THE LITTLE REVIEW


                      _Literature Drama Music Art_

                          MARGARET C. ANDERSON
                                 EDITOR

                             FEBRUARY, 1915

  Our First Year                                           The Editor
  Poems:                                                   Amy Lowell
    Bright Sunlight                                                  
    Ely Cathedral                                                    
  Heaven’s Jester                                 Mrs. Havelock Ellis
  Green Symphony                                  John Gould Fletcher
  The Case of French Poetry                         Richard Aldington
  The Last Woman                                         George Soule
  The Liberties of the People                      William L. Chenery
  A Hymn to Nature (An Unpublished Goethe Poem)                      
  My Friend, the Incurable:                         Alexander S. Kaun
    On the Vice of Simplicity                                        
    John Cowper Powys                                                
  Muck and Music                                         Alfred Knopf
  While Hearing a Little Song                       Maxwell Bodenheim
  A Hard Bed                                     George Burman Foster
  George Middleton’s One-Act Plays                   Clayton Hamilton
  New York Letter                                        George Soule
  Music                                                              
  Book Discussion                                                    
  The Reader Critic                                                  

                           Published Monthly

                            15 cents a copy

                    MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Publisher
                           Fine Arts Building
                                CHICAGO

                              $1.50 a year

         Entered as second-class matter at Postoffice, Chicago




                           THE LITTLE REVIEW


                                 Vol. 1

                             FEBRUARY, 1915

                                 No. 11

               Copyright, 1915, by Margaret C. Anderson.




                             Our First Year


                         MARGARET C. ANDERSON.

An interesting man said recently that the five qualities which go into
the making of the great personality—of the genius, perhaps—are (1)
energy, (2) imagination, (3) character, (4) intellect, (5) and charm. I
number them because the importance of his remark lies in the fact that
he arranged them in just that order. The more you think of it the keener
a judgment it seems. I can see only one possible flaw in it—a flaw that
would not be corrected, I am certain, by moving number four to the place
of number one, but by a reversal of number one and number two. Energy
does seem the prime requisite—after you’ve spent a few days with one of
those persons who has seething visions and a contempt for concentration.
But Imagination!—that gift of the far gods! There is simply no question
of its position in the list. It is first by virtue of every brave and
beautiful thing that has been accomplished in the world.

Last March we began the publication of THE LITTLE REVIEW. Now, twelve
months later, we face the humiliating—or the encouraging—spectacle of
being a magazine whose function is not transparent. People are always
asking me what we are really trying to do. We have not set forth a
policy; we have not identified ourselves with a point of view, except in
so far as we have been quite ridiculously appreciative; we have not
expounded a philosophy, except in so far as we have been quite
outlandishly anarchistic; we have been uncritical, indiscriminate,
juvenile, exuberant, chaotic, amateurish, emotional, tiresomely
enthusiastic, and a lot of other things which I can’t remember now—all
the things that are usually said about faulty new undertakings. The
encouraging thing is that they are said most strongly about promising
ones.

Of course THE LITTLE REVIEW has done little more than approach the ideal
which it has in mind. I am not proud of those limitations mentioned
above—(and I am far from being unconscious of them); I am merely glad
that they happen to be that particular type of limitation rather than
some other. For instance, I should much rather have the limitations of
the visionary or the poet or the prophet than those of the pedant or the
priest or the “practical” person. Personally, I should much rather get
drenched than to go always fortified with an umbrella and overshoes; I
should rather see one side of a question violently than to see both
sides calmly; I should rather be an extremist than a—well, it’s scarcely
a matter of choice: people are either extremists or nonentities; I
should far rather sense the big things about a cause or a character even
vaguely than to analyze its little qualities quite clearly; in short, I
should rather feel a great deal and know a little than feel a little and
know a lot. And so all this may serve to express our negative attitude.

But what am I to say about our positive attitude—how possibly express
all the things we hope to do? Perhaps I need not try: Oscar Wilde made
explanations of such a position superfluous when he said that the
worship of beauty is something entirely too splendid to be sane. That is
our only attitude. I hope at least half the people who read this will
understand that I did not say our platform is merely the worship of
beauty. Beauty involves too many elements to be championed lightly.
Beauty from the aesthete’s point of view and beauty from the artist’s
point of view are two widely different things. I might paraphrase Wilde
and say that the new Beauty is the new Hellenism. Certainly I want for
THE LITTLE REVIEW, as I want from life, not merely beauty, not merely
happiness, but a quality which proceeds from the _intensity_ with which
both beauty and ugliness, pleasure and pain, are present.

This much to start with. Now there are people who complain that within
their limited allowance of magazines they are forced to do without THE
LITTLE REVIEW because it gives them nothing definite, nothing finished,
nothing conclusive. But my idea of a magazine which makes any claim to
artistic value is that it should be conducted more or less on the lines
of good drama, or good fiction; that it should suggest, not conclude;
that it should stimulate to thinking rather than dictate thought. Most
magazines have efficient editors and definite editorial policies; that
is what’s wrong with them. I have none of the qualifications of the
editor; that’s why I think THE LITTLE REVIEW is in good hands. Because
the editorial tradition in this country has usurped the place of the
literary tradition we have lifted loyalty to policies into the place of
loyalty to ideals. A veteran editor—a man of letters—once told me that
there were fifty good writers to every good editor in America, and that
he would teach me to be the former. He proceeded to illustrate, not by
chucking out the poor stuff that was being written for his journal but
by showing how it could be stuck in where it wouldn’t be too noticeable!
When some manuscript that delighted his soul came in (he was very human
and out of sympathy with the crusted “policy” that had somehow grown up
around his own magazine) he taught me the “art” of reducing its policy
to a state of negativeness that would not be out of harmony with the
policy he was supposed to be supporting. Once he received some poetry
that was very strong and very beautiful. He treasured it so that he kept
it in his desk for months before returning it. It was so beautiful as to
be beyond the appreciation of his audience, he was sure; and anyhow his
journal had never gone in for publishing poetry—it merely printed
reviews of poetry; so what could he do but return it? I used to feel
that I was in the midst of some demoniacal scheme for achieving the
ultimate futility. And so I think that “policies” are likely to be, or
to become, quite damning things. Therefore instead of urging people to
read us in the hope of finding what they seek in that direction, it is
more honest to say outright that they will probably find less and less
of it. Because as “sanity” increases in the world THE LITTLE REVIEW will
strive more and more to be splendidly insane: as editors and lecturers
continue to compromise in order to get their public, as book-makers
continue to print rot in order to make fortunes, as writers continue to
follow the market instead of _doing their Work_, as the public continues
to demand vileness and vulgarity and lies, as the intellectuals continue
to miss the root of the trouble, THE LITTLE REVIEW will continue to
rebel, to tell the truth as we see it, to work for its ideal rather than
for a policy. And in the face of new magazines of excellent quality and
no personality we shall continue to soar and flash and flame, to be
swamped at intervals and scramble to new heights, to be young and
fearless and reckless and imaginative—

                                    ... chanter
      Rêver, rire, passer, être seul, être libre,
      Avoir l’œil qui regarde bien, la voix qui vibre....

—to die for these things if necessary, but to live for them vividly
first.

There are other people who argue that we might be hugely successful by
being better: that we might borrow a lot of money (they always say this
so casually), pay high for contributions, become acutely sophisticated,
fill a wide-felt need, etc. Now the first thing we shall do, as soon as
we are able to pay our printer’s bills without paroxysms of terror, is
to pay for contributions; it is disgusting that writers who do real work
don’t make enough out of it to live on at least. But as things are now
no one can _live_ by writing unless he writes badly. The only exceptions
are cases which emphasize rather than disprove the point. In the
meantime a magazine ought to be started for the sole purpose of printing
the good things that the best magazines reject. Until we are on our feet
and able to pay for stuff we can at least do this. And never, we hope,
will we achieve that last emptiness: sophistication.

But there is still another function, and it seems to me very important.
I have been reading a new book of Walter Lippmann’s called _Drift and
Mastery_, which has more of the quality known as straight thinking than
anything in the political-economic field published for a long time. Mr.
Lippmann says this in his preface:

   The issues that we face are very different from those of the last
   century and a half. The difference, I think, might be summed up
   roughly this way: those who went before inherited a conservatism
   and overthrew it; we inherit freedom, and have to use it. The
   sanctity of property, the patriarchal family, hereditary caste,
   the dogma of sin, obedience to authority,—the rock of ages, in
   brief, has been blasted for us. Those who are young today are
   born into a world in which the foundations of the older order
   survive only as habits or by default. So Americans can carry
   through their purposes when they have them. If the standpatter is
   still powerful amongst us it is because we have not learned to
   use our power, and direct it to fruitful ends. The American
   conservative, it seems to me, fills the vacuum where democratic
   purpose should be.

   So far as we are concerned, then, the case is made out against
   absolutism, commercial oligarchy, and unquestioned creeds. _The
   Rebel program is stated._ Scientific invention and blind social
   currents have made the old authority impossible in fact, the
   artillery fire of the iconoclasts has shattered its prestige. We
   inherit a rebel tradition. The dominant forces in our world are
   not the sacredness of property nor the intellectual leadership of
   the priest; they are not the divinity of the constitution, the
   glory of the industrial push, Victorian sentiment, New England
   respectability, the Republican party, or John D. Rockefeller....
   In the emerging morality the husband is not regarded as the
   proprietor of his wife, nor the parents as autocrats over the
   children.... There is a wide agreement among thinking people that
   the body is not a filthy thing, and that to implant in a child
   the sense of sin is a poor preparation for a temperate life.

   The battle for us, in short, does not lie against crusted
   prejudice, but against the chaos of a new freedom.

That is very good reasoning, if you grant the premise—which I do not. I
think the old authority is just as apparent as ever; its methods and
nature have merely changed. Mr. Lippmann lives among the small
minority—the people who have ideas. They represent about one tenth of
the population. Of the rest, five tenths have no ideas and the other
four tenths have something they call ideas: the rock of ages. It is
still there. The new authority is quite as strong as the old, and more
insidious because it is more subtle. Young people used to be
disinherited when they disagreed with their parents; now they are argued
with. The former method left their minds clear; the latter befogs
them—and they disinherit themselves. That is the difference. One worked
from without in; the other works from within out. Of course it’s much
better this way. But this is not the most important problem—this of the
old rock of ages. The horrible joke of modern life is that _we have been
presented with a new rock of ages_!

The rebel program is stated—exactly. More than that, it is in action.
The difference between the new issues and the old, to Mr. Lippmann, is
that we have now learned what we must do; to me, it is that we must
learn to do something else. The battle lies not against the chaos of a
new freedom, but against the dangers of a new authority.

Before I define, let me illustrate. About two months ago I spent four
days in one of our second-large cities—a place of about two hundred
thousand people. If I could only describe those four days and their
stimulation—to fresh rebellion! The people I saw belonged to the
supposedly enlightened inner circles—the representative upper middle
class: the ones that still loom very large in comparison to the thinking
minority from whom Mr. Lippmann draws his conclusions. Well, I had not
forgotten how ignorant people can be, but I had forgotten how cruel they
can be. I had not expected their knowledge to have increased, but their
hypocrisy to have lessened. I had not looked for vision but at least for
a beginning of sight; not for Truth, but perhaps for a willingness to
stop lying. And I found scarcely a glimmer of these things. It was
ghastly! But the strange part was this: all the time I found I was
thinking not of the great faults of their opinions but of the great
barrenness of their lives. Over and over the thought kept running
through my head: There is no poetry of living in this place!

This brings me to my point. The new rock of ages is that wholly false
perspective which assumes that _what one thinks is more important than
what one feels_. It has been set up, quite unconsciously, by the very
people who have trying to blast the old one. It is that perspective
which the new generation must fight not only with the old, but in its
own ranks! Here is the interest of the new battle! Our next renaissance
will be concerned with changing that perspective; the genius of the
future must be directed toward that end. And that is why I think it is
not enough to say that there will come a time when men will think of
nothing but education. There will come a time when men will think of
nothing but education in imagination! And since there is no such thing
as _education_ in imagination, but only _procreation_ of it,—well, the
time will come when men will think of nothing but art. The crimes of
ignorance are not comparable to the crimes of philistinism: there is no
philosophy that will ever reach beyond that of the personality or of the
artist.

The dominant forces in the new rock of ages are not of course the
intellectual leadership of the priest, the divinity of the constitution,
Victorian sentiment, or the Republican Party, but the intellectual
leadership of cleverness, the divinity of cults, no sentiment, and the
Practical Plan. They are endorsed by the most promising element in
modern life: the young intellectuals who are working valiantly to create
here what Europe has given to the arts and sciences,—and working in the
wrong direction. Our inferiorities to the other civilizations they
attribute to our puritanism, our speed, our economic evils. Oh, I get so
sick of their failure to reach to the real cause! It is so silly to keep
on insisting that we need poets like the French or philosophers like the
Germans or musicians like the Russians, etc., etc., if we don’t begin
soon to understand why we haven’t got them. We haven’t got them because,
in this curious country, we haven’t got people who feel.—Think of an
Irish peasant walking under the stars....

I grant you that it also becomes silly to talk eternally of “feeling”
without qualifying or defining. It is like taking refuge behind that
vaguest phrase in the language—“life itself.” But by “feeling” I mean
simply that flight of wings which makes walking unnecessary; that
dazzling tight-rope performance which takes you safely over the chasm of
Experience but leaves you as bruised as though you had fallen to its
depths. Feeling is that quality of spirit which will save any artist
from the philosophical redundancies of a _De Profundis_. The torturing
need of expressing something that far outstretches one’s capacity for
expression is the foundation of art. That’s why we have so little of it
in this country. There may be some Americans in whom the perspective has
retained its proper balance. I happen to know of one.

It is for some such need as this that THE LITTLE REVIEW exists: to
create some attitude which so far is absolutely alien to the American
tradition. I have been going to the lectures of John Cowper Powys, which
are spoken of in other places in this issue, and that appreciative man
gave me an interesting idea the other day. I should like to see him as
editor of a literary magazine whose policy was to cut off the
subscription list everybody who speculated about his pose or his
insincerity and failed to miss the great beauty of his words. Now Mr.
Powys is as unstable as water: that is his value. He feels entirely too
much ever to be fully sane. His hypothetical magazine would gather an
audience that could fight successfully the great American crime which
may be described briefly as _missing the point_. Thus we might establish
a reign of imagination which would make stupid things as impossible as
cruel things, which would consider a failure to catch some new beauty or
a “moral lynching of great and independent spirits” as greater crimes
than murdering a man in a dark corner.

On this basis we shall continue. If we must be sensible at least we
shall make it, in Shaw’s phrase, an ecstasy of common sense. And out of
all this chaos shall we produce our dancing star.


   The supreme vice is shallowness. Whatever is realized is
   right.—_Oscar Wilde._


   Before the scientific spirit can reach its full bloom, it will
   have to acquire an honest sense of the rôle that fantasy plays in
   all its work. This is especially true of the social sciences. We
   are just beginning to realize the importance in economics of the
   economist’s utopia. We are learning the determining influence of
   the thinker’s dream.—_Walter Lippmann._




                                 Poems


                               AMY LOWELL


                            Bright Sunlight

   The wind has blown a corner of your shawl
   Into the fountain,
   Where it floats and drifts
   Among the lily-pads
   Like a tissue of sapphires.
   But you do not heed it,
   Your fingers pick at the lichens
   On the stone edge of the basin,
   And your eyes follow the tall clouds
   As they sail over the ilex trees.


                             Ely Cathedral

   Anaemic women, stupidly dressed and shod
   In squeaky shoes, thump down the nave to laud an expurgated God.
   Bunches of lights reflect upon the pavement where
   The twenty benches stop, and through the close, smelled-over air
   Gaunt arches push up their whited cones,
   And cover the sparse worshipers with dead men’s stones.
   Behind his shambling choristers, with flattened feet
   And red-flapped hood, the Bishop walks, complete
   In old, frayed ceremonial. The organ wheezes
   A moldy psalm-tune, and a verger sneezes.

   But the great Cathedral spears into the sky
   Shouting for joy.

   What is the red-flapped Bishop praying for, by the bye?




                            Heaven’s Jester
                                   or
                      The Message of a White Rose


                          MRS. HAVELOCK ELLIS

“It is dawn! Men and women are in the city of sleep. Waken, thou strange
child of many dreams, and hear my message. A woman gave me to thee, a
woman thou lovest, whose fragrance for thee is as delicate as mine,
whose whiteness is thy strength and hope. But hark! the gods are
pitiless. Thy name is entered in the call-book of heaven by a woman thou
lovest also. In gentle jest she wrote the scrawl when thy soul passed
into Paradise with hers for one brief hour. She entered those gates in
the sweet sleep of Death and thou, by force of her love for thee, in the
sleep of life. “Heaven’s Jester” was inscribed in the registers of
Paradise and heaven’s jester thou must remain. Thy soul, after her
passing from Earth, had barely gained thy body again before the cap and
bells were donned by thee. Thy jests for men were written down. The
jingle of thy bells drew laughter and tears. God found he had need of
the fool the woman had signed to him. Hush! the jester of heavenly
courts must not lower his head or hide his face. Tears ill become the
piebald suit and trappings of mirth. Thou crazy clown! Didst think the
woman who gave me to thee needed thy heart? Hear the message the white
rose by thy bed gives to thee. She also needs thy cap and bells. It is
not for thee to choose thy way of love. God’s jester is neither man nor
woman nor child, but a singer of joys and woes to ease men’s souls and
dry the eyes of women. Play thy part, then, and laugh thy laugh. Men win
her lips, women crave her help, the world takes her service, and thou
her smiles. Wouldst thou have more, thou poet lover in the guise of a
fool?

Then throw thy cloak down for a lover to kneel on if Fate shows thee his
face. Drown the world’s chatter with thy bells while lips kiss. In his
absence make songs and sing them to ease the travail of love in her
body. If no lover comes, then hearten and hasten even thine own enemy
into her service, if so be she gets strength and comfort from the
strange enterprise. Then make thine own soul white as the rose she has
given thee. On with thy cap and bells! Grow nimble and dance. Dance and
sing in thy jester’s way, for the homesickness of the heaven thou hast
seen will teach thee strange melodies. When death claims thee, and the
cap and bells are laid aside, God’s Jester shall sleep with a white rose
on his breast.

“Dead,” they will say, but no! At last thou shalt hear the eternal song
of the souls of women and be satisfied!


                HEAVEN’S JESTER TO THE BODY OF HIS LADY

Heaven’s Jester said unto himself, “I have no need of my lady’s body,
her soul suffices. In the passionate pressure of lips the Fool has known
his God and the man has found the woman. Let that suffice!”

In the dawn the white rose spoke once more to the jester. “Thou hast
lied. Thy lady’s unknown body is untried music to thee. Thy hands would
touch the strings, thy ear catch the vibrations her soul modulates to
sounds of sighs and sobs at the call of love. Look at my whiteness!
Think of thy unrest! The secrets of thy lady’s body are not learnt
through the strong desires common to the herd of men or the fainting
dreams of impassioned women. Fool! inscribed as thou art in the heavenly
registers by a woman as God’s Fool, thou must learn the mystic’s lore
about the body of thy Love. Thy desire is towards thy lady, and her
will, not thine, is thy law. Hearken then! It were the work of an
instant to close thy strong hands round her throat and bruise her into
forgetfulness that love is pain. To force her mouth, so much desired,
into an open well for slaking thine own thirst is love’s delicious
robbery. To hurtle to her breast, as if to rob and forestall the child
who may one day drink there, is to have found a shrine for prayer and
peace. Yes! even to rest in the hallowed forests of her body ere thou
storm the citadel where thy weapon shall break into the silent house of
life, is easy and has always been the way of men with woman. Woman the
abandoned, man the triumphant, woman the flower, man the gatherer, woman
the luscious wine and man the thirsty drinker. Thy old-world needs
desire thy lady in the way of men, though prayer before and after would
grace thy feasting. Listen to the secret the white rose whispers to
thee. It does not suffice that thou dost need thy lady or even that thy
lady needs thee. Thou must prepare thyself for her even if she has no
need of thee. The gateways of thy body must be clean, pure as snow and
free from taint. Thy thoughts must shine through thine eyes like stars,
thy passions burn with fires at white heat, without smoke or noise.
Heaven’s jester may not approach the Holy of Holies till Desire is as
white flame. The sacrament of thy Lady’s Body is precious bread and
wine, to be partaken of at her desire, not thine, and only in Heaven’s
good time. It is not for thee to choose. Thy part is to watch and pray
and laugh and sing, and maybe lead another in to the feast thou hast
prepared. Thou must bring to thy lady’s white feet frankincense and
myrrh, the spoils of the sorrows thou hast borne for the tired
travellers on thy journey. Precious stones, too, thou must gather for
her neck, from the shores of thy past desolations. Pearls thou must also
offer, burnished out of the memories of thy wayward desires which knew
not her chastity or her smiles. For her breasts thou must bring shields
forged from thy gluttonies and petty aims. For her arms crystals wrought
out of thy dreams. For her girdle rubies made from all thy heart’s
desire. For her eyes? Ah! perhaps thy kiss, delicate and passionate as
is the way of seas and clouds when the earth sleeps. For her forehead
thou mayest weave a crown of myrtle, for friendship, as thy Love is thy
Friend and is steadfast. For her ears I will tell thee the dreams of my
sister, almost black with the redness the sun has poured into her heart.
For her hair, only a wreath of “love in the mist,” for in that little
flower is the wonder of the Great Heart thou art learning to understand.
For her lips, only thy hopes made chaste and thy fears made passionate,
if God wills.

Should thy Love waken with thy kisses on her closed eyes and turn
towards thee with wonder and joy at the things thou hast learned and the
gifts thou hast given to her, then have a care! Women are not drunk with
wine but with pity, and pity is no use to Heaven’s Jester. There are
signs, though, which even thou canst understand, and when Love is born,
the Fool is wise. If by chance, for there is no hope in this message of
the dawn, there is a resurrection day for thee, if by chance or God’s
pure will, she turns to thee as God allows one spirit to turn to another
spirit, when Love has prepared the altar, then clash thy cymbals, blow
thy trumpet, shout till the sleepy world rejoices, shake thy bells and
fling thy Jester’s cap and cloak aside, for to eat the sacramental bread
and drink the wine of thy love’s pure body thou wilt not need raiment,
and as thou wert born and as thou wilt die thou wilt enter into thy Holy
of Holies. And if thou die of joy, thou criest:

   What is Death?
   Only Love freed.


                    THE FOOL TO THE SOUL OF HIS LADY

The Jester said to himself, “If the body of my lady is so fair a
tabernacle for her soul, how can I, a Fool, understand the ways of her
spirit? My lute and pipes can only render the voices of the wind, the
sea, the trees and the cries of beasts in joy and pain. My bells are a
Jester’s toys for assuaging the griefs of the children of men. The
travailings of my lady’s spirit, like the snow on the mountains, are out
of reach of a fool’s understanding. For one brief hour I heard a faint
whisper in the halls of peace when my name was signed in the heavenly
registers, but, except in my heart, I carried no trophy to earth by
which I could tell men of the music I heard.

This is the birthday of my Lady, the festival which calls for prayer and
joy. Prayer, because the paths of earth are hard for the feet of her
whose tread awakens a longing for wings in the Fool standing near. Joy,
because her eyes are mirrors of a time to come when love and peace will
renew earth into heaven, and men and women will become as wise as eagles
and children. Through her body, I love the soul of my lady, and through
her soul I love her body. Neither her soul nor her body may help and
comfort the Jester even though God leads and helps him by both grace and
mercy. Though his heart be sore and his body sick unto death and there
seems none to comfort him, he can still sing songs for men and pipe
melodies for women of the wonders revealed to him.”

The White Rose, dying by the Jester’s bed, spoke once more to the Fool.

“Cast self pity out of thine heart. Learn to live as I have learned to
die, and then learn to die as I have learned to live. For thee absence
seems death, but trace the meaning of the soul of the woman thou lovest.
Her soul is also absent from the Oversoul as her body is absent from a
Lover. Only through absence can the Oversoul draw its own to itself, and
only through loneliness can the Great Lover and the Lesser Lover
understand one another. Words confuse and touch enslaves. Souls speak
clearly in the silence. In absence a note becomes a chord, and in
silence the chord becomes a symphony. The discord dissolves into
harmony, and the darkness into dawn. The absence of Death is not
different from that of Life, for Death is Life, and Life the discord
making Death’s music. The soul of thy Lady will find thine by the aid of
both Life and Death, for it is not God’s Fool who hath declared that
there is no Love nor a Creater thereof. Thou art learning that all is
Love. In thy prayers today for thy Lady’s peace incline thy spirit
towards hers as both approach the maternal source of the Universe. It is
the Mother-Spirit of the world who has hidden thy love from thy sight,
and taken thine head from the touch of her hands and torn thy lips from
her kisses. Is it not always so that the mothers of the smaller world
wean their children into growth and knowledge? Thou art still hers even
if her body is out of sight and touch, for pure love is the simple
miracle of thine heritage as a son of man and of God. Nothing can take
from me what the sun made of me through his shining. Even as I die the
fragrance remains. Nothing can rob thee of the hours when all things
seem possible because of thy hopes and her vows. Love is pain but
over-love is peace. Turn thy tears into help and pity for those who weep
without thy hope and for those who dwell in dungeons and are not yet
registered in heaven as wise or foolish. Let thy longings for one break
into prayer for the weal of the world. Thou wert not sent here only for
thy pleasure or thy peace, nor was the body of thy Lady sent for thy
delight, or her soul for thy strength alone. Pain is ordained for the
bringers of good tidings and love lent for the redemption of the many
through the loneliness of the one. Accept thy lot and thy vision shall
make thee free. Resist thy fate and thy Love’s soul and thine shall
sleep embedded in flesh and with no power to grow wings. On thy knees
then and pray for strength and courage with thy cap and bells in
readiness by thy side, and joy within thy heart. As I die thou must
live.”

The Jester took the rose in his hands, and, as its petals fell, a Fool’s
prayer broke the silence.

“Maker of men,” he cried, “pour into a fool’s heart the understanding of
life’s joy and pain. Make my spirit at one with the great order. Let me
understand what is required of me and in understanding be at peace.” As
he prayed, the Jester slept, for a great weariness was on him from much
dancing. In his dream, a little child ran towards him. He opened his
Jester’s cloak, and the little one held the sleeves in her tiny hands.

“Give all that thou hast and all that thou art even to one so small as
I,” cried the child and ran from his sight.

The Jester was awakened by the opening and clanging of a door. He went
out into the courtyard. A beggar, unshaved, and swollen with dropsy,
stood before him. He had evil eyes and a mouth twisted by pain. He
looked at the Jester and laughed.

“Give me thy cap and bells,” he said, “I have need of them.”

The Jester took money from his pouch.

“Take all this instead,” he cried.

The old man laughed.

“Any lord or lady can throw me that,” he said, “if only to keep me from
defiling them by my presence. Gold costs less to give than to gather. It
is dross and could only help my body to live and suffer. Thy cap and
bells would succour my spirit so that I could forget my body. With the
jingle of them I could smile at the curses of the healthy or the jibes
of the well-washed. Give them to me. Thou art well and happy and hast no
need of help.”

The Jester bowed his head and gave up his cap and bells, but with sorrow
and pain in his heart. The beggar ran away shaking the bells and dancing
with glee, the Jester’s cap all awry on his swollen head. A sweet
melting tenderness and faintness took hold of the Jester and an ecstasy
swayed him so that he nearly fell.

“It is the soul of my Lady speaking to mine,” he whispered. “What matter
the cap and bells? Let them go.”

The woman he loved stood by him and her voice was like a lute on the air
as she grasped the Jester’s shoulders.

“Give all thy music to me,” she whispered, “I am in sore travail because
of things a Fool cannot understand. Thy music ravishes me and makes me
know that love is a consuming fire in which one burns gladly. Thy wild
notes make desire in me a quenchless thirst which no drinking can
assuage. Thy soft piping fills my veins with a pain which is like joy
and with a joy which is like pain. Give me all, keep nothing back. I
would see as thou seest, hear as thou hearest, dream as thou dreamest,
so that I can play as thou, but I must tune thy pipes to the voice of my
heart.”

The Jester drew his hood over his head and went to his cell. His Lady
had no doubt as to what he would bring back to her, for she had learnt
from him that love gives all things without question or regret. The
Jester quite simply collected all the instruments he had made during the
long years of his youth and his manhood. They were precious to him, for
he had not been able to buy as others because of his poverty. He had
gone even to the offal of the slaughter-houses, and to the dank banks of
the ponds, and the waste places in hills and valleys for the things
which gave his instruments such power over men with the strange cries he
evoked. The Jester’s sadness had been greater than even his poverty, but
the music had never failed to comfort and strengthen him. Voices from
the over-world and under-world spoke to him, and the strange secrets he
translated into sound. The Jester’s heart was glad at last. His Lady had
need of him and of what he had made. His music was hers as his heart was
hers. He laid all his precious instruments at her feet and looked in her
eyes. There were smiles for him there. She bent as he knelt and took his
head, as of old, between her long cool hands, and kissed his brow.

“Happy, happy Fool,” she cried, “thus to be able to give all. I will
break hearts with the sweetness of these strings, I will bind others to
me and know it is thy gift. Happy Fool! Goodbye!”

“May God comfort thee and me,” said the Jester, as he turned toward his
cell.


                           THE JESTER SLEEPS

“The Jester is dead.” The words were said gravely, and the Lady who
heard them looked keenly in an old man’s face.

“Dead,” she cried.

“Yes! Found dead this morning. We could not find his cap and bells nor
the instruments he loved more than all other things. There seems no more
music in the world now, for we all grew happy through his music and the
sun.”

“Dead!” she whispered. “May I....”

She hesitated. “Yes, come.”

The old man led the way.

“He is there. We found nothing by him but the leaves of a dead white
rose and the wind from his window blew them on to his breast.”

“He smiles,” said the Lady.

There was silence in the cell except for the fierce howling of an April
wind and the tiny fluttering of the leaves on the breast of the Jester.

The Lady turned towards the door.

“His instruments are at the gate,” she said, impatiently. “Why did he
die, I wonder? The reeds are no use to me. I cannot play upon them ...
not a sound will come.”




                             Green Symphony


                          JOHN GOULD FLETCHER


                                   I

   The glittering leaves of the rhododendrons
   Balance and vibrate in the cool air;
   While in the sky above them
   White clouds chase each other.

   Like scampering rabbits,
   Flashes of sunlight sweep the lawn;
   They fling in passing
   Patterns of shadow,
   Golden and green.

   With long cascades of laughter,
   The mating birds dart and swoop to the turf:
   ’Mid their mad trillings
   Glints the gay sun behind the trees.

   Down there are deep blue lakes:
   Orange blossom droops in the water.

   In the tower of the winds,
   All the bells are set adrift:
   Jingling
   For the dawn.

   Thin fluttering streamers
   Of breeze lash through the swaying boughs,
   Palely expectant
   The earth receives the slanting rain.

   I am a glittering raindrop
   Hugged close by the cool rhododendron.
   I am a daisy starring
   The exquisite curves of the close-cropped turf.

   The glittering leaves of the rhododendron
   Are shaken like blue green blades of glass,
   Flickering, cracking, falling:
   Splintering in a million fragments.
   The wind runs laughing up the slope
   Stripping off handfuls of wet green leaves,
   To fling in peoples’ faces.
   Wallowing on the daisy-powdered turf,
   Clutching at the sunlight,
   Cavorting in the shadow.

   Like baroque pearls,
   Like cloudy emeralds,
   The clouds and the trees clash together;
   Whirling and swirling,
   In the tumult
   Of the spring,
   And the wind.


                                   II

   The trees splash the sky with their fingers,
   A restless green rout of stars.

   With whirling movement
   They swing their boughs
   About their stems:
   Planes on planes of light and shadow
   Pass among them,
   Opening fanlike to fall.

   The trees are like a sea;
   Tossing;
   Trembling,
   Roaring,
   Wallowing,
   Darting their long green flickering fronds up at the sky,
   Subsiding,
   Spotted with white blossom-spray.

   The trees are roofs:
   Hollow caverns of cool blue shadow,
   Solemn arches
   In the afternoons.
   The whole vast horizon
   In terrace beyond terrace,
   Pinnacle above pinnacle,
   Lifts to the sky
   Serrated ranks of green on green.

   They caress the roofs with their fingers,
   They sprawl about the river to look into it;
   Up the hill they come
   Gesticulating challenge:
   They cower together
   In dark valleys;
   They yearn out over the fields.

   Enamelled domes
   Tumble upon the grass,
   Crashing in ruin
   Quiet at last.

   The trees lash the sky with their leaves,
   Uneasily shaking their dark green manes.


                                  III

   Far let the voices of the mad wild birds be calling me,
   I will abide in this forest of pines.

   When the wind blows
   Battling through the forest,
   I hear it distantly,
   Like the crash of a perpetual sea.

   When the rain falls,
   I watch silver spears slanting downwards
   From pale river-pools of sky,
   Enclosed in dark fronds.

   When the sun shines,
   I weave together distant branches till they enclose mighty circles,
   I sway to the movement of hooded summits,
   I swim leisurely in deep blue seas of air.

   I hug the smooth bark of stately red pillars
   And with cones carefully scattered
   I mark the progression of dark dial-shadows
   Flung diagonally downwards through the afternoon.

   This turf is not like turf:
   It is a smooth dry carpet of velvet,
   Embroidered with brown patterns of needles and cones.
   These trees are not like trees:
   They are innumerable feathery pagoda-umbrellas,
   Stiffly ungracious to the wind,
   Teetering on red-lacquered stems.

   In the evening I listen to the winds’ lisping,
   While the conflagrations of the sunset flicker and clash behind me,
   Flamboyant crenelations of glory amid the charred ebony boles.

   In the night the fiery nightingales
   Shall clash and trill through the silence:
   Like the voices of mermaids crying
   From the sea.

   Long ago has the moon whelmed this uncompleted temple.
   Stars swim like gold fish far above the black arches.

   Far let the timid feet of dawn fly to catch me:
   I will abide in this forest of pines:
   For I have unveiled naked beauty,
   And the things that she whispered to me in the darkness,
   Are buried deep in my heart.

   Now let the black tops of the pine-trees break like a spent wave,
   Against the grey sky:
   These are tombs and memorials and temples and altars sunkindled for me.




                       The Case of French Poetry


                           RICHARD ALDINGTON

It is with a feeling of regret and astonishment that I find nearly all
my English confrères so opposed to the spirit of French culture, so
mistaken in their views, and so curiously ignorant of the real facts of
the development of modern French literature.

I am led to this reflection by reading Mr. Shanks’s excellent article in
your December number. It is a most ungracious task to criticise a man
who is about to hazard his life in the service of his country; and I
honor Mr. Shanks more than I can express. But if I felt as Mr. Shanks
does on the subject of French and German poetry I would not fight at all
or I would fight for Germany! To a poet poetry must be the great
business of life and, speaking for myself, I would emphatically support
the Germans if I thought they were better poets than the French and
English! (You will take that rhetorical statement for what it is worth.)

Intellectually about fifty per cent of English people are Germanized
without knowing it. I should say the percentage is even higher in
America. I believe that no study is considered so frivolous or so
suspect in both countries as the study of French art and poetry. And
yet—Russia and one or two Anglo-Saxons put aside—the history of the art
of the last fifty years is the history of French art. You who have given
Whistler to the world do not need me to tell you what French art is. The
American painting at a recent Exhibition here was of so high a quality
that I felt my respect for the intellectual progress of America greatly
increased. I admit freely and regretfully that it was immeasurely better
than English painting. That is because most Americans study painting in
Paris.

Why don’t they sometimes give a look at the poetry of France, for in no
country is poetry so cultivated, so well understood, and so honored? Mr.
Shanks apparently knows something of German poetry and nothing of
French. Of Liliencron I know nothing. But I do know something of
Hauptmann, Dehmel, and Stefan Georg. (I have no doubt Mr. Shanks
dislikes Georg because the latter got his training in France.) Well, I
will cheerfully wager that any more or less fair-minded person would
find three equally good poets in France to every one that can be
mentioned in Germany.

“Kahn, Régnier, and the other Symbolistes”! What an odd statement!
Régnier is a Parnassian and Kahn a nobody. I am not going to write a
history of modern French poetry, nor speculate as to the effect of 1870
or the probable effect of 1914 on poetry, especially French poetry. I
just want to give some names, and if anyone,—if Mr. Shanks,—can give me
half as many German poets of the same calibre, charm, and general
technical accomplishment I shall be delighted.

Let us grant that Rimbaud, Verlaine, and the elder Parnassians were
products of the period of before 1870. Well, since that disastrous war
France has produced the following—I will not say great—delightful and
readable poets: Samain, Francis Jammes, Henri de Régnier, Jean Moréas,
Paul Fort, Laurent Tailhade, Jules Romains, Remy de Gourmont, Charles
Vildrac, Laforgue, Louys (translations), Mallarmé (pre-1870?) and
younger men like Guy-Charles Cros, Apollinaire, Castiaux, André Spire,
Carco, Divoire, Jouve, Luc Durtain, and dozens more. I do not mention
the Belgians Maeterlinck, Verhaeren, Elskamp, and Rodenbach, nor the two
Franco-Americans Vielé Griffin, and Merrill—though they also have
considerable reputations. (Did you ever hear of an American who wanted
to write German?)

I have quoted off-hand twenty-six names from a period of about forty
years. And you must remember that there are scores and scores of names
only a little less known, and scores and scores beyond that which I may
have missed in my reading.

But I think those few names prove beyond all doubt—and I would like
people to read them and contrast them with German poets—that French
poetry is the foremost in our age for fertility, originality, and
general poetic charm.

It is not hatred of Germany but love of poetry which has called this
letter from me. I believe in France in the French tradition. And if
there is one thing which can reconcile me to this war it is the fact
that England has ranged herself beside France and Belgium, beside the
cosmopolite, graceful, humanizing, influences of France and French
civilization against the nationalist, narrow, and dehumanizing
influences of Berlin. I believe all Englishmen regret that they oppose
the gay, cultivated, cosmopolite Austrians; it is a misfortune. But of
the great issue between the nations—the great intellectual issue—there
can be no doubt. And Mr. Shanks, when he praises (unjustly I firmly
believe) the poets of Germany and disparages (equally unjustly) the
poets of France, is intellectually on the side of the enemy he is so
courageously opposing with physical force. I believe in the kindliness
of Germans; I know them to be excellent fathers and most generous
friends; I know them to be brave soldiers and sailors; I know they are
good chemists, reasonably good doctors, and very boring professors. At
the name of Heine all men should doff their hats, but that modern
Germany (Germany since 1870) has produced one-fiftieth of the poetry
that France has produced—in quality as well as quantity—that it has
added anything to the purely creative side of the arts, I utterly deny.

I know that there is Nietzsche.... Perhaps I will write you another
letter on Nietzsche, if I may.

I feel that this protest will be put down to “war-fever.” I must refer
you to my pre-war articles in English periodicals, and to the testimony
of my friends—some of whom are now in America—that such has always been
my attitude. It has always been a deep regret of mine that both American
and English literature, criticism and periodicals were so undermined
with German influences that all gentleness, all intentional good will,
all that we mean by the “Latin tradition” was anathema, and utterly
despised!




                             The Last Woman


                              GEORGE SOULE

     (_The second of a series of three Dramatic Extravaganzas to be
                    called “Plays for Irascibles.”_)


                              CHARACTERS:

             THE SAGE OF THE GREEN EARS   }                
             THE SAGE OF THE PURPLE HAIR  }                
             THE SAGE OF THE BLUE FACE    }                
             THE SAGE OF THE YELLOW HAT   }  FUTURIST SAGES
             THE SAGE OF THE RED SWORD    }                
             THE SAGE OF THE WHITE HEART  }                
             THE WOMAN                    }                


                                 SCENE:

_The Council Room of the Futurist Sages, decorated in brilliant colors
to suggest a battle of the minds at some far future date. The Sages are
seated about the walls in a parabolic curve. They are costumed with
appropriate inappropriateness. Green ears is in present day evening
dress; Purple hair in fiery green robes; Blue face in a pink business
suit; Yellow hat in a conventional futurist costume of mingled colors;
Red sword in a black monk’s gown, with a sword in his rope girdle; White
heart, who is young, in football armor._

BLUE FACE. Shall we give the woman a chance to defend herself?

GREEN EARS. Why should we? If her defense is good, we shall be
prejudiced against her. And as we admit the rule of prejudice, the
defense will lose its judicial character.

RED SWORD. Judicial? Who wants to be judicial? I abolished that word
last year.

GREEN EARS. That’s just the point. We hate the judicial; therefore if
the defense loses its judicial character we may be forced to decide both
ways at the same time. Acquit on the ground of illogical defense;
convict on the grounds of prejudice against good defense.

PURPLE HAIR. Red sword has abolished judicial. Well, we have also
abolished the past; we have abolished all abolishments!

YELLOW HAT. Above all, we must guard against precedent. Let us look up
all previous trials, and take care to do the opposite.

WHITE HEART. But again, that would entangle us in the past. I want to
see the woman!

RED SWORD. He wants to see the woman! He is a reactionary!

PURPLE HAIR. Do not argue, brothers. For if we argue, we shall either
settle the case by logic, which we repudiate, or by violence, so that we
shall kill each other before we have a chance to decide about the woman.

RED SWORD. Time server! I shall kill you all, and decide for myself.

BLUE FACE. Red cabbages, redness of blue cabbages, when breakfast is no
cabbage in a potato. Cocoa crinkles!

YELLOW HAT. He is right, brothers.

ALL. He is right.

BLUE FACE. We, who have exalted ourselves above all modes of thought, we
who have cast aside all images and unfettered ourselves from all
language and all sequence, we who have repudiated humanity; we have a
right to fight a lower order with its own weapons. Caprice is our god;
let us then have a caprice to judge this woman with logic and judicial
procedure. Have you all this caprice?

ALL. We have.

RED SWORD. I object: This is democracy.

GREEN EARS. We accept your objection, and act in opposition to it.

BLUE FACE. Then let the woman be brought in.

(_White Heart goes out right and brings in the woman. She is tall, of
beautiful face and figure, in a simple white Greek tunic. In her hair is
a gold fillet. She is led to the center, where she is left standing, as
White Heart resumes his seat._)

BLUE FACE. Deliver the charge, Red sword!

RED SWORD (_standing_). You are charged, first, with being a woman. And
as a woman you are the living incarnation of the past. You represent
conservatism and the anti-military virtues; you clog the wheels of
progress; you sap men’s energies and misdirect them from the triumphs of
achievement to the service of material things—or immaterial things. Your
effeminate beauty poisons art and furnishes countless photographic
realists with the means of selling paintings. The love of you has
vitiated poetry and music. Masquerading in the garments of caprice, you
have deceived man into accepting the traditional. As Futurists we detest
you. This is the first charge! (_A pause._)

THE WOMAN. You accuse me of being a woman. It is a grave charge. But
first, in order that I may have a chance to disprove it, I suggest that
you tell me what a woman is.

GREEN EARS. A woman is that whose place is in the home.

PURPLE HAIR. A woman is that which is ruled by instinct.

BLUE FACE. A woman is that which is beautiful.

YELLOW HAT. A woman is that which men call a mystery.

WHITE HEART (_rapturously_). A woman is that which men love.

RED SWORD (_vehemently_). A woman is that which men hate.

THE WOMAN. These are your definitions?

BLUE FACE. They are.

THE WOMAN. Then in order to prove that I am a woman you must prove that
they describe me. And you must prove that there is nothing else in me.

RED SWORD. We must prove nothing. We act.

THE WOMAN. Then why do you talk?

RED SWORD (_heatedly_). I deny that you are beautiful. And if you are
beautiful, I deny beauty.

YELLOW HAT. Is it not our caprice to be judicial? Come, Red Sword, do
not descend to flattery!

PURPLE HAIR. All our definitions have been proved a million times. They
are unprovable.

THE WOMAN. I admit them. What then? I will leave the home, I will learn
logic, I will cut off my nose, I will tell you my mystery, and I will
let your love and your hate kill each other. And I shall still be here.

WHITE HEART. Then you will not be a woman, you will be a feminist!

THE WOMAN. But I shall be I instead of what you think I am.

RED SWORD. You can not be you unless you are what we think you are.

BLUE FACE. Brothers, can we kill the woman and spare the feminist?

WHITE HEART. If you kill the woman you will make the feminist.

YELLOW HAT. No; the feminist is more female than the woman. The feminist
would inflict domesticity on the world. She wants all men for her
husband. She wants to tie pink ribbons on siege guns and abolish the
mountains to make room for the nursery. If we let the feminist live, man
can no longer find a place in which to be alone with his adventure. If
we let the feminist live we shall make the woman a giant. If we kill the
woman we shall kill them both at the same time.

GREEN EARS. Show us the feminist without the woman.

THE WOMAN. I will do so if you will cease to be men.

BLUE FACE. We have ceased to be men. We are supermen.

THE WOMAN. Then you see the subwoman.

RED SWORD (_fiercely_). We must kill what we see.

THE WOMAN. But have I not shown you that I am something besides a woman?

RED SWORD. You might show us that you are everything, and still I would
hate you. Hate is not hate unless it exists for its own sake.

THE WOMAN. At last you have spoken the truth. I am everything. And you
hate me because you hate me.

BLUE FACE. Gentle pickles in a vacillating pink mound. Inkwell is not
ink. Ink is not inkwell. Flying postman leathers purple letters.

THE WOMAN. But I have reserved my best defence to the last. I am a
descendant of Gertrude Stein!

RED SWORD. Descendant! What heresy! Gertrude Stein had no descendants.
She has ascendants!

YELLOW HAT. Deliver the rest of the charge.

RED SWORD. Be it known unto you that we are the sole surviving members
of the human race. By a process of selection we have killed all except
the best stock. You alone remain of the female sex. We charge you not
only in your capacity as woman, but in your capacity as mother. In order
to prove your right to live, you must justify mankind. We accuse you of
being the perpetuator of human beings! Defend yourself!

THE WOMAN. You are the sole surviving males?

YELLOW HAT. We are.

THE WOMAN. Then you may let me live. I shall not perpetuate the race.

WHITE HEART. Do not despair; _I_ will marry you!

GREEN EARS. Where are your manners? Has not Shaw taught us that women do
the wooing?

BLUE FACE. What have we to do with Shaw? Let us be serious about
frivolous matters.

RED SWORD. She is not to be trusted. It is necessary for her to defend
the race. Speak, woman!

THE WOMAN. Now indeed you have given me a heavy burden. What could be
brought forward as a defence for humanity? Why should anything exist?

YELLOW HAT. Why, indeed? That is for you to show. For aeons life has
perpetuated itself through a mere animal instinct. Yet through all that
time consciousness has been growing; will has at last come into the
ascendancy. Now for the first time man’s ego is really on the throne.
For the first time man, with power to extinguish himself, can demand an
adequate reason for his existence. And man is ready to hear the secret
of the sphinx. We have come to you, madam, as the last and most perfect
woman, as the final manifestation of the eternal mystery, to force you
on pain of death to divulge yourself.

THE WOMAN. But I thought mankind existed for the purpose of creating the
superman.

PURPLE HAIR. He did; but now he has created the superman. We are the
embodiment of the purpose. What next?

BLUE FACE. As futurists we refuse to accept the old answer. If our
existence merely pushes the problem forward a few generations, it is
futile. If, on the other hand, we are the crowning goal of man’s
endeavor, there is no need to create further.

THE WOMAN. You are superchildren using superlogic. How can a reason come
out of one who is ruled by instinct? How can a conservative satisfy a
futurist? But I will answer you, and my answer is this: I am a female so
that you may be males. I am a holder of traditions so that you may smash
them. And I perpetuate the race so that you may ask the reason.

RED SWORD. Come, come, this will not do. We are above the fogs of
mysticism. We are talking of final things, and we must have a definite
answer.

THE WOMAN. Then make a definite accusation.

PURPLE HAIR. We hold the human race guilty until it is proved innocent.
We assume the position of an all-wise intelligence, as aloof from the
earth as the farthest star. And we see a race of ant-things crawling on
two legs and going through all sorts of meaningless antics. Why is one
ant exalted? Because he has led an army which has killed a million other
ants. Because he has discovered how to make ants live a few seconds
longer. Because he has written a rhyme with ant-words or put a few
senseless daubs on ant-canvas. And when the ant asked himself what his
purpose was, he answered first, “To exist.” And his second answer was
like the first: “To create something more like myself than I am.” There
is no validity in these which a superior intelligence can recognize.
What is the third answer?

RED SWORD. Woman, defend yourself!

WHITE HEART. Stop! I love the woman and I demand her (_He jumps from his
seat and embraces her_).

THE WOMAN. Here, O supermen, is your answer! Man exists for that which
cannot be spoken, for that which cannot be thought. He exists for his
mystery, for that which he loves, for that which he hates. Man exists
for me!

GREEN EARS. And if he denies you?

THE WOMAN. You cannot have your future without your past.

RED SWORD. You see, I was right; we shouldn’t have listened to her. She
is her own argument; and she has to bring in the past. Away with her!

YELLOW HAT. Away with her; we exist for ourselves!

BLUE FACE. Remarkable apples, apple black, apple pink, blossom apples in
squirming shrieks. Skyrockets deserve apples. Bang!

RED SWORD. Stop using that antique language! I’m sick of it. It’s too
obvious.

PURPLE HAIR. Yes, we have proved that we can be more obscure in good
English.

RED SWORD. And now, brothers, the sentence! The execution!

ALL. The sentence, the sentence!

RED SWORD. Stand aside, White Heart, or I will kill you both at the same
time!

WHITE HEART. I shall die with her!

RED SWORD. You are not yet superman. We shall execute the last man and
the last woman together. (_To the woman_) Have you any last words? It is
traditional to have last words.

THE WOMAN. I will match my silence against your silence, my eternity
against your eternity!

RED SWORD. Come with me! (_He leads them out, right. There is an
oppressive silence. In a moment he returns, wiping his sword on his
gown. He takes his seat without a word. The light begins to fail, and
the room grows rapidly darker until the last few sentences are spoken in
an enveloping blackness._)

GREEN EARS. Man has produced the superman, and the superman has put an
end to mankind.

BLUE FACE. Brothers, we stand on an icy mountain peak in the twilight of
time.

YELLOW HAT. We experience a breathless emotion which no one has had
before, which there will be no more to have.

PURPLE HAIR. No longer do we feel the drag of the past; no longer do we
feel the lure of the future.

RED SWORD. We are the future. We are the goal of consciousness.

BLUE FACE. For this moment has mankind dragged out a million weary
years.

GREEN EARS. For this moment have been the countless joys of love, the
countless pangs of death.

YELLOW HAT. The thing-in-itself for which philosophers have sought—that
is here.

PURPLE HAIR. We have broken the spell of cause and consequence.

RED SWORD. Will has won its first and its last victory over fate.

GREEN EARS. The stupid serpent of wisdom swallowing its own tail has
grown great and finished the task.

BLUE FACE. Grubbing logic has looked into the mirror and discovered
itself to be gigantic caprice.

YELLOW HAT. Infinity has turned inside-out and become nothingness.

PURPLE HAIR. The great contradiction has annihilated itself.

RED SWORD. Let us keep silence before the solution of the ancient
riddle.

(_A long, dark silence. Slow curtain._)


   There is something transitory in the moods evoked by rhyme. For
   rhyme shimmers on the surface of language like sunlight on the
   surface of a shallow stream; it conducts the mind as in a circle;
   its sphere is a world of harmonious delights. Rhyme is to the
   mind what sentimentality is to art.—_Francis Grierson._




                      The Liberties of the People


                           WILLIAM L. CHENERY

LORD VALIANT. The exercise of such tyranny over the minds of men has
been productive, in a great degree, of the miseries that have fallen
upon mankind. We have been happy in England since every man has been at
liberty to speak his mind.

MEDROSO. And we are very quiet at Lisbon, where nobody is permitted to
say anything.

LORD VALIANT. You are quiet but you are not happy. Your tranquility is
that of galley slaves who tug the oar, and keep time in silence. * * *

MEDROSO. But what if I find myself quite at ease in galleys?

LORD VALIANT. Nay, in that case, you deserve to continue there.

                                                          _—Voltaire._

Sunday afternoon, January 17, Chicago was given a vivid picture of the
liberties allowed the people. On that occasion the freedom of assemblage
and the right of free speech were ruthlessly and brutally denied a great
host of people because forsooth they were poor and unemployed.

Men and women whose crime was that they could not find work had
assembled at Hull House. After the meeting, it was suggested that a
parade would impress their needs upon the city. Immediately they were
attacked by the police, some of whom had been disguised in the tatters
of unemployed men and scattered into the crowd. Young girls were beaten,
women were knocked down, men were assaulted, and all in the name of law.

The assistant chief of police, Herman F. Schuettler, directed the
official lawlessness. This exponent of anarchy detailed fifty mounted
police to charge the assemblage of hungry men and women. And here is the
explanation given by Schuettler:

“We expected something like this to happen. We had refused these people
a permit and they took it upon themselves to violate the law. I have no
fault to find with the conduct of the policemen. Of course they may have
been a bit rough but I am sure they acted within their rights. They were
obeying orders.”

And then, poltroon fashion, the anarchistic police attempted to conceal
their stupid crimes and cruelties by stressing the fact that Mrs. Lucy
Parsons, one of the philosophical anarchists of Chicago, was a speaker
at the Hull House meeting! Could bureaucracy go further?

The episode is important because it is typical of what is going on all
over the United States. It is a by-product of our undigested industrial
order and also a promise of what the future has in store for us; it is
the prophecy of a future feudalism which is rising like a flood and
which will sweep us into impotency if we are not wise enough and strong
enough to plan a sound reconstruction. From San Diego to Portland, from
Los Angeles to New York, the fight is raging. In places the people have
definitely lost all the rights and privileges of a supposed democracy.
In Lead, S. D., in the Colorado coal fields, in parts of Montana, in
parts of the Michigan copper country, in West Virginia, in Pennsylvania,
and in Massachusetts, whole sections of the population have been
degraded by forces too strong for them to a condition of servility. A
servile people is not a threat of the future; it is a comment upon the
present. And among the servile peoples, the liberties have perished. The
question which now remains is only: “Is the remnant strong enough or
disciplined sufficiently to regain the fundamentals of freedom which
slipped away while we slept?”

It is not only the poor unemployed who have been battered about and made
to cringe. Preachers and professors have also felt the stultifying
constraint exercised by tired business men in moods of irritation.
Howard Crosby Warren gave an appallingly lengthy list of professors who
have been discharged from universities all over the land within the last
two or three years because they exercised the most commonplace latitude
in the choice of their sentiments and their pronouncements. A Florida
professor had to forego his position because he doubted the finality of
the wisdom of the ante-bellum teachers in the South. A professor at
Marietta College, Ohio, was forced to resign because his political
opinions were displeasing to his masters. A professor at Wesleyan was
driven out on account of his opinion concerning the observance of the
Sabbath. But why go on? The number is tediously inclusive.

So great has this evil become among teachers that an association of
University professors was organized in New York in early January. From
it college presidents and deans were expressly excluded. The members of
the association, actuated no doubt by motives of middle-class
respectability, announced that they were not to be considered a trade
union; but, for all their dislike of the dignity of labor, they have
found it necessary to fight as a body for the retention of the liberties
essential to self-respect.

The attack on the Chicago unemployed, who made nothing like so much of a
parade as the visitors to a ball park any summer afternoon, nor so much
of a street jam as the fashionable attendants at a Mary Garden opera,
illustrated the direction in which the attack is being made. The real
government of men is industrial, and not political, as every one knows.
Consequently the genuine tyrannies, or abuses of government, can be
discovered naturally among the incidents of industry.

Dr. Annie Marion MacLean of Adelphi College, Brooklyn, read a living
document upon this phase of the question at a conference held by the
economic and sociological associations at Princeton during Christmas
week. In the course of her investigation, says Paul U. Kellogg in his
report of the meetings in _The Survey_, Dr. MacLean had been told by
girls how their foremen had warned them against telling what their pay
was, of loft building doors locked, of foul air, and what not. The head
of an employer’s utopia had told her he would keep out unionism by
making examples of the talk leaders. How? By firing them. She told of
strikers suppressed by the police for what they said, while
strikebreakers inside the factory, hurling insults at them from the
windows, went unmolested. “Working women have the right to state the
beliefs they hold without forfeit of their livelihood,” said she. “They
need reassurance that liberty is more than a catch word. The box-maker,
the bobbin girl, and the doffer have the right not only to life but to
liberty and free speech in a land which is supposed to be the home of
freedom.”

Professors are denied the right of free speech because colleges and
universities are organized on business principles. Scholars and teachers
are deprived of the franchise in all vital matters affecting university
life. They are clerks. Tired business men are the masters of education,
and tired business men have but one great principle: loyalty to the
organization. Criticism seems sacrilege. Incidentally, that accounts for
the fact that the great inventions in business have been made by
outsiders; but that is not my story.

The same tired business men operating through the police take away the
essential liberties from trade unionists, from the unemployed, from
socialists, and from the I. W. W.’s when the occasion arises. The police
acquire the habit of tyranny and then set to work to practice it on
their own account. What reason under heaven could have persuaded Herman
F. Schuettler to order an attack on hungry men and women, inoffensive,
armed only with banners bearing fragments of the Lord’s Prayer? Surely a
Christian litany is not an incitement to riot. “Give us this day our
daily bread”—if this be treason, we may well pray for annihilation at
the touch of some vagrant comet.

But the police are pawns in the great game of the modern world, the game
of hide and seek for sovereignty. Blind and stupid, they do the
occasional desires of their masters and then, filled by a lust for
repression, go on to satiate their unwholesome appetites.

Hitherto I have assumed that the somewhat constitutional guaranties of
free speech and free assemblage—the two go hand in hand—were actual
rights. Theodore Schroeder, leader among the libertarians, has been
prominent long among the small group which has ceaselessly stressed our
fading freedom. Schroeder has an article in _The Forum_ in which he
makes a witty attack upon Comstockery and upon the censorship which has
grown up in the Post Office Department—a censorship prudish and powerful
enough to exclude the Chicago Vice Report from the mails. This
censorship of the imagined obscene is puerile and petty in sufficiency
for any appetite, but it is useless to discuss it here. The reaction is
always more potent than the action where obscenity is charged, as
witness our own September Morn. Schroeder, albeit, announces his freedom
of speech to be “a natural and a constitutional right.”

Society, so far as I know, recognizes no natural rights and modern
philosophy seems to sanction none. As for constitutional rights, every
constitution, unless it be dead, is subject to amendment. The real
foundation for the liberties of speech and assemblage is discovered in
the social need for them. Without freedom the common weal withers and
perishes. That, then, is the basis and incidentally it affords a rod by
which any attempt at censorship, by the police, by factory foremen, by
the post office, by university trustees, and even by a sluggish popular
taste, may be measured.

If the powers of Olympus would lend to men some creature of infinite
wisdom and taste, some creature versed in the weary evolutions of the
past, and pregnant with the unformulated tendencies of the future
through which an increasing happiness may be attained by men, then well
might that creature assume a censorship of human thought and speech. But
salvation cannot be won so lightly, for the seed of happiness is with
men. No one lives, or has lived, with the power to say what idea was
valuable to the world and what idea was baneful. The human substitutes
which have been commissioned during the absence of this all-wise and
all-prophetic authority have been uniformly dull, limited, and poisonous
to the best hopes of the future.

Since, then, we may not have a wise authority, why not frankly face the
situation? We blame the police, and justly, for their cruelties; yet
upon them American society has imposed an impossible task. We have
demanded free speech and free assemblage by our fundamental law, and
privately we have told the police not to obey the constitution. Who’s at
fault? New York knows. Last winter at Madison Square Garden the same
sort of folly was enacted as that which disgraced Chicago on Sunday,
January 17. Then Arthur Woods, police commissioner, saw a great light.
He made an experiment in freedom. It worked hugely to his credit and,
parenthetically, to the discredit of some of those most noisy in
demanding the right. The emptiness of many of the speakers was exhibited
and that was all. The existing order was unruffled.

As a result of his enlightenment Commissioner Woods made a request at
the conference on the old freedoms held at Princeton: “Policemen are
entitled to definite orders,” said the commissioner. “People in this
country have the constitutional right to freedom of assemblage and
freedom of speech. The police have not only the responsibility to permit
it—but to protect them in its exercise, and the police should be so
instructed.”

The police should be so instructed; the welfare of the race demands it.
But they won’t get instructions until powerful organized groups of
citizens find expression. Upon this organization rests the future.




                            A Hymn to Nature


   (_This fragment, a “Hymn to Nature,” unknown to us in the published
     works of Goethe, was found in a little bookshop in Berlin, and
    translated into English by a strong man and a strong woman whose
    lives and whose creations have served the ideals of all humanity
       in a way that will gain deeper and deeper appreciation._)

Nature!

We are encompassed and enveloped by her, powerless to emerge and
powerless to penetrate deeper.

Unbidden and unwarned she takes us up in the round of her Dance and
sweeps along with us, until exhausted we fall from her Arms.

She creates ever new Forms; what is, was never before; what was, comes
never again—everything is New and yet ever the Old.

We live in the midst of her and are Strangers to her.

She speaks incessantly with us and never betrays her Secret to us.

We have unceasing Effect upon her and yet have no Power over her.

She appears to have committed everything to Individuality and is
indifferent to the Individual.

She builds ever and ever destroys and her Workshop is inaccessible.

She is the very Children—and the Mother—where is she?

                   *       *       *       *       *

She is the only Artist.

With the simplest Materials she arrives at the most sublime Contrasts.

Without Appearance of Effort she attains utmost Perfection—the most
exact Precision veiled always in exquisite Delicacy.

Each of her Works has its own individual Being—each of her Phenomena the
most isolated Conception, yet all is Unity.

She plays a Drama.

Whether or no she sees it herself we do not know and yet she plays it
for us who stand in the Corner.

There is an eternal Life, Growth and Motion in her and yet she does not
advance.

She changes ever, no Moment is stationary with her.

She has no Conception of Rest and has fixed her Curse upon Inaction.

She is Firm.

Her Step is measured, her Exceptions rare, her Laws immutable.

She has reflected and meditated perpetually; not however as Man but as
Nature.

She has reserved for herself a specific all-embracing Thought which none
may learn from her.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Mankind is all in her and she in all.

With all she indulges in a friendly Game and rejoices the more one wins
from her.

She practices it with many, so occultly that she plays it to the End
before they are aware of it.

And most unnatural is Nature.

Whoever does not see her on every side, nowhere sees her rightly.

She loves herself and ever draws to herself Eyes and Hearts without
number.

She has set herself apart in order to enjoy herself.

Ever she lets new Admirers arise, insatiable, to open her Heart to them.

In Illusion she delights.

Whoever destroys this in himself and others, him she punishes like the
most severe Tyrant.

Whoever follows her confidently—him she presses as a child to her
Breast.

Her Children are Countless.

To none is she everywhere niggardly but she has Favorites upon whom she
lavishes much and to whom she sacrifices much.

Upon Greatness she has fixed her Protection.

She pours forth her Creations out of Nothingness and tells them not
whence they came nor whither they go; they are only to go; the Road she
knows.

She has few Motive Impulses—never worn out, always effective, always
manifold.

Her Drama is ever New because she ever creates new Spectators.

Life is her most beautiful Invention and Death her Ruse that she may
have much life.

She envelops Mankind in Obscurity and spurs him ever toward the Light.

She makes him dependent upon the Earth, inert and heavy; and ever shakes
him off again.

She gives Needs because she loves Action.

It is marvelous how she attains all this Movement with so little.

Every Need is a blessing, quickly satisfied, as quickly awakened again.

If she gives another Need—then it is a new source of Desire; but soon
she comes to Equipoise.

She starts every Moment upon the longest Race and every Moment is at the
Goal.

She is Futility itself: but not for us for whom she has made herself of
the greatest importance.

She lets every Child correct her, every Simpleton pronounce Judgment
upon her; she lets thousands pass callous over her seeing nothing and
her Joy is in all and she finds in all her Profit.

We obey her Laws even when we most resist them, we work with her even
when we wish to work against her.

She turns everything she gives into a Blessing; for she makes it
first—indispensable.

She delays that we may long for her, she hastens on that we may not be
sated with her.

She has no Speech nor Language; but she creates Tongues and Hearts
through which she feels and speaks.

Her Crown is Love.

Only through Love can we approach her.

She creates Gulfs between all Beings and all wish to intertwine.

She has isolated all that she may draw all together.

With a few Draughts from the Beaker of Love she compensates a Life full
of Toil.

She is Everything.

She rewards herself and punishes herself, rejoices and torments herself.

She is harsh and gentle, lovely and terrible, powerless and omnipotent.

Everything is ever present in her.

Past and Future she knows not—The Present is her Eternity.

She is generous.

I glorify her with all her Works.

She is wise and calm.

One drags no Explanation from her by Force, wrests no gift from her
which she does not freely give.

She is cunning but for a good purpose and it is best not to observe her
Craft.

She is complete and yet ever uncomplete; so as she goes on she can ever
go on.

To Everyone she appears in special Form.

She conceals herself behind a thousand Names and Terms and yet always is
the same.

She has placed me here; she will lead me hence;—

I confide myself to her.

She may do with me what she will: she will not despise her Work.

I speak not of her. No, what is true and what is false; She herself has
spoken all;

All the Fault is hers; hers is all the Glory.




                        My Friend, the Incurable


                                  IV.

      Pro domo mea: on the vice of simplicity. John Cowper Powys—a
                               revelation

One of my critics sent me a New Year’s wish and admonition: “You are
hectic. Why not see things as they are? You must learn to be simple.”

This is another attempt on the part of my good-wishers to cure me, in
defiance of my resolute declaration that I cannot and do not want to be
cured. Furthermore, I am in the position of a normal lunatic who
considers the whole world, except himself, insane; not only do I refuse
to learn the art of being simple, but I regard simplicity as a vice, a
defect, a misery.

What is simplicity? I cannot define things; definitions are absurd,
limiting, simplifying. In this case perhaps I ought to adopt the method
of the school-boy who defined salt as “what makes potatoes nasty when
not applied to.” It is an English joke which I have tried with
discouraging results on the American sense of humor; it suits my purpose
nevertheless. How would this do: “Simplicity is that which makes life
dull when applied to?” No; decidedly, I cannot think in Procrustean
formulas.

Nothing is simple. What nonsense it is to synonymize this word with
“natural,” as if nature were not most complex and complicated! Neither
is the primitive savage simple, for he conceives things not “as they
are,” but through a veil of awe and mystery. Nor is the child simple,
Messrs. and Mesdames Pedagogues; you may instruct it scientifically,
tell it “plain truths” and facts, but the not-yet-educated young mind
will distrust you and will continue to live in its illusionary,
fantastic world. Not even beasts may be accused of that vice: recall
Maeterlinck’s subtle dogs and horses.

Nothing is simple, although civilization has attempted to simplify a
good deal. We have come to live in accordance with established
standards, customs, regulations; inertia and routine have replaced
impulse and initiative. Science has endeavored to explain away man’s
dreams, to do away with religion, soul, imagination, to prove away our
mysteries and wonders. Known stuff. Thus has come to be the
matter-of-fact multitude, the simple, the all-knowing, those who act and
think and feel “as everybody else does,” as they are taught and trained
by the ingenious apparatus of scientific, moral, and social
classifications, definitions, simplifications, in a word—the civilized
man.

Yet side by side with civilization, machinization, automatonization,
there is another powerful force moving the world: culture. Culture
_versus_ civilization, this is how I gauge the issue. Do not ask me to
define these words: let Professor Herrick do it. We are all civilized,
of course; especially the Germans: witness their recent astounding
achievements. Now try to apply the term “culture” to the activities of
those _Kulturtraeger_ in Belgium and before Rheims—Q. E. D.
Michael Bakounin “tried” it in 1848, when he suggested to his
fellow-revolutionists in Dresden that they place on the besieged walls
Raphael’s Madonna in order to avert the canon of the cultured Prussians;
luckily the Saxons knew better their cousins, “the blond beasts.” Pardon
this paroxysm of my old disease, Prussophobia. Bakounin, you see,
belonged to the few, to the non-simple, to those who had an insight
beyond the apparent, the fact, to the hectic, to the abnormal, if you
please; “abnormal” is the label given to such individualities by the
many, the civilized.

I am not so vulgar as to affect megalomania, when asserting that I am
cultured: this is an _apologia_, a confession of my sins before my
critic, the advocate of simplicity. When facing a sunset, I do not
simply see a display of colors, nor do I think of the simple explanation
of this phenomenon as offered by science, but I live through a world of
associations, recollections of diverse impressions and reactions
imprinted on my mind by Boecklin, Mallarmé, Debussy—by all the gods that
make up the religion of modern man. Life external, simple facts, are to
me an artless raw libretto, which, naturally, cannot in itself satisfy
one who has come into this world with the intention of enjoying
grandiose opera. I call it culture, this faculty of seeing things
_creatively_, not in monotones, not through window-panes, but through
multiplying lenses which collect the rays of all suns and concentrate
them on the focus. Now, pray, is there any hope for me “to learn how to
be simple?”

Life is composed of hundreds of grey days interspersed with a few
scintillating moments, the few moments justifying our otherwise
superfluous existence. In this respect I am not a Croesus, but the half
dozen or so of meteoric flashes that have pierced through the
ordinariness of my life I treasure grudgingly, and would not exchange
them for years of continuous well-being. Congratulate me: I have become
enriched now with another moment of rare beatitude, of indelible
radiance. I was present at the transubstantiation of Oscar Wilde,
performed by John Cowper Powys.

Was it a lecture? “Most certainly,” would advise me my simple friend.
What a dwarfish misnomer for the solemn rite that took place in the dark
temple, the “catacomb” of the Little Theatre! I close my eyes, and see
once more the galvanized demi-god vibrating in the green light, invoking
the Uranian Oscar. We, the worshipers, sit entranced, hypnotized,
demundanized, bewitched; the sorcerer makes us feel the presence in
flesh and spirit of the Assyrian half-god, half-beast, who had the moral
courage of living his life actively, to the full; we follow bewildered
the quaint meteor of Wilde’s genius illuminating the world for a moment,
dropping down into a hideous pit, reflaming in the pale glimmer of
discovered sorrow; we finally hear the sonorous requiem to Oscar’s
break-down from the shock of having discovered a heart in himself. The
lights are on, the sorcerer is gone, but we remain under the spell of
the hovering spirit.

To quote Powys is as impossible as to _tell_ a symphony. It is the How
and the What and the stage background that combine in creating the
inexpressible charm of that experience. As to Oscar Wilde—well, what
does it matter whether we agree with Mr. Powys’s interpretation or not?
Wilde was my idol for a long time; I chanted dithyrambs to him and
worshiped him fanatically. Later, in the perpetual process of dethroning
gods, I observed the halo of the Prince of Paradoxes becoming paler in
my eyes. Mr. Powys rekindled in my heart the sacred flame, for a moment
at least, and gave me the rare sensation of reliving an old love.

À propos of simplicity: Wilde proclaimed artificiality as the great
virtue, and certainly lived up to his theory. Compare his short but
italicized life with the last weary years of Tolstoy that were an
attempt for “simple life.” Need I tell you which I prefer?




                             Muck and Music


                            ALFRED A. KNOPF

   (_We disagree with Mr. Knopf in too many respects not to be eager to
                    print his interesting article._)

Dr. Karl Muck resumed charge of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the
fall of 1912. Looking over the twenty-two programs which he has given
since then one is forced to admit that his tastes are, to say the least,
peculiar. There have been frequent performances of Beethoven and Brahms
and occasional classical programs. These, perhaps, serve to keep his
feet on solid earth, but at other times he soars into the realm of
incomprehensible novelty and one can tell in advance where he will land
just about as easily as if he were a German Zeppelin headed for Paris.
One thing only seems certain—he cannot resist the virtuoso that is in
him; he gluts us with what can only be called virtuosity for its own
sake. If he offers a novelty (and when Brahms and Beethoven are taken
care of he chooses, for the most part, to offer little else) it is sure
to be some outrageously difficult affair—difficult both to play and to
listen to. One cannot reasonably object to music merely because it is
difficult to understand. The test is whether there is sufficient real
beauty in it to repay careful and painstaking attention. And my point is
simply that many of us feel that the beauty in Sibelius, Holbrooke,
Reger, Lendvai, Mraczek, Loeffler, Mahler, Schmitt and others is
disproportionately small.

The reasons for the New Yorker’s peculiar bitterness against Dr. Muck
are not difficult to discover. He makes only ten appearances each
season: the Philharmonic and the New York Symphony each gives many more
concerts. From our point of view, would it not be better if we relied on
Stransky and Damrosch (the merits of the one and the fripperies of the
other are too apparent to call for comment here) for our first hearings
of novelties? Then, if a particular composition seemed to warrant it,
the Boston Orchestra could play it for us in its usual masterly manner.
Just so long as New York worships the men from Boston in the mad
feminine way it does, just that long will it resent Dr. Muck’s playing
what it doesn’t want to hear. It was Theodore Thomas, I think, who,
discovering that people cared very little for Wagner’s music, played it
until they changed their minds. That is all very well when you have a
Wagner, but I wonder just how heartily Dr. Muck admires the music he has
recently served up to his New York audiences.

To begin with there was Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony. Now Sibelius is one
of the great living composers. He is a genuine musician—by which I mean
that you do not suffer all the agonies of stage fright when you hear a
composition of his for the first time. He knows the business of his
craft and you usually feel safe in his hands, thanks to three Symphonies
and Finlandia. But how rudely this fourth symphony shakes your
confidence! Call it musicianly: show how consistently-planned and
executed it is: you won’t like it any the more. To be sure, Sibelius is
a Finn and an intensely feeling one. He gives expression to the emotions
of that curiously unhappy race. But music to appeal must be more
universal than this angry symphony of ugly moods. You can’t explain it
on cubist grounds—unless the Finns also call it disagreeable. But one
ventures the guess that they, perchance, find it richly agreeable, in
which case its performance should, by International law (or what is left
of it) be confined to Finland.

Then there was _Schlemihl_—a symphonic biography by one Emil Nikolaus
von Reznicek. This was the pièce de resistance at the evening concert.
It is scored for one piccolo, three flutes, three oboes, English horn,
three clarinets, bass clarinet, three bassoons, double bassoon, four
horns, four trumpets, three trombones, contra bass tuba, two trumpets
off the stage, kettle drums, snare drums, bass drum and tambourine,
Glockenspiel, Cuckoo, Xylophone, cymbals, triangle, tam-tam, two harps,
celesta, organ, sixteen first violins, sixteen second violins, twelve
violas, ten violoncellos, eight double basses, and a tenor voice. This
huge orchestra, plus the detailed analysis of his work furnished by the
composer, explains _Schlemihl_. It is an attempt to out-Richard Richard
Strauss, and, like almost all such attempts, it fails. Reznicek recounts
the life and fate of a modern man pursued by misfortune who goes to
destruction in the conflict between his ideal and his material
existence. A compound essentially of _Tod und Verklärung_, _Tyll
Eulenspiegel_ and _Ein Heldenleben_, but at no time reaching the heights
attained by Strauss in all three of these tone poems. Imitators somehow
almost always fall down in two ways—they devote far too little attention
to what they want to say and far too much to their manner of saying it.
And as a not unnatural result of this, they forget, or appear to forget
at any rate, that melody is the prime essential in great music. Wagner
had melodic genius, as we all realize today, and that Strauss has it is
no longer open to very serious questioning. Reznicek hasn’t. His music
is all rather good, but none of it good enough to grip you as the finest
music does. It has no great moments but only moments of very great
sound. The house fairly quaked at some of the fortissimos. And yet
_Schlemihl_ would be pleasant enough were it not so pretentiously
bombastic and did it not last twice too long. But the mere existence of
_Ein Heldenleben_, _Tyll Eulenspiegel_ and _Tod und Verklärung_ deprives
_Schlemihl_ of any greater claim than that.

After these two pieces Scheinpflug’s _Overture to a Comedy of
Shakespeare_ proved quite simple and enjoyable. It is a musicianly piece
of work lacking neither in melodic invention nor in skilful
orchestration. The Allegretto Graziosa, in which an old English tune
from the Fitz William Virginal Book is introduced, is wholly delightful.
And having said that much, one really has said all. The overture can
have no possible chance of immortality; it is not great music, it is not
intensely interesting or unusually delectable: one feels rather that
such compositions as this are the by-products of the daily practice of
the art of music by men of no little talent but very little genius. As
such, they demand an occasional hearing—today Scheinpflug has the stage:
tomorrow someone else—what matter who, since none are really masters.

An occasional performance of Strauss’s early Symphonic Suite, _Aus
Italien_, is probably quite justifiable because of his imposing
importance among the composers of today. When a musician attains
greatness almost everything he ever wrote becomes of interest to his
disciples. _Aus Italien_ calls for little comment. First performed in
1887, it is difficult today to realize the great uproar and rage it
evoked. Now it seems quite tame. It was indeed Strauss’s “first step
towards independence,” and it is interesting as the connecting link
between his very early work and _Don Juan_ and its successors. Its first
movement “On The Campagna” is probably the most successful, reaching as
it does gravely grey and tragic heights. A sense of oppressiveness
fairly overwhelms the listener and there are chords that are exquisite.
“Amid Rome’s Ruins” is not nearly so sustained and well-knit. The
opening of the third movement, “On the Shore of Sorrento,” depicts with
wonderful effectiveness the brilliance of an Italian sea under a
dazzling sun—a brilliance that no one who has seen it is likely ever to
forget. Strauss, for all his reputed blare and noise, handles his
orchestra pianissimo in a manner immeasurably more impressive than
anyone else of his time. (The opening bars of _Tod und Verklärung_ and
the love scene in _Don Juan_ immediately come to mind). And you can
measure a generation’s progress in orchestration by the unruffled
placidity with which people nowadays listen to the at-one-time
“brilliant, tumultuous, audacious, unusual, and bold” finale—“Neapolitan
Folk-Life.”

Even the casual concert-goer must notice the amazing duplications that
are being offered this season. For two or three seasons a particular
composition is neglected; then suddenly it is played five times in half
as many weeks. Stransky plays _Don Juan_; a week later Muck, as it were,
shows us how it ought to be played. The Symphony Society plays Brahms’s
Second Symphony and shortly thereafter Muck administers his reproach to
Damrosch. Is there any reason why conductors shouldn’t meet occasionally
and plan to avoid such ways? Muck appears the chief offender. His
program stated that he was playing Ropartz’s Fourth Symphony for the
first time in New York, but Stransky had played it only eight days
earlier. When will we hear it again?

For this Symphony deserves another hearing. The only work by a Frenchman
that Dr. Muck has offered this season, it is far more satisfying than
any of his other novelties. The restless swing of the opening theme
grips you at once—and your curiosity is piqued as the violins sing
against the “Kernel” in the horns. The Adagio is not so successful—the
theme sung by the English horn is not sufficiently melodious. You need
only compare it with the heart-breaking Largo of Dvorak’s _Aus Der Neuen
Welt_. But there are the most engaging rhythms—many of them typically
Scotch in their snap. In fact did Ropartz’s gift for melody (it is far
from negligible) approach his rhythmic talent, he might produce really
great music. As it is, this Fourth Symphony interests and gratifies. But
it is too long. Its three movements are played without a pause and one’s
attention flags at times. It seems likely that this is inevitable in
absolute music: only a program can really hold one’s attention for
almost forty minutes. Strauss does it in _Ein Heldenleben_; but _Don
Juan_, _Tyll Eulenspiegel_ and _Tod und Verklärung_ last only about
twenty minutes each, despite the fascinating explanations that the
program notes always give of their musical contents. Ropartz’s Fourth
Symphony would be much better if played with pauses, and the sections
are so clearly indicated that this could be done without great
difficulty. But, on the whole, a hearing of his work makes one wish for
more French music, with its charming, clear-cut rhythms so typical of
the Gaul. (To my mind Ropartz’s indebtedness to César Franck is a matter
of comparative unimportance. Disciple or not, he has brought to his task
of writing music freshness and charm, a fund of melody and a quite
adequate technique).

After listening to these five compositions, what effect would
Beethoven’s _Egmont_ Overture naturally have? Relief,—pure unalloyed
relief. And it confirms one in the feeling that relief is ever going to
be one of the prime functions thrust by the musicians of today upon the
greatest master of them all. Invariably he brings us back to earth, and
as we sit listening to him in smug contentment, we can say over, without
fear of contradiction: “This after all is music.”




                      While Hearing a Little Song


                           (_Solveigs Lied_)

                           MAXWELL BODENHEIM

   A song flew lazily
   Over my upturned head.
   It dropped and I could see
   The ivoried limbs, the spread
   Of swaying, dream-colored wings,
   And barely sense the drift
   Of slender, cloud-voiced rings
   Of notes which seemed to lift
   The oval of my soul
   Up to their lingering death ...
   A purplish pallor stole
   Down to my leaden breath,—
   It was my melted soul
   And the soft death of the throng
   Of notes from the slim song.




                               A Hard Bed


                          GEORGE BURMAN FOSTER

Warfare against suffering, this is man’s most natural fight. Suffering
is an attack upon man, upon his will to live. On this account, he has a
right to protect himself from suffering, to hold suffering far from him.

But the struggle seems futile. The host of sufferings seems illimitable.
For each old suffering which we thought we had vanquished, ten new ones
come of which we had never dreamt. Indeed, the capacity to suffer grows
with the growth of man. The feeling of pain grows as the senses become
sharper and finer. The higher a man’s development, the stronger becomes
his ability to feel life’s pains. Even if we could exchange all the
sufferings of life for pure joy and bliss, this latter life would be
suffering still, a surfeit and a search, and I doubt not we would long
for an hour of some old anguish again that would redeem us from a
pleasure now grown oppressive and intolerable.

Shall we, then, hate life? Shall we say that it were better not to be
than to be? We might, did we not find strength and comfort in and with
every suffering,—did we not allow every item or event of experience the
democratic right to a trial by a jury of its peers and to our trust that
it is worth while until it shall prove that it is not,—did we not
experience that up from the abyss of every suffering, painful as it
seems, a path leads to a summit where all sufferings are only shadows of
a blinding flood and fullness of light; that all articulate and fit into
the eternal process of an upward-striving life.

There is no question but that this is the workable view of life to
present to the heart of man, draining, as one must, pain’s bitter cup
for one’s self. But the sufferings one feels for others, sufferings in
which one’s love, expressed in sympathy and pity, is complicated—this is
another matter, here one may fall into mischievous aberration. There can
be no doubt that the pain of our pity for others may be more painful
than the pain of our own lives. In the throes of such pity, the woes of
our own lives may seem small indeed, and finally fade away. To behold a
human being that is deeply dear to us suffer is worse than it would be
to suffer in his place. And if the man of moral elevation of soul feels
equal in the end to all that brings pain to his own life, all the more
defenseless does he feel with regard to the great all-prevailing misery
which, in pity, celebrates its triumphal entry into his heart. Love is
our noblest human power, and it is love that lets us feel such misery,
it is love whose wealth of recognition and experience renders it
possible for us to descry sorrow’s abysses, to anticipate them even in
advance of the poor sufferer himself.

Now, may love be good, and pity bad? What a problem is here! May we war
a two-fold warfare, one against suffering and one against pity? Ought
we? War upon pity—would not that be in contradiction to all that our own
generation especially calls good and great? Our generation has done its
best to develop in the human heart an ever-enlarging capacity for
pity—what would it say to a warrior who pitilessly took up arms against
pity?

_Friedrich Nietzsche_ was such a warrior, single-handed and alone! And
the venomous verbal onslaught upon Nietzsche by those who did not
understand him was equalled only by those who did. At first Nietzsche’s
own success consisted in supplying his opponents with new weapons
against himself. Of all the words which have been used as bludgeons to
break the head of this most resolute rebel against our previous moral
view of life, Nietzsche’s piercing words concerning pity and the pitiful
have most occupied the attention of his enemies. This may not deter us
from looking unabashed the great question squarely in the face. In the
end, is pity something to be overcome, a disease of the old culture?
Does the path of the new culture lead men out and beyond and above pity?
This is no longer a Nietzsche question merely. This is a question of the
moral life of our time. Perhaps this is the last weightiest question
which our time can put to men of dignity and depth of thought.

However, it is only fair to say at the outset that no one has any right
to fly into a rage at Nietzsche in particular for summoning men to arms
against pity, since, if rage is in order at all, the conventional
practices of our previous life furnished therefor occasion enough. Aye,
there is an old wide-spread fashion of averting the strain of pity which
is so mean and cool that almost anybody could fly into a frenzy over
it—the fashion, not of triumphing over pity, but of cowardly flight from
pity. Consider the whole conception of life of the so-called favorites
of fortune. To what lengths do they go that they may be spared the sight
of misfortune, that they may not be agitated by a touch of pity! How
they avoid, if at all possible, every place that would remind them that
there are want and misery, hunger and sorrow, in the world—as the
Parisians did, until Zola, the most calumniated author of the nineteenth
century, dragged these things, with their ensuing vices, out into the
light of day and made the French people look at them! How furious they
are, as the French were at great Zola, at anybody who dares to open
their eyes to the sad and harrowing realities of life! Nay, they have
invented a special art and religion that shall succeed in sparing them
pity; the former to conjure up a make-believe world in which life shall
be all sunshine and gladness; the latter to advocate the doctrine that
all pain is punishment from God, and that, since God must be just, He
will properly parcel out and administer pain and suffering. We do not
need to bestir ourselves in behalf of sufferers; that would be a wrong
against God; a doubt of the Everlasting Justice; hence all may not feel
pity for the wicked man upon whom God visits His wrath and punishment!
Thus the “good people” and the just harden their hearts. They have
stones which they heave at the poor sinner—especially at a “sinful
woman”—but no mercy, no pity, for those who are not as they are, and do
not think and feel and act as they do. They grow chesty: “Yes, if others
were as good as we are, then it would be as well with them as it is with
us!” With such pride they choke all feeling of kinship and connection
with others. Where pride grows, no pity can thrive. And at last pity
itself becomes a kind of pride, a sorry self-reflection as in a mirror.
The most subtle and dangerous way for men to free themselves from the
pain of pity, when they cannot stave it off completely, is to make it a
thing of pride and praise: “I thank Thee, God, that I am not like the
hard-hearted!” Then they revel and riot in their pity, then they rejoice
that they are so good-hearted, so tender-hearted, because they can see
no suffering without being touched and melted to tears. And the pitiful
call this their morality and their virtue. They make a “delicacy” of
their pity to set before themselves at the table of life when all of
life’s other gratifications and indulgences begin to grow stale and
tasteless. The tears of emotion that gush generously forth at the
spectacle of suffering humanity—even of frail and faulty humanity—taste
so good! Many is the time they have felt the weary weight of this
unintelligible world on listening to a sad story or seeing a play, and
screwed up melancholy and doleful countenances—maybe pity can be put
among the things that can make life, always requiring to be braced up a
bit, a trifle more interesting. And so pity is at last honored with a
place among the articles of luxury with which they enrich and adorn
their lives—their lives, always surprising them with some fresh sign of
poverty and patches!

But if all guilt be revenged upon earth, punishment of this misuse of
pity may not be stayed. It is doubly punished and revenged—upon him who
practices it and upon him upon whom it is practiced. Or do we not know
that the pharisees of pity become ever more feeble and sentimental men,
losing all power and energy of will through pure emotionality? Or do we
not know that most crafty business speculation, speculation in pity, in
which sufferers magnify their least pains, expert in making an
impression with their “cases” in order to arouse the interest of the
pitiful, an interest which need not always be relieved by the clink of
coin, but which makes ready its punishment much more frequently with
idle hours spent in dreaming and weeping, with the unprofitable
breathing-out of pathos and reproach? Often enough the enthusiasts of
the kind and tender heart do not know what they do, but they rob men of
the marrow of life, they emasculate and coddle the soul; and the
emotional debauchery in which they live, requires ever stronger stimulus
which ever operates more enervatingly still.

Contemplating these devastations wrought everywhere in life by love’s
softness, one begins to cherish some respect for a Nietzsche who
preached to men “a hard bed,” love’s hardness. To be sure, if one is to
understand this preaching, one must keep in mind what the preacher says:
“My brethren, give heed unto each hour, in which your spirit wisheth to
speak in parables: there is the origin of your virtue.” Nietzsche speaks
in parables. For instance, his words on war and warriors—a good war
hallowing every cause—these, too, are parables. And hardness, bravery,
praised by him as the strength and consecration of life, truly this is
not the barbarity of prize-fighting or the brutality of lynching; this
is the high mind fearlessly going its own way, stampeded by no danger
into thinking and acting and being other than what it holds to be right.
Danger is but the acid test which such a mind applies to the ingredients
of its life. To such a mind, hardness is the characteristic of the gem,
of the diamond, which thus guarantees its genuineness, its sparkling
worth. Zarathustra-Nietzsche loves everything which steels the will and
augments life’s force. Therefore he loves his foe, for, thanks to his
foe, he never comes to a standstill and stagnates. Therefore his true
friend is the one who has become his best foe, who makes him sweat, who
summons him to risk hot war with him, to break a lance with him in an
intellectual passage at arms in which the soul struggles for its own yea
and nay. So, similarly, this Zarathustra-Nietzsche hates pity. Why? Not
because he is a brute. “Kind unto the sick is Zarathustra.... Would that
they were convalescent and conquering and creating a higher body for
themselves!” Not because, as we have seen, so much of pity is for self’s
sake and not for the sake of service, though this is an essential part
of the answer. Then why? Because it works an embarrassment for man,
because it knows no shame, no reverence, in the presence of the giant
forces which, for every brave soul, is concealed in great and deep pain.
Therefore he combats pity because it is a passion and not an action, and
yet life is not for passionists but for pragmatists. “All great love is
lifted above all its pity, for it seeketh to create what it loveth....
But all creators are hard.” “If thou hast a suffering friend, be a couch
for his suffering, but a hard bed, as it were, a field-bed; thus thou
wilt be of most use for him.”

Hearken ye, O Reader, to another Transvaluer of values Whose Person
Nietzsche “the Crucified,” excoriated at ill-starred moments, but did so
on the basis of that very “high mind” for which He, rejecting pity, went
to His Crucifixion! “And Jesus, Pilate handed over to their will. As
they led him off he was followed by a large multitude of the people and
also of women who beat their breasts and lamented him; but Jesus turned
to them and said, ‘Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me!’”

Now, as it seems to me, this Nietzsche preaching is not so far removed
from that other preaching which we are otherwise wont to call a gospel,
a good, a glad message! For this glad message was not a lamentation, but
a hymn of heroism and of victory, a call to creation! And I take the
liberty to repeat that the Preacher of this glad message forbade pity
for himself even in his dark and desolate hour—do you think what that
hour was?—when he appealed to weak and wailing and weeping womanly
souls, Weep not for me, weep for yourselves! And He Who Himself wills no
pity, Who bears in Himself a greatness which is elevated above all pity,
would he have willed to have men so weak and pitiful as we often enough
today imagine the Ideal of a Christ-man to be?

What, now, if the true pitiful love, the true mercy to men, were to
_harden_ them, to make them free from what meant only suffering to them?
It is, to be sure, very much more difficult to make men themselves
“hard,” so that the burden lying on their backs can not crush them than
it is to indulge their weakness and sensitiveness and to leave them as
they are. Indulgent parental hearts would a thousand times rather remove
all life’s burdens from their children than to place burdens upon their
children which they might learn to bear. So often our pity plays us a
sorry trick—we would rather do something for men than to repress our
pity, silence it, and then teach men how they themselves can do what is
good and necessary for them. We speak of a ministrant love, meaning a
love which knows nothing higher than to provide comforts, avert trials,
spare vexations, and everything which could shake a man to his
foundations. How much greater a service of love it would be to lead man
to himself, make him strong that he might be equal to what we had
thought we must take away from him! Pray, not for easier tasks, lighter
burdens, but for more power! This Nietzschean love is not only a greater
love, it also requires a greater, more tiresome work, it requires a
constant conquest of our pitying weakness, it requires a courageous
faith in man and a firm earnest appraisal of his power. And how entirely
different a service of friendship do we render a friend if we show a
hard love to him, if he break a tooth on us, as Nietzsche says, because
we do not flatter and fit him, but compel him, out of love compel him,
to assert himself against us, and to withstand our defense of our rights
against him! Foolish men seek their friends among the _Jasagern_, most
preferably, among those who are of their own opinion in everything. They
then call this an ideal friendship: two souls and one thought, two
hearts and one beat! But in such a friendship, their best, their own
soul, their sense of truth, and their courage for the truth, soon rusts.
To spare a friend the disillusion which he would suffer if he felt an
antagonism, an opposition, in the friendship, they have pity on him,
they learn to keep silent, and silence soon becomes a lie. Since they
dare not cause the friend the grief of discovering to him these lies,
they lie more, lie life-long,—all out of pity, out of their weak tender
love. How much nobler and greater that friendship whose ideal Nietzsche
sketches for us, in which we are gripped from the outset in a friend’s
contradiction and hostility! We seek and love in him precisely what is
not attuned to us, but is his own, and must forever remain his very own.
Such hard love which gives the friend a “camp-bed” and not one as “soft
as downy pillows are” and requires the like in return is the proudest
manliest friendship, is alone what brings our sluggish and pampered
natures forward, and makes us stronger, freer, richer in understanding
and experience. Every genuine love should be a spur, freedom, to us, not
an easy berth and a trammel in life.

We cannot, we ought not, refrain from pity in life. We cannot, we ought
not, stave it artificially from us. Pity belongs to man as man. It comes
stealing upon him, and ought so to come. But when it has come, he ought
not to be enmeshed in it. Still less ought he to let it grow rank. He
should ennoble it, overcome it, with strong will and energetic deed. For
pity is yet _suffering_ and all suffering summons men to conflict, to
defense. The sign that such overcoming has succeeded is that
_rejoicing-together_ has been born of _suffering-together_—is that the
conflict has issued in a victory in which hard militant love triumphs
over every weakness, and is grateful to the hardness which has given it
such a victory!

In his brilliant book on Nietzsche, “Who Is to Be Master of the World,”
Ludovici writes powerfully as follows: “What the units of a herd most
earnestly seek and find, is smug ease, not necessarily mastership. For
mastership entails responsibility, insight, nerve, courage and
_hardness_ towards one’s self, that control of one’s self which all good
commanders must have, and which is the very antithesis of the gregarious
man’s attitude towards himself.... Hardness?—He knows nothing of the
hardness that can command his heart, his mouth, before it attends to the
command of others; he knows nothing of the hardness that can dispel the
doubts of a whole continent, that can lead the rabble and the ruck to
deeds of anomalous nobility, or that can impose silence upon the
overweening importunities of an assembled nation. He knows _this_
hardness, that he could coldly watch the enemy of his private and
insignificant little interests, burnt at the stake; he knows _this_
hardness, that he would let a great national plan miscarry for the sake
of a mess of pottage;—the gregarious man and future socialist has this
so-called hardness; but so have all those who burn with resentment,—so
have all parasites and silent worm-gnawers at the frame-work of great
architecture.”

But not Nietzsche’s interpreter, but Nietzsche himself, shall have the
last word: “Praises are what maketh hard!—I do not praise the land where
butter and honey—flow! To learn to look away from one’s self is
necessary in order to see many things: this hardener is needed by every
mountain climber.”

_Also Sprach Aristoteles—Zarathustra!_




                    George Middleton’s One-Act Plays


                            CLAYTON HAMILTON

The one-act play is an art-form that is worthy of careful cultivation.
It shows the same relation to the full-length drama as the short-story
shows to the novel. It makes a virtue of economy of means. It aims to
produce a single dramatic effect with the greatest economy of means that
is consistent with the utmost emphasis. A one-act play, in exhibiting
the present, should imply the past and intimate the future. The author
has no leisure for laborious exposition; but his mere projection of a
single situation should sum up in itself the accumulated results of many
antecedent causes. The one-act play, at its best, can no more serve as a
single act of a longer drama than the short-story can serve as a single
chapter of a novel. The form is complete, concise, and self-sustaining;
and it requires an extraordinary focus of imagination.

No other American dramatist has so carefully cultivated this special
type of drama as George Middleton. His recently-published volume of
one-act plays, entitled _Possession_, was preceded by two other volumes,
called _Embers_ and _Tradition_. Each of these books contains half a
dozen plays. From the fact that Mr. Middleton has chosen to publish
these eighteen one-act plays in advance of their production, it is not
to be inferred that he is a believer in the closet-drama. A closet-drama
may be defined as a play that, being unfit for production in the
theatre, is fit only to be locked up in a closet. Mr. Middleton is not a
literary amateur, but a professional and practical playwright. He has
produced more than half a dozen full-length plays in the commercial
theatre; and such artists as Julia Marlowe, Margaret Anglin, George
Fawcett, and the late E. M. Holland have appeared in dramas of his
composition. All of Mr. Middleton’s one-act plays are written for the
stage; and—to quote from his own preface to _Possession_—he conceives
“the value of play publication not as a substitute for production but as
an alternative for those whose dramas may offer little attraction to the
manager because of theme or treatment.”

At present there is, unfortunately, scarcely any market in the American
theatre for one-act plays that take life seriously. It is against our
custom to provide a full-length drama with a curtain-raiser or an
after-piece; and the field for one-act plays in vaudeville is restricted
to slap-stick comedies and yelling melodramas. It is for this reason
that Mr. Middleton has been required to choose publication as an
alternative for production, in the case of these diminutive dramas. The
trouble is not at all that his pieces are unsuited to the stage: they
are admirable in technique, and—like all good plays—they would be more
interesting in the theatre than in the library. The trouble is only
that—for wholly artificial and accidental reasons—the commercial theatre
in America at present is inhospitable to the one-act play.

Mr. Middleton’s one-act plays reveal a wide range of subject-matter and
a corresponding versatility of treatment. No one of them is similar to
any of the others. Yet, pervading this variety of subject and of mood,
there is discernible an underlying unity. Each of them deals essentially
with woman—and with modern woman in relation to our modern social
system. Woman is, at present, a transitional creature, evolving from the
thing that man considered her to be in the far-away period of wax
flowers and horse-hair furniture to the being that she considers herself
about to become in the unachieved, potential future; and Mr. Middleton
has caught her in this period of transition, and has depicted her, under
many different lights, colored with her virtues and discolored with her
faults.

Many of the most poignant and dramatic problems of present-day society
arise from the fact that the evolution of woman is proceeding more
rapidly than the evolution of her environment. While individuals
advance, traditions linger. Mr. Middleton’s favorite subject seems to be
a conflict between an advanced woman and a lingering tradition. The
author is himself a radical, and his sympathy is forever on the side of
the revolutionary individual; but his technical treatment is so fair to
both sides of the contention that it remains possible for conservative
readers to rank themselves against the individual on the side of the
lingering tradition. Scarcely any of Mr. Middleton’s women would be
pleasant to have around the house. Since most of them are discontented
with the conditions of their lives, they naturally make the worst of
these conditions instead of making the best of them. Hell hath no fury
like a woman in revolt; and many readers may dislike Mr. Middleton’s
heroines more heartily than he seems to like them himself. But to be
able to dislike a character is a proof that that character is real, and
must be considered as a tribute to the author’s art. The heroine of _The
Unborn_, in Mr. Middleton’s latest volume, refuses to have children
because motherhood might interfere with “her work,”—the work, in this
case, being merely a habit of attending to minor matters in her
husband’s photographic studio; but the intensity of impatience with
which the reader listens to her twaddle is an indication that this
character is really representative of a silly type of creature that is
not infrequently encountered in actual life. Again, in the play called
_Possession_, a woman who has been divorced for adultery attempts to
kidnap her little daughter from the house of her former husband, to
whose custody the child had, of course, been awarded by the courts. Her
adultery was inexcusable, because it had been occasioned not by an
irresistible and overwhelming love but merely by a superfluity of
leisure; and her attempt to kidnap the child was treacherous and
ignominious. She excuses herself, however, by telling her husband that
the process of child-birth had been painful, and that, therefore,
despite the judgment of the courts, their little daughter belonged more
to her than to him. The reader is, of course, annoyed by all this
nonsense; but this annoyance, once again, must be regarded as a tribute
to the reality of the author’s characterization. No heroine who was not
a living human being could make the auditor so ardently desire to climb
upon the stage and talk back to her.

Fortunately, it is not at all necessary to like Mr. Middleton’s women in
order to like his plays. One may admire Ibsen’s _Hedda Gabler_ without
wishing to be married to the heroine; and the pleasant thing about Mr.
Middleton’s women is that, while the reader is permitted to observe and
study them, he is also allowed to realize with hearty thankfulness that
he will never have to live with any of them. The world in which his
women move is a world of discontent. This discontent is truly
representative of the present transitional period in the evolution of
society; but it is not representative of that perennial reality of life
that remains oblivious of periods and dates. At all times, the really
womanly woman has been a lover of her life and has not found it
difficult to feel at home at home.




                            New York Letter


                              GEORGE SOULE

It would be difficult to imagine a more fantastic occasion than a debate
in New York on the justice of the cause of the Allies vs. that of
Germany between Cecil Chesterton and George Sylvester Viereck. The gods
permitted it to happen last week, much to the chagrin of the Allies, for
the hyphenated Germans took good care to fill the hall and hiss every
offensive statement. Mr. Chesterton, an honest fighter and a clever
polemicist, who has leapt through every phase of radicalism into the
enfolding charity of the Catholic Church, deserves to be known for his
journalistic achievements and his exposure of graft in high places
almost as much as for his brother Gilbert. Mr. Viereck, a sublime
egotist, has come into sudden favor with his countrymen by editing _Das
Vaterland_, although before that he had taken every known means to
secure notoriety for a naturally obscure individual. He began as a poet
of strange verse, both in German and English. When it became apparent
that it wasn’t going to sell, he issued a last volume which he called
his “swan song,” with the announcement that as this commercial age was
unappreciative of his poetry he would write no more, and anyone who
wanted a last chance to value him at it must buy this book. For himself,
he was going to get in line with the genius of the century and become a
Big Business Man, for he must make himself felt. He announced in a
stentorian wail his admiration for Theodore Roosevelt, and was much
chagrined when that celebrity would not let him trail along on the
skirts of his ample publicity. Later on, when Alfred Noyes began to sell
in large quantities, Mr. Viereck resumed his dictatorship of poetry, and
by scurrilous attacks attempted to draw Mr. Noyes’s fire—and newspaper
space. Now German Patriotism has lifted him to the headlines.

If Poetic Justice was present at the debate, she probably did not
receive much enlightenment on the questions which are now vexing her in
Europe. To quote any of the substance of the debate would be an insult
to her intelligence.

A more serious event was Richard Bennet’s recent production of Brieux’s
_Maternity_. Considering the deadly earnestness with which author and
cast struggled to inculcate lessons, the apathy of the public in respect
to moral instruction was pathetic. On the night of my visit there was
exactly one normal “theatre-goer” in the house. There was a sprinkling
of people who had long admitted what Brieux has to say, and went from
“high-brow” reasons. There was a young society matron who had escaped
from her husband for the evening and is taking an amateurish interest in
social questions. There were numerous persons who are always on the
lookout for a chance to cackle at what they consider broad humor. These
blonde ladies furnished an interesting refutation of one of Brieux’s
theories. In one scene various women tell their troubles, emphasizing
the fact that all women are united in their sorrows and understand them,
whereas men do not. Immediately after this the drunken husband returns
and disgusts and outrages the wife. There were many laughs in the
audience to greet him—but not one from a man. Even the blonde ladies’
fat escorts tried to quiet them while the rest of us were hissing.

Granville Barker opens this week with _Androcles and the Lion_ and some
of the other recent London productions. A number of the backers of the
old “New Theatre” are guaranteeing his expenses, a fact which is a
historical corroboration for Mr. Barker’s wit. When he was brought over
as the chosen manager for that institution, he objected to the immense
size of the house. “But the alterations you suggest would cost us a
million dollars,” he was told. “If you don’t make them, it will cost you
three million,” he replied, and sailed back to London. His popularity
with the New Theatre guarantors has been steadily increasing from that
day to this.

There is even a rumor that if the present experiment succeeds, the New
Theatre project will be resumed. This whisper aroused an answering howl
from the American managers and actors. Why should good American money be
spent in encouraging English talent, especially in such a disastrous
season? they wailed. The answer was, in effect, the one that should be
made to the whole “made in America” propaganda. What has American
production done that it should be encouraged? When “made in America”
comes to have any relation to honesty and intelligence, it will be time
enough to invoke “patriotism” in its favor. In the meantime, the more
disastrous foreign competition can be to our present shoddy products,
the better.

This ironic year has produced few more strange reversals than the one
which has brought Mr. McClure to the status of an employee of Mr.
Munsey. When a man has apparently won his life campaign and written so
engagingly of it as has Mr. McClure in his Autobiography, we begin to
regard him as beyond the touch of the fates. Perhaps the present
eventuality should be taken, however, merely as another proof that in
our present arrangement of things it is less profitable to have a touch
of genius than to become the owner of trust companies. At any rate
_McClure’s Magazine_ has apparently not profited much in recent years by
Mr. McClure’s separation from its editorial policy.

There is one real consolation in a season which has brought such
material devastation to commercial managers and magazines. When
conventionally-planned “successes” don’t succeed, success comes to have
less meaning. People who are after money in the promotion of artistic
products are in their desperation more ready to try less “safe” ways of
getting it, while the others have a decidedly better chance of gaining a
respectful public attention.




                                 Music


                         KREISLER AND SHATTUCK

In certain realms, words are opaque and stupid things. In others—oh,
comforting thought!—they seem to become transparent and almost
intelligent. Following this out consistently, it becomes easy to write a
page about Arthur Shattuck, pianist, and very difficult to say anything
at all about Fritz Kreisler, violinist.

Arthur Shattuck was a disappointment. His faults, in a lesser man, would
have been considered the sign of mere mediocrity; but in himself, they
are obtrusive and disagreeable. An exasperating contrast existed between
what may be called his style, with its rhythmic sureness and its
admirable perspectives, and his great lack of tonal beauty. He cracks
out hard tones. Any particular phrase of Mr. Boyle’s concerto for piano
with orchestra, when passed on from the orchestra to the solo
instrument, lost its lyric curve and became flat and lifeless under Mr.
Shattuck’s long, aggressive hands. When another pianist, Ernest
Hutcheson, played the same work with the composer conducting the New
York Philharmonic, a certain phenomenon was lacking which appeared when
Frederick Stock conducted the work with the Chicago Symphony. This
phenomenon (let it be whispered) was a strange prominence of the brass
choir of the orchestra in certain portions of the work which led one to
believe that Mr. Stock was, perhaps, more interested in the orchestral
accompaniment than in the performance of the soloist. If this were as
true as it appeared, it is on a par with another startling fact:—that
the public is really learning something about tone-values and the
possible beauties of piano music. What else could account for the
numerous confessions caught in snatches in the corridors and stairways,
the composite of which was, “He left me cold”?... Arthur Shattuck is a
millionaire.

A compassionate attitude toward Chicago was considerably relieved by the
sight of the Auditorium-full which paid to hear Kreisler. Think of so
many people being moved by such good taste! And, what was better still,
they all behaved well. Kreisler deserved their tribute of attentive
silence. Such violin playing hasn’t been heard in Chicago since the same
artist was here last season. There is no describing Kreisler’s tone; a
magic circle of stillness encloses it, which words have not learned to
cross. In the memory it is a living beauty, penetrant and bewitching.
Praise and appreciation are miserable things in the presence of this
man’s music. Fritz Kreisler is a genius.

                                                     HERMAN SCHUCHERT.




                            Book Discussion


                       Ellen Key’s Steady Vision

     _The Younger Generation, by Ellen Key._ [_G. P. Putnam’s, New
                                York._]

In the present amusing reign of boisterous propagandic voices, it is
good to find a thinker who describes the exciting truth in simple terms.
The many are able to catch glimpses of the truth; between glimpses, they
shout and wave their inefficient arms for the enlightenment of their
brothers, and for their own joy. The few see the truth steadily and,
because they see steadily, become so passionately enthusiastic that they
are driven to express themselves in quiet, mighty phrases. Such phrases
imprint vital ideas upon the mind of the seeker, while pitiable
confusion alone results from the shouts and wavings. In _The Younger
Generation_, Ellen Key tells simply and surely her conclusions about
vital things.

Conservative judgment is at once a splendid balance and a terrific
barrier in the world of ideas. Intense enthusiasm, when it displays
itself, often combines blindness with sight. It has always seemed to be
asking too much to expect in one person a finely balanced enthusiasm in
which the conservative element does not hamper the divine qualities of
youth—courage, impetuosity, and an ever-fresh perception. Not to be
extravagant, but to characterize her fairly, one may say that this
Swedish woman writes as if she possessed the virtues commonly attributed
to both age and youth. She is vigorous, free-hearted, and
calm—enthusiastic, fiery, and sane—a champion of revolution when and
wherever it breaks the path for evolution.

Reaching deftly into anarchism, christianity, feminism, individualism,
socialism, and other good glimpses of the truth, she secures the
elements for a strangely consistent wisdom.

   Parents of the new generation will feel it to be a blasphemy
   against life—another name for God—that the beings their love has
   called into existence, the beings who bear the heritage of all
   past generations and the potentialities of all those to come,
   should be prematurely torn from the chain of development. Every
   such link that is wrenched away from unborn experiences, from
   unfinished work, was a beginning which might have had the most
   far-reaching effects within the race.... It is not death that the
   men of the new age are afraid of, but only premature and
   meaningless death.

“Women ought not to be content until governments have been deprived of
the power of plunging nations into war.”—Ellen Key doesn’t ask the
ladies to fidget and whimper at afternoon teas, nor to operate upon
male-kind with their verbal lancets, nor to adopt circuitous resolutions
about affairs of which they know nothing; but her suggestion, here as
elsewhere, is simple and practical—so very simple that the ladies will
smile down upon it as something delightfully girlish and
unsophisticated. It is safe to speculate that not one of the smilers
could, in her comfortable condescension, live up to this humble and
powerful procedure:—“Women can always and everywhere ennoble the
feelings, refine an idea of justice, and sharpen the judgment of those
who come under their influence. The indirect result of this influence
will then be that war will become more and more insufferable to the
feelings, repugnant to the sense of justice, and absurd to the
intelligence. When thus the eyes of the best among the nation are opened
to the true nature of war, they will be finally opened also to the way
to real, not armed, peace.” And as it is the secret and boasted and
forgotten desire of every woman to influence a man, or men, these
profoundly plain suggestions would seem to be sown in a fertile field.
There is hope in this. Then she says, on another page: “To win over
men’s brains to the idea of solidarity, that is the surest way of
working for peace.” And this, being a more complex remark, will probably
upset everything gained by the clarity of the preceding quotations; but
it is given here to repay the time otherwise wasted by the many for whom
simplicity has lost its god-like charm. Solidarity is a great idea,
partly because it is something to be shouted about. But the first
element in solidarity, human kindness, has never seemed “strong” to a
shouting age.

One of the firm demands which Ellen Key makes in her future “Charter for
Children” is “the right of all children to disinheritance; in other
words, their being placed in the beneficent necessity of making full use
of their completely developed powers.” After reminding us of the
strenuous manners of a past age in which the children of any conquered
city were dashed hideously against the walls, she claims that “the
judgment upon our time will be more severe. For the people of antiquity
knew not what they did, when they caused the blood of children to flow
like water. But our age allows millions of children to be worn out,
starved, maltreated, neglected, to be tortured in school, and to become
degenerate and criminal; and yet it knows the consequences, to the race
and to the community, that all this involves. And why? Because we are
not yet willing to reckon in life-values instead of in gold-values.”

What a frantic rage must there be in the souls of the truly
social-minded when this terrific indictment is pronounced in their
hearing! But the appalling nightmare will go on until the frantic
element is overcome, and the rage is focused to a point of white heat—an
intense simplicity.

                                                     HERMAN SCHUCHERT.


                           Two Conrad Reviews

     _Joseph Conrad: A Study, Richard Curle._ [_Doubleday, Page and
                          Company, New York._]

“The business of criticism,” says Mr. Curle, “is to surmount this
_impasse_ between conviction and the power to convince.” Judged by this
test, his study of Joseph Conrad is undoubtedly successful: it is hard
indeed to imagine any reader reaching the end of it without believing
that Conrad is a very great writer. A careful reading of the numerous
and often lengthy quotations from Conrad’s books should alone convince
the persons Mr. Curle is most anxious to convert—those who know nothing
about them.

But _Joseph Conrad_ has two obvious faults. In the first place, Mr.
Curle is quite too modest—almost haltingly so. His pages abound in such
phrases as “I dare say”, “I cannot help”, “I think”, and the like.
That’s all very honest, but Americans prefer the more lordly manner. One
feels really, that while the critic may speak in such fashion to
himself, he should give us only his conclusions—and no apologies for
them to boot. In the second place, Mr. Curle seems to think that he is
very brave in putting forth this book, that the critics haven’t
appreciated Conrad at all, and that since _he_ does there must be a real
quarrel between him and them. Now as a matter of fact this is not so.
Probably no living writer has had a fraction of the hearty recognition
from the best critics that Conrad has. True, he has (until six months
ago) woefully lacked anything like popularity and the material rewards
it brings—but very few of those whose opinion carries weight will
hesitate to agree with most of the fine things that Mr. Curle says about
the author of _Chance_. Mr. Curle’s attitude simply arouses unfriendly
antagonism on the part of his readers who know and love their Conrad.

So much for its faults. They are not of serious importance and should
not obscure the really splendid qualities of Mr. Curle’s book. It
abounds in acutely perceptive remarks—often extremely well put. In the
course of seven chapters on Conrad’s Psychology, Men, Women, Irony and
Sardonic Humour, Prose and the Artist, he piles up an overwhelming
evidence of the man’s greatness. Is there a man alive, has any English
novelist ever lived about whom one could wax so easily, so madly
enthusiastic? True, to some Conrad does not appeal. They have never
caught the glorious glamour of his pages—the solemn grandeur of his
magnificent prose. Probably the surest way to win converts would be to
compile a small book of extracts from his works, carefully graded
according to their difficulty.

When I was still at college I was curious about Conrad. A well-meaning
bookseller sold me _Lord Jim_. I tried to read it, but fifty pages was
as far as I could go. I tried again, but with even less success. Then
one day at Interlaken I found a Tauchnitz copy of _A Set of Six_. Before
I had quite finished the last story I lost the book—changing trains. But
Conrad has never since seemed obscure to me. A beginner in French would
never try to appreciate the shimmering pages of Flaubert; nor would even
the Yankee farm-hand feed his baby pie. More than any living writer has
Conrad needed some one to _present_ him to the public. This his American
publishers have tried of late to do. Mr. Curle’s book will add to their
success in so far as they manage to persuade people to read it. Except
for those who have begun with _Lord Jim_, _Nostromo_, or _Chance_, I
have never found anyone, who, having read one book by Conrad, was
content to stop there. Mr. Curle thinks _Nostromo_ Conrad’s greatest
work. It is now, with Europe in the throes of a bloody conflict, that
one realizes more and more how Conrad’s men and women, far removed from
the problems of a Wells, a Chesterton, or a Shaw—problems which _appear_
suddenly to be of very little importance after all—bulk great and ever
greater. There they loom—like Rodin’s _Balzac_ against the glowering
sky.

                                                         ALFRED KNOPF.

    _A Set of Six, by Joseph Conrad._ [_Doubleday, Page and Company,
                              New York._]

In this first American edition of his _Set of Six_, Conrad is revealed
as an artist _par excellence_. You find no subjective emotionalism on
the part of the author in any of his six tales, in spite of their
subtitles—_Romantic_, _Indignant_, _Pathetic_, and the like. You see in
him the wistful observer of characters and situations, which he presents
with impassionate objectivity, with the impartiality of a painter who
lovingly draws his object, whether it is ugly or beautiful, whether it
is a villain or a saint. Conrad possesses a wonderful skill in setting
up a background, which, at times, appears of more importance than the
plot. He makes you feel equally at home in the atmosphere of Napoleonic
France and of France of the Restoration, of revolutionary Peru and of a
Neapolitan amusement garden. You enjoy the tales greatly, you admire the
clever craftsmanship of the story-teller, but you close the book with an
empty feeling, as if you had listened to brilliant anecdotes in a
bachelors’ club.

                                                                    K.


                          Amy Lowell’s Poetry

     _Sword Blades and Poppy Seed, by Amy Lowell._ [_The Macmillan
                          Company, New York._]

In one of his letters, Byron says: “To withdraw myself from myself has
ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.”
Such a confession seems strange coming from a poet, and it is a
confession of quite a different character which is written on every page
of Miss Lowell’s book of poems. There one finds in every line the
expression of a personality which tries to realize itself and succeeds
in doing so. The unity as well as the interest of the book is in this
very development of a strong personality, of which a new and original
aspect is revealed in every poem.

What charms us at once in this personality, and renders the reading of
the book a constant enchantment, is a most wonderful imagination—an
imagination at the same time creative and representative, rich, varied,
overflowing with images and themes. All that life and nature offer is
the domain of this imagination; it wakes up at the most unexpected
moment and seizes the unseen detail, giving us an idea of the wonderful
wanderings through which it must take the person fortunate enough to
possess it. Now it is a temple; now a church; now a beggar; a blue
scarf; the distant notes of a flute; or the nocturnal noises of a London
street, which starts it on its way. At other times we find the
imagination at play with itself, so to speak, creating out of nothing a
historical or legendary atmosphere, or opening a philosophical vista, as
in _The Great Adventure of Max Breuck_, _The Basket_, or the poem from
which the book takes its name. Each one of these poems (and several
others also) has its own special atmosphere, precise in its complexity
and different from all the others.

In the style itself, in the development of the subjects, one finds the
same quality. It seems as if the pen were too slow to note the multiple
images which offer themselves to the mind of the poet. They accumulate
themselves, sometimes, in a manner not unlike that of Victor Hugo,
forming long periods in which the idea is turned in all possible ways,
presented from all angles and in every natural or artificial light.

It is not only the richness of the images, but their quality, which
reveals the power of Miss Lowell’s imagination. We all experience at
every minute of our lives an infinity of sensations of which we are more
or less conscious. It might almost be said that we are poets in exactly
the measure that we realize and enjoy our sensations. The real poet not
only registers his sensations, but is able to awaken in the mind of his
readers the sudden recollection of those visual or auditive impressions
which have never before reached his consciousness. This is what often
delights us in _Sword Blades and Poppy Seed_. It gratifies us to feel
that we are able to understand these subtle comparisons, these curious
and unexpected alliances of words, such as those in the first poem of
the book, where, to define certain shades of porcelains the poet speaks

      Of lustres with so evanescent a sheen
      Their colours are felt, but never seen.

Also in the first poem entitled _Miscast_, where she speaks of her mind
as

      So keen, that it nicks off the floating fringes of passers-by,
      So sharp, that the air would turn its edge
      Were it to be twisted in flight.

To help her imagination, Miss Lowell possesses a faculty which belongs
only to the happy few: the gift of words. The astonishing description of
arms and vases in the first poem is but one example, if one of the best,
of this rare gift.

It is necessary also, in order to study thoroughly this interesting and
complex personality, to mention the great dramatic quality of some of
the long poems in the book. From that point of view, _The Great
Adventure of Max Breuck_ seems to me the most interesting. And there is
much to be said of the sincerity and depth of sentiment in such poems as
_A Gift_, _Stupidity_, _Patience_, _Absence_. All these short poems have
something unique about them and constitute one of the greatest charms,
and an important part of the value, of the book. It is almost incredible
that a little poem like _Obligation_, for example, should contain such a
world of thought and restrained sentiment in its ten short lines. I have
chosen this poem as the type of this genre, because it characterizes
perhaps better than any other this very special trait of Miss Lowell’s
talent:

      Hold your apron wide
      That I may pour my gifts into it,
      So that scarcely shall your two arms hinder them
      From falling to the ground.

      I would pour them upon you
      And cover you,
      For greatly do I feel this need
      Of giving you something,
      Even these poor things.

      Dearest of my heart.

There is, in these few lines, a simplicity so naive, a sincerity so
complete, and at the same time such an intensity of feeling, that we
almost feel while reading it as if we were composing it ourselves. And
everybody knows that this is the mark of genius. It is rare to attain
such perfection in thought and in form as we find in these short poems,
which stand on their stems, straight and pure, like wild flowers opening
their hearts to the sun.

I should like, in conclusion, to speak of the very new and effective
attempts of the author in the free use of all possible rhythms. The
preface presents the author’s point of view, but I may add that she has
been especially skilful in the adaptation of the rhythms to the
subjects, a thing which requires great poetic tact and musical sense. To
study this side of the book would carry us too far, for to do it
properly a long article written especially on the subject would be
necessary.

To those who love poetry, and who are at the same time interested in the
progress of new schools, this book must be of the greatest value.

                                                    MAGDELAINE CARRET.


                         The Man and the Artist

    _Achievement, by E. Temple Thurston._ [_D. Appleton and Company,
                              New York._]

“Every man knows himself; but there are few women with all their
experience of men who act as if they knew anything about them.” “For it
is only in moments that men are dispassionate about women, while half
their lives through women are being dispassionate about men.” Why is it
that such glistening generalities prove invariably attractive to the
“general reader”? Perhaps the poor maligned g. r. fancies he is getting
“tips” on the values of his neighbors’ lives, or interminable “good
leads” as to his own adventures. Perhaps the fatuous distinctions merely
tickle the sex-vanity. Undoubtedly the same word-wisdom, offered in
regard to mankind and without the alluring distinction between man and
woman, would secure but half the attention. This attention seems no whit
slackened if the generalities are manifestly unfair by reason of their
fealty to traditionalism, as Mr. Thurston’s statements of this ilk are
apt to be.

The foregoing generality is not unfair to Mr. Thurston, since this
attractive bait is offered without stint in his latest novel
_Achievement_. In fact, the theme of the book is that ancient perennial
among popular themes: the conflict between a man and his loves; in this
case finding its redemption from the usual in that the protagonist is
the man’s work rather than the man.

Yet, in spite of these sops to Cerberus, the book does not hold. It is
but another of the multiplying outputs of today which are interesting to
the critic alone, and to him only as a study in the pathology of the
creative instinct. The lay-reader will find himself nodding over the
crucial scenes or will lose his place time and again, if he persist in
reading to the end. If a sense of justice will not permit him to judge
the whole by a part, his persistence is tribute only to the undeniable
sincerity of aim felt throughout the work. A stronger tribute, of
course, is the mere length of this review; the fact, that is, that
whatever of critic be in the reading mind is drawn to reiterate
questions and puzzle over their answer, as to the reason for the falling
short of this novel from the better standards, manifestly striven after.

The reader who does concern himself, then, with _Achievement_ will be
puzzled, perhaps irritated, by the insistent question: “But what is the
matter?” There is a certain mastery of words; there is honesty and
sensitiveness of treatment, to a degree beyond the usual; moreover, side
by side with the theme proper, is carried a sympathetic and reverent
revelation of the mind of a creative artist, in this case, a painter; a
study alone sufficient to redeem the work from the stigma of triteness.
These qualities should carry any novel into favor at least; might be
expected to overshadow the noticeable unevenness of work, astonishing in
an author of E. Temple Thurston’s apprenticeship. But the book fails to
convince. The only lasting impression it leaves is the question, “Why
inadequate?”

Perhaps the answer lies in the inadequacy of the theme itself. This may
be voiced, in both its major and minor keys, through Mr. Thurston’s own
words, “For as it is the tragedy of women when the romance of love is
gone from them, so it is the tragedy of men, when their work is done.”
Had the author juggled the words of that sentence a bit—had it read so:
“The realization that the romance of love has gone out from one’s life
is no more a tragedy than the instant when one knows that his work is
done”; could the author have conceived this theme, the subject of
achievement would have compelled a more worthy treatment. Had he been
able to think of women and men as alike potent, whether creators or
lovers, then his picture of the creator in Richard Furlong fertilized by
the lover in him might have been adequate.

The greatest need of today is a pronoun of the common gender. It is
beginning to be recognized that the generation now growing up to face
the ultimate issues of living is one which will declare that spiritual
experience is basically an unsexed phenomenon. Woman of today has been
heard to declare that whatever charge can be made about man’s
potentialities, even his propensities, can be charged alike to the
woman. This is no meaningless attitude. Neither is it naive nor
amusingly unscientific, when the young girl of the future lifts her
voice and sings out, “Before she is woman or he is a man, man and woman
are alike persons.” In this theorem, difficult to word, lies the fertile
germ of suffrage, feminism, suffragettism, militantism, and all the
other lifted voices of woman.

No one of the women of Mr. Thurston’s portrayal is of value to herself
or to the lives about her, except as a woman, a slave or queen of man,
his toy or his inspiration, life’s parasite. The author would answer
that he is not attempting a study of woman, but of an artist achieving
by means of woman. None the less, if all the women who influence his
artist were drawn in as hunchbacks, we would resent the distorted
picture, the hypothesis that woman is essentially hunchbacked. Thus,
since all the women in _Achievement_ are traditionally paralyzed women,
we resent the generic theme of art under influence of womanhood. In
order to receive serious audience today, any portrayal of woman,
indirectly or directly, must recognize that there are genuine women as
there are men, who live in terms of selfhood rather than in terms of
sex.

The denouement is the usual stock company curtain. However, if so many
pistol shots per volume is a stipulation in the novelist’s contract, it
must be conceded him that his telling of the murder is admirably simple.
A more admirable simplicity is attained in the trenchant description of
the murderer’s psychology after the deed. The author is to be
congratulated for missing that “opportunity” for analysis, of which the
usual fiction writer spins chapter after chapter, morbid, a snare to
catch cheap horror and pity, a spider-web for flies.

That the scene of the last two pages should have been written once is
regrettable. That these pages were not cut out hastily as soon as
written is unforgivable in an author who desires so profoundly to be in
sympathy with the artist who has achieved.

                                                                    R.


                         Ethel Sidgwick’s Books

                [_Small, Maynard and Company, Boston._]

I cannot let another issue of THE LITTLE REVIEW go to press without some
mention of Ethel Sidgwick. Last year, with a sense of worship, I read
_Succession_, the second volume of a trilogy devoted to the story of a
boy-wonder violinist. To find such subtlety, such radiance, such art—to
find such music!—in a piece of fiction was an unforgettable experience.
Music has never been so richly treated in fiction—except in _Jean
Christophe_, which of course is the master work of the last years. I
felt that I had never comprehended any character so fully as I did
little Antoine, and I still feel that way. This year on Christmas day,
as a sort of special celebration, I read the first volume, _Promise_. It
is just as interesting, though there is not such a brilliant
concentration of art in it. But isn’t there some way to make these books
known? They will never be popular; but it is tragic to think of their
not getting to the people who would value them. Their publishers would
far rather advertise their cheap fiction than to try to force Ethel
Sidgwick on a nation that does not demand good work of novelists.


                           Oxford and Genius

       _Sinister Street, by Compton Mackenzie._ [_D. Appleton and
                          Company, New York._]

E. Temple Thurston attracted attention here before Compton Mackenzie
did, but the latter is as far ahead of him now as is Gilbert Canaan,
whose _Peter Homunculus_ came out about the time of Thurston’s _City of
Beautiful Nonsense_. These three young Englishmen know how to write
English prose; Mackenzie and Canaan know how to tell big stories.
_Sinister Street_ is much too important a book to be reviewed in less
than three or four pages at least. The first part of it tells of the
modern man at Oxford—“a more complete account of the mind of a young man
of our day than has been written previously in English, an account which
presents some of the things that Thackeray meant when he complained that
his public would not permit him to tell all he wished about Pendennis,
and a good many more besides,” as Lucien Cary has said. It is so
extremely well done that the second part of the volume—the hero’s
reactions to life after Oxford—comes with a sense of forced writing.
Perhaps the war had something to do with it. We shall try to review this
book more at length later.


                    “Without Machiavellian Subtlety”

     _The War and Culture, by John Cowper Powys._ [_G. Arnold Shaw,
                              New York._]

Among all the patriotic rubbish that has been heaped upon the book
market since the outbreak of the European war, Mr. Powys’s pamphlet
presents at least not dull reading. The brilliant lecturer unmasques the
underlying motives of German statesmen who have accepted Machiavellian
principles, “without acquiring Machiavellian subtlety.” He successfully
attacks Münsterberg and other apologists for the Fatherland, who
endeavor to present their country in the image of an innocent lamb
dragged into the bloody struggle by greedy barbarians. Mr. Powys’
mission is a negative one, and there it ends. He falls flat as soon as
he attempts to idealize and to glorify the Allies. His speculation that
the present war is a struggle of ideas, of individualism versus state,
of soul versus machine, is far fetched.




                           The Reader Critic


                        Mr. Powys on Dostoevsky

       (_A reader sends us these jottings from one of Mr. Powys’s
                              lectures._)

Shudders of life....

I have only one thing to do—to bring you into a strange mass of palpable
darkness with something moving in it. Dostoevsky is really a great mass,
a volume, not a cloud nor a pillar of fire nor a puff of smoke, but a
vast, formless, shapeless mass of darkness, palpable and drawing you
towards itself.

Reading him is dangerous because of the inherent sense of fear likely to
be accentuated in those who are a little mad and whose madness takes on
the form of fear. We go on a visit to a mad house, to hospitals with
Dostoevsky. But with him this whole world suddenly changes into a mad
house. It is all haunting mad houses and hospitals filled with us
maniacs of the particular fear we are subject to.

(Life is all a running away—a distraction. We are running away when we
are talking, when we are making love—then more than ever, perhaps.)

In Dostoevsky we suddenly realize that these Russians are ourselves. If
the religion, mysticism, liberalism, despotism they possess were only
Russian there are excellent books written by travellers in Russia for us
to read. But Dostoevsky is different. If I could but mesmerize you....
It is like reading the gospels in childhood, being overrun and
overthrown by fate and then after one has lived meeting the words of the
childhood situations and making associations.

I do not think of him as an artist, though he is a great one. You do not
_think_ of him.... In ordinary life we suppress half the things and more
we might say. Vanity and fear are the ultimate things. In Dostoevsky the
people tug and scrape at one anothers’ vain nerves with adder’s poison.
He gives one the sensation of discovering one’s self and betraying one’s
self. He reveals as friends talking and discussing in the small hours of
the morning reveal themselves to one another. The talk may be a
describing of the animal functions of the human body. But in reality it
is the psychic tingling, electric vibrations which the physiological
structure exerts upon mind! Mind! Mind! Dostoevsky is interested in what
people actually feel. He is more with people who have written diaries
than with so-called realistic novelists. One gets from him a sense of
perversion of human imagination.... He is the most important of
novelists; full of ripples and vibrations of imagination. Everybody has
imagination. The things we do are nothing. Imagination is the only thing
over which Will has no power.

Nietzsche says that he got all his contemporary philosophy from
Dostoevsky. He got from him even his idea of the inner circle of
aristocratic souls who really rule the world, are themselves unhappy,
and take with others to places which they (these others) cannot enter.
Dostoevsky thinks that the secret of the world is in abandonment,
perversion; Nietzsche in harness, stiffness, the gay, the strong, the
beautiful, aristocratic, dominant.... Nietzsche with all his reality
does not describe life as it is. Zarathustra is a dream—impossible
perhaps. But Dostoevsky does describe life. Nietzsche’s man is
absolutely alone—has his own hell. Dostoevsky’s has that too, but in a
different way. He gives the feeling of a third person where two are
alone. Do not think that Dostoevsky is a mystic. The essential thing is
that you have this sense of a third person to which genius appeals.
Dostoevsky is a stronger as well as a truer one than even Nietzsche
himself.

Nietzsche is as a skater upon the ice, a dancer upon a tight rope who
remains a white, balanced figure on the surface. Dostoevsky plunges—into
a darkness full of voices. You must get there by a form of perversion.
Every one of his characters is incurably hurt. Nietzscheans harden their
hearts and live on the surface. All Dostoevsky people are weak. He
thinks that only out of weakness will redemption come; abandonment to
every emotion. In that he is Dionysian.... Dostoevsky I cannot put into
words. Perversion; Disease; God is Disease; God is Pain; Dostoevsky
depicts how Disease gives one illumination. We have an idea that we must
be well. Even Nietzsche says that. The Greeks said it ages ago.
Dostoevsky says “No; I offer you a new value.” He has a lust for
fools—understands the mania that people have of making fools of
themselves. God is Folly; God is Cruelty—perhaps an epicene God.

Dostoevsky is a cerebralist. His specialty is imaginative reactions. All
the lusts that have stretched their wailing arms, all the hopes, all the
goblins.... In sex as in everything else people are not what they are
doing; they are in that vortex of what they imagine themselves.
Dostoevsky understands all that. Those frank-spoken people who think
they know sex are puritans on the other side. They have no imagination.

We can overestimate what Dostoevsky has from Russia and not attribute
what he is to himself. Other Russians are Russians—Turgeniev, Tolstoy,
Andreyev, Chekhov, Gorky—but they are not as big as he is; perhaps they
are more of the broader stamp.

... Constance Garnett’s translations are masterpieces. The French are
too artistic to translate Dostoevsky.... No one can approach Dostoevsky
in creating a saint. Russia as the spiritual bringer-back of the world
to Christianity—this runs through his works. He is _the_ Christian. His
books are full of translations from Scripture. He understands the
underlying psychology of the gospels. Nietzsche said that putting the
gospels with the art of the Old Testament was a crime in the name of
Art. The Old Testament is undoubtedly finer art, but the New is
psychology—masterly.


                      VERS LIBRE AND COMMON SENSE

_Clinton Masseck, St. Louis_:

_Vers Libre_ has no inconsiderable tradition in English verse, as Mr.
Arthur Ficke has recently pointed out in THE LITTLE REVIEW. Its progress
in French poetry, particularly among modern writers, is familiar to all
students. And if we were inclined to forget or to forgive Whitman
(meaning in politer terms to accept him and his followers), the recent
verse of the Imagiste group and such writers as Miss Amy Lowell and Mr.
Max Bodenheim in our own midst would be likely to force our attention to
this interesting form—if I may employ this word in no paradoxical sense.

But _vers libre_ is of the moment—new, if you will, in its present
appeal. Its modern themes, its unique figures of speech, its wide
practice, both in this country and in England, mark it as a new
movement, or at least a new recrudescence.

Anything new invites attack; anything new in literature perhaps warrants
attack. If it can stand the test, by just such a token, it is worth
consideration. But there are those to whom the new is always a thing to
be attacked—because it is new, because it is inexplicable according to
their own canons of emotion and intellect. Francis Jeffrey, with his
famous caption on Wordsworth, “This will never do,” has his echo, futile
and otherwise, in every generation of critics. And so we have Mr.
Llewellyn Jones, in the January issue of THE LITTLE REVIEW, sending up
his protest against _vers libre_ in general and Mr. Bodenheim in
particular.

Mr. Jones is markedly distressed. If he were not so much in earnest and
so decently—or indecently—polite, so “suedy,” so suave, even scholastic
in his handling, he might be amusing. He is also distinctly pugnacious
and, as most pugnacious people are inclined to be, he is curiously
inconsistent.

In fact, it is a little difficult to determine why Mr. Jones cannot
accept Bodenheim. (He is guilty of reading Meredith, “popularly supposed
to be obscure.”) Because our poet writes of “a world of growing sieves,
slim squares, powdered souls, cool, colorless struggles, the obstetrical
adventures of white throats, and green and yellow dins,” and because Mr.
Jones, in the smallness of his soul or environment, has never been able
to concoct or to conceive of poetry couched in this garb—let us grant
the idea behind it—he straightway announces “This will never do.”
Wordsworth, after being so thoroughly “sieved” by the critics, still
lives; the divine essence of romanticism was not killed by Jeffrey and
his thunder-pellet phrase. Courage, Mr. Bodenheim!

Yet in a really admirable paragraph of summary as to the function of
poetry and the relation of a poet to his audience, Mr. Jones lays down
the dictum that “the poet sees the world as we do not see it.
Consequently, he can put a new complexion on it for us. The world is
pluralistic, and so are we. Intellectually we may be of the twentieth
century, but emotionally we may be born out of our due season. Then let
the poet of that due season mediate to us the emotional life that we
need.... By his aid alone we may get outside of our own skins and into
the very heart of the world.”

The last words of this statement are peculiarly significant in this
connection. “By his aid alone we may get outside of our skins into the
very heart of the world.” What is the heart of the world? I do not know
it all, emotionally or intellectually, although if I were to trust one
of these endowments in order to render judgment upon poetry, I should
choose the first. On the other hand, Mr. Jones does not know the entire
heart of the world; nor does Mr. Bodenheim. But we may each of us know
some little corner of this heart that the other does not or cannot ever
know. For some of us poetry remains but the supreme expression of mere
external beauty, for others the expression in consummate form of a
purely intellectual process; to others poetry is a weapon wherewith to
pierce the veil of externality and to expose the hidden but the real
reality. The late William James once declared that we were standing on
the verge of new discoveries in feeling and knowledge; that just beyond
us lies a world of new adjustments and new experiences. Of course, in
this instance, James had reference to our new appreciation and estimate
of the value of mysticism in the judgment of certain phases of religious
experiences. But the thing holds true even in poetry; the line between
the poet and the mystic has yet to be drawn. I, for one, should not want
to think myself incapable of enlarging either my soul or my
appreciation. If anybody can show me whether in new terms or not a
hitherto unsuspected and unknown aspect of beauty, I shall be content to
accept that person. I would go further; I should be very thankful that I
had obtained a new point of view with which to regulate both my emotions
and my intellect.

I, for one, saw and felt and appreciated the appeal of the
much-discussed “sieve” poem. To be sure, along with Mr. Jones, I had
previously thought of a sieve only in relation to ashes and garden
earth—and even of that “little triangular sieve that fits into kitchen
sinks.” But if some one can come along and convince me that this
hitherto vulgar and despised implement has inherent in it the
possibilities of metaphysical development, and that a certain person can
be likened to a sieve, why, then I have learned a new aspect of beauty.

And hence, it would seem to me that Mr. Bodenheim has fulfilled every
single requirement that Mr. Jones has put upon the poet. And the only
reason Mr. Jones cannot appreciate these little poems is because,
intellectually and emotionally, he is “born out of due season.”

After all, “All art is convention.” The Alaskan Indian, with his
grotesque—to us—totem poles, cannot understand the smooth and plastic
strength of much of classic sculpture. The African Negro, with his
Campbell-soup-can earrings and his Connecticut-made curtain ring
bracelets, cannot appreciate the effect of simple unadornment. Yet in
any case the point of view, the impelling instinct that leads toward
beauty, is the same for any person, any race, any civilization. Let us
be honest and admit this. Let us sincerely seek and discover the
philosophy that guides every new movement, whether in fashion or food or
poetry.

Yet it seems to me that we are too prone to accept poetry and to judge
it from a too utilitarian point of view. We would make it stand the same
test that we apply to religion, to household furnaces, and other things
that have been long tried. We ask ourselves when some new manifestation
of it arises: “Will it do the trick? Will it comfort and warm and
sustain us in the way that we have been accustomed to being comforted,
warmed, and sustained by that which has already been accepted?” Yet if a
new form discovers a new idea, if it tears away the covering with rough
and clumsy hands in order to show the emotions, a fresh significance or
a bold interpretation, we jump back in terror and horror.

So it is with _vers libre_ at the present moment. Because it shows us
new things, and a new and perhaps at times an awkward manner, critics
fed on the diluted sentimentality of Longfellow—or even the classic and
obscure Meredith—revolt. Eventually they will accept it; they must.
Those that are not fools must remember that history repeats itself; that
to cite but a recent instance, Manet and Monet and Sisley, in painting,
are accepted where forty-five years ago they were characterized as fools
and madmen. After time has crystalized the unusual into the
conventional, and the crystals are as common and as pretty as only time
and much practice can make them, the critic, along with the man in the
street, will be content to partake and to appreciate. It will be then
too late; what was once unique and rare will be common and banally
uninteresting; a new awakening will then take place, and once more the
world will witness the same absurd attack of the critics.

In this connection, in our future judgment of _vers libre_, let us
recall the wise and simple words of R. A. M. Stevenson: “The test of a
new thing is not utility, which may appear at any moment like a shoot
with the first favouring breath of spring. The test is the kind and
amount of human feeling and intellect put into the work. Could any fool
do it? Now, in this matter of depicting truth, there are eyesights of
all grades and breadth, of grandeur, of subtlety, and art has more than
the delicacy of a tripos examination in tailing out as in a footrace all
the talents and capabilities of the competitors.”

Go to it, Mr. Bodenheim!




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   The Open Court                                                       
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   so many artists who have played all other leading pianos have
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      Mason & Hamlin Pianos are for sale only at the warerooms of
                                  the


                         _Cable Piano Company_

                       _Wabash & Jackson_ Chicago


                      _New Joseph Conrad Stories_




                              A SET OF SIX

        _Containing five short stories never before published in
      America and “The Duel,” formerly published as “The Point of
                                Honor”_

   The publication of this volume for the first time in the American
   Edition of Conrad’s works is in response to an interest that is
   rapidly making the name and work of Joseph Conrad known
   everywhere.

   It marks the full turn of the tide in favor of this wonderful
   Polish-English writer.

   The stories included are:

                      GASPAR RUIZ—A Romantic Tale
                      THE INFORMER—An Ironic Tale
                      THE BRUTE—An Indignant Tale
                     AN ANARCHIST—A Desperate Tale
                        THE DUEL—A Military Tale
                        IL CONDE—A Pathetic Tale

   Five of these are practically unknown to American readers. Of
   “The Duel,” (formerly “The Point of Honor”) Mr. Curle, in his
   critical work on Joseph Conrad writes:

   “It is a work of wide imaginative impulse—a wonderful
   reconstruction of the Napoleonic atmosphere. As a sustained
   effort in Conrad’s sardonic later style it is unmatched.”

      _Now Ready in the “Deep Sea” Limp Leather Edition of Conrad.
                   Net, $1.50; in cloth, net, $1.35_


           Other Volumes in the “Deep Sea Edition” of Conrad

   Bound in rich sea-blue limp leather

                                 Chance

   “‘Chance’ is a book that could have been written by no one but a
   master—a book which it is well nigh a duty for every lover of
   good writing to read.”—BASIL KING, author of “The Inner Shrine,”
   etc.

                                 Youth

        _Contains “Youth,” “Heart of Darkness,” and “End of the
                               Tether.”_

   “To read it is in some sense to live again, and that, I think, is
   the highest praise that can be laid upon a work of the
   imagination.”—HENRY L. MENCKEN.

                                Lord Jim

   “‘Lord Jim’ is the greatest psychological study of cowardice that
   I have ever read.”—DAVID BELASCO.

                      The Nigger of the Narcissus

   “The sea, in his hands, fades to a background—sometimes smooth
   and blue—sometimes white and furious—but always a background
   against which are silhouetted the haunting figures in which he
   interprets man’s endless struggle.”—Chicago _Evening Post_.

                          ’Twixt Land and Sea

                       AND TWO OTHER SEA STORIES

   “Mr. Conrad has never painted more vivid scenes of nature or
   looked more deeply into the hearts of his characters than in this
   moving book.”—_The Outlook._

             Almayer’s Folly, and An Outcast of the Islands

                 _Mr. Conrad’s first and second novels_

   “The figures in these books live for us, and above and beyond
   them are the power of presentment, the marvellous faculty for the
   absolute creation of atmosphere, the genius for description, and
   the individual, finished style which these, Mr. Conrad’s earliest
   works, display.”—Sir HUGH CLIFFORD, K.C.M.G., in the _North
   American Review_.

                                  Falk

           _Contains “Falk,” “Amy Foster,” and “To-morrow.”_

   “‘Falk’ leaves one inclined to declare that the writing of that
   one story would be sufficient to place him among the
   immortals.”—_New York Times._

                                Typhoon

   “To read a story like ‘Typhoon’ is to undergo an almost physical
   experience. It is unforgettable, even as the experience it
   pictures and interprets must be unforgettable.”—HILDEGARDE
   HAWTHORNE.

                                Romance

                      (_With_ FORD MADOX HUEFFER)

   “‘Romance’ is indeed a work of blazing imagination. It is a sheer
   novel of adventure, and the glory of it lies in its color and
   shifting lights.”—RICHARD CURLE, in “Joseph Conrad.”

      Each Volume, Net, $1.50. Set of Eleven Volumes, Boxed, Net,
                                 $16.50

       Published by DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY Garden City, N. Y.




                     Published February Sixth, 1915

                          Carranza and Mexico

                          by CARLO DE FORNARO

   “Carranza and Mexico” tells the story of the Mexican revolt
   during the last three years—the true story of the fifteen million
   peons who are making history, breaking tradition and waging a
   vigorous battle for liberty and common justice.

   To the student of sociological problems, Mexico is probably the
   most fascinating spot in the universe. Its problem is so
   complicated that very few people indeed know what the trouble
   really is about. Mr. Fornaro does. He has lived for a long time
   in Mexico, and his book, which tells of the overthrow of Madero,
   the campaign against Huerta, Wilson’s Mexican Policy, and other
   matters of immediate interest, is the result of a labor extending
   over a period of ten years.

                  _With Illustrations and Map, $1.25_

                                Creation

                       _Post Impressionist Poems_

                            By Horace Holey

   This is a notable volume of verse, called “Post Impressionist,”
   because in spirit it is based upon a warm sympathy for the art of
   the greater Post-Impressionists. Symmetric form is disregarded
   for the more characteristically modern effects of rhythm.

   It is distinguished throughout by clear convinced thought, strong
   and definite emotion and a fine mastery of rhythmic phrase. It is
   not passionate in the romantic sense—that is, the thought is not
   a mere decoration of the mood, but it certainly is passionate in
   the sense that thought and emotion are continually welded
   together by the white heat of personal conviction.

                               _75 cents_

                             The Primal Law

                               _A Novel_

                          By ISABEL OSTRANDER

   An engrossing story of a woman’s way through the third decade of
   her life—and of the various men with whom she comes in contact.
   Ben Donahue, a fellow mill-worker in a small New England town;
   Marcus Beeman, the salesman who takes her to New York; Frank
   Kelly, the famous horse-trainer with whom she sees Saratoga,
   Paris, London and Dublin; Baron Georges Iverskoi of Russia, whose
   companion she is in Biarritz, Monte-Carlo, Aix, Trouville, Rome,
   Ostende and other places; Captain Cecil Cope-Herrington; Senor
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   sculptor, whose career her love unwittingly ruins—these are but a
   few of the characters that are intimately pictured in these
   pages. “The Primal Law” presents a rare panorama of the
   cosmopolitan life that the European War has now brought abruptly
   to an end. And withal, it is a book written with a serious
   underlying motive.

                                _$1.35_

                        The World of H. G. Wells

                           By Van Wyck Brooks

   Certainly no writer has of late been more in the public eye than
   H. G. Wells. It is high time, therefore, that a complete and
   trenchant study of his work and personality in all their various
   phases should be published. And that is just what Mr. Brooks has
   written. To his task he has brought rare gifts of analysis and
   synthesis, together with no little charm. The result is a book
   which will be welcomed as one of the most informative and
   interesting in critical literature. A clear understanding of H.
   G. Wells is imperative for all thoughtful men and women, and no
   more appropriate time than the present could be found for issuing
   a book that fully satisfies that need.

                                _$1.25_


                  MITCHELL KENNERLEY’S RAILROAD NOVELS

   Most people when they are traveling like to read—nothing heavy or
   too serious—but a good yarn that will amuse and interest them. To
   supply just this want I have started my series of “Railroad
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   are printed in large type on light paper, and bound in limp
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   are uniform in appearance and price.

                           Can a Man Be True?

                           By WINIFRED GRAHAM

   A good old-fashioned tale of adventure and intrigue, which in
   some ways recalls “The Prisoner of Zenda,” and the romances of
   the great Dumas. The sort of story that is passing now, but which
   every one enjoys once in a while. No sex, no problem, but lots of
   plot and counterplot and excitement. A book that may be read and
   enjoyed by every member of the family.

                                _$1.00_

                 MITCHELL KENNERLEY PUBLISHER NEW YORK




                        Books By Havelock Ellis

   Mr. Ellis is one of the most distinguished psychologists, and men
   of letters in the world today. He is a scientist with a vision
   and a sense of humor, a traveler who sees below the surface, and
   a scholar who has read and digested a great part of the world’s
   literature without becoming a pedant. To readers of THE LITTLE
   REVIEW who are not familiar with his work we confidently
   recommend any of the four books below.

                        IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS

   “A book of random observations, thoughts, and half-thoughts,
   crotchets, hobbies, guesses, and whims. One day Mr. Ellis muses
   over a drunken woman and on another he descants on the evolution
   of furniture, having in the meanwhile declared his taste in
   architecture, the women of Normandy, the ugliness of modern
   civilization, and the music of Franck and Elgar, and his opinion
   of the devil, Cornishmen, George Meredith, Raphael, Gaby Deslys,
   war, and nakedness.”

                          F. M. Colby in The North American Review.

                               $1.50 net.

                       THE TASK OF SOCIAL HYGIENE

   A discussion of the changing status of woman, the emancipation of
   woman in relation to romantic love, the significance of the
   falling birth-rate, and other aspects of sex and society. “It is
   an inspiring and reassuring volume, which deserves not one but
   several readings from everyone who takes anything more than a
   predatory interest in the social organism.”

                               Waldo R. Browne in the Chicago Dial.

                               $2.50 net.

                          THE WORLD OF DREAMS

   A scholarly, yet entertaining study of just the peculiarities and
   curiosities of the world of dreams which everybody has wondered
   at. It describes them with the vividness and fantastic imagery
   which combine so charmingly in Kipling’s “The Brushwood Boy,” and
   at the same time interprets them in the light of a psychologist’s
   special knowledge.

                               $2.00 net.

                           THE SOUL OF SPAIN

   This brilliant volume on the romance, the woman, the art, the
   dancing, and the gardens of Spain, and especially on the Spanish
   character, is probably the most illuminating as well as the most
   readable interpretation of this inscrutable people in literature.

               With photogravure frontispiece, $2.00 net.

         Order at your bookstore or direct from the publishers

             4 Park Street HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY Boston




                          Transcriber’s Notes


Advertisements were collected at the end of the text.

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

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

   [p. 11]:
   ... of good tidings and love leant for the redemption of the many
       through the ...
   ... of good tidings and love lent for the redemption of the many
       through the ...

   [p. 15]:
   ... Hallow caverns of cool blue shadow, ...
   ... Hollow caverns of cool blue shadow, ...

   [p. 29]:
   ... to the descredit of some of those most noisy in demanding the
       right. The ...
   ... to the discredit of some of those most noisy in demanding the
       right. The ...

   [p. 30]:
   ... Unbidden and unwarmed she takes us up in the round of her
       Dance and sweeps along with us, until exhausted we fall from
       her Arms. ...
   ... Unbidden and unwarned she takes us up in the round of her
       Dance and sweeps along with us, until exhausted we fall from
       her Arms. ...

   [p. 31]:
   ... If she gives another Need—then it is a new source of
       Desire; but soon she come to Equipoise. ...
   ... If she gives another Need—then it is a new source of
       Desire; but soon she comes to Equipoise. ...

   [p. 36]: (multiple cases)
   ... von Rezñicek. This was the pièce de resistance at the
       evening concert. ...
   ... von Reznicek. This was the pièce de resistance at the
       evening concert. ...

   [p. 36]:
   ... first violins, sixteen second violins, twelve violas, ten
       violincellos, eight double ...
   ... first violins, sixteen second violins, twelve violas, ten
       violoncellos, eight double ...

   [p. 36]: (multiple cases)
   ... existence. A compound essentially of Tod und Verkläring,
       Tyll Eulenspiegel ...
   ... existence. A compound essentially of Tod und Verklärung,
       Tyll Eulenspiegel ...

   [p. 37]:
   ... Tod und Verkläring deprives Schlëmihl of any greater claim
       than that. ...
   ... Tod und Verklärung deprives Schlemihl of any greater claim
       than that. ...

   [p. 39]:
   ... (Solvieg’s Lied) ...
   ... (Solveigs Lied) ...

   [p. 48]:
   ... favor with his countrymen by editing Der Vaterland, although
       before that ...
   ... favor with his countrymen by editing Das Vaterland, although
       before that ...

   [p. 60]:
   ... to glorify the Allies. His speculation that the present war
       as a struggle of ...
   ... to glorify the Allies. His speculation that the present war
       is a struggle of ...

   [p. 62]:
   ... Dostoevsky is a celebralist. His specialty is imaginative
       reactions. All ...
   ... Dostoevsky is a cerebralist. His specialty is imaginative
       reactions. All ...

   [p. 63]:
   ... England, mark it as a new movement, or at least a new
       recrusence. ...
   ... England, mark it as a new movement, or at least a new
       recrudescence. ...