The Little Review, September 1917 (Vol. 4, No. 5)

’Tis of my country that I would endite,

In hope to set some misconceptions right.

My country? I love it well, and those good fellows

Who, since their wit’s unknown, escape the gallows.

But you stuffed coats who’re neither tepid nor distinctly boreal,

Pimping, conceited, placid, editorial,

Could I but speak as ’twere in the “Restoration”

I would articulate your perdamnation.

This year perforce I must with circumspection—

For Mencken states somewhere, in this connection:

“It is a moral nation we infest”.

Despite such reins and checks I’ll do my best,

An art! You all respect the arts, from that infant tick

Who’s now the editor of The Atlantic,

From Comstock’s self, down to the meanest resident,

Till up again, right up, we reach the president,

Who shows his taste in his ambassadors:

A novelist, a publisher, to pay old scores,

A novelist, a publisher and a preacher,

That’s sent to Holland, a most particular feature,

Henry Van Dyke, who thinks to charm the Muse you pack her in

A sort of stinking deliquescent saccharine.

The constitution of our land, O Socrates,

Was made to incubate such mediocrities,

These and a taste in books that’s grown perennial

And antedates the Philadelphia centennial.

Still I’d respect you more if you could bury

Mabie, and Lyman Abbot and George Woodberry,

For minds so wholly founded upon quotations

Are not the best of pulse for infant nations.

Dulness herself, that abject spirit, chortles

To see your forty self-baptized immortals,

And holds her sides where swelling laughter cracks ’em

Before the “Ars Poetica” of Hiram Maxim.

All one can say of this refining medium

Is “Zut! Cinque lettres!” a banished gallic idiom,

Their doddering ignorance is waxed so notable

’Tis time that it was capped with something quotable.

Here Radway grew, the fruit of pantosocracy,

The very fairest flower of their gynocracy.

Radway? My hero, for it will be more inspiring

If I set forth a bawdy plot like Byron

Than if I treat the nation as a whole.

Radway grew up. These forces shaped his soul;

These, and yet God, and Dr. Parkhurst’s god, the N. Y. Journal

(Which pays him more per week than The Supernal).

These and another godlet of that day, your day

(You feed a hen on grease, perhaps she’ll lay

The sterile egg that is still eatable:

“Prolific Noyes” with output undefeatable).

From these he (Radway) learnt, from provosts and from editors unyielding

And innocent of Stendhal, Flaubert, Maupassant and Fielding.

They set their mind (it’s still in that condition)—

May we repeat; the Centennial Exposition

At Philadelphia, 1876?

What it knew then, it knows, and there it sticks.

And yet another, a “charming man”, “sweet nature”, but was Gilder,

De mortuis verum, truly the master builder?

From these he learnt. Poe, Whitman, Whistler, men, their recognition

Was got abroad, what better luck do you wish ’em,

When writing well has not yet been forgiven

In Boston, to Henry James, the greatest whom we’ve seen living.

And timorous love of the innocuous

Brought from Gt. Britain and dumped down a’top of us,

Till you may take your choice: to feel the edge of satire or

Read Benett or some other flaccid flatterer.

Despite it all, despite your Red Bloods, febrile concupiscence

Whose blubbering yowls you take for passion’s essence;

Despite it all, your compound predilection

For ignorance, its growth and its protection

(Vide the tariff), I will hang simple facts

Upon a tale, to combat other facts,

“Message to Garcia”, Mosher’s propagandas

That are the nation’s botts, collicks and glanders.

Or from the feats of Sumner cull it? Think,

Could Freud or Jung unfathom such a sink?

My hero, Radway, I have named, in truth,

Some forces among those which “formed” his youth:

These heavy weights, these dodgers and these preachers,

Crusaders, lecturers and secret lechers,

Who wrought about his “soul” their stale infection.

These are the high-brows, add to this collection

The social itch, the almost, all but, not quite, fascinating,

Piquante, delicious, luscious, captivating

Puffed satin, and silk stockings, where the knee

Clings to the skirt in strict (vide: “Vogue”) propriety.

Three thousand chorus girls and all unkissed,

O state sans song, sans home-grown wine, sans realist!

“Tell me not in mournful wish-wash

Life’s a sort of sugared dish-wash”!

Radway had read the various evening papers

And yearned to imitate the Waldorf capers

As held before him in that unsullied mirror

The daily press, and monthlies nine cents dearer.

They held the very marrow of the ideals

That fed his spirit; were his mental meals.

Also, he’d read of christian virtues in

That canting rag called Everybody’s Magazine,

And heard a clergy that tries on more wheezes

Than e’er were heard of by Our Lord Ch.... J....

So he “faced life” with rather mixed intentions,

He had attended country Christian Endeavour Conventions,

Where one gets more chances

Than Spanish ladies had in old romances.

(Let him rebuke who ne’er has known the pure Platonic grapple,

Or hugged two girls at once behind a chapel.)

Such practices diluted rural boredom

Though some approved of them, and some deplored ’em.

Such was he when he got his mother’s letter

And would not think a thing that could upset her....

Yet saw on “ad.” “To-night, THE HUDSON SAIL,

With forty queens, and music to regale

The select company: beauties you all would know

By name, if named”. So it was phrased, or rather somewhat so

I have mislaid the “ad.”, but note the touch,

Note, reader, note the sentimental touch:

His mother’s birthday gift. (How pitiful

That only sentimental stuff will sell!)

Yet Radway went. A circumspectious prig!

And then that woman like a guinea-pig

Accosted, that’s the word, accosted him,

Thereon the amorous calor slightly frosted him.

(I burn, I freeze, I sweat, said the fair Greek,

I speak in contradictions, so to speak.)

I’ve told his training, he was never bashful,

And his pockets by ma’s aid, that night with cash full,

The invitation had no need of fine aesthetic,

Nor did disgust prove such a strong emetic

That we, with Masefield’s vein, in the next sentence

Record “Odd’s blood! Ouch! Ouch!” a prayer, his swift repentance.

No, no, they danced. The music grew much louder

As he inhaled the still fumes of rice-powder.

Then there came other nights, came slow but certain

And were such nights that we should “draw the curtain”

In writing fiction on uncertain chances

Of publication; “Circumstances”,

As the editor of The Century says in print,

“Compel a certain silence and restraint.”

Still we will bring our “fiction as near to fact” as

The Sunday school brings virtues into practice.

Soon our hero could manage once a week,

Not that his pay had risen, and no leak

Was found in his employer’s cash. He learned the lay of cheaper places,

And then Radway began to go the paces:

A rosy path, a sort of vernal ingress,

And Truth should here be careful of her thin dress—

Though males of seventy, who fear truths naked harm us,

Must think Truth looks as they do in wool pyjamas.

(My country, I’ve said your morals and your thoughts are stale ones,

But surely the worst of your old-women are the male ones.)

Why paint these days? An insurance inspector

For fires and odd risks, could in this sector

Furnish more date for a compilation

Than I can from this distant land and station,

Unless perhaps I should have recourse to

One of those firm-faced inspecting women, who

Find pretty Irish girls in Chinese laundries,

Up stairs, the third floor up, and have such quandaries

As to how and why and whereby they got in

And for what earthly reason they remain....

Alas, eheu, one question that sorely vexes

The serious social folk is “just what sex is”.

Though it will, of course, pass off with social science

In which their mentors place such wide reliance.

De Gourmont says that fifty grunts are all that will be prized

Of language, by men wholly socialized,

With signs as many, that shall represent ’em

When thoroughly socialized printers want to print ’em.

“As free of mobs as kings.”? I’d have men free of that invidious,

Lurking, serpentine, amphibious and insidious

Power that compels ’em

To be so much alike that every dog that smells ’em,

Thinks one identity is

Smeared o’er the lot in equal quantities.

Still we look toward the day when man, with unction,

Will long only to be a social function,

And even Zeus’ wild lightning fear to strike

Lest it should fail to treat all men alike.

And I can hear an old man saying: “Oh, the rub!

“I see them sitting in the Harvard Club,

“And rate ’em up at just so much per head,

“Know what they think, and just what books they’ve read,

“Till I have viewed straw hats and their habitual clothing

“All the same style, same cut, with perfect loathing.”

So Radway walked, quite like the other men,

Out into the crepuscular half-light, now and then;

Saw what the city offered, cast an eye

Upon Manhattan’s gorgeous panoply,

The flood of limbs upon Eighth Avenue

To beat Prague, Budapesth, Vienna or Moscow,[4]

Such animal invigorating carriage

As nothing can restrain or much disparage....

Still he was not given up to brute enjoyment,

An anxious sentiment was his employment,

For memory of the first warm night still cast a haze o’er

The mind of Radway, whene’er he found a pair of purple stays or

Some other quaint reminder of the occasion

That first made him believe in immoral suasion.

A temperate man, a thin potationist, each day

A silent hunter off the Great White Way,

He read The Century and thought it nice

To be not too well known in haunts of vice—

The prominent haunts, where one might recognize him,

And in his daily walks duly capsize him.

Thus he eschewed the bright red-walled cafés and

Was never one of whom one speaks as “brazen’d”.

Some men will live as prudes in their own village

And make the tour abroad for their wild tillage—

I knew a tourist agent, one whose art is

To run such tours. He calls ’em .... house parties.

But Radway was a patriot whose venality

Was purer in its love of one locality,

A home-industrious worker to perfection,

A senatorial jobber for protection,

Especially on books, lest knowledge break in

Upon the national brains and set ’em achin’.

(’Tis an anomaly in our large land of freedom,

You can not get cheap books, even if you need ’em).

Radway was ignorant as an editor,

And, heavenly, holy gods! I can’t say more,

Though I know one, a very base detractor,

Who has the phrase “As ignorant as an actor”.

But turn to Radway: the first night on the river,

Running so close to “hell” it sends a shiver

Down Rodyheaver’s prophylactic spine,

Let me return to this bold theme of mine,

Of Radway. O clap hand ye moralists!

And meditate upon the Lord’s conquests.

When last I met him, he was a pillar in

An organization for the suppression of sin ....

Not that he’d changed his tastes, nor yet his habits,

(Such changes don’t occur in men, or rabbits).

Not that he was a saint, nor was top-loftical

In spiritual aspirations, but he found it profitable,

For as Ben Franklin said, with such urbanity:

“Nothing will pay thee, friend, like Christianity”.

And in our day thus saith the Evangelist:

“Tent preachin’ is the kind that pays the best.”

’Twas as a business asset pure an’ simple

That Radway joined the Baptist Broadway Temple.

I find no moral for a peroration,

He is the prototype of half the nation.

It was dawn upon the fields of Heaven,

The dew upon the fence-rail twinkled,

And there were seven

Stars upon the sky that beamed;

And in the grass the cow-bells tinkled,

And daisies dreamed,

And sweet smells streamed

Over the tasselled corn.

God lay dimmed in slumber,

And Jesus’ warm hair was pillowed on His Father’s breast;

Seven disciples like seven points of a star

Were rayed about the sleeping Majesties,

And Judas was brighter than the rest,

Because his spirit had a fiercer sin to burn.

His ruddy hair was rimmed with dew,

And what he was to me he is to you.

There was no sound

But the lyric murmur of a Mary, singing

Low upon the ground,

Where a brook ran upon a secret errand

Like a silver hound

Slipping beneath the unbound hair of trees;

Mary was singing to the least of these,

Some Children.

All listened,

For the breath of her caressed the silence

With curves of melody;

And hence the very corn awoke to hear,

And to inhale the healing psalmody.

So because the grass, the daisies, stirred

Pleasantly, and light wings whirred

As birds arose from nests,

And quests of dew and honey went upon,

The Children, one by one, moved about,

And some would run up the hill,

And back again; another seemed to pout,

But changed and blew a glad shrill whistle out

That pleased the sailing stars.

Then Mary ceased her song,

And silence fell like shadow on them all.

Now amongst the ones who slept

Judas raised his head;

Sleep never touched his eyes with cool forgetfulness,

Instead his soul was fed with sin

That never flickered out within.

He yawned and bent his knees,

And the tongue of a silver bell

Shivered above the sleeping Majesties

Within the ring of seven,

Because there were but six

When Judas vaulted the fence-rail

Out of the fields of Heaven.

And now you could hear Jesus breathe,

And God murmur peace upon the wakeful corn.

“God!”

A spire of frail sound rose from a boyish will,

“See God, He’s walking down the hill,

See, Mary!”

And Mary looked up

And saw Judas coming toward them,

The sweet hand of a Child in the cup of either hand.

“Shall I tell them the truth, Judas,

That you are far from God,” said she,

“Or will you burn them with your sin,

You who are no kin to such as these,

And drive them back to me,

Crying bitterly?”

A smile struggled with his twisted face,

But could not give it grace,

And the two Children, wary

Of the lurid tumult in his breast,

Wrested their twined fingers from the gnarled hold of him,

And their eyes dim with tears,

Ran back to Mary.

Judas, the silent shadow of a man,

His will as heavy as a fallen tree in a wood,

Stood upon the hill,

And watched the Children as they ran,

Saw them nestle into Mary’s arms,

Seeking in the cloudy charms

Of her loosened hair,

The peace they knew was there.

Words crowded in his throat,

And he sat upon the hillside

With his face between his knees.

Now when his face was hidden

From the least of these,

One, bidden by the helplessness

Of the man on the side of the hill,

Came from the shelter of Mary’s hair,

And minding not her warning touch,

Nor her sounding of his name,

Knowing he was not chidden much,

Went winding an idle way

Up the hill, and around and away

From the still bowed man.

And first he picked a flower

Which he threw higher toward the fence-rail.

God smiled in His sleep,

And Jesus opened His eyes,

Put forth a hand for the plucked flower,

And hid it in His breast,

Yet did not rise nor cease His rest.

The Child,

Keeping a moody soft eye upon the grey humped figure,

Betrayed his mischief in a smile

That waxed bigger, bubble-like, and broke into a laugh,

And like a thief in the night

Crept up the hill to the fence-rail,

And peeked.

The fence-rail creaked

As Jesus turned His face to him:

“Poor man, dear boy,” he whispered silverly,

“Until he learns to play,

To dress his dusty head

With ribbons of the rosy day,

Never can he share

Your early morning passion,

Flecked with foamy curls of hair.

Would you give him back again

To my bosom, cleansed of pain,

Spill your living ways of laughing

In his muffled ears;

At him, and beset him! Splash him, little dears,

In your fun,” Jesus bade the boy.

“Run!”

And the Child winked, Yes,

Turned about and ran,

Put his flying hands upon the shoulders of the man,

And while a star blinked

At what he saw,

The Child broke the law of sin

As he leaped over Judas in the old, old game;

Ran screaming down to Mary’s covering hair,

But did not linger there;

Sped back and bounded over once again,

And others captured by the first one’s joy

Were startled into rapture

And followed, girl and boy,

In the glamour of the game,

Until the sunken man became

Bathed and spattered,

Shaken, shattered and half-hidden,

In the breaking foam of Children.

There came a pause

When the Little Ones, breathing

Hard about Judas, saw him raise his head,

Saw a smile like theirs, wreathing

His face, washed with sleep,

As though he waked in his bed

From the keep of angels.

In his eyes remembrance shone

Of when he was a boy

And looked upon the face of God everywhere;

Of when he was himself a toy,

A plaything of a God who dreamed

Everywhere and everything.

And when the Children saw

Upon his face the broken law

Of sin dissolve like shadows

In a ruined wood;

When they saw the sun come up

Within him, fill his face as the cup

Of the world is filled,

They spilled their bubbling laughter on the air,

And cuddled to his knees

As though he, too, were of the least of these.

His greedy arms inarticulately stuffed

With bloomy charms,

His roughed voice sweet

With honey of his joy, he began:

“Now when I was a boy

I had as little as you to give me joy,

And made as much of it,

Made a world of many mansions

Each great enough for God to dwell in;

Yes, mansions of my little joy,

Even as do you.”

“Do we?” asked one thoughtfully,

And, “What is mansion?” said another.

“And who put the shadows in your face?”

“And who took them away again?”

“A great light put the shadows in my face.”

Said he;

“Because I hoarded it within,

And boarded it up with sin

Of my importance;

Because I would not dance with joy of it

Like a brook prancing to the sea,

But in a deep dark well

Sealed the living spirit up;

What grace of it I could not keep

I would not give away

In play, like you.”

“Do we?” asked one closer than the rest.

“And who is Grace?” from another troubled breast.

“And what is sin?”

“Sin is a stone,”

Dreamed Judas, his chin on a silky head,

“Which when a seed is blown

Upon it, harbors not

The desire of a flower in the seed,

But must be broken by the shower,

And a deal of shining,

And the bold clutch of cold;

Grace is the flower

Of desire in the seed,

And sin is the stone that will not feed the flower.”

“Here is a flower,”

Said a Child with a daffodil.

“And here is a stone,

Will you show us how

The stone won’t feed the flower?”

“Yes, will you now?” chattered all.

Judas took the stone in one hand,

And in the other raised a black leather bag

That sagged from the girdle at his waist.

“There is little grace in either,

As much in one as in the other,”

Murmured Judas, hefting the leather bag.

“Oh, I hear something jingle,” said a little blond brother.

“Are they sins?” said his sister.

“NO!” spoke a voice like the beat of a great wing

On the air behind Judas.

Then a white light shone upon him,

Through him spread the light

So that no shadow of him fell

Like night around the Children.

And Judas looked up,

And saw Jesus standing there.

“See, Children!” cried Jesus, with many smiles,

“What the good Judas has brought you all these years;

See, my dears, what he has saved all the stony hilly miles,

For you!”

And Jesus opened the black leather bag,

And brought forth hands full of sweet bread

Which he fed to the Children.

Then Judas, his hands sticky

With crumby kisses of the Little Ones,

Went up the hill with the great Lover,

Under the cover of His arm,

All harm gone from him.