The Little Review, June 1914 (Vol. 1, No. 4), Ed. Margaret C. Anderson

Nicholas Vachel Lindsay

[After seeing the reel called Oil and Water.]

The Church of Vision and Dream

Alexander S. Kaun

That Futurism is not a mere fad, a capricious bubble, is apparent from the fact that after five years of stormy existence the movement does not disappear or abate, but, on the contrary, continually gains soil and spreads deep and wide over all fields of European art. The critics of the new school no longer find it possible to dismiss it with a contemptuous smile as a silly joke of over-satiated modernists, but they either attack the Futurists with the vehemence and fury of a losing combatant, or they discuss the doctrine earnestly and apprehensively.

To set art free of the atavistic fetters of the old culture and civilization, to imbue it with the nervous sensitiveness of our age, have been the negative and positive aims of Futurism. It is absurd to abide by the forms of Phydias and Æschylus in the days of radium and aeroplanes. The influence of the old masterpieces is accountable for the fact that of late humanity ceased to produce great works of art. It is quite natural that the protest against the “historical burden” should have originated in Italy, a country which, after having served for centuries as a pillar of light, has so degenerated that in our times it can boast only of such names as the saccharine Verdi and the pretentious D’Annunzio. It is natural, I should like to add, that in this country Futurism is still a foreign plant; for, fortunately or unfortunately, we have been free of a burdensome heritage, and an iconoclastic movement would appear quixotic.

Started in Milan in the end of the year 1909, the movement has swept the continent and has revolutionized art. Even conservative England feebly echoes the battle-cry in the attempts of the Imagists. I do not intend to prognosticate the future of Futurism; it is still in its infantile stage, growing and developing with surprising leaps, continually taking on new forms; but the present-day Futurism is abundant with quaint, grotesque features approaching caricature; and some of them merit a few words.

The “parent” of Futurism and the present leader of Futurist poets, Marinetti, is, to say the least, an unusual personality. His Boswell, Tullia Pantea, describes his master’s life in its minutest nuances and chants dithyrambs to his wonderful achievements. We learn that Marinetti was born in Egypt in voluptuous surroundings, his father being a millionaire. From his childhood on he disposed of unlimited sums of money. “At the age of eleven he knew a woman; at fifteen he edited a literary magazine, Papyrus, printed on vellum paper; at seventeen he fought a duel.” We follow this enfant terrible to Paris where he lavishly squanders his millions, fights duels, and faces the court for his pornographic poems. He is sentenced to an eight weeks’ imprisonment for an exotic work which I shall not venture to quote, as it is too repulsive to the English reader. Pantea further describes his master’s kingly palazzo in Milan, where “... at night in the bed-chamber decorated with astonishing elegance and with mad extravagance meet the most beautiful women of Italy and Europe.”

I quote these nauseatic details, for they help to explain the erotic aroma of Marinetti’s poems. Their erotism is morbid, aroused by artificial “convulsions of sensuality,” “imitation of madness,” “a cancan of dancing Death.” Yet we cannot overlook the beauty of the verses, their devilish rhythm, and enchanting mysticism. Some of his early poems, more natural than his latest Words at Liberty, are intoxicating with their mad exoticism.

The following is one of his best-known poems, The Banjos of Despair:

The hysteric and savage banjos that meow like cats maddened by the odor of the storm; the sea which, swelling its back of a hippopotamus, applauds their songs with its sonorous twick-twacks and snorts—I understand the poet, I believe him. But, as I said, this is Marinetti’s early poetry. How far he has “progressed” you may judge from the following quotation from his latest Words at Liberty, as it appears in The London Times:

This “poem” is a description of a battle during the Turco-Bulgarian war; the style is supposed to be “polychromatic, polymorphous, and polyphonic, that may not only animalize, vegetalize, electrify, and liquefy itself, but penetrate and express the essence and the atomic life of matter.” This is the dernier cri of Italian Futurism which originated in a—draff-ditch. Here is Marinetti’s own “electrified” description of that memorable event:

Thus the new art was born under peculiar circumstances—“under the sign of scandal”—and scandal became the tactics of Italian Futurists who have professed their “delight in being hissed” and their contempt for applause.

A few points of that manifesto:

This bombastic program has been heralded by the Italian Futurists ever since 1909. Fortunately they went no further than threats, but they strove to attract attention and in this they gloriously succeeded.

Their attitude toward women was expressed in the motto: “Méprisez la femme.” Love for woman is an atavism and should be discarded into archives.

Woman is justified in her existence inasmuch as she is a prostitute. Sensuality for the sake of sensuality is extolled as the only stimulus in human life,—its only aim. Otherwise human beings are of no importance, at best as important as inanimate objects.

These aphorisms belong to the pen of Marinetti or to those of his disciples, who are but pigmies in comparison with their leader. They greeted the war with Turkey in Tripolitania enthusiastically, and Marinetti joyously witnessed the splendor of “bayonets piercing human bodies” and similar features of the great “health-giver”—war. At that time he began the cycle of his pictorial poems recently published in the Words at Liberty. Here is one of his early descriptions:

To complete the character of Marinetti I shall quote his article in The London Daily Mail in which he states his “profound disgust for the contemporary stage because it stupidly fluctuates between historic reconstruction (pasticcio or plagiarism) and a minute, wearying, photographic reproduction of actuality.”

His ideal is the smoking concert, circus, cabaret, and night-club as “the only theatrical entertainment worthy of the true Futurist spirit.” “The variety theater is the only kind of theater where the public does not remain static and stupidly passive, but participates noisily in action.” The variety show “brutally strips woman of all her veils, of the romantic phrases, sighs, and sobs which mark and deform her. On the other hand, it shows up all the most admirable animal qualities of woman, her powers of attack and of seduction, of treachery, and of resistance.”

At this point I am ready to agree with the Russian critic, A. Lunacharsky, who thus defines Marinetti:

In connection with the foregoing it is curious to observe the pranks of Marinetti’s colleagues in the land of eternal contradictions—Russia. The Russian Futurists, Ego-futurists, and Acmeists, vie with the Italians in noisiness and eccentricity, and they have aroused an extensive pro and con polemic. In the last issue of Russkaja Mysl there is an interesting criticism of the Futurist poetry written by Valery Brusov. This foremost poet, known on the continent as the Russian Verhaeren, began his literary career some fifteen years ago with the one-line “poem”: “Oh, conceal thy pallid legs.” This extremist is now ranked by the Futurists among the reactionaries. Brusov is not hostile to Futurism, although he opposes the contemporary bearers of its banner. In a dialogue supposedly carried on between a Symbolist and a Futurist Brusov makes the latter say:

And so, since words have become enslaved and carry, unfortunately, within them the ballast of established notions and conceptions, the Futurists experiment in liberating the words of their accepted meanings by creating new words, weird combinations of syllables, skilful arrangements of sounds which defy translation. For the benefit of that part of mankind which does not understand Russian the Futurists invented a “universal tongue” which consists exclusively of single vowels. Here is a specimen under the title Heights. I give the original letters and their English transliteration.

Do you feel the heights? The poet does, however, and he proclaims in his defense: “The more subjective is truth, the more objective is the subjective objectivity.”

 

Brusov’s point of view is expressed in the impassioned words of the historian of literature who appears at the end of the above-mentioned dialogue:

The weak point of Futurism appears to be, as is the case with every revolutionary movement, the fact that alongside with the true fighters for new horizons straggle parasitic marauders, that on the heels of the sincere searchers of artistic truth tread nonchalantly buffoons and charlatans. The number of the latter is so great that the true prophets drown in the vast slough, and the public sees but the caricature side of the movement. Take for instance, the Post-Impressionist and the Futurist painters. Any unbiased and open-minded observer will admit that many of them, like Odilon Redon, Duchamp, Picasso, Chabaud, even Matisse, have created works which, whether you like them or not, possess the sure criterion of art: they stir you, arouse your thoughts and emotions. Yet how easy it is to smuggle into their midst colossal nonsense and counterfeit can be judged from the following episode:

A group of young painters in Paris decided to arouse public opinion against the unrestricted accessibility of the Independent Salon by proving that among the exponents of the exhibition such an “independent” artist as a donkey could find a place. The editors of Fantasio undertook to assist them in carrying out their plan. A manifesto was issued of which I quote a few pearls:

Down with contours, down with half-tones, down with craft! Instead—dazzling and resplendent colors! And so on. Bombastic phrases borrowed from Marinetti and his colleagues. The manifesto is signed Joachim Raphael Boronali. Boronali is the anagram of Aliboron—the French word for donkey. The jesters later explained that they intended by the euphony of an Italian name “to arouse with more certainty the admiration of the crowd.”

The next step was to procure the services of Lolo, an old donkey well known to the artists on Montmartre, as its stable is at the cabaret Lapin Agile. The following procedure is immortalized in an official protocol, the most unique document in the annals of art:

From the photograph it may be seen that the donkey had been teased with some appetizing food held before his mouth, to which tantalization the so-called Boronali responded with the wags of his “tail-extremity,” according to the phraseology of the solemn document.

The picture then having been taken to the Salon, Monsieur Boronali was asked to pay his membership fee, and thenceforward his name figured among those of Matisse, Rousseau, Le Fauconnier, and other great. To the astonishment of the Fantasio group, their prank remained unnoticed for some time; the critics spoke of Boronali’s work along with the other pictures, and the manifesto of the Excessivists was but slightly commented upon. In a series of sensational articles and piquant stories The Fantasio finally succeeded in drawing general attention to their chef d’oeuvre. The Paris press, as well as the foreign, opened a hot discussion on the significance of Boronali’s work in a serious tone. Only the Kölnische Zeitung in a review of the manifesto and the picture carefully remarked, “If it is not a carnival joke”—referring to the manifesto but not doubting the authenticity of Boronali’s canvas. True, the title of the picture seemed mystifying: why The Sun Asleep over the Adriatic, when there were neither sun nor sea? The Gazette de France ridiculed the title. The New York Herald, endeavoring to justify the name of the picture, suggested that the sun was asleep beneath the Adriatic—an ingenious hypothesis. The Revue des Beaux-Arts gave a detailed and scholarly account of the picture, but found in it nothing extraordinary in comparison with the other Independents. The hardest blow to Boronali’s genius was dealt by De l’Art Ancien et Moderne, which accused him of being banal. “Among the cosmopolite crowd, along with Messrs. Ghéon, Klingsor, Jamet ... struts the sheer banality of M. Boronali.”

The scandal that took place after the mystificators had revealed their trick is of secondary importance. What looms out of this incident is the dangerously vague line of demarcation between what is true art and what is mere daubery in Futurism.

The Gaulois summed up the affair in a few significant words:

Margaret C. Anderson

The wonder-child is not so much a “wonder” in Europe as in this country. “At seven, yes—even up to eleven, perhaps,” a young German violinist who began to concertize at six once told me. “But after that—there are so many and they all play so beautiful! So it is more common there and people think not so much of it.” And she went on to tell me, with the most wistful seriousness, how at twelve she had felt suddenly so oppressed with age and weariness that for two years she had wanted not to play at all. She described it as a period when she wanted to “stop feeling and run in the country all day and be only with animals.”

But on the whole her theory seemed to be that it was the simplest thing in the world for a child to play well—better, in some ways, than he will ever play later on; and very likely it’s true. The newer psychologists have given us enough reason to think so.

It still comes with something of a shock to us here, however; and when we started for The Chicago Little Theatre one night two weeks ago to hear Master Ruby Davis, aged twelve, give a violin recital, it was with the most excited anticipations. I had never heard a child play the violin. Surely disappointment was inevitable....

A little boy walked quietly out on to the stage, smiling. (I heard afterward that some one had asked him if it didn’t frighten him to face all those people. “Oh, no,” he said, “I’m going to play my violin!”) He had on a little soft white shirt and knickerbockers. His hair was almost auburn and curled away from his forehead; his eyes were blue and his skin the softest white. His hands were the long, slender, “artistic” type rather than the blunt, heavy type which is quite as common among first-rate violinists. “Antoine”—that was all I could think.

And then he lifted his bow and swung into the Haendel Sonata in A with all the assurance of a master. It was only a matter of seconds until you knew that he could not disappoint—ever: he knew how to feel! A musician may commit all the crimes in the musical universe, or he may play so flawlessly that you marvel; but none of it matters particularly. A phrase will tell you whether he is an artist—the way the notes rise or fall or seem to be gathered up into that subtle thing which is the difference between efficient Playing and Music by the grace of God.

Ruby Davis makes Music. And how he loved doing it! He played a Canzonetta by Ambrosia, and the Jarnefelt Berceuse, and other difficult things like the Pugnani Praeludium, and that Motto Perpetuo of Ries, beside the regulation Cavatina and the Dvořák Humoresque—every one of them, in spite of small deficiencies that will be corrected, with a quality that is genius. As nearly as I can register it this is the picture of him I shall remember:

A little slender, eager, swaying body, and a great violin above which his face seemed worshipping. His eyes turned deep blue as flowers when he raised his head for some lovely soaring tone or dropped it on his instrument over some deep G string melody. His mouth was the saddest little mouth I’ve ever seen, and somehow you could watch the music coursing through his cheek bones. His right foot kept moving gently inside his shoe, always in perfect time.

DeWitt C. Wing

One of the momentous achievements of applied science is the convincing demonstration that the earth is a living thing. It is as truly a live organism as any of the animals of which it is the mother. Life could not have been evolved by or from it if there had not been life in it. We do not require an inexplicable miracle to account for the evolution of man; we can trace his pedigree back to an ancestry with fins and gills, and of course it stretches far beyond that comparatively recent stage in his development. From the beginning of the world conditions have steadily grown more favorable to the habitation of the earth by the higher animals. Since man is a part of the earth, what he himself has done to bring about this auspicious change may be credited to the mind or life resident in the earth. Then there is essential goodness in the earth—which is not saying that there is no evil in it. The world is a better place for a man to live in now than it was when his ancestors occupied dismal caves. It is no illusion that, design or no design, the cosmic urge has been toward goodness, by which I mean an increasingly hospitable dwelling-place for men. There have been recessions, and there will be others, but, apart from faith and hope, established facts compel the man who understands them to declare his absolute and unalterable certainty that the inexorable law of life’s becoming greater than it is cannot be nullified. So that, regardless of all poverty and misery, of all that is unlovely, of all the blind and passionate class hatreds and sex quibbles, the man who really thinks must think hopefully. There is indeed the most ample justification of optimism.

The world is God, and the man who worships it the new pagan. He comes off the same stock as the old pagans, who were called heathens—because they were not Christians. They were, in fact, the classic earth-lovers, and, hence, more truly the sons of God than the crusaders who, directed by an anthropomorphic Deity, tortured and killed them. The new pagan, who not only feels, smells, hears, and sees the earth, but comprehends the established scientific facts about it, finds a keener and larger delight and satisfaction in it than his forefathers could experience. He loves it with his heart and his mind. Having this attitude toward it, he wishes to serve it, prompted by the same motive which actuates him when he serves his immediate father and mother.

Ruskin was sure that his beautiful England was desecrated when steel rails were laid across its green fields and factory smoke contaminated the golden air; he canonized the landscape, and when it changed, his heart ached. He was an artist, not a prophet. The industrialism that he hated disseminated his written appreciations of beauty. Machinery is the extension of man’s personality and power; the instrument with which he is realizing the bounties and the Fatherhood of God. At present it is too much an end in itself instead of a means toward nobler results, but tomorrow will see the needed adjustment. Wherefore the new pagan is not saddened but gladdened at the sight of factories and the development of commerce. The awful carnage which commercialism entails is the price which we have been fated to pay for experience. Through commerce we are paving the way for the action of the world-mind—the collective thought of men. Collective thinking precludes socialism as well as individualism, and brings in humanism. The increasing complexity of civilizations symbolizes the enlarged intricacy of human life. Experience and consciousness are expanded by the maze of external detail through which a child in a modern state passes to maturity. The extension of a more highly organized civilization into every habitable region of the earth, and commercial and intellectual communication among all nations, will synthesize the thought of the world. Toward this goal every vital movement is directed, whether consciously or unwittingly. The germ of life was the original leaven, and it will leaven the whole lump. That races and states should disappear does not matter; if human life as a whole were to vanish the birth-labor that the world has begun would be retarded but not abandoned. Man would return in a few billion years. If not, a higher animal would; man himself is on the long way to ever-new heights. He has climbed up out of the sea, and with the birth of reason in his brain he began to ascend into loftier realms. The power of reason is a late acquisition, but it has provided the wondrous banquet at which the modern pagan feasts. It has enabled him literally to soar and revel in high, thin air.

All the fine arts are subsidiary to and dependent upon material progress, and the primal source of well-being is the soil. Man is a land animal, and he must have access to the land with the same freedom that a babe enjoys at its mother’s breast; otherwise he will be stunted and dwarfed. The earth is the Old Mother, yielding an abundance of food for all her children. More reason and more consciousness on their part will induce them to share it with one another, not like unreasoning pigs but like reasoning men. The “new freedom” means eventually the accessibility of the earth to every man. In the meantime the biggest business at hand is to build soils as well as schools; to keep the land full of sap; to extend mechanism into the arts of agriculture; to unify the thought and purpose of city and country. All this will follow the world-mindedness that is being developed by industrialism and internationalism.

All constructive thought and action must deal not less with the city but more and more with the country—the land. Typical cities are sapping the wealth of life that grows up round them. The obsessed man in the market place needs the poise and power of the shepherd on the hill. The only true and durable magnificence of a state lies in the equitable use of its natural resources. No man who has thought profoundly wants to own land, but the majority of men do want to use it. That ought to be every man’s privilege, for every man is in some fashion a lover of the verdant earth. But even the millions of us who are landless, because a few men legally own the earth, have occasional esthetic accesses to it, and if we passionately loved its beauty we should hasten the day of its release by an uneconomic monopoly. An intelligent love of the earth as a living thing is at the bottom of the dynamic impulse of man to be forever becoming.

And as these lovely days of wanton greenness steal like fairies into the secret recesses of his child-heart, man has a sense of eternal kinship with

Eunice Tietjens

George Burman Foster

Like the sense for the true, the good, the holy, the esthetic sense is elementary. Man comes to himself as man in all alike. Without the effectuation of his peculiar artistic impulse, man, the born artist, could not find the real consecration and dignity of the human. Indeed, the worth of all human culture depends upon the sense for the beautiful. As religion is not restricted to some fragment of our experience but informs the whole, so culture requires that life shall be beautiful down to the commonplace and homely things of the daily round. The new program, to which this modern insight points, means a rebirth of our entire moral and social life.

Why is it, then, that those who vocationally and constantly worship in the sanctuary of art—the priests in this sanctuary—often so easily and singularly fail in the consecration which the worship of beauty is supposed to supply to the human personality? The lives of those whose calling it is to exhibit and exemplify the beautiful, why are they often so very ugly, so bereft of lovable emotions? The shortcomings of the artist, why do we count among these the pettiest and the basest known to man? To be specific, why do we speak almost proverbially of an artistic vanity, an artistic sensitiveness, an artistic envy or jealousy? If we answered, “Because the shadows of the ‘human all too human’ seem so dark in the golden light of the artistic calling,” that would be true, but it would not be the whole truth. Does not the professional occupation of oneself with art involve a danger to character? To live constantly in the world of the emotions, to fable and fantasy and dream, in all this there is so easily something weak, not to say “effeminate” and sickly, and hence enervating. Of great spirits this is true often enough—how much more of the lesser who sophistically find warrant in the weakness of the great for the greatness of their weakness! For instance, they have heard of “inspiration”—something not under the control of the artist, something that must “come upon him,” but only when the divine hour strikes, as it struck at the pentecostal “outpouring” of the “spirit” upon the early Christians. Hence no care for a thousand things—in both cases—for which other men must care! Hence a standard of life different from that by which other men live! To be outwardly different from others, to set oneself above others, that is to be artistic. Because some great artists are different from other people in moods and manners and morals, it is naïvely concluded that to emulate the latter is to be the former, and right merrily does the emulation go on. It must be a grief to a real artist, this culture of the eccentric head and the more eccentric heart. Therefore we need a man to free us from these eccentricities, a man to lift us above these caricatures because he has himself put them beneath his feet. This man is Friedrich Nietzsche.

The sickness and the soundness of life, both these were in Nietzsche. In his demand for an artistic culture he put his finger upon the wound of present humanity. This demand was accepted, the meaning of the demand was lost sight of. This was the fatality—as if Nietzsche required a new artistic culture only, and not at the same time a new life culture! Beauty the form of life indeed, but strength, will, deed, the content—that was the brave burden of the prophet’s message.

Nietzsche was born into a time that marked the climax of a more than millennial cultus of Death. The old songs of death as bridge of sunset into the eternal day of Bliss, songs of earthly lamentation and heavenly yearning and anticipation, these no longer came from the heart, to be sure; though still sung, the voices of “the faithful” grew ever thinner and thinner; and the songs were a monument of past piety rather than a witness to a present. Like vice, this earth which was once “a monster of so frightful mien” was first endured, then pitied, then embraced—and even wedded by man; its sufferings were healed and its delights enjoyed. The pain, the pleasure of earth, what does it mean? man’s heart again asked as it asked in happy Greece long ago. But as time went by, the human mind was bruised and broken over this question, until it concluded that all we call life is a great illusion. And back and behind this life, with its tumult and fitful fever, there is the “vasty deep” of the infinite nothing. Life is a cheat. And now there is Weltschmerz, Lebenschmerz—simply a naturalistic form of the old ecclesiastical longing for death. It said the same “No!” to life that the old church song said—it, too, valued the day of death higher than the day of birth; it, too, urged that, since life is intrinsically evil, the cure of the evil is to live as little as possible.

Into such a world Friedrich Nietzsche was born, breathed its atmosphere, was himself once drunk upon its drugged drinks. The preacher of this modern yearning for Nirvana,—i.e., not metaphysical non-existence but psychological desirelessness,—was Schopenhauer as well as his disciple von Hartmann. This is the worst possible world, croaked Schopenhauer; No, moaned von Hartmann, it is not the worst possible world, it is the best possible world, but it is worse than none! And once Nietzsche called Schopenhauer his teacher—went forth as an enthusiastic apostle of the message of passive resignation to the inevitable sorry scheme of things, nay, of the message that the world is the work of an anguished god seeking redemption from the infinite misery of existence by the infinite negation of life.

And surely the anguish of Nietzsche fitted him, as no other, to be partner in distress of this anguished god. Surely he, if anyone, could say, To this end was I born and for this purpose came I into the world, to bear witness—to the body of this death. From his mother’s womb was he set apart to suffer. Endowed with a transcendent and super-abundant fulness of spirit, every fresh and forceful impulse of his personality he felt as an indictment of the inexorable pitiless limitations within which his best innermost life was imprisoned. He was a voice crying in the wilderness, not only to men, but to himself. Each new flash of light which illumined his inner eye let him see the graves upon which he was treading, and revealed those who claimed to be alive in the mask of the death to which they had succumbed. In the abounding wealth of youth he felt a mortal sickness getting its grip upon him. As life dragged on, he felt more and more the hell tortures of pain from which he had to wring his work every hour of his existence.

Who would have the effrontery to cast a stone at this man had he flung down his arms into one of those graves, and cried with an old philosopher: This may all be very well for the gods, but not for me! But he did not lay down his arms! Freed from all encumbrances of conscience and debilitating sense of sin which had paralyzed the Christian, and from the Schopenhauer Welt- und Lebenanschauung, he welcomed all that life had to offer and went unhesitatingly toward the universal goal of annihilation with a blithe and unregretting spirit. Entertaining no illusions about indeterminism or free-will or immortality, he rejoiced in his strength, seized with avidity the passing moment, and fell fighting to the last. He spoke his courageous “Yes!” to life, while Schopenhauer, with his money and his mistress, and all the world beside, were crying to him to say “No!” For this we must thank him. In this we find an antidote to present-day tendencies to sink the individual in the multitude, to subordinate men to institutions, and to apotheosize mediocrity. Nietzsche met pain with a power which transformed even death into life, and turned the day of his death even into a festival of the soul. He taught himself and he taught others to believe in that power, which alone is great,—to believe in the Power of the Will! Nietzsche, like Jesus, proclaimed the inestimable worth of the individual man, saw for him vast and glorious possibilities, sought the regeneration of society through the regeneration of the individual. Both committed the fortunes of the cause to which they devoted their lives to individuals and not to masses of men. Both believed that the best was yet to be. Both believed in the inwardness, the self-dependence, and the autonomy of personality. Neither ever side-stepped or flinched.

Today we are suffering from impuissant personality, from cowardice, from weakness of the will. Taming the great wild strong instincts, making them small and weak, choking them, so that man can will nothing or do nothing great and original and special—this is what we call civilization. A comfortable existence, this is the final end of life, according to this civilization. No conflict, no danger, for these menace comfort! Not to know the comfort of a calm, safe existence from which you can look down upon the struggles in a neck-breaking life far below—that is barbarism indeed! And is not this comfort a virtue, buttressed by moral principles at that? So buttressed, one’s slumbers are not disturbed. And may not one add to this virtue of comfort that other cardinal virtue of hatred of all that keeps matters stirred up, all that causes unrest, that causes sleepless nights and stormy days? What the man of civilization hates he calls “bad,” what he loves he calls “good.” Accordingly, as Nietzsche saw and said, the weak are the “good” people, the brave and the strong are the “bad.” Accordingly, also, it is comfortable to be “moral.” All one needs is to attune one’s life to the “common run,” to quarantine against every profound disturbance, to steal by every dangerous abyss of life. And if powers stir in man which do not amiably submit to taming, why, “morality” may be used as a whip to lash these insubordinate stirrings into subjection. And if the living heart crouches into submission under the lash, why, such crouching is called “virtue,” and the daring to resist and escape the lash, this of course is “vice.” In a word, the most will-less is the most virtuous. Thus—such was Nietzsche’s uncanny insight—“moral laws” are devices for disciplining the will into weakness! “Morality” is a poison with which man is inoculated, so that his strength may be palsied. “Morality” is itself death to a man, a will to weakness, a destruction of the will, while life is a will to power, a will to self-affirmation.

Every virtue has its double, easily confounded with it, in reality the exact opposite of it. Take meekness, peaceableness. It is a virtue which the cowardly, the over-cautious, arrogate to themselves—those who duck and bow and bend so as to give no offense, and to conjure up no violent conflict. Yet to be peaceable and meek is in truth supreme strength, having one’s own stormy heart under control, and being absolutely sure of power over the militant spirits of men. Humility is a sign at once of smallness and of greatness. Patience is at once a lazy lassitude and an active steadfast strength. Chastity may be reduced vitality, fear of disease, fear of being found out, lack of opportunity, slavery to respectability, poverty, or it may be temperance and self-control in satisfying sex-needs. And so on. Every virtue may arise because a man is too weak for the opposite. And this virtue which walks the path of virtue because it lacks the courage and the strength not to do so, this complacent, harmless, untempted virtue, men make the universal criterion of all virtue, the codex of their morality. Today still the pharisee, not the publican, the son who stupidly ate his fill in his father’s house, not the “prodigal” who hungered in the far country, heads the scroll of the virtuous. To fear and flee vice, or to “pass a law,” this is the current solution of morality, dinged into us from youth up, not to confront vice, battle with it, conquer and coerce it!

So misunderstood Nietzsche thought. He thought that the morality of “virtuous people” was, in fact, a foe of life, that the virtue of the weak was a grave for the virtue of the strong, and that, consequently the consciences of men must be aroused so that they could see the whole abomination of this, their virtue, of which they were so proud. To bridle and tame men is not to ennoble them; to make men too weak and cowardly for vice is not to make them strong and brave for the good. This anxious and painful slipping and winding and twisting between virtue and vice, this cannot be the fate of the future, the eternal destiny of man; this is to make man the eternal slave of man; to damn him in his innermost and idiomatic life to the lot of the eternal slave. Virtue and vice are values which men mint, stamps which men imprint upon their ever-changing conduct, not eternal values, born of life itself, sanctioned by the law of life itself. As time goes on tables of old values become sins. To obey them, to have the law outside and not inside us, is “to fall from grace” indeed. A law of life cannot be on paper, for paper is not living. Life must be the law of life. Life must interpret and reveal life. And life must be the criterion of life. What makes us alive, and strong, and mighty of will, is on that account good; what brings death and weakness, foulness and feebleness of will is bad. The courage which in the most desperate situation of life, in the most labyrinthan aberration of thought, dares to wring a new strength to live, is good; all pusillanimity, all over-mastery by pain, all collapse under the burden of life, all disappointing desert of the censure, “O ye of little faith, why are ye fearful?”—all this is bad. It will be a new day for man when he feels it wrong and immoral to lament his lot, to whine, but right and moral to earn strength from pain, a will to labor from temptation to die. Not the fear of the moral man to sin, but the fear to be weak, so that one cannot do one’s work in the world—that is to be the fear in the future. The powerful will, nay, the will become power itself, the fixed heart, the keyed and concentrated personality; this means freedom from every slave yoke. And it means that life is no longer at the mercy of capricious and contingent gain and loss, but a King’s Crown conquered in conflict with itself, with man, and with God.

By Charlotte Wilson

Marguerite Swawite

Karen Borneman, by Hjalmar Bergström. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.]

From the north, whence Ibsen’s Nora challenged the world as far back as 1879, comes a fresh message of rebellion in the more radical figure of Karen Borneman. In judging this play of Bergström’s, which has but now appeared in Edwin Björkman’s translation, we must remember that it was written in 1907—before we had grown so sophisticated concerning the rebel woman in her infinite manifestations. And yet, because this vanguard of a new morality is still a slender company, the addition of a new member cannot fail to arouse a ripple of excitement in the watchful rank and file. For that reason, as well as for some novel characteristics of her own, Karen Borneman merits a word for herself.

Bergström chose the most obvious method of contrast in projecting his heroine upon a background of stringent restraint. Her father is Kristen Borneman, a professor of theology whose chief interest in life is the propagation of the principles contained in his magnum opus, Marriage and Christian Morality. Her mother is an apparently submissive woman who sometimes questions the edicts of her husband. Her brother, Peter, is an adolescent youth, already awake to the conflict between the natural man and the unnatural economic system, and seemingly bound for destruction. Thora, her young sister, is already seeking out the clandestine outlet for an excessive and dangerous sentimentality. Another sister, Gertrude, has suffered a mental collapse and is confined in an insane asylum. These children, the author seems to say, are the results of a chafing restrictive discipline, and natural instincts gone wrong—a conclusion weakened, not strengthened by over-illustration. When four of a family of eight show signs of a similar abnormal development one suspects not only the disciplinary system but the purity of their inheritance.

Be that as it may, the chief protagonist, Karen, is quite a normal person—except in the matter of courage, of which she possesses an inordinate amount. But then all new women are courageous to a fault. She is a woman of twenty-eight, mature, cultivated, and a successful professional writer. Her most salient claim to consideration in the early scenes of the play is her quiet assurance in the right of her position. She voluntarily opens up her past to the professedly liberal physician who seeks her hand.

“Some years ago I—lived with a man.... You are a widower yourself. You may regard me as a widow or—a divorced wife.”

And when he spurns her action as squalor, she indignantly replies, “Doctor, how dare you. A phase of my life that at least to me is sacred, and you cast reflections on it, that—”

There is a brevity, a terseness, about her words that create greater sense of her power than would any amount of emotional pyrotechnics. In the later scene with her father she is equally as simple:

“The sum and substance of it is this: I have been married twice.... I mean that twice during my life—with years between—I have given myself, body and soul, to the man I loved, firmly determined to remain faithful to him unto death.” Then follows the recital of the two love affairs—the first with a brilliant but very poor journalist who died prematurely, and the other with a sculptor, Strandgaard, whom she left on the discovery of his faithlessness.

Her vision is of a time of greater freedom for self-expression:

Her justification is the characteristic one:

The clash with her father whom she loves tenderly she accepts as inevitable in spite of the pain it must bring them both. The ecstasy of a great vision softens to the note of personal loss as she leaves him:

Because Karen advocates a course generally denoted by the term (of wretched connotation) free love, she is not to be confused with those of lesser fineness who are fighting at her side. For instance, with Stanley Houghton’s heroine in Hindle Wakes. Anyone who sees in Karen another Fanny Hawthorne, has failed to understand Karen’s position. She is a woman of culture and of ideals in all matters of life, and especially in that of the sex relationship. “I have given myself, ...” she says, “to the man I loved, firmly determined to remain faithful to him unto death.” This is a far cry from Fanny’s reply to Alan: “Love you? Good heavens, of course not! Why on earth should I love you? You were just someone to have a bit of fun with. You were an amusement—a lark.” To Karen the relationship is justified only by depth of passion, and she entered it with as great a solemnity and glow of consecration as did ever a serious woman a church-made marriage. To the many camp-followers of “established” feminism, those who don or doff their principles with the transient fashion,—to them Karen must seem a humorous, if not a pitiable figure. For she dares to have beliefs and gallantly cleaves to them.

Karen, then, is a new woman in the sense that in the moment of crisis she did not accept as inevitable the reply of convention, but weighed her need against the law, and, finding the latter wanting, fulfilled her need at the sacrifice of the law. On the other hand, she is not of those who break laws for the intrinsic pleasure of destruction.

“Of course,” she admits, “it would have been ever so much more easy for me if, while I was still young, some presentable man, with all his papers in perfect order and a financially secure future, had come and asked for me—”

And she welcomes marriage with the good Doctor Schou in an attitude unpleasantly reactionary:

And worst of all, she, who throughout the play declares herself unconvinced of guilt or stain, at the close of the first act becomes quite mawkishly sentimental over Heine’s pretty line, “May God forever keep you so fair, and sweet, and pure.”

Because Karen exhibits these painful inconsistencies, she is no less possible or real or worthwhile. We who know many women emerging in diverse odd shapes from the travail of awakening have discovered just as inconsistent a combination of precipitation and reaction; and thus will it ever be until we have at length worked out our way to the most serviceable harmony. It is for this very reason that Karen is interesting: she is no superwoman, but our own imperfect sister.

Of the other characters there is but one deserving special comment—Karen’s mother, who to me is the most remarkable person Bergström has here created. She confesses to her husband that she has known for three years that Karen had been living in Paris with Strandgaard, but had kept the knowledge to herself because it had been too late to interfere, and because she did not regard the calamity as others would have in her place. From a terrible and bitter experience with another daughter, Gertrude, who had gone insane through the abrupt breaking off of a long engagement which had aroused primitive passion and left it unfulfilled, Mrs. Borneman had reached a revolutionary conclusion:

When Karen, however, defends her course as an abstract ideal of “every human being to continue its life through the race,” and appeals to her mother to understand, Mrs. Borneman retreats with, “I wash my hands of it, Karen. I don’t dare to think that far....”

It was her motherhood that had forced upon her the courage to overlook the law, and not any desire to throw over the old to set up a new law. The glory of the new vision means nothing to her in comparison with her husband’s suffering to which she herself has added. She is the promise of a new type—the awakened mother.

As for the play as a whole, it appears to me that Mr. Bergström has tried to say too much in the slight space of one short play, for he has two distinct themes—the right of woman to love and life, and the relationship between marriage and children. The first is the chief theme, which is worked out in the story of Karen; the second is too important to be employed as a subsidiary thread, and instead of adding richness to the first it rather clutters and confuses it with unnecessary baggage. Mrs. Borneman pities one of her sons because he cannot afford to have children on his slender salary, and feels that her other son is not justified in blindly bringing child after child into the world, depending upon the rest of the family for their maintenance. She asks her husband:

The poor professor is made consistent to the point of absurdity, and the main issue befogged, when he cries out to Karen:

Perhaps this matter was included for the sake of Karen’s reply:

Technically the play is not so perfect a thing as Mr. Björkman’s unbounded encomiums would make us believe. It opens, for instance, in the good old fashion scorned by Ibsen—with the gossip of servants, who are here engaged in laying the table instead of in the time-honored task of dusting. The whole action is cast within some eight hours, thus causing a use of coincidence to the straining point. The most commendable feature of technique is the admirably sustained suspense: the story of Gertrude overshadows the entire piece from the opening scene to Mrs. Borneman’s avowal in the last act. The powerful use of the story as contrast to Karen’s career is also unusual.

And yet in spite of its faults—perhaps because of them—we have found Karen Borneman the most stimulating play of the year. We hope one of our two organizations dedicated to the drama will put it on in the near future.

George Soule

Hilaire Belloc is coming to America next fall for a lecturing tour. It is well to take stock of him, so that we shall know what to expect. He is clever, and a Catholic—that tells the whole story. We don’t know exactly how he will say it, but we know what he will say. Through various smiling subtleties and paradoxes he will attack democracy, feminism, socialism, individualistic rebellion of any kind. It is quite possible that he will aim a few careless shots at Montessori, the discussion of sex questions in public, Galsworthy, and Bernard Shaw. He is a masculine, English, Agnes Repplier. He will entertain his cultivated audiences, and give them the impression that he is very modern and daring.

It is curious how the thinking mind immediately discounts the testimony of one who is known to have given his allegiance to an embracing authority of any kind. Whether the authority in question is the Vatican, Karl Marx, Business, Nietzsche, or Theodore Roosevelt, we know the man’s whole mind is likely to be colored with it, and that the evidence is probably of less importance to him than his case. Yet there is always a moral suspicion against the man who refuses to enroll himself under any banner. He seems dead, inhuman, academic. March to the drums, salute the colors, or admit there is no blood in you! It is good that most of mankind does so. The strongest army (not necessarily the largest) will win, and the battle must come for the sake of the victory.

Therefore, let the radicals welcome Mr. Belloc as a good enemy. He stands for a sincere, highly organized, and powerful propaganda which cannot be ignored on the modern battlefield. On account of their worship of authority the Catholics have a solidarity which no other movement can boast. For the same reason they are doomed to an eternal enmity with adventurous souls, those who fight for change of any kind. They seem often to be in accord with advancing thinkers because they condemn present conditions. But closer investigation will always show that instead of pointing to the future they cling to the past. Mgr. Benson, during his recent visit to New York, stated in private conversation that present social conditions are intolerable. He went on to say that an ideal society can be attained only under feudalism, with the church in control.

There will be no more danger from the Catholics than from any other army as long as we know what they are fighting for, and are able to recognize their irregular troops.

But let there be no complacency among the enemies of the church on the ground that it may not be really in the field, or has not artillery when it gets there. Without investigation of any kind, I have heard of two books attacking the church which were suppressed by their publishers at the demand of Catholic authorities. In each case the weapon was a threat to withdraw an extensive text book business from the house in question. Naturally, the parties to the matter have not been anxious to give it publicity. A magazine which published an article displeasing to Catholics received a letter threatening it with black-listing. There appears to be a well organized and efficient church publicity bureau to attend to these and other matters. A proposal was recently made by a Catholic journal that priests in confessional impose as penance the subscription to Catholic papers and the purchase of Catholic books, at the same time warning the people against secular publications. This was discussed with some approval by America, the New York Jesuit weekly, which regretfully admitted, however, that in the end Catholic publications must depend “mainly on their merit.” We are likely to ignore such mediæval methods until we find them obstructing some actual movement of importance. They do obstruct such movements, however, sometimes very annoyingly.

All these methods are but the natural and blameless working of the doctrine of intolerance. And perhaps their greatest danger is that their temporary success will induce the opposing armies to use the same weapon and so shackle themselves. The intolerance of the Puritan was a natural result of his bitter struggle, yet it produced a century of aesthetic darkness. The advanced opponents of the Puritan era are now uttering pronunciamentos and personalities that are Archiepiscopal in their intolerance.

But, you say, intolerance is necessary in the soldier. He must hate his enemy and seek not only to dislodge but to silence his opponent. Well, I will admit that when the soldier is in battle he must shoot to kill. But there is a new kind of soldier developing who is more valuable to man than the old. He joins the army not so much because of the magic of the colors as because of the necessity of the cause and its temporary usefulness in serving the truth behind it. Just as he will not march to war without reason, so he will stop fighting his immediate enemy when his cause is won, and will not go on to bickering and pillage. He is ready to enlist under a new banner at any moment when a new banner represents a more glorious cause than the old. His General is not a god, but a leader. His freedom of choice is always the biggest asset of his strength. Therefore he cannot be intolerant. He is strong, hard, efficient, relentless, but never pompous or slavish. How much time the world has lost eliminating armies of strong men whose fatal fault was excessive, unreasoning loyalty!

That, after all, solves the riddle of my second paragraph. And if the soldier must subordinate his cause to his truth, how much more so the General and the King! The General has very little time to hate his enemy. He must know their strength, study their methods, adopt the best of their ideas, spy out the country, plan a campaign. He orders slaughter not for revenge or hatred, but for success. Therefore it is of supreme importance that his success be worth while.

And the King, the man who selects the cause and fires men to battle. The nearer he comes to an assertion of infallibility the surer is the final defeat of his cause. If he will allow no room for change and growth, change and growth will sweep him aside. We need big men who will not enlist under colors, but are always pushing back the horizon of truth. Distrust the leader who has found the final answer to the riddle. Some day shall we not have a Messiah who shall begin by saying: “Do not found in my name any church, cult, or school. If a man question my message, listen to him closely and learn what truth he has. Always seek the new, the more perfect. Always grow out from the fixed. So shall you begin a race of Kings greater than I.”

That the United States of America is young is a truism which needs no stating, and unfortunately its youth is hopelessly fettered in the strings of tradition.

Ferrero says that aesthetic taste in America shows itself in bathrooms; and certainly in plumbing we do seem to have a taste above that of the rest of the world. In other things America fears originality and change far more even than England does. Miss Columbia is a bright girl, sitting in a schoolroom, with well-worn editions of the English classics on the book-shelves. Miss Columbia writes verses and stories following the most approved models; she succeeds rather well, but, after all, they are only school essays. It seems impossible for Americans to have the courage to admit that Life is as they see it. Hence the shallow and frivolous optimism which hangs like an obscuring fog over practically all our writing. It would be a convention were it not that we think we believe it; it would be a conviction only that we never look at it close enough to test it. The vogue, a year or two ago, of Mr. Robert Haven Schauffler’s Scum o’ the Earth is a case in point. It deals with the problem of immigration, not as it is, but as it might be if it were. The poem is imitative as art, and false as life, but it flatters an existing condition, and paints a sore to represent healthy flesh; wherefore America hails it with content. Americans are afraid of Life, in the Victorian manner. A Catholic said to me, some time ago: “Sex is dirty.” This sacrilege is a thoroughly Victorian sentiment, but sex alone does not come under the ban; pain, squalor, and, above all, the fact that virtue and effort frequently go unrewarded, are facts to which, in America, one must shut one’s eyes. Miss Columbia is very young, and her gold must be minted before she recognizes it; in the matrix it looks insignificant to her inexperienced eyes.

Style is not manner, but personality. And the fact that our poets and story writers keep to the old forms and expressions proves (does it not?) that they have no inward urging which makes them find old molds too cramping.

In a play of George Cohan’s, Broadway Jones, you have the best of middle-class America—its good points and its limitations. Perhaps this is even better brought out in his other play, Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford. “Crude,” you say; “childish!” Quite true, but entirely and absolutely America. For the United States is governed by the Great God: Mediocrity! The middle-class, or, as we call him, “the man in the street,” rules. Neither the gaunt simplicities of the lower class (although we talk a great deal about the lower class), nor the simplicities of the educated and intellectually alert, can leaven the lump of self-satisfied commonplaceness. Not only don’t we know, but we don’t want to know. An American writer, who had lived in Europe long enough to forget the peculiar American temper, was sufficiently ingenuous as to propose to the editor of one of our best-known magazines a series of three articles on six contemporary French poets. They were refused, because his clientèle did not care to read of things of which they knew nothing. “They will know less than I,” said the editor, “and I have only heard of two of these names.”

We are a little better off as regards our musical taste, because music is a universal language, and we can hear music in the “original,” so to say. In music, again, our output is more in accordance with the spirit of the whole world.

This does not mean that there are not good writers in America. There are. But most of them write “dans le goût d’avant-hier.” I am only telling you that Miss Columbia is in her artistic ’teens, and is as unimaginatively conventional as is the human animal at the same age. And, again like the human animal, she was not so childish when she was a baby. Paul Revere, riding across the Middlesex Fells to rouse the minute men, was like any adult man on a job which he shrewdly suspects will change the fate of nations. Poe and Whitman were not exactly childish. But were Poe writing today, he would be told that his subjects were “unimportant” and that he “lacked social consciousness.” For we in America are suffering from a pathological outlook on the world. Our activities function along the line of preventive medicine for communities. The richness and variety of personality is lost sight of in the lump. We forget that admirable truth set forth in the poem beginning “Little drops of water.”

And then, too, poor America is so many different kinds of persons and places. What we are going to be lies on the lap of the Gods. But it seems quite clear that, whatever it is, it will not be Anglo-Saxon.

Go to any vaudeville theatre and you will see Americans “turkey-trotting” to an intricately syncopated music we have dubbed “rag-time.” No European can dance it with just that zip and swing. It is a purely American thing. Stop a minute! Do you realize that this is America’s first original contribution to the arts! Low or high, that is not the point; it is America’s own product, and for that reason I regret to see the tango superseding it, although the tango is a better dance. I am told by those who know, that dancing is the first art practised by primitive peoples. I believe that in our “turkey-trotting” and “rag-time” we have the earliest artistic gropings of a new race. Our musicians scorn “rag-time,” and it takes the clear eye of a Frenchman to see its interest. Debussy has seen it in his Minstrels.

Amy Lowell.

We are afraid. We are all horribly afraid. The seal of poetic propriety is laid upon our lips, the burden of tradition bows us down. Crouched and abject beneath the dominance of the slave-driver, gap-toothed Custom, we set our shoulders to the toil—the useless toil—of dragging through the mile-years of simoom-whipped sand the impassive statue of Mediocrity.

What, if the vulture scream above us, can we dare to tell the meaning of its cry? Sharp will descend the whip of circumstance to warn that otherwhere the nightingales are singing under a full-orbed moon and we must sing of them.

Does an all-reckless slave defy his Maker with a thunderbolt of blasphemy, forged in the furnace of his agony? Straight comes the penalty decreeing silence and neglect unless we chant apocalyptic anodynes.

If the challenge of the blood outbeats the clanging of the bonds and in the glowing dusk man and woman cling to each other until the uttermost is won, shall this be told in paean and in song? Not unless social usage has been satisfied and it be ascertained that desire has given place to design, that love has been exchanged for lucre, and that marriage has been substituted for mating; then are we bidden cull from the common-casket of permitted phrases the veil, the orange-flower wreath, and all the weary paraphernalia of convention, and write an epithalamium to the plaudits of the admiring throng.

Rituals began in poetry. And since all rituals today have lost most of their ancient power, serving to soothe and charm instead of to stir and challenge, we look to the poetry of today to lay the web whereon the rituals of the future shall be spun. Let not that web possess one strand of mediocrity. Platitudinizing is no pattern for the future. If we are fain to cry aloud, let our throats crack thereat; if we would hurl defiance, let us not fear to charge after our javelins and find our freedom in the breach ourselves have made.

Every true poet has the uttermost within, if he or she will but give it voice. Oh, poets of every craft, give of the uttermost! Better a single cry like The Ballad of Reading Gaol, like Bianca, like When I am dead and sister to the dust—to touch on a few moderns only—than a lumber-loft of pretty and tuneful voicings of the themes that please but do not satisfy. There are those of us who read whose blood runs hot and red as well as yours. Dare, O you poets of every craft! Rise to the cry! Your hearts are high and full of gallantry, the world is waiting to be led by you to heights before unscaled. Shake cowardice away and dare!

Francis Rolt-Wheeler.

All art is symbolical. A mere presentation of things as they are seen by our physical eye is photography, not art. Yet there exists a Symbolistic school in contradistinction to other currents such as Realism, Impressionism, Neo-Romanticism, etc. Is not this a misnomer? Can we say, for instance, that Beaudélaire’s Fleurs du Mal were symbols, while Goethe gave us but realistic reproductions of actual life? Should we exclude Whitman from the Symbolists for the reason that his poems are less fantastic, nearer to life than those of Poe? What about Vereshchagin: was not his brush symbolistic because he adhered to realistic methods? Obviously, an artist presents not objects but ideas, and the symbolisticity of a certain work of art is rather a question of method and degree.

Perhaps we should differentiate artists according to their relationship with and attitude towards the public. The realist—and under this elastic term we may understand likewise the romanticist and the impressionist—is definite in his interpretation of life, is outspoken and clear in conveying his conceptions; he drags us unto his point of view, makes us see through his eyes and take for granted his impressions. He says to us: “Thus I see the world. Thus life and nature are reflected in my mind. This is precisely what I mean; please do not misinterpret me.” We are bound to obey; the artist—provided he is a real artist—forces upon us his eyeglasses, and we follow his directions.

The purely Symbolistic artist, on the other hand, grants freedom to the public. Vague tones, dim outlines, abstract figures, imperceptible moods, misty reflections, make his art unyielding to a definite interpretation. All he imposes upon us is an atmosphere, into which we are invited to come and co-create. Here is a canvas, here are colors, here are moods; go ahead and make out of them what you like. We are thus left to our own guidance; we are enabled to put our ego into the artist’s work, we are free to find in it whatever reflections we choose and to form our own conceptions. If we succeed in solving the problem, if we make the symbol live in our imagination, we experience the bliss of creation; should we fail in our task, should the symbol remain meaningless to us, we conclude that the given atmosphere is alien to our mind. Music of all arts is the most symbolical. True, Wagner and Strauss have endeavored to impose upon the listener leit-motifs, to dictate the public an interpretation of specific tones, but they have failed in their attempts to introduce a sort of a “key” to music; we remain autonomous in “explaining” Siegfried and Don Quixote.

Which of the methods is preferable? I should resent any narrow decision on this point. A crystalline September day or a purple-crimson sunset, how can we choose? We delight in both, but in one case we admire the visible beauty, while in the other we make one step forward and complement the seen splendor with strokes of our creative imagination. Perhaps my non-partisanship is due to my dilettantism; as it is, I approach a book or a picture with one scale: is it a work of art? If it is, then any method is justifiable, no matter how differently it may appeal to the individual taste.

Yet—and there is no inconsistency in my statement—I do discriminate in art productions in so far as my personal affections are concerned. Great as my delight is in the arts of Tolstoi and Zola, of Rubens and Corot, of Brahms and Massenet, of Pavlova and Karsavina, my mind is more akin to the mystic utterances of Maeterlinck and Brusov, to the hazy landscapes of Whistler and to the unreal women of Bakst, to the narcotic music of Debussy and Rachmaninov, to the wavy rhythm of Duncan and St. Denis. It is with them, with the latter, that I erect fantastic castles of my own designs and find expression of my moods and whims. I may not understand all of the Cubists and Futurists, but I owe them many new thoughts and emotions which I had not realized before having seen the new art. Schoenberg’s pieces still irritate my conventional ear, but I allow him credit for discovering new possibilities in the region of sound interpretation. We, plain mortals, who are doomed to contemplate art without having the gift to contribute to it, we are envious of genius and crave for freedom in co-creating with the artist. Hence my love for Bergson who appeals to the creative instinct of man; for him I abandoned Nietzsche, my former idol: it is so much more pleasant and feasible to be a creative being than to strive to become a perfect super-being.

Alexander S. Kaun.

Bergson argues that there is a spiritual entity behind all science and that it is impossible for scientists to go beyond a certain point in developing a knowledge of whence we came. Clara E. Laughlin, in writing a review of The Truth about Woman, by Mrs. Walter M. Gallichan, accuses the writer of possessing a short-sighted, astigmatic vision of “whereuntoness.” She winds up her discussion with the sob of an ultra religionist by accusing Mrs. Gallichan of having left out a most important point in her discussion—that of the immortality of the soul. To quote Miss Laughlin exactly:

Very fortunately for the future of her book, Mrs. Gallichan ignores the religionist except to say of religion, “I am certain that in us the religious impulse and the sex impulse are one.”

Mrs. Gallichan’s book is a scientific discussion of woman yesterday and today, without any attempt at sentimentalism. Her analysis is perfect and decidedly constructive. She goes back to prehistoric times and discusses in scientific phraseology how woman has progressed through the ages, and describes the part she has taken in establishing civilizations. Nowhere does she forget that she is writing for posterity and indulge in the petty foibles that are sometimes so noticeable in the work of women who write on feminism.

Lee A. Stone.

[The question of whether whatever it is that is meant by the word soul is immortal—immortal in the sense that it will live forever in a realm of the spirit or the blessed—is answered affirmatively by those who hold to the orthodox faith, is not worth discussing by a rational man who is informed, and is discussed by avowed or implied atheists with a fanatical seriousness that destroys whatever force their main contention may have. The legitimate domain of argument is limited; truth that is verifiable by men here and now is its only content. As regards what uncritical people call “immortality” serious argumentation is absolutely impossible. Faith, quotations, and personal desires are not arguments. Mrs. Gallichan’s book is in parts scientific, and is therefore of importance to thousands of people whose religion is an achievement of courageous thinking and living. To many excellent persons their professed belief in what they term “immortality” is a kind of merciful necessity. They crave and even invent assurances of it. To such persons there is no argument against it. To persons who produce the “negative” arguments there is no argument for it. And there you are!—W. C. D.]

The Possessed, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]

Shatov was an incorrigible idealist, with a keen satirical ability to destroy his own ideals. He had made a god out of Verhovensky, the leading figure in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed. Verhovensky was, he imagined, a god of selfish courage and supreme unconcern, the sort of man whom everybody followed involuntarily. Shatov knew that his hero had irreparably injured three women, one of them half-witted and defenseless. That did not bother the idealist at all; it was “in character.” But when Verhovensky lied about it to avoid condemnation, Shatov hit him a savage blow on the cheek and brooded for weeks over the disappointment. The disappointment was deepened by the fact that Verhovensky did not kill him for the blow.

There is something characteristically Russian about that. It goes far to explain Russian pessimism, and give the key to this very book. Your Russian wants above all things to be logical. He will fasten upon an idea and enshrine it in his holy of holies. He will relentlessly follow the dictates of his idea though it lead him to insanity. There is greatness in his attitude, also absurdity. Witness Tolstoy. And when he recognizes his own absurdity he becomes gloomy and savage; there is no escape from the vanity of the world, the spirit, and himself.

I can imagine the mood of Dostoevsky when this book germinated in his mind. He saw this trait in the people about him, he felt it in himself. The intellectuals, each with his little theory, were steadily working towards—nothing at all. The government with its elaborate systems for economic improvement and individual repression, the revolutionary with his scheming insincerity and chaotic program, were equally futile. The women with their pathetic loves, the frivolous with their mad pursuit of amusement, the great and the small, the sycophant and the rebel, were all bitter failures. Suddenly it occurred to him—they are all mad in an insane world, each in his way, one no more than another. I will vent my disgust with these vermin in a book; I will show what they really are. Like the madman who carefully traces out his meaningless labyrinth, I will with the most painstaking psychology unravel their minds, and in so doing I will find my release and my fiendish joy. The only thing lacking in this madhouse is complete self-consciousness. That I will furnish.—And so Dostoevsky logically and nobly followed his idea to its insane conclusion.

The fascinating result cannot be described in a paragraph. It is done, of course, with consummate ability. Beginning the book is like walking into a village of unknown people. They are real enough outwardly; you don’t know their nature or direction. Little by little you learn about them, and begin to take sides. Long habit makes you pick favorites. This man will be noble and successful; perhaps he is the hero. Suddenly you begin to suspect that something is wrong. All things are not working together for one end, as in well-regulated novels. Your favorites become jumbled up with the others. The author doesn’t give you a chance, because he never shows you a cross-section of a mind. He merely tells what the people do and say. You must draw your own conclusions as in ordinary life. When you get used to this, you see an occasional subtlety, a flash of sardonic laughter. Some of the people are not quite right in their minds. And at length the truth dawns; the sane people are even crazier than the others! This impression comes by sheer force of magic; how the author creates it is inexplicable. But once you have it, the fascination of following an idea obsesses you. And at the end it is impossible to find any meaning or direction in the world.

Of course, no such obsession can find a firm footing in the American temperament. After a while it seems Russian and incredible. If you can’t answer Dostoevsky logically, you will abandon logic. But he has stirred you up, and certain important conclusions rise to the surface.

One is that it would be impossible to be such a pessimist unless one looked for a good deal in the world, and looked for it rather sharply. Idealism and courage began this course of thought. Isn’t a big share of our optimism shallow? Shouldn’t we go a little deeper into things before being so sure they are right? Another is that no living individual is worth very much, after all. Our only salvation is in creating a nobler race. And for that any sacrifice of present individuals is supremely worth while.

It is as if some inspired member of a negro tribe in central Africa had suddenly awakened to the fact that his voodoo-worshipping friends were not acting rationally. From their status the burden of his chant might be horrible for its devilish revelations. But in our eyes he would be a seer and a prophet. Why should he have considered the feelings of the miserable savages? There is something more important than that!

George Soule.

Social Forces in England and America, by H. G. Wells. [Harper and Brothers, New York.]

Like many philosophers, Mr. Wells is concerned mainly with the need of a new human race. All profound reformers want that. The method of achieving this desirable result is, however, the rock of turning. It probably isn’t necessary to say that our present reformer is not one of those blind apostles of effortless immediacy. Such transmution was respectable when Botany Bay was a popular seaside resort for radical poets and philosophers. They of today realize something of the immensity of the developmental process. Their hopes are often so remote that they seem almost despair, but still time is trusted with a reliance on science for the urge toward human perfectibility. Of such the leader is H. G. Wells.

Clearly the conviction that civilization needs a new race is well founded. All ideals, all ideas, civilization, culture are and have always been the products of a pitiful minority. The tendency at present is toward making the desire of the majority supreme. The majority do not cleave toward ideals—not even toward establishing their own glory. Rousseau imagined that millions loved righteousness; Jefferson made such beliefs the basis of the country’s documents of incorporation. The idealists were manifestly mistaken. Men have never been drawn toward the ideals they have professed. Truth, justice, equality have never been valued when sex, property, or power were opposed. The virtues came in the early days from “Thus saith the Lord,” and they come today, if they come at all, from “Thus saith a Strong Man.”

Mr. Wells guesses that there are fifty thousand reading and thinking persons in England—keepers of the citadel. The fifty thousand are practically England. Perhaps his estimate is too low. John Brisben Walker says that in the United States the number of persons able to think independently about political and social matters has increased from a few score to about two hundred and fifty thousand within thirty years. The fact is, albeit, that the world has been fashioned always by this very small minority. Furthermore the present creation is not one in which there is reason for great pride.

The essay on the Great State is especially fine in this connection. Wells’s idea of the Normal Social Life and of the constant divergence of a minority is altogether clarifying for the watcher from any vantage, but it is in his discussion of the labor unrest that the reader in Colorado discovers the prophecies he most needs. For illustration this:

The ruling minority in Colorado has been confronted with this question during the coal strike. So far no response has been given save the impromptu utterances of a hideous rage and fright at the thought of awakening workers.

Wells answers his own questions. He replies as Colorado will sometime if Colorado is to persist. It is in this tone:

That is the truth which men hate most to hear. It is the doctrine which “Mother” Jones preaches and for which she has been imprisoned regardless of laws and constitutions.

But this reasonableness of Wells appeals as little to the left wing of the socialists as it does to conservatives. The I. W. W.’s have no patience with the detailed delays suggested and Wells is as irritated with the losses in civilization to which a violent revolution is likely to lead. He sets forth his feeling in a discussion of the American population, a curious phrase, necessary on account of his distaste for the word people. In speaking of the possibility of a national revolutionary movement as an arrest for the aristocratic tendency now so pronounced he says:

It is true almost. There are always enough of the Gracchi family present to supply the minimum number of weapons essential. To the truth of this the revolutionary movement in Mexico is a witness and Colorado itself could tell tales.

Social Forces, a too collegiate title, sums up satisfactorily Wells’s important opinions. The book isn’t really a whole: some of the essays are journalistic and some are old. It lacks nearly everywhere the fierceness of The Passionate Friends. In this book Wells is in his dinner coat, comfortable and well fed. He is respectable—horrible admission—but he is still prophetic.

In a sense, too, Social Forces is a warehouse. There one may find stored the rough materials which on occasion are hammered into the poignancies of Marriage or Tono-Bungay. As a vista into a masterhand’s workshop the book has its intense psychological interest, but most of all it is text for salvation of the world.

William L. Chenery.

Vandover and the Brute, by Frank Norris. [Doubleday, Page and Company, New York.]

It would seem inevitable that had Frank Norris lived he would have rewritten Vandover and the Brute. In the book, as it was rescued from the packing box that had been through the San Francisco fire and sent to the publisher, there is much that would have been discarded by the later Norris. Perhaps he would have thrown it all away and written a new story with the same theme. He was a big man and he had the courage of bigness. He could throw fairly good work into the waste-paper basket. The decay of man in modern society, the slow growth in him of the brute that goes upon all fours—what a big, terrible theme! What a book the later Norris would have made of it!

In the introduction by Charles G. Norris quotation is made from the Frank Norris essay, The True Reward of the Novelist, in which this sentence stands out: “To make money is not the province of the novelist.” Also it is suggested that the book was written under the influence of Zola, and there is more than a hint of Zola’s formula that everything in life is material for literature in the way the job is done.

As it stands, Vandover wants cutting—cutting and something else. With that said and understood, we are glad that the book has been rescued and that it can stand upon our book shelves. American letters cannot know and understand too much of the spirit of Frank Norris, and just at this time when there is much talk of the new note and some little sincere effort toward a return to truth and honesty in the craft of writing, it is good to have this visit from the boy Norris. He was a brave lad, an American writing man who lived, worked, and died without once putting his foot upon the pasteboard road that leads to easy money. “The easy money is not for us,” he said and had the manhood to write and live with that warning in his mind. He had craft-love. With a few more writers working in his spirit we should hear less of the new note. Norris was the new note. He was of the undying brotherhood.

When Frank Norris wrote Vandover he was not the great artist he became, but he was the great man; and that’s why this book of his is worth publishing and reading. The greater writer would have possessed a faculty the boy who wrote this book had not acquired—the faculty of selection. He would have been less intent upon telling truly unimportant details and by elimination would have gained dramatic strength.

Read Vandover therefore not as an example of the work of Norris the artist but as the work of a true man. It will inspire you. Its very rawness will show you the artist in the making. It will make you understand why Frank Norris with Mark Twain will perhaps, among all American writers, reach the goal of immortality.

They Who Knock at Our Gates, by Mary Antin. [Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.]

Shaking the Declaration of Independence in the face of all those opposed to immigration in any form Mary Antin makes an impassioned appeal for practically unrestricted immigration. Her motive is no doubt praiseworthy, her enthusiasm and eloquence are admirable. She contrasts the nature of our present-day immigrants with those who landed in the Mayflower. The self-satisfied middle class attitude peeps through the question: “Is immigration good for us?”

And of course it is good. The immigrants do more than three-quarters of our bituminous coal mining. They make seven-tenths of our steel. They do four-fifths of our woolen, nine-tenths of our cotton-mill work, nearly all our clothing, nearly all our sugar, eighty-five per cent of all labor in the stock-yards. You cannot but come to the same conclusions as Mary Antin: “Open wide our gates and set him on his way to happiness.”

On his way to happiness? One thinks of Lawrence, Massachusetts, where immigrants are not exactly happy; or Paterson, New Jersey; or an incident of this kind from Marysville, California, related by Inez Haynes Gillmore in Harper’s Weekly for April 4: “An English lad, the possessor of a beautiful tenor voice, song leader of the hop pickers, was walking along carrying a bucket of water. A deputy sheriff shot him down.” One thinks of the Michigan copper mines. Alexander Irvine told us something about peonage in the South in his “Magyar.” The New York East Side with its 364,367[2] dark rooms and its “lung block with nearly four thousand people, some four hundred of whom are babies. In the past nine years alone this block has reported two hundred and sixty-five cases of tuberculosis.”[3] In Pittsburgh alone, according to The Literary Digest of January 16, 1909, five hundred laborers are killed and an unknown number injured every year in the steel industry. According to Dr. Peter Roberts about eighty per cent of those suffering from rickets in Chicago are Italians, Greeks, and Syrians. This disease is almost unknown in the southern countries. The following is taken from an article by Henry A. Atkinson in Harper’s Weekly:

“Open wide our gates and set him on his way to happiness” says Mary Antin.

Sixty thousand illiterate women were admitted in 1911 to this country. The president of The Woman’s National Industrial League says in this connection to the House Committee: “Syndicates exist in New York and Boston for the purpose of supplying fresh young girls from immigrants arriving in this country for houses of ill fame. Immigrants arriving in New York furnish twenty thousand victims annually.” Mr. Jacob Riis said very recently: “Scarce a Greek comes here, man or boy, who is not under contract. A hundred dollars a year is the price, so it is said by those who know, though the padrone’s cunning has put the legal proof beyond their reach.”

But these are statistics, and Mary Antin is horrified by statistics except when she can prove that “the average immigrant family of the new period is represented by an ascending curve. The descending curves are furnished by degenerate families of what was once prime American stock.” The “happiness” that those who knock at our gates run into once they land in our mines, factories, sweatshops, department stores, etc., might be traced further. The real question is this: Is immigration good for the immigrant? In view of the above facts there is but one answer so far as the illiterate and physically weak are concerned. Twisting of facts out of a desire to reach certain conclusions will only harm the immigrant and the inhabitants of this country.

Mary Antin would have been Mary Antin in Russia, Turkey, or Aphganistan. The weak and the illiterate are the ones who keep this question in the foreground. Probably the only exception is the Russian Jew. He has no country of his own and the New York East Side is a comparative improvement over the Czar’s empire.

William Saphier.

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[2] Fifth Report of Tenement House Department, 1909. Page 102.

[3] Ernest Poole:—A Handbook on the Prevention of Tuberculosis.

Notes of a Son and Brother, by Henry James. [Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York.]

Whatever the deprecators of Henry James’s later manner may have to say about the difficulties of his involved style there are some situations, some plots, for which it is most happily suited. Was so haunting a ghost story ever written as that truly horrible one which involved two children—the name of which has unfortunately escaped me, for I should like to recommend it for nocturnal perusal. And in The Golden Bowl the gradual way you are led to perceive the wrong relationship between two of the characters, which, had it been offered bluntly, with no five degrees of approach and insinuation, would have lost half its mystery of guilt. As he himself says, in the Notes of a Son and Brother, “I like ambiguities, and detest great glares.”

Unfortunately, the style that is fitting to a slow unfolding of a psychological situation does not lend itself well to biography. The direct way is the only possible way there, if the reader is to keep an unflagging interest, and the direct way is simply not possible for Henry James. And one asks nothing more than to be told simply of the student days at Switzerland and Germany, and the life afterward at Newport, just as the Civil War was beginning or best of all throughout the story of a united family—the four boys, little sister, father, mother, and aunt, quite unlike, I imagine, any other family in the world. The quality of the genius of the brothers seems to have sprung from the association with a father as unlike as possible to the American father of today. He did not influence them, we are told, by any power of verbal persuasion to his own ideas. It was quite simply himself, his personality and character, the way he lived life, that took hold upon his sons’ imagination. Of course that is the only way anyone ever is influenced, but I think most parents do try the verbal persuasion as well. Henry James says of his father:

Speaking of the “detached” feeling they had after returning from Europe to settle in Newport, he says:

Very interesting are the occasional letters telling of Emerson and Carlyle. Especially so to me are the side lights on Carlyle, as chiming in somehow with the series of impressions I seem gradually to have accumulated about him as time goes on. Perhaps it really isn’t fair, as a large amount of those impressions I feel sure I owe to Froude, but I can’t help wondering what our times, with modern surgery and therapeutics, would have accomplished with Carlyle’s indigestion, and what resultant difference there would assuredly have been in his philosophy. To quote from a letter of the elder Henry James:

And again in a letter to Emerson:

An earlier letter has this delicious bit about Hawthorne:

And in the postscript of the same:

Which shows how much in earnest the Abolitionists really were—it was a tenet of faith with them. Sad and strange and illuminating to us of a later generation, who are now struggling for other abolitions of slavery, and still hoping for a new world.

I wish I could quote from the delightful letters of William James, but they must be read entire, with the author’s comments, to place them correctly. Pending a biography of the man, these letters will be to many readers the most interesting feature of the book. One of the most magnificent things about the book, however,—if I may use a large word for a large concept—is the spirit running through it of filial and fraternal love, never expressed in so many words, but apparent throughout, which makes, as I said before, the James family unique in the history of American letters.

When Ghost Meets Ghost, by William De Morgan. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]

Whatever else I may say about De Morgan’s new book, I absolutely refuse to tell the number of its pages. Every other criticism begins or ends with this uninteresting fact, and usually adds that it makes no difference how long it is, since the writer’s charm pervades it all. But it does make a difference, and it is too trite to say we are so hurried and nervous and given over to frivolity nowadays that we are unable to read Dickens and Thackeray and Scott and De Morgan. There is a great deal more to read, and a great deal more to do and to think about, than ever there was in Thackeray’s day. And if we are going to spend our time reading countless pages (I very nearly told how many, after all!) we want to be sure it is more worth while than anything else we can be doing, or thinking, or reading.

However, one can’t say very well that he greatly admires a stork, or would if he had a short beak and short legs. De Morgan’s style is his own, and he will tell the story his own way, though we all have a quarrel with him for leaving the most interesting bits to a short “Pendrift” at the end. Did Given’s lover contemplate taking his East Indian poison when the newspapers announced that she was to marry an Austrian noble? Think of cutting that episode off in a few words, while an entire chapter is devoted to a “shortage of mud” for little Dave and Dolly, who were making a dyke in the street! But then, De Morgan doesn’t know how to stop when he begins to talk of children. How he loves them, and all other helpless creatures! He can’t speak even of kittens without a touch of tenderness:

It is bits like this that make Mr. De Morgan’s story so long, and it is bits like this that reconcile us to its length. I believe most readers won’t care greatly whether the two poor old sisters who have been separated so many years ever do meet again. There is no feeling of climax when they do—merely relief that the thing has finally been put across. It was beginning to look as if it never would happen; and though the reader himself, as I say, doesn’t greatly care, he can see that De Morgan does; he has apparently been doing his best to bring it about, but the cantankerous ones just wouldn’t let him.

On the other hand, who can help loving Given o’ the Towers—all sweetness, beauty, and light? Only—isn’t she really more of a twentieth-century heroine than a Victorian young lady, with her crisp decisiveness and air of being most ably able to look out for herself? Truly Victorian, however, are our “slow couple”—Miss Dickenson and Mr. Pellew. Miss Dickenson is thirty-six, and, by all Victorian standards, quite out of the running. De Morgan is extremely apologetic for allowing her to have a romance at this belated hour—her charms faded and gone. But we are betting quite heavily on Miss Dickenson’s chances for happiness with the Hon. Mr. Pellew. The two were “good gossips,” and would always have topics of interest in common.

The Pendrift at the end—quite the most fascinating part of the book—tells us of the daughter of this union Cicely, by this time sixteen years old.

“You know,” says the girl, Cis,—who is new and naturally knows things, and can tell her parents,—“you know there is never the slightest reason for apprehension as long as there is no delusion. Even then we have to discriminate carefully between fixed and permanent delusions and——”

“Shut up, Mouse!” says her father. “What’s that striking?”...

The young lady says, “Well, I got it all out of a book.”

One good reason for reading De Morgan is the fact that he is older than the majority of his readers. We read so much, we hear so much acclaimed that is written by children of twenty, whose experience of life must necessarily be got, like Cicely’s, “out of a book.” The saying of De Maupassant surely applies here—that the writer must sit down before an object until he has seen it in the way that he alone can see it. De Morgan has had the opportunity of seeing life, surely, and knowing what most of it amounts to. The result is a large tolerance and tenderness toward his fellow men.

M. H. P.

Social Insurance: With Special Reference to American Conditions, by I. M. Rubinow. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]

The logic of events is rapidly forcing nation after nation into what has hitherto been damned with the epithet paternalism. America, perhaps, is the last important country in the world to face the problems raised by the march of events in this direction. Social insurance, a thing accomplished and a commonplace of government functioning in so many countries, recently adopted in England, is, in this country, still a novelty outside the university class room and the lecture halls of fanatical demagogues who wish to upset the foundations of our civil government and civilization—as the elder politicians express it when their attention is drawn to these sinister activities of thought.

The author of this book in fact was the first academic lecturer on the subject to give a university course in the various forms which social insurance has taken. These lectures he delivered before the New York School of Philanthropy, and they are reprinted here in an extended form.

After giving the philosophy of the matter, the underlying social necessity for insurance, the author takes up the various forms of the activity. Accident, disease, old age, and unemployment must all be provided against, and the state, the employer, and the laborer may share the burden among them, or the two latter may be relieved—as in various types of non-contributory insurance.

Of course the old school economist will ask why the latter two are not relieved, and why the employe or private citizen is not just encouraged to insure with a private corporation. The author’s answer is that, even if he were educated to the point of desiring to do that, he could not. A man insures his house because the feeling of security is worth the small premium he pays, even if that premium is larger than the actual risk involved would warrant—larger by a sum equal to the cost and profits of the business of the insurance company. But the poor man’s chances of loss of employment, accident, or sickness are so much greater in proportion to the capitalized value of his job that he could never afford to pay the premium necessary for a private company to take care of him; while his old age could not be insured without taking all of his earnings—and even then he might die before he reached it.

The situation then is that an admitted necessity cannot be obtained unless the state as a whole takes steps to attain it for all the members of the state. How other states have done this, how type after type of insurance has been evolved, and how these types may be adapted to American practice is the burden of the present work.

The author writes in a clear and non-technical manner, and makes no extravagant claims for what some people may regard as a social panacea; but he is confident that the full development of the idea of social insurance will relieve the worst aspects of poverty—the aspects in which poverty is not only a hardship, but a haunting spirit, sapping the vitality of its victims until they are rendered socially useless.

Llewellyn Jones.

Red Hanrahan, by William Butler Yeats. New edition. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]

If you believe, with Chesterton, that “should the snap dragon open its little pollened mouth and sing ’twould be no more wonderful a thing” than that a solemn little blue egg should turn into a big happy red-breasted bird; if you are of “the young men that dream dreams” or of “the old men who have visions” the songs and the tales and the wanderings and the mysteries of “Red” Owen Hanrahan will thrill you with a sense of your real nearness to “something lovelier than Heaven.”

Such a group of tales of the people and by the people as Mr. Yeats has gathered together in Red Hanrahan can be nothing if not a personal matter. Frankly, I never saw a fairy, or a gnome, or a hobgoblin. I have never even had a vision worth writing a book about; but I am young yet, and if the gods continue to be kind.... In the meanwhile I shall grasp the first opportunity to read Red Hanrahan in a deep woods, at dusk—regardless of the optician’s orders.

H. B. S.

Marguerite O. B. Wilkinson