The Little Review: 1914/04 (Vol. 1, No. 2), Ed. Margaret C. Anderson

George Soule

George Burman Foster

In his voluptuous vagabondage Rousseau at length halted at Paris, where he managed to worry through some inconstant years. The thing that saved the day for him was the fragment of a pamphlet that blew across his path in one of his rambles, announcing a prize to be awarded by the Academy of Dijon for the best answer to an extraordinary question. Had the renascence of the arts and sciences ennobled morals? That was a flash of lightning which lit up a murky night and helped this bewildered and lonely wanderer to get his bearings. Thoughts came to him demoniacally which shaped his entire future and won him no small place in the history of humanity.

Answer is “No!” said Rousseau. And his answer was awarded the academic prize.

It seems strange that the history of his times sided with Rousseau’s “No.” Certainly it was the first fiery meteor of the French revolution. It pronounced the first damnatory sentence upon a culture that had already reached the point of collapse. In his own body and soul Rousseau had bitterly experienced the curse of this culture. It was largely responsible for his heart’s abnormal yearning whose glow was consuming him. Instead of ennobling morals this culture had inwardly barbarized man. Then it galvanized and painted the outside of life. And then life became a glittering lie.

Thus Rousseau became prophet in this desert of culture, and called men to repentance. “Back from culture to nature,” was his radical cry; back from what man has made out of himself to what nature meant him to be. Nature gave man free use of his limbs; culture has bound them with all sorts of bindings, until he is stiff, and short-winded, and crippled. According to nature man lives his own life; man is what he seems and seems what he is; according to culture he is cunning, and crafty, and mendacious.

The eighteenth-century man of culture hearkened with attentive soul to the dirge in which one of its noblest sons vented his tortured heart. The melancholy music bruised from this prophet’s heart silenced the wit and ridicule of even a Voltaire, who wanted to know, however, whether “the idea was that man was to go on all fours again.” In a few decades the feet of revolutionary Frenchmen were at the door ready, with few and short prayers, to bear to its last abode that culture whose moral worth even a French Academy had called in question, and for whose moral condemnation had awarded the first prize.

Now it is our turn! What is the good of our culture? Such is the query of a host of people who know nothing thereof save the wounds it has inflicted upon them—a host of people who face our culture with the bitter feeling that they have created it with the sweat of their brows, but have not been permitted to taste its joys. Such, too, is the query of others who, satiated with its beneficence, have been its pioneers,—a John Stuart Mill, political economist, who doubts whether all our cultural progress has mitigated the sufferings of a single human being; a Huxley, naturalist, who finds the present condition of the larger part of humanity so intolerable today that, were no way of improvement to be found, he would welcome the collision of a kindly comet that would smash our petty planet into smithereens.

Also, there is your proletariat. And there is your culture on summits far out of his reach. The more inaccessible it is, shining there with a radiance that never falls upon him, the less does he reflect that all is not gold that glitters. Then there is your philanthropist, foremost in culture of mind and heart, surveying the masses far beneath him, in the slime and grime of life, and doubting at last whether any labor of love can lift men up to where he thinks men ought to be; whether, after all, it can bring joy to men who are sick and sore with the load of life.

Not to be partial, one may magnanimously cite your philistine also—the man of “the golden mean,” the “man of sanity,” as mediocrity has ever brand-marked itself, who “hates ultra.” For the life of him your philistine cannot understand how a “reasonable” man can have any doubt about our culture. Does he not read in his favorite newspaper how gloriously we have progressed? Does he not encore the prodigious achievements of our technique? Has he not heard his crack spellbinder orate on the cultural felicity that follows our flag? Down with the disloyalty of highbrow doubters!

Now it was from an entirely different side, indeed it was from an entirely different standpoint, that Friedrich Nietzsche contemplated modern culture, particularly the national culture of the German Fatherland. What horrified him was not simply the content, but the criterion, of our culture. He sharply scrutinized the ideals which we set ourselves in our culture. He found not simply our achievements but our ideals, ourselves even, so inferior, so vulgar, so contemptible, that he began to doubt whether even the Germans could be recognized as a culture people or not. Hence Nietzsche became the most ruthless iconoclast of our culture. Unlike the majority, unlike the scholars, the philanthropists, the philistines, Nietzsche was not moved by the misery of the masses, by the great social need of our time. He did not regret that the boon of our culture was shared by so few, inasmuch as, in his opinion, this boon was of very doubtful value. He found our life so barbarous, so culture-hostile, that he still missed the first elements of a true culture among us.

Hence Nietzsche lunged against status quo. He did what he himself called “unzeitmässig,” untimely. He flung a question, more burning than any other, into our time—more burning than even the social question, constituting indeed the main part of that question. It was the question as to how man fared in this culture—the question as to what man got out of it and as to what it got out of man.

Never before had this question been put as Nietzsche put it. We should recall that Nietzsche was not one of those who had experienced the extremes of either plenty or want, nor was he one of those who filled the wide space between the two. To him, the pessimism of the discontented and the optimism of the fortunate and the satisfied were alike superficial, if not impertinent. It was not a question of “happiness” at all. In bitter, biting sarcasm he says, with reference to the English utilitarian “happiness morality”: “I do not seek my happiness; only an Englishman seeks his happiness; I seek my work.”

No; his was a question which his conscience put to culture. Was it a “culture of the earth, or of man?” Here Nietzsche probes home. And he alone did it. The most diverse censors of our time had not seen and said that no matter how desirable, no matter how gloriously conceived the new order of things might be, man must be the decisive thing; man must tip the scales. It was this that went against the grain. Mightier machines, larger cities, better apartments, bigger schools, what was the good of it all, et id omne genus, if new and greater men did not arise? So said Nietzsche. And he said it with high scorn to a generation which had forgotten that man is not for “culture,” but culture for man; of man, by man, for man.

Every people seems to pass through a period in which it is obsessed with the idea that the causes of popular prosperity are at once motive and criterion of culture; that the natural laws of economics are the universally valid norms of the ebb and flow of human values; that a balance on the balance sheet to the good, the satisfactoriness of the statistics of exports and imports to the wishes of the interested parties, are an occasion for jubilation over the ascent which life has compassed. Harbor some scruple as to whether the jubilation be warranted or not, and you are at once pilloried as a pessimist and a malcontent. And yet had there been no Nietzsche there would still remain Cicero’s warning: “Woe to a people whose wealth grows but whose men decay.” But there was a Nietzsche, and he dared to call even his Fatherland Europe’s “flat country”—flat was a hard word for a land that could once boast of so many poets and thinkers. But now the flatter the better! But now no peaks to scale, no yawning abysses on whose edges one grows dizzy! Nothing a single step removed from the ordinary, the conventional! Now heights and depths, distinctions and distances, these are valid in the world of quantity, not of quality; of possession, not of being; of tax tables, not of human essence and human power! Now all men are equal! But Nietzsche knew that if men are equal they are not free; if free they are not equal. With a fury and a fire that literally consumed him, he dedicated himself to the task of leading men up out of this flatness, away from this leveling—up to an appreciation of the potential—not the actual—greatness of man’s life. Greatness is not yet man’s verity but his vocation, his true and idiomatic destiny. Greatness? This is a man’s strength of will; the unfolding of a free personality. To say I will is to be a man. All human values are embraced in this I will. To produce men who can say I will is at once the task and the test of culture. This I will is the climax and goal of man. In this I will vanishes every fearsome and disquieting I must, every compulsion of outer necessity. Not the passive adjustment of man to nature, but the active adjustment of nature to man; nature outside of him and nature inside of him—that is human calling and human culture. Vanishes, also, every I ought. Man refuses to be ridden by a duty spook, but subordinates even duty to himself. Duty, too, is for the sake of man, not man for the sake of duty. In the depths of his own being, man reserves the sovereign right to speak his yes and his no to duty. To his own will he subjects all good and all evil taught him by others, past or present, and thus occupies a standpoint “beyond good and evil.” Lord of the Sabbath? Yes, but lord also of standards sanctified by their antiquity; lord of all the standards of life; lord of all that has been written or thought or done. “And thou, O lord, art more than they!” Thou—thou alone—art central and supreme and sacred and inviolable. “Bring forth the royal diadem and crown him lord of all!”

But not yet! Alas, there are no such lords, no such will-men, personality-men! Such men are not Gegenwartsmenschen, present day men, but Zukunftsmenschen, future day men; not reality but task—our task. That future man will surpass present man as much as present man surpasses the monkey which he in his development has left behind. We are bridges from monkey to superman. Superman! In him at last, at last, all that is unliving, unfree, withered and weak, all that is sickly in man, shall be obliterated; and all the forces that are great and creative shall be unfolded and molded into cultural values.

This is the meaning of the superman of Friedrich Nietzsche. Malice and ignorance have vied—vainly we may now hope—in caricaturing it. The way to superman is the rugged, steep mountain path up to conscious deed and mighty achievement; not the gentle incline down to stupid indulgence, indolent disposition, enervating or bestial impulsive life. Not that! Superman is precisely the man who overcomes the man of today aweary of life and athirst for death.

This preaching of Superman might be called Messianic. It is the bold faith that we are not the last word of the Word of life; it is the glad hope that the best treasures, the greatest deeds, the supreme goals of humankind are still in the future. Nietzsche’s message is a breath of spring blowing over the land proclaiming the advent of an issue from the womb of time of something greater, better than anything we have been, than anything we have called good or great; the advent of a new day when our best songs now will be our worst then; our noblest thoughts now our basest then; our highest achievements now, our poorest by-products then.

We shall usher in that day; superman shall be our will, our deed! Superman gives our life worth. Ours is the new, exhilarating responsibility, swallowing up and nullifying all the petty responsibilities which fret us today. We have to justify our lives to that great future, to that coming one, to our children. They, through us, must be greater, better, freer, than all of us put together. We are worth our contribution to the achievement of future man. Nay, only superman can justify the history of the cosmos! Consider pre-human and sub-human life, red in tooth and claw; consider human life, often not much better and sometimes much worse; consider ourselves, our meanness and our mediocrity. Is this all? Is this warrant for the long human and pre-human story? Can you escape the conviction that but for superman the eternal gestation and agony of cosmic maternity admits of no rational vindication?

Breed, then, with a view of breeding supermen. Marriage? Let this be not for ease, not for the propagation of yourselves; the pushing of yourselves into your children, parents, but for the creation of something new, of superman! Education? Not to assimilate the children to us, to the past, but to free them from us; not Vaterland, but Kinderland, must be our concern. Children shall not “sit at our feet” but stand upon our shoulders, that they may have a freer and broader sweep of the horizon. And in our children we shall love the Coming One, prepare the way for Superman, that free, great man who shall have conquered present petty man with all his slave instincts! Such, at all events, are the dreams of the great poetic and prophetic philosopher of the German Fatherland of today.

Arthur Davison Ficke

Angel Island, by Inez Haynes Gillmore. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]

Angel Island is several rare things: original, profound, flaming. It leaves you with a gasping sense of having been swept through the skies; and also with that feeling of new life which comes with a plunge into cold, deep seas. Angel Island is a new kind of Winged Victory!

Innumerable books have been written about the conflict of the sexes, about the emergence of the new woman. Most of them are dull books. But Mrs. Gillmore’s is beautiful and exciting. I kept thinking as I read it: here is something absolutely new, absolutely authentic; something so full of vision and truth that it’s like getting to the top of a mountain for the sunrise. Its freshness and its clearness are like cool morning mists that the sun has shot through.

But to discard vague phrases and get to the story—for it is not a tract, but a novel—or rather a poetic allegory—that that Mrs. Gillmore has written. Five men of representative modern types—a professor, a libertine, a soldier of fortune, a “mere mutt-man,” and an artist—are shipwrecked on a tropical island. After a few days their attention is caught by what appears to be huge birds flying through the heavens. The birds come nearer and prove to be winged women! Then comes the story of their wooing, their capture, their ultimate evolution into what modern women have decided they want to be: humanists.

However, this is going too fast. The only way to appreciate Angel Island is to be conscious of the art of it as you read. Beginning with the shipwreck, Mrs. Gillmore creates a series of brilliant pictures that culminate in the flying orgies of the bird-women.

All this is gorgeous enough—this clear, vivid painting of nature. But when Mrs. Gillmore turns her hand to the supernatural, she is simply ravishing. For instance:

To me, that is wonderful work—one jeweled word after another. And it’s sustained through the whole book. But of course, after this first sense of ravishment with her pictures, you touch upon the deeper wonder of Mrs. Gillmore—her ideas. There are enough ideas in Angel Island to equip the women who are fighting for selfhood with armour that is absolutely hole proof.

The winged women differ in type as widely as the men; and each man chooses very quickly the type that appeals to him most. The libertine wants the big blond one, whom they’ve named “Peachy”; the professor likes Chiquita, the very feminine, unintellectual one; Billy, the mere man, falls violently and reverently in love with the radiant Julia, the leader of the group and the one your interest centers in immediately. Julia has a personality: she appears to be “pushed on by some intellectual or artistic impulse, to express by the symbols of her complicated flight some theory, some philosophy of life.” She seems always to shine. She is a creator. In short, Julia thinks.

The men plan capture and finally accomplish it by a time-honored method: that of arousing the women’s curiosity. Then follows a tragic episode when they cut the captives’ wings, making flight impossible. Of course, marriage is the next step, and later, children are born on Angel Island—little girl children with wings, and boys without them. But all this time Julia has refused to marry Billy, though she’s in love with him. Her only reason is that something tells her to wait.

Inevitably the women mourn the loss of their wings; and just as they become reconciled to a second-hand joy in their daughters’ flights, Peachy’s husband informs her that flying is unwomanly—that woman’s place is in the home, not in the air (!)—and that their daughter must be shorn of her wings as soon as she’s eighteen.

What next? Rebellion, with Julia shining gloriously as leader. She had been waiting for this. And in ten pages of profound, simple, magnificent talk—if only every woman in the world would read it!—she explains to the others that they must learn to walk. Peachy objects, because she dislikes the earth. “There are stars in the air,” she argues. “But we never reached them,” answers Julia. The earth is a good place, and they must learn to live in it. Besides, their children will fly better for learning to walk, and walk better for knowing how to fly; and she prophesies that then will be born to one of them a boy child with wings.

The women hide and master the art of walking. While they’re doing this their poor wings have a chance to grow a little, and by the time the men are ready to capture and subdue them a second time they have achieved a combination of walking and flying that puts them beyond reach. Then the men submit ... and Julia asks Billy to marry her.

That’s all, except one short chapter about Julia. She has a son with wings! And then she dies—radiant, white, goddess-woman, whose life had been so fine a thing. The beauty of it all simply overwhelmed me.

All of which points to several important conclusions. First, that Mrs. Gillmore is a poet and prophet of golden values. Second, that prejudice is the most foolish thing in the world. A general prejudice against that obvious form of comedy called farce might cause you to miss The Legend of Leonore. And a stubborn caution in regard to allegories—which, I concede, generally are unsubtle—might keep you from Angel Island.

I am just reading The Passionate Friends, and every time I read anything of Wells’s I wonder why it is I don’t like him better. The World Set Free that has been running in The Century was intensely worth while, I thought—really prophetic. One tasted something almost divine; human nature is capable of such wonderful undreamed of things! It was like Tennyson prophesying the Federation of the World, airships, etc. Wells does seem inspired in some ways. But every time I read any of his novels—well, you remember I have a distinct mid-Victorian flavor that has to be reckoned with. I wasn’t brought up in a minister’s family for nothing! I suppose it’s what we used to call our conscience. Mine isn’t much good, alas; I sometimes think of it as a little old Victorian lady. She sits in the background of my consciousness and knits and knits and nods her head. Meanwhile I go blithely about, espousing all sorts of causes and thinking out all sorts of theories—imagining, you know, that I’m perfectly free. Suddenly she wakes up—she lays aside her knitting with a determined air and says, “Mary Martha, what are you thinking about! Stop that right now; I’m ashamed of you.” And she has authority, too, you know. I stop. Ridiculous, isn’t it?—but so it is.

And every time I read a Wells novel my little old lady folds her hands and sits up very primly and says, “Aha, you’re reading something of that man’s again. Well, I’m not asleep—I’m right on the job and I know just what I think of him.” So you see! And the worst—or the best—of it is that I agree with her. I can’t like him. I read along and it’s all so reasonable—he’s so clever and he thinks; but his conclusions are all so weak—if he comes to any. One passage in The Passionate Friends has made me furious. How can a man who’s at all worth while be so really wicked—(another word gone out of style). I mean this:

Now can you suppose that is Wells’s own reasoning that he puts into the mouth of his unfortunate hero? Talk about Edith Wharton being thin-lipped in the pursuit of her heroines—that’s a great deal better than being loose-lipped; don’t you agree with me? It may be true, and I rather think to some extent it is true, that a man cannot have an absorbing friendship with a woman and not run the risk of falling in love. But what does that prove? That he should be allowed free rein and carry on as many liaisons veiled under the name of friendship as he chooses? Or unveiled, rather, for Wells seems to want everything in the open. He’s like a child who says: Here’s a very dangerous beast in a flimsy, inadequate cage. Frequently he escapes from it and has to be put back in. Let’s abolish the cage and let the beast run about openly, doing what it wants. And the good old-fashioned word for that beast is lust, and it should be caged; if the cage is getting more and more inadequate it’s only a piece with what Agnes Repplier calls our loss of nerve. How I liked that article of hers! What in the name of sense are we in this world for if not to build up a character? That’s all that amounts to anything, and it comes from countless denials and countless responses to duty. And what Goethe said, some time ago, is still everlastingly true: “Entbehren sollst Du, sollst entbehren!” (Deny yourself, deny, deny.) He ought to know, too, because he tried indulgence, goodness knows, and knew the dregs at the bottom of that cup. And I can’t forgive Wells. He knows better than to let people make all manner of experiment with such things. They wouldn’t even be happy; for happiness is built of stability, loyalty, character, and again character. My husband said, after reading that passage in The Passionate Friends, “The trouble with him and the class he writes of is that they aren’t busy enough. Let ’em work for a living, be interested in something vitally for ten hours out of the twenty-four, and they’ll forget all about their neighbors’ wives and be content with good men friends and casual women friends.”

The trouble lies with poor old human nature, I guess, and the way it wants what it cannot and ought not to have. But Wells says all unreality is hateful to him. Let’s tear down the barriers, let’s show up for what we are. Poor Smith wants something his neighbor has—well, let’s give it to him, whether it’s his neighbor’s success or his wife or his happiness. Nature is still unbearably ugly in lots of ways. When we can train it to be unselfish and disinterested then it will be time to tear down barriers.

Lady Mary in The Passionate Friends is an unconvincing character, too. I can conceive of a woman who will take all of a man’s possessions, giving him nothing in return, not even fidelity, but I cannot conceive of her justifying herself unless she is an utter moral degenerate. The danger of such writers as Wells is that they are plausible enough till you look below the surface. He tries to represent Lady Mary as charming, but she, it seems to me, even more than modern society which he arraigns, is “honeycombed and rotten with evil.”

“M. M.”

The description of a “little old Victorian lady” who sits in the background of our consciousness and plays conscience for us is charming; but.... She’s a sweet-faced little lady to whom the universe is as clear as crystal and as simple as plane geometry. She is always knitting, and what she knits is a fine web of sentimentality with which to cover the nakedness of truth—“for it is not seemly, my dear, that anything, even truth, should be naked.”

This web of hers is as fine as soft silk and as strong as chain mail. It’s sticky, too. And it clothes truth so thoroughly that she grows unrecognizable to any but the most penetrating searcher—to H. G. Wells, for instance. It’s natural enough that the old lady should dislike Wells, for he’s found her out; he’s made the astonishing discovery that underneath the web life is not sentimentally simple. He discloses to her scandalized eyes various unfortunate facts which she has done her best to conceal, as for instance the fact that there is such a thing as sex.

“Sex,” says Wells in effect in every one of his novels, “is a disturbing element, the disturbing element, in life. So long as sex exists it is a physical impossibility that life should be the sweetly pretty parlor game our little Victorian lady would have it.”

Right here the husband of the little lady has something to say: “The trouble with him and the class he writes of,” he announces, “is that they aren’t busy enough. Let ’em work for a living, be interested in something vitally for ten hours out of the twenty-four, and they’ll forget all about their neighbors’ wives and be content with good men friends and casual women friends.” This is an excellent example of what Wells finds the next most disturbing element in life—“muddle-headedness,” the lack of ability to think straight, to think things through. “Let Wells be vitally interested in something for ten hours of the twenty-four!” Doesn’t he see that if Wells had ever limited himself to ten hours of interest he would be making shirts today? It is because Wells works twenty-five hours of the twenty-four at being “vitally interested in something” that he is one of the major prophets of our time. And the thing in which he is interested is life itself, the great unsolvable mystery, life which extends below the simple, polished surface that is all the Victorian lady knows as the sea extends below its glassy smoothness on a summer day.

One of the greatest things that Wells has done for some of us who came on him young enough so that our minds did not close automatically at his first startling revelation, is this: he taught us to look at life squarely, without moral cant, and with a scientific disregard as to whether it pleased us personally or not. We may not always agree with him—very likely we don’t—but at least we must face the issue squarely and not take refuge in the vague sentimentality and slushy hopefulness of the Victorian lady.

Wells states facts and very frequently lets it go at that. Witness the shock this method is to our little old lady. She asks how anyone at all worth while can be so “really wicked” as to write about sex and society as he does.

She admits that what he says is a fact, but—it sticks out like a jagged, untidy rock from the smooth surface of things; therefore it is wicked. As a matter of fact that statement of his has no more to do with morality, is no more wicked, or virtuous, than the statement of a physical fact—to say, for instance, that glass breaks when hurled against a stone wall. It is unfortunate, but it is not “wicked.”

No, the day of Victorianism is past. We are slashing away the web, we are learning to think. It is a slow and painful process and we know not yet where the struggle will end. But at least we shall be nearer to the divine nakedness of truth. If Wells has done nothing else than to prove to us how much of our thinking is dictated not by our own souls but by the artificially-imposed sentimentality of the “little old Victorian lady” he has done a full man’s work. And we who owe our emancipation largely to his vision can never be too thankful to him.

Frances Trevor.

You treated Brooke in a masterly way in the last issue. I saw many things I hadn’t seen before, and understood the Wagner better. But I disagree with you in one way.

The Wagner and the Channel Passage are merely clever realistic satire—that’s always worth while. But it’s the thought behind the Menelaus and Helen sort of thing that I don’t like. Of course there’s no doubt that Helen grew wrinkled and peevish. But to say that therefore Paris in his grave was better off than Menelaus living is just a bit decadent, isn’t it? I’m forced to picture Brooke as the sort of chap who couldn’t enjoy a good dinner if he had to wash the dishes afterward:—instead of regarding dishwashing as a natural variety of living that could be thoroughly enjoyable with shirtsleeves and a pipe. I’m afraid he wouldn’t play American football for fear of getting his face dirty. He’s just a bit finicky about life. He’s afraid to commit himself for fear he’ll have to endure something about which he can’t weave golden syllables. That’s the reason I don’t agree with you about Whitman liking all of him. Whitman was frank about the whole world, dirt and all, and he accepted it enthusiastically. Brooke writes about dirt in such a way as to make it seem horrible.

This poem of Whitman’s will prove my point:

Beside this, doesn’t the Menelaus and Helen seem like an orchid?—a very beautiful, rich orchid, to be sure, but not of the Whitman family.

George Soule.

The idea of “the new note” might be worked out more fully, but after all little or nothing would be gained by elaboration. Given this note of craft love all the rest must follow, as the spirit of self-revelation, which is also a part of the new note, will follow any true present-day love of craft. You will remember we once discussed Coningsby Dawson’s The Garden Without Walls. What I quarreled with in that book was that the writer looked outside of himself for his material. Even realists have done this—as, for example, Howells; and to that extent have failed. The master Zola failed here. Why do we so prize the work of Whitman, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Twain, and Fielding? Is it not because as we read we are constantly saying to ourselves, “This book is true. A man of flesh and blood like myself has lived the substance of it. In the love of his craft he has done the most difficult of all things: revealed the workings of his own soul and mind”?

To get near to the social advance for which all moderns hunger, is it not necessary to have first of all understanding? How can I love my neighbor if I do not understand him? And it is just in the wider diffusion of this understanding that the work of a great writer helps the advance of mankind. I would like to have you think much of this in your attitude toward all present-day writers. It is so easy for them to bluff us from our position, and I know from my own experience how baffling it is constantly to be coming upon good, well-done work that is false.

In this connection I am tempted to give you the substance of a formula I have just worked out. It lies here before me, and if you will accept it in the comradely spirit in which it is offered I shall be glad. It is the most delicate and the most unbelievably difficult task to catch, understand, and record your own mood. The thing must be done simply and without pretense or windiness, for the moment these creep in your record is no longer a record, but a mere mass of words meaning nothing. The value of such a record is not in the facts caught and recorded but in the fact of your having been able truthfully to make the record—something within yourself will tell you when you have not done it truthfully. I myself believe that when a man can thus stand aside from himself, recording simply and truthfully the inner workings of his own mind, he will be prepared to record truthfully the workings of other minds. In every man or woman dwell dozens of men and women, and the highly imaginative individual will lead fifty lives. Surely this can be said if it can be said that the unimaginative individual has led one life.

The practice of constantly and persistently making such a record as this will prove invaluable to the person who wishes to become a true critic of writing in the new spirit. Whenever he finds himself baffled in drawing a character or in judging one drawn by another, let him turn thus in upon himself, trusting with child-like simplicity and honesty the truth that lives in his own mind. Indeed, one of the great rewards of living with small children is to watch their faith in themselves and to try to emulate them in this art.

If the practice spoken of above is followed diligently, a kind of partnership will in time spring up between the hand and the brain of the writer. He will find himself becoming in truth a cattle herder, a drug clerk, a murderer, for the benefit of the hand that is writing of these, or the brain that is judging the work of another who has written of these.

To be sure this result will not always follow, and even after long and patient following of the system one will run into barren periods when the brain and the hand do not co-ordinate. In such a period it seems to me the part of wisdom to drop your work and begin again patiently making a record of the workings of your own mind, trying to put down truthfully those workings during the period of failure. I would like to scold every one who writes, or who has to do with writing, into adopting this practice, which has been such a help and such a delight to me.

Sherwood Anderson.

Sara Teasdale

Eunice Tietjens

Agnes Repplier on Popular Education

Through all of Miss Repplier’s latest essays in The Atlantic runs a note of appeal for the sterner virtues, which she thinks are in danger of dying out under modern conditions. So persistently is this note, admirable in itself, sounded, that we wonder if it doesn’t hark back a bit to Sparta, and the casting away of the unfit. When it comes to the question of an education broad enough to fit the needs of every child, we may all pause and take a deep breath. We may not approve of a school of moving pictures, advocated by Judge Lindsey, and yet we may not wish to go to the other extreme of severe discipline advocated by Miss Repplier. If only all children were of exactly the same type, so that the same kind of schooling would suffice for all their needs! Or even if they could come from the same kind of homes with more or less similar ideals!

Let us hear what she and Mr. Lindsey have to say about Tony—(Tony is a boy who does not like school as it is at present organized). “Mr. Edison is coming to the rescue of Tony,” says Judge Lindsey. “He will take him away from me and put him in a school that is not a school at all but just one big game.... There will be something moving, something doing at that school all the time. When I tell him about it Tony shouts ‘Hooray for Mr. Edison!’ right in front of the battery, just as he used to say ‘To hell wid de cop!’” On the other hand:—“The old time teacher,” says Miss Repplier, “sought to spur the pupil to keen and combative effort, rather than beguile him into knowledge with cunning games and lantern slides.... The old time parent set a high value on self discipline and self control.”

But can she believe for one moment that Tony’s parents ever dreamed of “setting a high value on self discipline and self control?” Or that Tony’s sister was taught to “read aloud with correctness and expression, to write notes with propriety and grace, and to play backgammon and whist?” ...

Figurez-vous! And so, if we can reach little Tony’s darkened vision by the simple method of moving pictures, keep him off the streets until he learns at least not to become a hardened criminal—are we not that much to the good? Tony will never, never be ambassador to the court of St. James (or if he is going to be, he’ll be it in spite of movies!) but he may be a fairly honest, happy fruit vendor some day, instead of No. 207 in a cell. Useless to cite the dull boys in school, who absolutely refused pedagogic training and later blazed their way—luminaries—through the world, when once they had found the work that interested them. To interest, stimulate, and arouse is the prelude to work; and precious few kiddies, except those who don’t really need it, do enough work that they dislike to strengthen their little characters. But even if they do, are those who will not to have nothing?

Of course, education is a thing that can’t be disposed of in a few well meaning phrases. Miss Repplier may be right, too, in what she says of the education of Montaigne. You remember he learned to talk Latin under a tutor, at an early age, in much the same way that our modern young ones learn French and German.

“All the boy gained by the most elaborate system ever devised for the saving of labor,” she says, “was that he over-skipped the lower forms in school. What he lost was the habit of mastering his prescript lessons, which he seems to have disliked heartily.” But how does any one know that that was all he gained? I should hardly select Montaigne as my model, if I were trying to point out the ill effects of any particular type of education. Besides, whatever its effect may have been on him, I should hate to lose the mental picture of the little lad Latinizing with the “simple folk of Perigord.” Charming little lad, and wonderful old father, doing his best to elevate and help his boy. No, decidedly; whatever Miss Repplier may do to dispose of Tony and his ilk, I am glad she had nothing whatever to do with the education of Montaigne!

Since it appears to be my duty to read all the critical journals and dissect their contents for these columns, I can’t in good faith neglect The Little Review. I have just devoured the first issue. What can I say about the superb “announcement”? I agree ardently with it. It needed to be said; the magazine needed to be born. There’s no quarrel between art and life except where one or the other is kept back of the door. Anyone with a keen appreciation of art can’t help appreciating life too, and Mrs. Jones who runs away from her husband can’t fairly stand for “life.” Besides, why should anybody object to a thing because it’s transitorial? Everything is transitorial. It must either grow or perish.

Mr. Wing’s criticism of Mr. Faust is admirable—direct, unpretentious, sound. But you must let me register a slight objection to Dr. Foster’s Nietzsche article. It seems to me there’s just too much enthusiasm to be borne by what he actually says. When I came to the end of that third paragraph on page fifteen I sneaked back to Galsworthy’s letter and found an answering twinkle in its eye. I felt like going up to Dr. Foster with a grin, putting my hand on his shoulder and saying, “My dear man, a candidate for major prophet doesn’t need political speeches. It is really not half so important that we unregenerate should give three cheers for him as that we should live his truth. Won’t you forget a little of this sound and fury and tell us as simply as you can just what it is that you want us to do?”

I went from his article with the impression that here was a man who was very enthusiastic about Mr. Nietzsche. I’m sure that’s not the impression Dr. Foster intended to make. But I have a feeling that pure enthusiasm wasting itself in little geysers is intrinsically ridiculous. Enthusiasm should grow trees and put magic in violets—and that can’t be done with undue quickness, or in any but the most simple way. Nobody cares about the sap except for what it does. And, anyhow, it always makes me savage to be orated at, or told that my soul will be damned if I don’t admit the particular authority of Mr. Jehovah or Mr. Nietzsche or Mr. anybody else.

That’s all by the way, however, and the impression of the magazine as a whole is clear, true, swift. Its impact can’t be forgotten. You haven’t attained your ideal—which is right; but you’ve done so well you’ll have to scratch to keep up the speed,—which is right, too.

M. H. P.

Clara E. Laughlin.

The Truth About Women, by C. Gasquoine Hartley (Mrs. Walter M. Gallichan). [Dodd, Mead & Company, New York.]

Mrs. Gallichan has not told the whole truth about woman; but she has told as much of it as has been told by any one writer except Olive Schreiner; and although she has made no important discovery, educed no brilliant new conclusion, she has summarized the best of all that has been said in a book which can scarcely fail to render notable service.

It is interesting to recall how the truth about women has been disclosed. The voice of Mary Wollstonecraft, crying in the wilderness, in 1792, pleaded that “if woman be not prepared by education to become the companion of man, she will stop the progress of knowledge; for truth must be common to all.” Yet it was nearly sixty years before Frederick Denison Maurice was able to open Queen’s College, and give a few English women the opportunity of an education. (In America, Mary Lyon had already broken ground for the higher education of her countrywomen.)

Here and there, in those days, an intrepid female declared herself a believer in woman’s rights; but her pretensions were scarcely honored to the point even of ridicule. Women were inferior creatures, designed and ordered by God to be subordinate to men. Didn’t everything go to prove it? And, indeed, nearly everything seemed to!

In 1861, several scholarly gentlemen in Europe were delving in fields of research where they were destined to upturn facts of great interest to the inferior sex. One of these was John Stuart Mill, whose impassioned protest against the subjection of women was then being written, although it was not published until eight years later. Another was Henry Maine, who was disclosing some significant things about the ancient law on which our modern laws are founded. Another was Lecky, who was gathering material for his History of European Morals, from Augustus to Charlemagne, and—incidentally—discovering that “natural history of morals” wherewith he was to shock the world in 1869. But two of the others were searching back of Augustus—“back” of him both in point of time and also in degree of civilization. One of these was Bachofen, a German, who published, in 1861, Das Mutterrecht, in which he made it clear that women had not always been subordinate, dependent, but among primitive peoples had been the rulers of their race. McLennan’s Primitive Marriage, published in 1865, brought prominently to British thinkers this quite-new contention of woman as a creature born to rule, but defrauded and degraded.

Then, in 1871, Darwin startled the world with The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex; and those who accepted his theory of evolution had to revise all their previous notions about the relations of the sexes.

During the next quarter-century many minds were busy with this wholesale revision of ideas, but nothing signal was set forth until Charlotte Stetson—working with the historical data of Maine and Mill and Lecky and their followers, with the ethnological data of Bachofen and McLennan, and many more, and with the natural history of morals as Darwin and Wallace and Huxley and their school disclosed it—declared that the enslavement of women was economic in its origin and in its final analysis. This was not the whole truth, but it was so important a part of the whole that the book Women and Economics may be said to have given the most productive stimulus the feminist movement had had since The Descent of Man.

Scores, almost hundreds, of books dealing with some phase or other of woman’s history, appeared in the next few years. But while many of them were valuable, and some were all but invaluable, none of them was epoch-marking until Olive Schreiner put forth her magnificent fragment on Woman and Labor, the chapter on Parasitism being the noblest and most pregnant thing that any student of woman has given to the world. Olive Schreiner saw much further into the question of women and economics than Charlotte Stetson knew how to see. She has a greater vision. She perceives that women are ennobled by what they do—just as men are—and that they are degraded by being denied creative, productive labor—not by being denied the full reward of their toil.

Mrs. Gallichan does not advance upon the contribution of Mrs. Schreiner, as Mrs. Schreiner did upon that of Mrs. Stetson; but she had less opportunity to do so: Mrs. Schreiner did not leave so much for some one else to say. But Mrs. Gallichan has summarized all that has been said more fully than any other writer has done; and she has done it so interestingly, so ably, that she deserves grateful praise.

Her book has three sections: the biological, the historical, and the modern.

Two suggestions which Mrs. Gallichan makes in the biological section are especially striking. One is derived from the bee, and one from the spider. The bee, she reminds us, belongs

The danger to society, when maternity shall be left to the stupid parasitic women who are unable to exist as workers, is pointed out by Mrs. Gallichan; as is also that exaggerated form of matriarchy which is realized among the ants and bees. And she reminds women who are workers, not mothers, that in the bee-workers the ovipositor becomes a poisoned sting. She warns women not to become like the sterile bees; but she warns them also against state endowment of motherhood. And she does not suggest how the great excess of women are to become mothers without reorganizing society.

The second example she cites in warning, the common spider, whose courtship customs Darwin described in The Descent of Man, is “a case of female superiority carried to a savage conclusion.” And from this female who ruthlessly devours her lover, Mrs. Gallichan deduces a theory for “many of those wrongs which women have suffered at the hands of men. Man, acting instinctively, has rebelled, not so much, I think, against woman as against this driving hunger within himself, which forces him helpless into her power.”

The stages by which parasitism was transferred from the male to the female still need some elucidation—like the stages by which marriage passed from endogamy to exogamy. But Mrs. Gallichan’s suggestion about the male preserving himself by appearing as self-sufficient and as dominant as he can, is highly interesting. It will probably not be long before we know a great deal more of this.

In the historical section of her book, Mrs. Gallichan devotes four admirable chapters to the mother-age civilization, and four others to the position of women in Egypt, Babylon, Greece, and Rome.

Of immense significance is the relation between the enviable status of women in Egypt and that love of peace and of peaceful pursuits which characterized the Egyptian people. War, patriarchy, and the subjection of women, have gone hand in hand. Social organizations in which might was right have minimized the worth of women; those in which ingenuity, resourcefulness, and ideality were set above brute force have given women most justice.

Mrs. Gallichan’s chapter on the women of Athens and of Sparta is most suggestive. So is that on the women of Rome.

In her modern section she discusses women and labor:

She considers “the women who have been forced into the cheating, damning struggle for life,” and urges that “the life-blood of women, that should be given to the race, is being stitched into our ready-made clothes; washed and ironed into our linen; poured into our adulterated foods”; and so on. But her reasoning in this chapter is not very clear. Women, to avoid parasitism, must work, and only a relatively small proportion of them can now find in their homes work enough to keep them self-sustaining. Protest against the sweating of women is not only philanthropic—it is perfectly sound political economy. Women workers not only should be protected against long hours, unnecessary risks, insanitary surroundings, merciless nerve tension, and the computation of their wages on a basis of their assured ability to live partly by their labor and partly by the legitimatized or unlegitimatized sale of their sex; but this can, and must, be done. Yet, when all this has been accomplished, will Mrs. Gallichan feel satisfied that the struggle for life is not “cheating, damning,” if owing to conditions we cannot regulate that struggle fails also to comprehend the struggle to give life, to reproduce?

This is the keynote of her book. But she is by no means clear in her mind as to how the mothers of men are to maintain themselves in a freedom which shall be real, not merely conceded; nor as to how the millions of women who, under our monogamous societies, cannot be permanently mated, are to justify their struggle for existence by becoming “mothers of men.”

The something that Mrs. Gallichan lacks, not in her retrospect so much as in her previsioning, has been lacked by many of the great investigators and writers who have built up the magnificent literature of evolution and evolutionary philosophy: she has an admirable survey of the “whenceness” of life and love and labor, but a short-sighted, astigmatic vision of its “whereuntoness.”

If the sole purpose of life and love and labor, among humans as among lower animals, is to continue life, to transmit the life-force, then indeed are those frustrated, futile creatures who are cheated, or who cheat themselves, out of rendering this one service to the world which can justify them for having lived in it.

But if, as most of us believe, we are more than just links in the human chain; if we have a relation to eternity as well as to history and to posterity, there are splendid interpretations of our struggles that Mrs. Gallichan does not apprehend. If souls are immortal, life is more than the perpetuation of species, or even than the improvement of the race; it is the place allotted to us for the development of that imperishable part which we are to carry hence, and through eternity. And any effort of ours which helps other souls to realize the best that life can give, to seek the best that immortality can perpetuate, may splendidly justify our existence.

Mrs. Gallichan’s conclusion about religion is that it is an “opium” to which women resort when they have no proper outlet for their sex-impulses. “I am certain,” she says, “that in us the religious impulse and the sex impulse are one.” And when she was able to satisfy the sex impulse, she no longer had any need of or interest in religion.

The limitations this puts upon her interpretation of life are too obvious to need cataloging. And this is the reason she signally fails to tell the whole of the truth about woman. This is the reason why the latter chapters of her book, in which she writes of marriage and divorce and prostitution, are of less worth to the generality of readers than the earlier ones; though this is not to say that these chapters do not contain a very great deal of vigorous thinking and excellent suggestion. But to anyone who holds that the continuance of life is the principal justification for having lived, yet deplores free love and state endowment of mothers, there is inevitably an appalling waste, for the elimination of which she may well be staggered to suggest a remedy.

Mrs. Gallichan’s book is not constructive in effect. But it is so excellently analytical, as far as it goes, that it can scarcely fail to provoke a great deal of thought.

There is coming soon, to the Fine Arts Theatre—that charming Chicago home of the Irish Players and of “the new note” in drama—a play with an interesting title. It is called Change. It is to be given by the Welsh Players—which fact alone has a thrill in it. But the theme is even more compelling.

Two old God-fearing Welsh people have denied themselves of comforts and pleasures to give their sons an education. Then, when they expect to reap the benefits of the sacrifice, three unexpected and awful things happen: the student son has so fallen under the influence of modern skepticism as to be forced to abandon his father’s Calvinistic creed. The second one has become soaked with socialism and syndicalism. The third, a chronic invalid, is a Christian and a comfort; but he is killed, quite unnecessarily, in a labor conflict instigated by his brother. Then—the two old people again, alone. What can a playwright do with such a situation? Nothing, certainly, to attract a “capacity house.” But we shall be among the first of that small minority who likes thinking in the theatre to hear what Mr. Francis has to say. His theme is tremendous.

Llewellyn Jones

Not least among the stirring events of our present poetical renaissance are the publication of the collected editions of the works of Alice Meynell and Francis Thompson (Scribner). Spiritually akin, mutually influencing one another in material as in more subtle ways, their poetry stands in vivid contrast to the muse of our younger singers, the makers of what English critics hail as a new Georgian Age. That this difference gives them an added significance, and not as some critics have said, a lessened one, is the burden of the present appreciation of the poems of Alice Meynell. For there is a tendency for the reader who is intoxicated with poetic modernity to reason somewhat after this fashion. Here, he will say,—as indeed Mr. Austin Harrison has said of Francis Thompson—is a “reed pipe of neo-mediaevalism ... a poet of the gargoyle,” not of this modern world, and so neither in sympathy of thought or melody with us of the twentieth century, its free life and vers libre. All this, of course, because, Francis Thompson was—as is Mrs. Meynell—a child of the Catholic Church. Our supposititious reader will continue to the effect that there is no spiritual profit to be had in reading these poets when the modern attitude is to be found in such writers as W. W. Gibson, Masefield, and Hardy. But in so arguing, our reader will be entirely wrong as to the facts, and mistaken in his whole manner of approach to the realm of poetic values.

Mr. Max Eastman, in his charming book, The Enjoyment of Poetry, lays stress on the fact that poetry is not primarily the registering of emotions but the expression of keen realizations. A mathematical concept may arouse an emotion, but the poet makes the actual emotion transmissible by his selective power in picking out the focal point of the experience by which it is aroused. If poetry is essentially realization of life, then we have no longer any excuse for asking our poets to share our doctrinal views before we consent to read them. On the contrary, we should be more anxious to read Mrs. Meynell than Mr. Gibson, if we are modernists, for Mr. Gibson may, conceivably, not be able to tell us anything we have not already felt. Mrs. Meynell, on the other hand, can inform our feelings with fresh aspects of experience, and she does so abundantly. Her Catholicism is not mediaevalism, but, in so far as it is translatable into her poetry it is simply a vocabulary for the expression of certain emotional realizations of life which we modernists find it very hard to express because we do not have the necessary vocabulary. What can be more modern than the doctrine of the immanence of God and his abode in man, that much-discussed “social gospel?” Yet the following poem, not in spite of but through its Catholic terminology, heightens our realization of brotherhood and dependence one upon another. It is entitled The Unknown God:

The spectacle of a general communion again gives Mrs. Meynell inspiration for a poem whose last two stanzas apply equally as well to the secular, evolutionary view of salvation as they do to the ecclesiastical view, and whose last stanza is most suggestive in the light it throws upon the puzzling discrepancy between the littleness of man and the unlimited material vast in which he finds himself a floating speck:

Even so typically modern a philosopher as Henri Bergson would find one of his leading and rather baffling ideas beautifully realized in one of Mrs. Meynell’s sonnets. Matter, Bergson tells us, in all its manifestations is moulded by a spiritual push from behind it, so that the sensible world is not a mosaic of atoms obeying fixed laws but rather a cosmic compromise between matter and spirit, a modus vivendi the operation of which would seem very different to us were our viewpoint that of pure spirit. Says Mrs. Meynell in To a Daisy:

The sense of what might, perhaps, be called restrained paradox in that sonnet, is frequently met with in Mrs. Meynell’s writings, and it corresponds to aspects of reality which the old religious phraseology she has so freshly minted for us is alone fitted to convey. The Young Neophyte is a beautiful sonnet enshrining the fatefulness of every human action, the gift of the full flower which is implicit in the gift of the smallest bud, the preparation we are constantly making for crises which are yet hidden in the future. Thoughts in Separation also deals with the paradoxical overcoming of the handicaps of personal absence of our friends through community of thought and feeling. Not only are these paradoxes in human psychology delicately set forth by the poet, but those darker ones of human work and destiny are consolingly illuminated in such a poem as Builders of Ruins—which does not depend for its quality of consolation upon anything foreign to its poetic truth.

One poem in the book is, perhaps, most remarkable for the light it throws upon the sense in which the term poetic truth may be used, and as showing the difference between the poetic, the realizable, and, therefore, the true side of a religion—the side Matthew Arnold was so anxious to keep—and the mere theological framework, always smelling of unreality and always in need of renovation. The poem may stand as a warning against confusing real poetry—in whose truth we need not be afraid to trust because its author does not inhabit our own thought world—with versified theology. If all of Mrs. Meynell’s work were like her Messina, 1908, then the critic and reader who now mistakenly shun her would be right. And the poem is a curious commentary upon Mr. Eastman’s insistence that poetry is realization. For in her other poems the author has presented those aspects of her religion which are verifiable in experience. Perhaps the quotations given above bear out that point. But one aspect of religious thought has now been pretty generally abandoned, not because it has ever been proven false, but because we have never succeeded in realizing it for ourselves. The God of orthodox church theodicy never did “make good”; Christ, the Saints, and even the very material form of the cross itself had to mediate between man and the divine. And it is precisely in the one case in this book where Mrs. Meynell tries to present the governing rather than the immanent God to us that she fails—as, if poetry be realization, we should expect her to fail. The first stanza of the poem addressed to the Deity describes in a few bold strokes the wreck of Messina, and ends with the lines:

The second stanza describes the missions of mercy to the stricken city, and ends:

The essential weakness of this dependence for poetic effect upon the two adjectives and their negatives is no less obvious than the weakness of the poet’s attribution of such apparently impulsive and then retractatory conduct to a God whose ways must either be explicable in terms of a human sense of order or not made the subject of human discourse at all.

Mrs. Meynell describes herself in one of these poems as a singer of a single mood. Some of her critics have taken her at her word and saved themselves some trouble thereby in their task of appreciation. But as a matter of fact, she should not be taken at her own modest estimate, for her one mood is such a pervasive one, such a large and sane mood, that it pays to look at more than one aspect of life through its coloring. And in truth, besides her better-known poems which need no further mention here, The Lady Poverty and Renouncement, for example, there will be found within the small compass of her beautifully-housed collection of verse many aspects of nature, all of them instinct with a mystic shimmer of life, as well as aspects of the innermost life of man which it is given to few spirits to sing in words—only, in fact, to those spirits whose effort it is to make their poetry

William L. Chenery

Euripides and His Age, by Gilbert Murray. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]

The “conspiracy of silence” which oppressed the youth of those of us who were born in the late Victorian era never seems more hateful than when some master hand connects the present labors of liberty with the strivings of the infinite past. In some fashion the dominating spirits of a generation ago contrived to make the struggles for human freedom appear as ugly isolated episodes without precursors or ancestry. They forgot the Shelleys and the Godwins and they even denied the significance of the classic forerunners of today’s ardent prophets.

There were happy exceptions. Some of us cherish the teachings of a Virginia professor who, as far as the adolescent capacities of his students permitted, bridged the gap between Socrates’s free questionings and the contemporary yearnings for a world of uncompromising justice and beauty. What that Southern student did for his small band of followers Gilbert Murray has long been doing for the great world. His present contribution belongs to that satisfying series, The Home University Library. Incidentally, one reflects that this Home University is one of the few institutions of learning which has completely avoided the blinders so many are complacently wearing. The Euripides of Murray suggests to the author—and to the reader, one may claim—both Tolstoi and Ibsen. But, one hastens to state, Professor Murray is too learned and thoughtful a man to paint a revolutionary Euripides such as The Masses—much as one loves that exuberant Don Quixote—would delight to honor and to portray. His onset, however, catches us:

The suffragist and the feminist movements have recently brought the great dramatist to his proper appreciation in respect to women. Some of the passages in the Medea are quoted as often in suffragist campaigns as the words of Bernard Shaw or of Olive Schreiner. This Greek is sometimes said to be the first literary man who understood women. For that reason, as Professor Murray so charmingly emphasizes, Euripides was ever accounted a woman hater, despite even the implications of his great chorus which sings so nobly woman’s destined rise as a power in the world. His statement of the cause of barbarian woman against a civilized man who has wronged her is incomparably more contemporary than Madam Butterfly, and with Murray we may doubt “if ever the deserted one has found such words of fire as Medea speaks.” And, as the author continues, “Medea is not only a barbarian; she is also a woman, and fights the horrible war that lies, an eternally latent possibility, between woman and man. Some of the most profound and wounding things said both by Medea and Jason might almost be labelled in a book of extracts ‘Any Wife to Any Husband’ or ‘Any Husband to Any Wife.’”

The change which came over the spirit of Euripides’s vision, as Athens itself was transformed by empire lust from the first glories of Pericles, suggest again the purifying satire of our ablest moderns. War is hateful and the picture which the Attic dramatist drew of the horrors of dying Troy leave little to the present imagination. Euripides accordingly became as popular in imperialistic Athens as was Bebel among the Kaiser’s ministers. Murray interprets this phase magnificently. He concludes: “This scene, with the parting between Andromache and the child which follows, seems to me perhaps the most heartrending in all the tragic literature of the world. After rising from it one understands Aristotle’s judgment of Euripides as the ‘most tragic of the poets.’” One has only to recall the brave gentleness of Hector’s wife, described first in Homeric words, to agree with the present author.

On the purely critical side Professor Murray’s words are vastly important. Especially valuable is his discussion of the chorus and the deus ex machina concerning which so much error has been taught since Horace wrote on the art of poetry. But this small book is not designed for those whose interest in Greek drama is technical. It is Euripides, the philosopher; Euripides, the satirist of his times; Euripides, the preacher of lofty virtues, the apostle of new men and more righteous gods, who concerns the great awakening world of 1914. The intellectual battles which Euripides fought on behalf of Athens have been waged again and often for the millions who slumber and are content. They are being fought now with an intensity unprecedented. So it brings courage and it brings calm to realize the continuity of the conflict, and to recall the signal victories of the olden days. Gilbert Murray’s achievements are too numerous to permit praise. One may only say now that the present book is in line with the fine things of his past; that by virtue of his labors the world agony for liberty and justice and beauty reveals new phases of the intrinsic dignity and honor which have been its possession since men desired better things.

Henry Blackman Sell

The query of the anti-suffragist—“Will the women really use suffrage if they have it”—was rather conclusively answered in the affirmative at Chicago aldermanic elections on April 7, when equal suffrage was given its first real test in an American city of first rank. This election brought out many interesting incidents which might be considered as having “laboratory” value.

It has been contended by the “antis” that the women would be bad losers; that they would not support the non-partisan ideals which are becoming a definite part of our “new patriotism”; that the result of equal suffrage would simply be one of double vote, wives voting as their husbands decided; that the women coming out in the first enthusiasm of registration would not take the same interest in the prosaic work at the polls; that the fights against bad nominees would result either in a duplication of man-run campaigns, or in ineffective and lady-like campaigns.

The first of these contentions was proved untrue to even the most casual observer at the polls on election day. The women were fighting uphill all the way, and where the so-termed “suffrage men” were slightly unpleasant in their attitude towards the “antis,” the women were all cheerfulness and all refreshing encouragement. As one explained: “It has been the most wonderful feeling, working shoulder to shoulder with the men in something that has really been our duty all along.”

Nine women candidates were up for election and not one was chosen; and yet, after talking with five defeated women candidates and three defeated men candidates, I concluded that the women knew more about the philosophy of politics and its sad uncertainties than men who had been contesting for years.

True, election to office is but a by-product of political experience; it is a most coveted by-product, nevertheless, and when a woman like Marion Drake, who ran a close race against Chicago’s “bad” alderman, says, at the closing of the polls, “I have not been elected, but every minute of the time I have expended has been worth while and I shall try again at the next election,”—it shows the right spirit and the fundamental error in the assertion that women cannot lose gracefully.

Non-partisanism could be given no real test, for these ideals seemed necessary of application in only two or three wards. In one—the twenty-first—an alderman with a bad record was up for re-election in opposition to a Republican of no particular merit. The women got together, with the aid of some of the better men, and selected a non-partisan candidate. This man was elected directly through the efforts of the women who, Republican, Democratic, and Progressive, rallied in true non-partisan spirit to his aid.

As to the control of the women’s votes by the men: it is interesting to note that in the more intelligent wards there was considerable variance between the men and the women, while in the wards of the poorer and less intellectually-inclined portions of the city the votes ran a great deal alike.

The women came out in good numbers and, as a matter of fact, the masculine vote was considerably higher than usual; but even with this advantage, the registered women outvoted the registered men by a small per cent.

The campaigns conducted by the various women were distinctly different from the ordinary political campaigns. They were dignified, straightforward, strong, and effective. Miss Drake, in her campaign against John Coughlin, colloquially and delicately known as “Bathhouse John,”—the name originating from the fact that the gentleman in question received his political training as a mopper and rubber in one of Chicago’s most infamous bath houses,—made a direct appeal, in a house to house, voter to voter, canvass of her ward. In this way she told over two-thirds of the people of the “Bathhouse’s” territory all about the gentleman, his ambitions, his desires, and his insidious motives. And while she was defeated, it must be remembered that though Coughlin received a sufficient plurality, he by no means attained his boast:—“I’ll beat that skirt by 8,000 votes.” In fact, where his plurality at the last elections was approximately eight to one, this year it was less than two-and-a-half to one, making an obvious deduction that Miss Drake’s campaign was decidedly successful even though she did not win.

William Saphier

The Education of Karl Witte, translated by Leo Wiener and edited by H. Addington Bruce. [Thomas Y. Crowell Company, New York.]

Mr. Saphier is a Roumanian who came to this country only a few years ago and learned English. The following review is his first attempt at writing, and we print it just as it came to us, hoping our readers will find it as interesting as we did.

French, Italian, English, Greek, and German at the age of nine, a Ph.D. degree at fourteen, a doctor of laws and an appointment to the teaching staff of the Berlin University at sixteen—these were some of the achievements of Karl Witte. Or shall I say of pastor Witte, the father? For the boy had very little to do with it: he was merely a piece of putty in the able hands of a strong-willed man who knew what he wanted and how to get it. A child of ordinary abilities, according to pastor Witte and others, Karl absorbed an enormous amount of knowledge in a comparatively short time, as a result of a method of education which began almost as soon as he showed intelligence.

The book, originally written about one hundred years ago when scientific advice on the subject was lacking, is a remarkable document. It is full of useful information and practical hints to parents and people interested in the education of children, even in this day of scientific methods and conflicting authorities. But as we might have expected, the discipline reminds us a little of the German “Kaserne.” The spilling of a little milk on the tablecloth was punished by enforced abstinence from all foods except bread and salt. Punishment as a remedy for an offense is always wrong, because it does not prove the responsibility of the act to the child.

The spirit in which pastor Witte went about his task is shown in the following passage:

The development of intellectual and moral courage, the most important qualities any man or woman may possess, were neglected, at least were not given the attention they deserve. To inculcate in the child a desire for liberty and social equality, he overlooks entirely.

The father is really the more remarkable of the two. A product of the method of education prevailing at the time, he stands as a refutation of his own theories. Pastor Witte conceived and carried out an idea successfully. He did something, at least theoretically, worth while. The son died at eighty-three. Now what difference would it have made either to the boy or to the world if his appointment to the teaching staff of Berlin had come at a later date? Most methods of education aim at the training of the senses and the accumulation of facts. While these are necessary, I think the speed at which this is done is immaterial to the child.

Some of the finest men and women, who made this a better world to live in, had no scientific training in their childhood or later. We need not go back to history to find them. Maxime Gorky, for instance, lost his parents before he was four years old, and began to read under the supervision of a cook at sixteen. Jack London is another instance that suggests itself readily to one’s mind.

Of course these are exceptional people, but take the thousands of able and brainy men and women in labor organizations and idealists in all walks of life. Usually they had very little attention from their parents, either because they had no time or did not know enough. These men and women who had to rub up against the rough edges of our money-making machinery and to stand squarely on their feet facing this world and its problems,—willing to lend a hand, yes, even to give their lives for the betterment of social and economic conditions—these persons are worthy of the name.

Now I don’t want to say anything against the early training of children. The kindergarten and all the methods of early training in schools have come into existence because there is a real need for them. Parents, for many reasons, no longer have the time to train their own children; but we expect results from education in general that cannot be accomplished.

What good are all the learning and scientific facts that we have accumulated up to now, if we don’t use them to make our life richer and more beautiful? Knowledge and ability are worthless if there is no moral and intellectual courage to back them up. Pastor Witte thought the education of his son finished when he reached the age of sixteen. We today do things in the same spirit. We get things done. Nothing slow about us. The result, of course, is very poor; nobody is satisfied. Our experts, always ready with advice on any and everything, tell us that what we need is technical training to provide industry with efficient help. These educators do not see that the difficulty is not with the child but with industrial conditions. They are going to fit the child to this misery called modern industry. But remove the possibility of the unscrupulous taking advantage of the inexperienced and simple-minded, and many of the so-called educational problems will disappear.

Chitra: A Play in One Act, by Rabindranath Tagore. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]

Nothing is more irritating to a really modern critic than to have to join in a chorus of universal praise. It is particularly irritating when the person acclaimed is a Nobel prize winner, for surely those of us who sit in private judgment in secluded places ought to be able to discern values subtler than the ones open to the eyes of some mysterious frock-coated and silk-hatted jury of professors in Stockholm, or wherever it may be. The very marrow in the bones of criticism curdles at the thought of agreeing with a popular award.

But a certain native honesty and a distinct desire to spread good news obliges one, in the case of Chitra, to withhold the amiable dissecting knife. The play is far too beautiful to serve as a cadaver for the illustration of either the anatomist’s skill or the facts of anatomy. Let it be confessed that this reviewer, who was about to send the book back with a refusal to review any work of Tagore, found, after reading a few lines, that he was forced to go on; and that having once gone on, he preferred to write the review rather than to give up the book.

This play was written twenty-five years ago, and belongs, therefore, to that earlier strata of Tagore’s life which is to the normal mind so much more alluring than the latter detritus that seems to have accumulated over him. His later work appears to be old with the old age of Asia and with the old age of himself. Its fundamental feeling is the only too familiar impulse to recline on the bosom of a remote God. We who regard this attitude as a perversion of manhood will turn from it with relief to the earlier writing, in which the very life-blood of our own hearts seems quivering with the intimations of a better-than-godlike beauty.

As I have suggested, there is very little that can rationally be said about this play Chitra. To indicate something of the nature of so perfect a work is the sole office that I can profitably perform.

Chitra, daughter of a King who had no sons, was brought up to live the life and perform the activities of a man, with a man’s hardness of frame and a man’s directness of will. One day while hunting in the forest, she found sleeping in her path Arjuna, the great warrior of the Kuru Clan. “Then for the first time in my life I felt myself a woman, and knew that a man was before me....” Going to the gods of love, Chitra obtained from them the gift of a perfect and world-vanquishing beauty to last for one year only; and returning to Arjuna she overcame by this invincible weapon the monastic vows which he had taken upon himself, and swept him away into the wild and glorious current of her year of beauty. Thus the year begins:

A few words, a half dozen pages of prose modulated to perform an office as subtle as that of blank verse, give us the exquisite essence of the year that follows; and toward the end there steal into it notes of the inadequacy which the great warrior feels in this perfection, and his desire for the old and harsher round of human life. Thus the year ends:

And as it ends, and as Chitra realizes that there is to fall from her that radiance which has been, for a year, the sole bond between her and her lover, and also the sole barrier between the real her and him, she finds that his profounder longing has changed into a desire for the companionship of that strong and eager boy-woman that she was before her transformation.

Arthur Davison Ficke.

Our Friend John Burroughs, by Clara Barrus. [Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.]

That title engenders a resentment in me, a sense of unfitness. It is an epitome of a popular approval which has cheapened the word “friendship.” If Walt Whitman, John Muir, and Francis F. Browne had jointly written of Burroughs, the words “our friend” in the title of their collaboration would have been inevitable and nice. The common disregard of so unimportant a matter as this seems to be in the author’s opinion exhibits the crass liberties which the public is wont to take with personalities. The result is that a great man may become popular and useful before he is understood.

Burroughs happily is both read and understood. His popularity therefore is wholesome. But the mild and consistent protest which his life has been and is against the necessary artificialities in which most of his “friends” live has never drawn them into a comprehending, practicing sympathy with it. He is read, applauded, and envied—but not followed. His softness and gentle unconcern with affairs are the antitheses of those dynamic qualities which confer leadership and vitalize men’s impulses and deeds. His urban admirers go to the country to rusticate and picnic but not to live a life like his. He does too much speculative thinking to give his attitude toward the world an opportunity to go home to his readers.

Whitman, with a similar indifference to a following, drives men into the open road; Thoreau lures them to Walden Ponds to repeat his experiment; Ik Marvel persuades them to farm; David Grayson charms city folk back to the land, to anchor and live. Burroughs attracts visitors to Slabsides. He is on the verge of becoming an institution, a curiosity. His life has been a personal success. He is young in spirit and surprisingly robust at nearly eighty years of age—he is seventy-seven this month—and I daresay that his obvious failure to lead his readers towards country homes of their own or seriously to interest them in the art of simple living has never given him the slightest pain. He has assumed no responsibility for the ways of the world. Nature is capable of working out her own salvation during a future eternity. A leaf on a tree does not quarrel with or attempt to reform its personal kin. It functions alone; the life of which it is a part must take care of horticultural sociology. Burroughs to me acknowledges himself to be a leaf on the great tree. That is exceedingly interesting; but endow leaves with reason, give them an expanding consciousness, and their functions must change. Burroughs would require to be more than a predestinated leaf if his fellows were leaves.

By virtue of society’s struggle and industry, in which Burroughs is not interested, he has made of the world, so far as he is concerned, a quiet, beautiful outdoor cathedral, domed by the sky, its chief priest being fed and clothed by the slaves of productive industry in your world and mine. With great respect and admiration I pronounce him a sagacious man, a clever leaf that has employed its reason with remarkable personal advantage. In Burroughs’ world the tragedies, strife, and noise that we experience do not exist; his cathedral is a by-product and he is a modest beneficiary of humanity’s work. In relation to the masses of people it is as unreal as it is unproductive of racial fitness to persist in the world as most men know it. He loves to dream, think, and write in his cathedral; what is going on outside does not disturb him. He revels in the leisure, order, and security which the outsiders have provided. He assures us that it is pleasant and satisfying, and we honor and reward him for the information, but I should like to ask him whether the largest freedom and selfhood that are achievable apart from working, conflicting, warring men are not themselves fundamentally artificial.

Burroughs does not seem to be sufficiently alive to suspect that he has missed something greater than personal contentment. A reader of everything that he has published, I never, until I read the autobiographical sketches in this work, felt the pity and unsocial contempt—not for the man but for the type—which I have here tried to express.

D. C. W.

The Tragedy of Pompey the Great, by John Masefield. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]

Creative artist that he is, Masefield moves forward into amazing clearness, heightened by flashes of poetic light, the scenes of nearly two thousand years ago in Rome. The fidelity of this tragedy to the facts of history, and the remarkable extent to which it reproduces the overwhelming glory of a great struggle, are new proofs of the author’s special affinity with the sanguinary deeds of heroic men. Masefield’s plays and narrative poems give the element of tragedy something of its old vividness and nobility in art. Some of his phrases sound like the fall of a guillotine. He is a master of the magic of objectifying tremendous unrealities. He hates feeble passions; wanton courage and oaken physical power in action are the big things that he likes to ennoble with poetic treatment. And his success is incomparable, so far as his contemporaries are concerned.

Masefield’s great characters, true to the glossed facts of life, in crises exhibit indwelling cave-men. His frankness and honesty are themselves tragical. Life is full of and inseparable from tragedy. Pompey “saw a madman in Egypt. He was eyeless with staring at the sun. He said that ideas come out of the East, like locusts. They settle on the nations and give them life; and then pass on, dying, to the wilds, to end in some scratch on a bone, by a cave-man’s fire.” The old warrior lies awake, thinking. “What are we?” he asks Lucceius, and that actor in a great play replies, “Who knows? Dust with a tragic purpose. Then an end.” Masefield surveys the recorded history of the past, sees into the heart of the present and exclaims, “Tragedy!” And of course that is in his own life; otherwise he could not see it apart from himself. In sheer desperation he endues dust with a “tragic purpose,” but he does not believe so much as he hopes that a “purpose” inheres in that resultant of life, for in the big poem with which he summarizes the record of Pompey he says:

The Tragedy of Pompey the Great, unlike any Shaw play or even The Tragedy of Nan, is not good reading; its short sentences, tragic with import, are mere outlines. But they drive incarnate reality into one’s soul.

What was the tragedy of Pompey? Well, it began hundreds of years before he was born; he was the accidental embodiment of it. He had earned security and peace. He had aided Caesar in conquering Gaul. “Caesar would never have been anybody if Pompey hadn’t backed him.” But that tyrant’s lust for power provoked a civil war, and the end was “a blind, turbulent heaving towards freedom.” Pompey’s dream of freedom—his conviction that power was in too few hands—cost him his life. To him Rome was inwardly “a great democratic power struggling with obsolete laws.” He declared that “Rome must be settled. The crowd must have more power.” But Pompey’s dream was shallow and human, even if great, for, regarding the “thought of the world” as of transcendent importance, he asks, “For what else are we fighting but to control the thought of the world? What else matters?”

History seems to try to repeat itself. Lentulus, fearing that they were losing Rome, said to Pompey, “You have done nothing.” The reply—“Wait”—has a modern sound. Pompey was preparing to fight Caesar, but public opinion, voiced by Metellus, excitedly demanded, “but at once. Give him no time to win recruits by success. Give them no time here. The rabble don’t hesitate. They don’t understand a man who hesitates.”

That too might have been said by a modern American newspaper, affecting to speak for the crowd.

Philip, beloved of the maiden Antistia, is fanatically true to his master, whom he would follow “To the desert. To the night without stars. To the wastes of the seas. To the two-forked flame.” To him this blind devotion meant more than Antistia’s love. “We shall have to put off our marriage,” he said to her, and she, speaking from the deep heart of the mother, unachieved, answered:

Whatever the fate of Pompey, Antistia’s was the supreme tragedy.

DeWitt C. Wing.

The World Set Free, by H. G. Wells. [E. P. Dutton and Company, New York.]

Do you remember the little verse of Kipling’s in the Just So Stories about the small person who kept so many serving men

There’s something very much like that small person in a decidedly larger person called H. G. Wells. For all the great sweep and astonishing convincingness of his later novels he still keeps the child-like quality of asking startling questions about everything in the universe. He still wants to know: “Why can’t I catch the sun, and what would happen if I did?”

In his last half dozen novels he has been asking about various phases of our modern society, politics, and the sex question. But in this latest book, The World Set Free, he goes back to a type of question that interested him some years ago, the type half fanciful and half sociological that produced In the Days of the Comet, The Time Machine, and When the Sleeper Wakes. But this book is not entirely like the earlier ones. For one thing the science is for the first time so nearly possible that it is almost probable, and for another this book is the work of an older, quieter soul with less regard for externals and with more faith in the ultimate high hope for mankind.

What Wells has asked himself this time is: “What would happen if man were suddenly given command over an unlimited amount of physical power?” He brings this about by modern chemistry. A scientist discovers a new theory of matter which enables him to break down metals by radio-activity and so generate practically limitless power. The first use the world makes of this power is to go to war. We can hardly quarrel with Wells for the improbability of this because it sweeps the board so clear for his reconstruction period, which is the heart of the story.

A strange story it is; one whose hero is mankind—mankind in the bulk, groping, struggling, trying half blindly to adapt himself to the new conditions, and at last, after a desperate period of reconstruction, coming out into the sunlight, triumphant, clean, and at peace. Now and then an individual is caught up for an instant into the story, transfigured for the moment by circumstances into a mouthpiece for the mass of mankind,—a scientist, a middle-class Englishman who wrote his memoirs, the Slavic Fox, a dying prophet of the later age,—but for the most part it is just mankind who speaks. Wells, by the great sweep and vision of his ideas and the almost super-human handling of the technical difficulties of such an impersonal story, succeeds in raising us for a moment out of our personal selves so that we are completely identified with the race, and view its later successes with a serene and personal pride.

Each of us becomes a link in the great chain of humanity that reaches from the cave man through the “chuckle-headed youth” to the dying professor, the men who dreamed of snaring the sun in a net and taming it to their hand. “Ye auld red thing ...” we say with the chuckle-headed youth, “We’ll have you yet!” And the dying prophet cries for each of us to the setting orb:

Eunice Tietjens.

Diane of the Green Van, by Leona Dalrymple. [The Reilly and Britton Company, Chicago.]

About the middle of last December Mr. F. K. Reilly sent a telegram to a Miss Leona Dalrymple of Passaic, New Jersey, in which he asked: “May I call upon you Thursday afternoon?” The telegram was the result of the $10,000 prize contest which the Reilly and Britton Company had planned early in the year; and Miss Dalrymple had just been announced as the winner by the three judges—S. S. McClure, Ida Tarbell, and George N. Madison. She knew nothing of this, however, though she thought Mr. Reilly’s telegram must mean an interest in her work; so she replied calmly that she would be pleased to see him on Thursday. Then Mr. Reilly’s eyes begin to twinkle, as he tells the story, for it is rather a joke to set out on a journey with a $10,000 check in your pocket for an unsuspecting young woman. Even when he explained to her and presented the check she remained calm—though she is only twenty-eight years old and this was her first taste of real fame. She told Mr. Reilly that she had another novel which she hoped might interest him—but he took the words out of her mouth by saying that he had come prepared to make a contract for it!

So much for the latest of modern fairy tales. Diane of the Green Van is the prize-winning novel, and, despite our first suspicion of it because of that very fact, it proves to be a good one. Miss Dalrymple loves the outdoors, and her present story of an American girl who goes jaunting in a van in the Florida Everglades was suggested by a newspaper clipping about an adventurous young Englishwoman who managed to break away from conventions once a year and roam the country in a gipsy wagon. Not all “best sellers” have as much real charm as this one. Perhaps its freshness and spontaneity are due to the fact that it had to be written in six weeks for the contest.

Miss Dalrymple has stated that her purpose in writing novels is to “entertain wholesomely through optimism and romance.” Usually that type of purpose is linked up with a sentimentality which means being sweet at the expense of truth. But this author is not that sort: in expressing her dislike of sex stories, for instance, she attributes their shortcomings to treatment, not to material—“since there is absolutely no subject under the sun which may not be treated with perfect good taste in a novel.” She has also stated that in her opinion the modern woman is over-sexed—a popular though altogether wrong-headed view which we mean some time to argue with her in these columns.

The Russian Novel, translated from the French of Le Vicomte E. M. de Vogüe by Colonel H. A. Sawyer. [George H. Doran Company, New York.]

Although this book was written in 1886, its treatments of Pushkin, Gogol, Turgeneff, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy are now first made accessible to the English reader, and will still be worth his attention. In fact one reads them with a growing regret that the author, who died in 1910, did not continue his interpretation of the Russian spirit as the religious and mystic tone of its nihilism gradually faded and left us the bleaker outlook of such men as Gorky. With Tolstoy, however—“probably the greatest demonstrator of life which has arisen since Goethe”—the book closes.

The author treats his subject from the standpoint of a certain formula which he finds to hold throughout the range of that realism which succeeded the romanticism of Pushkin—a romanticism which disappeared in 1840. Thereafter there grew up the great realistic school which gives Russia the leadership of the world in the field of realistic fiction—a leadership due partly to the temperamental standpoint of the Russian, adapted for just the kind of work which the great realistic novel involves, and partly to the importance of the novel as the vehicle of those ideas which the censor barred from every other channel of expression.

In the bible we are told that God made man out of the slime of the earth and breathed into him the breath of life. In those words is the secret of the Russian realistic novel. For the realism of his own country the author of this work has little praise. Because, he says, it lacked that human sympathy which saw in man not only the slime of the earth but the breath of life, it is barren.

Dickens, on the other hand, and George Eliot gave to English realism a standpoint which was moulded, nay, impregnated through and through, with the religion of that book to which Mary Evans had renounced formal allegiance—the Protestant bible. In fact, De Vogüe goes so far as to say that some of her writing, for instance “the meeting between Dinah and Lisbeth,” is biblical in the quality of its appeal, and might have been written by the hand that gave us Ruth.

This spirit, but without the Anglo-Saxon hardness, is the spirit of Russian realism. It has all the photographic accuracy, the preocupation with all types of life that distinguishes French realism; but the preoccupation with the divine, the mystical turning away from the things of this world, is also present. The sympathy of Gogol is intensified to painfulness in Dostoevsky and is apotheosized into a new religion of renunciation in Tolstoy.

And because (in contrast to the French) the Russians “disentangled themselves from these excesses, and like the English gave realism a superior beauty moved by the same moral spirit of a compassion cleansed of all impurities and glorified by the spirit of the gospels”—because of this De Vogüe regards Russian realistic literature as the one force that can rejuvenate the literary art of the European nations.

The author writes with the authority of long study and gives us a sufficient basis for what we must now do ourselves—namely, read comtemporary Russian literature and ask ourselves what it tells us; whether or not it tells us that Christian realism is a contradiction in terms.

Llewellyn Jones.

Nowadays: A Contemporaneous Comedy in Three Acts, by George Middleton. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]

Some little theatre company ought to send eight of its members on tour through all the smaller cities of the country in Nowadays. It would be the most effective way in the world to awaken the people of those slumbering places to the really amazing revolutions in contemporary life—and incidentally in the contemporary theatre. For one thing, it shows how parents and children are gradually bridging the foolish gulf between the generations—the gulf that Shaw has called the degrading objection of youth to age; for another, it reflects the extraordinary renaissance that has come to our theatre since the first visit of the Irish Players.

Mr. Middleton takes a typical small-town family—a father, mother, son, and daughter—and leads them through a domestic crisis that has probably been the sad lot of most modern families. The daughter, like all proper young women, has an ambition: she wants to be a sculptor. The mother understands, having had similar longings before she married a man who made it his business to suppress them. The father refuses to listen to the daughter’s idea, and tells her that if she goes to New York it will be without his help. But she goes; and the play opens with her first visit home. The son, a weakling without ability of any sort except to spend money and sow wild oats, has also left home; but he has managed to live very comfortably because of a monthly allowance from his father. The justice of the situation harks back to the antique theory that even a weak boy has more right to the splendors of the world than a girl of any type.

Diana’s father refuses to think about woman suffrage. “I don’t have to think about something I feel. I tell you, if we had woman suffrage, women would all vote like their husbands.”

“They say it would double the ignorant vote,” answers Diana’s friend, Peter, the journalist, who has encouraged her in rebelling.

“He’s a good-natured old fossil,” Peter says later to Diana. And when the girl insists that she loves her father anyhow, Peter says, “I love radishes, but they don’t agree with me. If he had a new idea he’d die of dropsy.”

The result of Diana’s visit is to produce certain rebellions in her mother, who goes back to New York with her to help make a home of that lonely little flat, and to revive her own early ambitions as a painter. Later the father succumbs to the new order. It is all good “comedy”; also it’s tremendously good thinking. If only it could be read by all the people who misunderstand the surging modern spirit that is riding so bravely through traditions and inheritances.

But Nowadays has another value besides that of its story. It is made of the stuff of the new drama; it fulfills our demand that the theatre shall give us the truth about life in a simple way. However, we shall talk more about this in another issue.

Our Mr. Wrenn, by Sinclair Lewis. [Harper and Brothers, New York.]

The poverty of American workaday criticism has rarely shown more threadbare than in the fact that of all the reviews of Our Mr. Wrenn, a first novel by Sinclair Lewis, a new author, not one has mentioned the idea under the book.

They have been good reviews, too, as reviews go. Many have praised the book, have talked around it, described its characters, attempted to classify it—under names so various as Locke, Wells, and Dickens. Yet so expected is the novel that means nothing, and so dead is critical vision, that no one has thought to say “Here is a new American writer. What is in his soul?”

Let me prove the point. “Our Mr. Wrenn” is a mouse-like little clerk in the office of a New York novelty company. He is called “Our Mr. Wrenn” in business correspondence by the manager of the firm. He is overshadowed by “the job.” He lives uncomfortably in Mrs. Zapp’s downtown boarding house. Because the author can see, various figures from the drab stream one meets in the street are made human. Because the author has whimsicality and scorn and sympathy, the book has humor and satire and pathos. All these things have been noted by the critics.

Mr. Wrenn is not always “Our.” He becomes his own in the gorgeously illustrated travel leaflets sent out by steamship companies. Eventually he does go to England on a cattle steamer. He is “Bill Wrenn” and licks a tough. He meets adventures—Istra, an over-fine artist girl who likes him because he’s real. In the end he pathetically sees her soar above him and sails back to America, where he goes into the office again, falls in love with a sweet little lingerie-counter clerk, marries, and “settles down.” All these things the critics have told us.

But Mr. Wrenn is at once glorious and pathetic, not only because he says “Gee!” when he has the emotions of a poet. It isn’t only the little things of the book that twist our smiles.

There is an epic conflict between Mr. Wrenn of the job and Bill Wrenn of the sunsets and the sea. Our Mr. Wrenn, oppressed and bullied, scuttling out of the way, not quite daring to think his own thoughts or dream his own dreams, not knowing quite enough to understand the great things of the world—this man is everywhere in New York, in America; he is in our own souls. And when he musters courage to become Bill Wrenn, when he sets out on dangerous quests and loves strange beauty, he becomes a conqueror who rallies with him the great of history, and stands on the high places of our own spirits.

Pitifully inadequate Bill Wrenn is, of course. The lonely tragedy of that conventionally “happy ending” has escaped the critics. The drab, the commonplace, creep over Bill again without his knowing it. That’s the frightful part of it. It’s very like what appears to happen to everybody. Our Mr. Wrenn he is at the end, sunk in comfort and forgetting his flags in sunsets.

It is a poignant, bitterly human novel. After reading it in sympathy one cannot lean back in satisfaction and write commonplaces. It leads to understandings and resolutions. When we learn to demand such things of American writers, their primary purpose will then cease to be either to entertain or to “teach a lesson.”

Gilbert Alden.

Little Essays in Literature and Life, by Richard Burton. [The Century Company, New York.]

Readers of The Bellman will welcome in this permanent form many little lantern gleams of thought that have been shed athwart their path by this unacademically-minded incumbent of a Minnesota chair.

Mr. Burton flashes his lamp fitfully over a large area, and shows us loitering spots as well as boggy ground it were well to avoid. Opening his book at random, we find here a hint on reading and here a warning gleam over some political or social morass.

When the morass is a deep one, however, we must not expect to sound its depths with a lantern gleam, and so sometimes Mr. Burton disappoints us. Thus in discussing the individual and society he merely tells us what we all know: that we pay for the advantage of sociality, of mutual comfort, and support by the loss of individuality, by the growth of a fear to do the thing that commends itself to our best judgment. But what must we do? Must we fill in this particular morass by throwing in all the individuals? Or will the individuals be able to jump it? Mr. Burton is discreet on such points.

More satisfactory than that essay and others like it are those on literature. Under “Books and Men” the author deplores the tendency which characterized Chaucer (“Farewell my books and my devotion”) of drawing an antithesis between men and books, between literature and life. Literature has its origin in life and its apparent separation from it is an accidental result of the printed book method of spreading what used to be spread by the human voice alone or in chorus.

Illiam Dhone.

Nietzsche and Other Exponents of Individualism, by Paul Carus. [The Open Court Publishing Company, Chicago.]

Expositions of Nietzsche are usually written by uncritical disciples with little knowledge of formal philosophy. In so far as Nietzsche was a poet, some of these productions may be of value in spots, but in so far as Nietzsche was an intellectual critic of life they are worthless.

Dr. Carus writes from the standpoint of a philosopher in the most formal sense of that word. To him Nietzsche the thundering voice of protest named Zarathustra is of less importance than Nietzsche the extreme nominalist. The chief value of his work therefore is purely informative. He will certainly not send the philosophic debutante further into the matter.

Even from the purely informative side, however, Dr. Carus’s work is delimited by his own attitude, which is that of the old time believer in the validity of universals. Recurrence, uniformity, eternal norms of things behind the changing phenomena are the foundations of Dr. Carus’s stated or implied world view.

He therefore treats Nietzsche as simply a forerunner of such, to him, mischievous people as William James and Henri Bergson. He takes great pains, indeed, to show that there are many Nietzsches, and among them he classes George Moore, on the strength of extracts from his Confessions of a Young Man. Of more value than that is his consideration of the philosophy of Stirner—mainly because Stirner is not so well known as Nietzsche, nor so well as he deserves to be on his merits.

One undoubted merit the book has, and that is the industrious collection of personal recollections of Nietzsche and of Nietzsche portraits which Dr. Carus has brought together in its pages. These will give the book a positive value to the Nietzsche enthusiast, while the sight of Dr. Carus’s cool, scholastic temperament trying to drench the burning bush of Nietzsche will at least interest him.

Illiam Dhone.

Anthony the Absolute, by Samuel Merwin. [The Century Company, New York.]

It is interesting to watch the struggles of an essentially chivalrous masculine soul caught in the whirlpool of modern feminism. Samuel Merwin, ever since the old days of A Short Line War and Calumet K., written in collaboration with Henry Kitchell Webster, has held towards women the attitude of the knight errant. Recently, as shown in The Citadel, The Charmed Life of Miss Austin, and even more strongly in this latest book, Anthony the Absolute, he has become a determined feminist. But the attitude has not changed. Formerly his hero laid at the feet of the lady of his choice as much wealth, fame, and position as he could acquire; this latest hero gives her in the same spirit a career and the chance to develop her own personality. Mr. Merwin says: “The man who deliberately stops a woman’s growth—no matter what his traditions; no matter what his fears for her—is doing a monstrous thing, a thing for which he must some day answer to the God of all life.” He is still the knight errant. It is still man who permits woman to develop.

None the less it is a very readable tale. The male characters are all clearly and convincingly drawn, not without humor. The lady is a little nebulous, but very charming. Illustrating the absoluteness of Anthony and serving as an introduction to the charming Heloise is an interesting musical theme. The scene is laid in China, where Anthony is studying primitive music, and Heloise is able to sing for him a perfect close-interval scale, in eighth tones instead of the “barbarous” half and whole tones of the piano scale.

Unfortunately Mr. Merwin has permitted himself to be led by the exigencies of a popular magazine, in which the story appeared in serial form, into giving the tale a certain meretricious air of sex allurement which it fundamentally does not possess. On the whole, except in a certain technical facility in handling the situations and sustaining the tension of the plot, Anthony the Absolute is a decided falling below the really splendid standard of excellence which Mr. Merwin set for himself in The Citadel.

Eunice Tietjens.

George Soule

Is it true that a Chicago woman’s club recently declared any book to be immoral which contains a character whom you wouldn’t invite into your home to meet your daughter? If so, the world is to be congratulated, because all novels except the Rollo Books are labeled immoral, and we needn’t worry any more about the word. Provided, of course, that the daughters of this particular woman’s club are sheltered as carefully as they should be, having been brought up by such mothers.

I’m afraid only authors and publishers know just how threatening this fear of “immoral” books is getting to be. The most significant American novelist has just written a masterful book which has been declined by two at least of the oldest and best publishing houses because it is “too frank.” The men in charge want to publish it; they think the world ought to have a chance at it. But they are afraid. And the author, unlike most authors under similar circumstances, won’t modify the book. He says he’ll wait twenty-five years, if necessary, but he won’t change a word. And yet, if the book were published, some people would accuse him of “pandering to commercialism.”

Don’t blame the publisher. Mitchell Kennerley came near being fined hundreds of dollars and sent to jail recently for issuing Hagar Revelly—a serious though by no means a great novel. Anthony Comstock, who earns his living by attempting to suppress anything which he happens to consider immoral, is likely at any time to pick out a good piece of work for his thunderbolts—and he is a government official in the post office department. You can’t tell what he is going to do next. Everybody remembers his ill-advised censorship of Paul Chabas’s delicate and inoffensive little September Morn; yet in every cheap picture-store window in New York there is now displayed without protest a photograph of a nude woman which makes no pretense to art or beauty.

Not many people know that six men decide what Boston may or may not read. The Watch and Ward Society, a group of puritans backed up by the blue laws of the state, have long been active in this pharisaical undertaking and from time to time have arrested booksellers. The booksellers in self-defense have recently formed a committee of three to act with three members of this society. When a new book comes along which anybody “suspects,” it is put before the joint committee, and if that decides against it, Boston cannot buy it except by mail. The Devil’s Garden only barely escaped, because somebody had read to the end of the book and labeled it “religious.” In other words, it teaches a lesson. But the same argument did not save Witter Bynner’s Tiger.

Magazine editors will tell you similar facts by the hour. The Metropolitan was recently held up by the post office because it contained photographs of nude statuary—from the winter exhibition of the National Academy!

We shall not rid ourselves of this vicious situation by simply getting enraged at the censors. The truth is, they are too well entrenched in public opinion. The people who enforce the law are ignorant postal clerks, clergymen of archaic convictions, and lower court judges of the tobacco-chewing, corner-saloon type to whom any thought of sex is necessarily nasty. But behind them is the man who is always saying that such and such a book or play “oughtn’t to be allowed.” He is always wanting to protect “the young,” or somebody else, although he rarely reads books himself, and probably would resent interference with his own often vicious pleasures. His mind is essentially rotten. He is incapable of understanding the pure beauty of the human body, because he has seen so many “musical comedies.” He would be shocked by the statement that passion is a beautiful element of nature toward which we should be reverent. He has a sense of propriety, not so much about what should be done as about what should be said. And then there is the vast Florence Barclay contingent, largely women, who, because they don’t know what the world is like, don’t want to know, and don’t think anybody should be allowed to know.

The trouble with censorship is that we always want it to apply to other people, never to ourselves. It is our national weakness that we try to prescribe conduct by law, instead of seeing that the individual is strong and truth-seeing, and leaving conduct to take care of itself, allowing ideas to fight their own battles. If we must have a censorship, let it be in the hands of the strong and intelligent. Let us forbid all books which are not true. Mental and moral fibre is really vitiated by the Florence Barclay sort of thing. People brought up on that are enemies of light and progress. Their world is an exercise-place for impossible ethics. Their emotion is washed-out sentiment. Courage and vigor are unknown to them. And the worst of it is that their soft and clinging hands are wrapped about the rest of us, as they try to drag us down from the rain-washed skies of the morning to their stuffy hair-cloth religion and pink-candy pleasures.

The fight between the writers and the censors is sure to grow bitter in the next few years; both sides are getting more determined every day. But such crises are welcomed by the adventurous. We shall end not only by riding over our small opponents, but by carrying with us an army awakened to the true issues of art and life.

The current number of Poetry prints a speech that William Butler Yeats made during his recent visit to Chicago, in which he took occasion to warn his confreres in America against a number of besetting sins. He said, in part:

The following books, arranged in order of popularity, have been “bestsellers” in Chicago during March:

The Little Review is now on sale in the following bookstores: