicate
craftsmanship; lines finely wrought, fresh rhythms, uncommon phrasing.
The contents reveals a happy versatility: there are a variety of Songs,
some Poems, Discourses, and Epigrams.

_When Love Flies Out o' the Window_, by Leonard Merrick. [Mitchell
Kennerley, New York.] A pretty story of the love affair of a charming
chorus girl and a novelist-journalist. It should make good late summer
reading, for the route of true love is not over-smooth, and the end is
happy. We recommend the earlier portion of the book as done in the
inimitable Merrick fashion. It is rather too bad that this author's
sustained performances fall so far below his short stories.

_The Man and the Woman_, by Arthur L. Salmon. [Forbes and Company,
Chicago.] A comforting little volume for smug Victorian women of both
sexes.

_Short Plays_, by Mary Macmillan. [Stewart and Kidd Company,
Cincinnati.] Ten short plays deftly done, and sufficiently varied in
theme to meet the diverse demands of the woman's club, the girls'
school, and the amateur dramatic society.

_English Drama of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century_, by George
Henry Nettleton. [The Macmillan Company, New York.] Interesting to
academic students of the historical facts of the early periods of the
modern English drama.

_Erna Vitek_, by Alfred Kreymborg. [Albert and Charles Boni, New York.]
This further enterprise of a new and daring publishing house is an
attempt, and a promising one at that, at the naturalistic American
novel. But it is only an attempt. Mr. Kreymborg's style is marred by the
very frequent use of journalese. He has an excellent plot, but the
treatment has somewhat failed to do it justice. Also, it seems to us
that the episode narrated in the book would have made a far better short
story than a novel. Despite these defects of juvenility, the book gives
promise of future work by this author that will surely count. Also one
obtains a refreshing insight into the real New York Bohemia.

_A Stepdaughter of the Prairie_, by Margaret Lynn. [The Macmillan
Company, New York.] Vivid impressions of pioneer life in the Missouri
Valley by a writer who knows the wide prairies of that region.

_Business: A Profession_, by Louis D. Brandeis. [Small, Maynard and
Company, Boston.] A book composed of the lectures, essays and
discussions which gave rise to the efficiency idea in big business
management. It belongs on the shelf with President Wilson's _The New
Freedom_.

_London and Paris_, by Prof. John C. Van Dyke. [Charles Scribner's Sons,
New York.] Two additions to the _New Guides to Old Masters Series_ that
point out to conventional visitors the things that they should see when
they look at the pictures in the famous galleries of London and Paris.

_Letters from a Living Dead Man_, dictated to Elsa Barker. [Mitchell
Kennerley, New York.] Unimportant even if true, which they are alleged
to be. Psychical researchers will salt this thing down with their
"facts."

_Where Rolls the Oregon_, by Dallas Lore Sharp. [Houghton Mifflin
Company, Boston.] A group of delightful impressions of "the vast
outdoors of Oregon" by an interpretative observer whose zestful
phraseology is full of local atmosphere. A number of charming halftones
are included.

_The Red Light of Mars_, by George Bronson-Howard. [Mitchell Kennerley,
New York.] This philosophical comedy in three acts, which adds
creditable variety and interest to _The Modern Drama Series_, will be
staged this season. Being typically American in spirit, it lacks iron in
the body of its thought.

_Bambi_, by Marjorie Benton Cook. [Doubleday, Page and Company, New
York.] "_Bambi_" is altogether delightful. After marrying a writer of
impossible plays, she endeavors to support him and to teach him to
support himself. She becomes an author, and with her delicious vanity,
and knowledge of her ability to wind men around her tiny finger, uses
her own fame as a lever to place her husband among the successful
playwrights. This sprightly midget is one of the most lovable characters
we have met in many moons.




                           The Reader Critic


"_Gaudeamus_":

In these historic days I cannot think of your September issue in other
terms than as of a Zeppelin hurling bombs into the enemy's strongholds.
From the first to the last page (yes, even the letters!) I read the copy
to an imaginary beating of drums, blasting of trumpets, fluttering of
banners. When I reached the last line, I relaxed in nervous expectation
of the results of the grandiose charge: Will there be no explosion, no
earthquake?

I ask this question in dead earnest. THE LITTLE REVIEW has become
definite in one point--in its uncompromising warfare against the rotten
features of the existing order. In this one issue you have attacked with
the fervor of unhesitating youth some of the stanchest fortified
dunghills of American life and art. From _Armageddon_, that merciless
bomb into the camp of provincial complacency prevailing in this country,
through the execution of academical _Grocers_, through the venomous
_Democrat_ that reveals the beauty of constructive hatred, down to the
palpitating letter of the "Boy-Reader" who deals a tender death-blow to
the despotic authoritativness of parenthood,--I scent war powder! And
with hope and anxiety I put the question once more:

Will there be no response to the call of the clarion? Will your
battle-cry not be echoed by young America, who for the first time hear a
free unmercenarized word? Will your courageous gospel not stir the
hearts of college men and women, those who have not yet been completely
philistinized by their "vocational guides"; college men and women who in
other countries have always been the torch-bearers, the advance-guard
and martyrs in the fights for truth and ideals? Will THE LITTLE REVIEW
not succeed in creating a _Drang und Sturm_ epoch?

A negative answer would spell a death-verdict for the future of this
over-dollarized land.

_An Interested Reader, Chicago_:

THE LITTLE REVIEW bubbles over with enthusiasm and love of life. Here is
an instance of a losing fight with life--perhaps it may interest you.

A childhood spent in the slums of a large city--not in the camaraderie
spirit of the slums but within the close bounds of a little clean
apartment presided over by an aristocratic-notioned mother. Absolute
barrenness of childhood experience--not a toy, never even a rag doll,
not a tree, not a flower, not a picture of any beauty--a household of
petty quarreling and incessant scrubbing and cleaning, and strict
adherence to duties. As the child, now grown, thinks back, she knows
that there was always a subconscious feeling of revolt. She would often
go off for many hours knowing that punishment would follow; she
destroyed much that caused tears in her efforts to create, she craved
and found affection where life was a little richer.

And then came books--avid, unsystematic reading. But life was never
touched intimately and directly from any angle but one of barrenness,
pettiness. A routined school course enriched living by a deep and
lasting friendship. Continually the inner revolt and the outward
conforming dragged along together. And then came a time of complete
awakening, of burning whys, with realization of a dual existence and a
desire for sincerity in living above all things. Life demands some sort
of a medium of expression which has its beginning in childhood
experience. A maturing mind just beginning on impressions that should
have come in childhood is a sorry spectacle. Its desires are so out of
proportion to its human possibilities that it flounders and does
nothing. It finds in itself capacities dulled for want of stimulation,
it looks on things and sees them out of relation to itself. One grows to
despise human beings, to hate living--to see that there is beauty and
radiance in the world only for the chosen ones who respond to it
intimately and not only through day dreams.

Youth is not always synonymous with love of life; the gutter does not
always hold a reflection of the sky, and a conversation or even
understanding with one's parents but seldom solves the problem of soul
imprisonment. Breaking the bars of immediate environment is not so
wonderful a thing for an independent adult, but how is one to overcome
the barriers of a wasted childhood?

_C. A. Z., Chicago_:

What splendid letters those are from George Soule! Every one has been
really worth while and inspiring. Especially the advice and warning he
gives in his last: "Let us go to the theatres next fall prepared to
trace the beginnings of a new stage art in this country; in the
meantime, however, not hoping to escape the flood of cheap and
artistically vicious stuff with which the commercial managers will
attempt to drown our sensibilities."

Perhaps after this warning one ought not become agitated or angry with
any of the productions of those showmen who are frankly in the business
for the sake of revenue. However, when the "super"-showman, who is said
by the press-agent to possess unconquerable ideals, does something that
is supposed to be the uttermost of stage production--and fails--well,
then one can't help becoming irritated. In a production of _Joseph and
His Brethren_ which I saw recently there is evidence that he is aware of
the presence of new ideas in the theatre. But nowhere is it perfect
enough or fearlessly new enough to be satisfying. What new ideas are
used are swamped under, in their imperfection, by the mass of "excellent
mediocrity" that Mr. Soule speaks of. In every act is present that
hideous compromise--rank mixture of the old theatrical devices with a
cautious lifting of some daring modernists' best ideas. But the pictures
received applause. Most came for the scene that jarred most. It was a
moon-light garden scene. The backdrop and sense of distance were
perfect, but stuck prominently in the foreground, on either side of the
stage, were huge clusters of pink blossoms. The applause for that was
great--just as Soule predicted.

Mixing ideals--so-called--with the business of attracting the crowd for
what it brings to the box-office may produce a super-showman and make of
him a millionaire, but it does not advance the cause of the theatre. Not
only is the production to be quarreled with, but the drama itself is of
mongrel character. Everywhere is evident that catering to the ordinary
theatrical taste:--entire speeches from the bible alongside those of
modern idiom and thought together with re-arrangements and useless
additions to the already satisfying detail of the scriptures.

After a "smashing" finale with the gorgeously garmented multitude waving
dusty palms in a private house I decided to dismiss the entire show as
fruitless, so far as the "new note" was concerned. However, one critic
writes that the German and Russian moderns were suggested in some scenes
and that the chief female character might have been costumed by Bakst
himself! That arouses one to the danger of the thing. Is this the final
word in the theatre and what we are to expect as the best this season?

_Marion Thayer MacMillan, Cincinnati_:

The July number of THE LITTLE REVIEW is before me, and the demure brown
cover brings a smile as I recall the stimulating sparkle and scarlet
audacities hidden beneath. After Nietzsche's notion of the Wagnerite, it
is at least interesting to read Mr. Brooke's description of pâte de
foi-gras at the opera. The talk of Dr. Brandes and the tedious speaker
is a gladsome thing, but most of all I was held by _The Renaissance of
Parenthood_. It is a large subject for one article and too large for a
letter; nevertheless I must quarrel with one of your implications. I
refuse to admit that one can deduce anything whatever from the writings
of Mr. George Bernard Shaw. Don't mistake me: I feel sure that I agree
with everything you think about him--"aye more." But I deny that you can
justly follow any statement of his with "hence." When a man takes his
authorized and adoring biographer and tells him "Lo! here is the house
where I first saw the light," and, when the adoring and authorized one
comes a cropper because he deduces from this remark that the self-same
house is the birth place of his idol, it behooves one to walk warily
with this God! No doubt to read the profound and playful prophet
philosopher is to conclude that he believes "the old-fashioned game in
which the mother sacrificed everything was unfair and unnecessary and
wasteful." Equally, however, there is no doubt that G. B. S. himself
holds an entirely opposite point of view since he emphatically affirms:
"When others thought I should be working to support my mother, I made
her work to support me. Five years after I was entirely capable of
earning a living, I kept her at it so that I could learn to write
English"; and, to prove his rightness, he cries: "And now look who's
here!"




                            To Serve an Idea


There is no more vivid thing in life. All those people who are vitally
interested in THE LITTLE REVIEW and its idea, its spirit and its growth,
may want to become part of a group which has just been suggested by
several of our contributors and readers. An attempt to influence the
art, music, literature, and life of Chicago is an exciting and worthy
one, and should have its opportunity of expression. Such an opportunity
is planned in a series of gatherings--the first to be held in 917 Fine
Arts Building at eight o'clock on Saturday evening, October 10. For
further details, address The Little Review Association, 917 Fine Arts
Building, Chicago.


                               New Books
                         on a Variety of Topics

                     MEDITATIONS ON VOTES FOR WOMEN

                         By Samuel M. Crothers

   This book is not an argument for equal suffrage, but rather a
   quiet consideration of the subject. The book is in no way
   controversial, but preserves throughout the lightness of touch
   and urbanity of tone for which Dr. Crothers is so well known.
   $1.25 net.

                         A BEACON FOR THE BLIND

                            By Winifred Holt

   A vivid and readable biography of Henry Fawcett, the blind
   Postmaster-General of England, which should attract wide
   attention in this country as well as in Great Britain.
   Illustrated. $2.50 net.

                           THE READING PUBLIC

                          By MacGregor Jenkins

   The author writes in a whimsical fashion of the public in its
   pursuit of literature in the home, at the club, and on the
   suburban train and trolley. 75 cents net.

                         SONGS OF THE OUTLANDS

                        By Henry Herbert Knibbs

   Mr. Knibbs' "Songs of the Outlands" tell in swinging verse
   stories of Western characters, or celebrate the life of mountain
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                               THE EGOIST


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                          Transcriber's Notes


Advertisements were collected at the end of the text.

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

The article "The Viennese Dramatists"--in the print interrupted on page
35--was continued on page 55. The continued text on page 55, starting
with "... namely, that the ordinary is really ...", was therefore moved
directly after page 35.

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

   [p. 26]:
   ... land in distant oceans, that he may make amends to the
       children for there ...
   ... land in distant oceans, that he may make amends to the
       children for their ...

   [p. 26]:
   ... marvels to have torn themselves lose from it. "No more
       Sehnsucht ...
   ... marvels to have torn themselves loose from it. "No more
       Sehnsucht ...

   [p. 52]:
   ... fadded flowers touched with sulphur and pressed between the
       leaves of a ...
   ... faded flowers touched with sulphur and pressed between the
       leaves of a ...




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