The Little Review

Literature Drama Music Art

MARGARET C. ANDERSON
EDITOR

JANUARY, 1915

Published Monthly

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The Little Review

Vol. I

JANUARY, 1915

No. 10

Copyright, 1915, by Margaret C. Anderson.

The Allies

(August 14th, 1914)

Amy Lowell

Into the brazen, burnished sky the cry hurls itself. The zigzagging cry of hoarse throats, it floats against the hard winds, and binds the head of the serpent to its tail, the long snail-slow serpent of marching men. Men weighted down with rifles and knapsacks, and parching with war. The cry jars and splits against the brazen, burnished sky.

This is the war of wars, and the cause? Has this writhing worm of men a cause?

Crackling against the polished sky is an eagle with a sword. The eagle is red and its head is flame.

In the shoulder of the worm is a teacher.

His tongue laps the war-sucked air in drought, but he yells defiance at the red-eyed eagle, and in his ears are the bells of new philosophies, and their tinkling drowns the sputter of the burning sword. He shrieks, “God damn you! When you are broken the world will strike out new shoots.”

His boots are tight, the sun is hot, and he may be shot, but he is in the shoulder of the worm.

(Over)

A dust speck in the worm’s belly is a poet.

He laughs at the flaring eagle and makes a long nose with his fingers. He will fight for smooth, white sheets of paper and uncurdled ink. The sputtering sword cannot make him blink, and his thoughts are wet and rippling. They cool his heart.

He will tear the eagle out of the sky and give the earth tranquility, and loveliness printed on white paper.

The eye of the serpent is an owner of mills.

He looks at the glaring sword which has snapped his machinery and struck away his men.

But it will all come again, when the sword is broken to a million dying stars, and there are no more wars.

Bankers, butchers, shopkeepers, painters, farmers,—men, sway and sweat. They will fight for the earth, for the increase of the slow, sure roots of peace, for the release of hidden forces. They jibe at the eagle and his scorching sword.

One! Two!—One! Two! clump the heavy boots. The cry hurtles against the sky.

Each man pulls his belt a little tighter, and shifts his gun to make it lighter. Each man thinks of a woman, and slaps out a curse at the eagle. The sword jumps in the hot sky, and the worm crawls on to the battle, stubbornly.

This is the war of wars, from eye to tail the serpent has one cause:

PEACE!

The Logical Extreme

George Soule

(The first of a series of three Dramatic Extravaganzas to be called “Plays for Irascibles.”)

CHARACTERS:

General Heinrich von Buhne
Marya Rudinoff

SCENE:

A private dining room in the General’s house in Berlin. It is decorated in black and white, and designed to impress one with the luxury of austerity. A chaotic but strong cubist bust in black onyx is at the left. The dining table, right center, is prepared for a meal. The effect of the room is that of a subtle beauty compressed and given terrific force by a military severity. There is a door at the rear and an entrance for servants at the left.

The General enters rear, followed by Marya. He is tall, with a large mustache and gray hair; his face and figure are in striking harmony with the room. A man of high intellectual quality; the lines and angles of his jaw, his mouth, his brows, are almost terrifying in their massiveness. He is in evening dress, and wears a single crimson order. Marya likewise is tall, a young woman with dark hair, and of a tense beauty. She is subtle, yet apparently lacks utterly fear and the softer qualities. She moves about with an unemphasized superiority over her surroundings. She wears a red evening gown, low cut to show her superb shoulders, yet without daring for its own sake. One feels that she would be equally at ease as a nude Greek goddess.

The General seats her at the right of the table, bows, and sits opposite her. Two servants enter with appetizers; they continue serving the dinner as the dialogue progresses.

General von Buhne (lifting his glass). To a good day’s work. (She touches hers to her lips) Fräulein Rudinoff, you are superb! I do not refer to your beauty; any dog could see that. I don’t believe in praise. But as a sculptor to his statue, allow me to say that of the many secret agents I have employed, you are the most subtly efficient—cold as ice and blazing as fire.

Marya. Please, Heinrich! I don’t believe in praise either.

General. Not even when it is for myself? But you are right. Man does not become strong until he ceases to wonder at his strength.

Marya. That is your secret, I believe.

General. My secret, Marya? I do not have secrets. A secret is something guarded, kept. My mystery, perhaps, yes. That is something which the many are incapable of discovering—even when it is flaunted in their faces.

Marya. But we flaunt nothing, you and I.

General. No, we stand for everyone to see. My enemies think you are their spy, and I—know what you are.

Marya. And so, we have them at last where your iron fist can close on them.

General. Yes, I have them, thanks to you. The poor visionary fools shall not assassinate the chancellor and blow up the churches.

Marya. You know, we women are supposed to worship the poets. Well, we do, but we are fascinated and held by men like you. I loved the comrades, but—as you see——

General. You are right, Marya. I love them, too; that is why—I crush them. (He laughs shortly.) And perhaps that is why I dominate you. It is not an effort; it is an instinct. There is something—inevitable—about our love. That, I think, is because I—am inevitable.

Marya. When I first came to you, Heinrich, I hated you. I think I do still, a little. There is always the zest of hate about the greatest love.

General. How you echo me! (A silence) Would it surprise you, my beautiful one, to know that I, like you, was once an anarchist?

Marya. You!

General. Yes, I, the bugaboo of the democrats, the great reactionary, the militarist, the apostle of repression, the fortress of the German Empire. I was once a revolutionist, and I plotted to kill your Czar!

Marya. And yet you failed!

General. I am in a whimsical mood tonight. Shall I explain to you the paradox?

Marya. Tell me!

General. When I was a young chap I was restless, full of that driving spirit all healthy youngsters have. The methodical occupations they gave me in the Fatherland disgusted me. I had money, and I traveled. So I came to Russia and took up with one of your artistic groups in an interior city—I won’t tell you which. Believe me, I was fascinated, lifted out of myself! The great, clean spirit of your intellectual anarchists, the daily dangers they thrived on, the nonchalance with which they met death or exile, their daring minds, which ripped the veil from the future, their beautiful art productions—these things carried me to the height of inspiration. They represented the highest human quality of which it was possible to dream.

Marya (covering her eyes with her hand). You have known that, too!

General. Yes, and love along with it. It was a boy-like worship. And when my beloved one went to the scaffold it burned into me a white-hot scar of fearlessness and severity I shall never lose. The love, I see now, was ephemeral; the scar is eternal.

Marya. And why did you leave them? Why did you leave them?

General. I had heard of America; I wished to go there and study the freedom we desired to create in Russia.

Marya. So you went; what then?

General. I found a country without a hereditary ruler, one rich in opportunity, where all men are theoretically equal before the law. I found a country where even the peasants read and have their magazines, a country without a state church. It was a land won from the wilderness by heroic struggle, whose freedom men had died to create, and whose unity men had died to preserve.

Marya. Did you not breathe more freely there?

General. Ah, Marya, that was the tragedy! I suffocated! For it was also a country without a poet, without a musician, without a sculptor, without a philosopher. The cities were run for loot, and the people, in whose power everything lay, could not seize the reins. And business—business—business, everywhere. As I went along the railroads I saw nothing beside the track but dirty wooden shanties in the cities, nothing in the country but ugly advertising signs. What do you think was the best paid and most highly honored profession? Advertising!

Marya. Are you lying to me!

General. No, it is the truth. Heroism, the love of beauty, the love of truth—except convenient truth—any sort of high endeavor for its own sake, was laughed at and crushed in those people by the dull weight of prosperity. That whole nation was an ugly monument to the triumph of the commonplace, a stone over the grave of godlike aspiration.

Marya. But surely they have improved since then?

General. Do you know why they put up new buildings? Because some millionaire who sells worthless things for five and ten cents wishes to make money renting offices; because some railroad or insurance company wishes to get advertising space in the papers without paying for it. Do you know why the clergymen preach honesty? So that business conditions may not be disturbed! Do you know for what purpose the magazines accept stories and articles? So that they may gain the largest possible public to offer up to their advertising men! Whenever an artist appears, he is either ignored or scoffed at by that bestial monster, the majority! It is like a prehistoric animal taking up the whole earth with his vast bulk, seizing everything beautiful for food with which to stuff his maw, and poisoning the air with the breath of his indigestion. (He rises and goes to the sideboard, where he busies himself selecting a cigar. As his back is turned, Marya quickly empties a powder into his glass. As he comes back and seats himself, she lifts her glass.)

Marya. Then let us toast Russia, General! (They drain their glasses.)

General. Would you mind telling me, Marya, how long I have to live? (He lights his cigar.) You are surprised? But that does not suit you. You should have known me better than to think I did not know what you would do when I turned my back tonight.

Marya (rising, pale): About a minute, General.

General. Then let us use the time well. Now we can be perfectly frank. Why have you—(He waves his hand in the direction of the empty glass.)

Marya. Because I am true to my cause! Because you are the scourge of Germany; you represent everything we hate, every cruelty, every oppression, every evil thing of the past. I have lived for this moment for years!

General. Ah, you are beautiful! In you is my reward! And do you renounce your love, too?

Marya. I have loved you—more than I knew how to bear. Do not think I shall live after you. And yet—I had to kill you!

General. Now I am ready to die. My work is done. I have produced the beauty I desired!

Marya. You? What do you mean?

General. You, who know how to kill what you love, can ask that? To produce the rebellion in Germany, to make heroes with the scourge—that has been my life! I, too, have lived for this moment! To be loved by a woman with a flaming soul, a woman who is greater than her love!

Marya (Springing to him as he weakens): Stay with me! Come back to me! O Heinrich, Heinrich, I have wronged you!

General. No, Marya, you would have wronged me if you had not carried your faith to its end. I—I—am the greatest anarchist of you all! (He dies. She looks at him a moment, puts her arms across her eyes, then rises and speaks levelly to the servant who enters.)

Marya. Peter, I have killed your master. No, do not be afraid, I shall sit here quietly. Lock me in, if you like, and send for the authorities. (The servant stands stupidly staring at her.) Do as I say, at once! (He tumbles out. She sits slowly at her place, her elbows on the table, looking dumbly into the distance.)

Slow curtain

Little Flowers From a Milliner’s Box

Sade Iverson

Reminders

I have been making a little hat;

A hat for a little lady.

Red and brown leaves edge it,

And the crown is like brown moss.

If I might, I would say to her:

“Pay me nothing, pay me nothing—

I have been paid in full, lady—

I have been paid in memories.

Ah, the sweep of the sun-burned meadow

Rising above the woodland!

Ah, the drift of golden beech-leaves,

Fluttering the still hour through!

I can hear them falling, softly,

Softly, falling on the tawny ground.

The nuts, too, are falling, pad-pad,

Mischievously on the earth.

Never was sky so blue, so deep,

So unbearably perfect!

I throw up my hands to it,

I fling kisses heavenward,

To Something, to Somebody,

Who made beauty—who made Youth!

Take your hat, little lady,

Wear it smilingly;

It is all sewn with dreams,

And looped with memories.

Little dead joys, like mists,

Float about it invisibly,

Making it miraculous.

You lack the money to pay for these things.

It is I who owe you for the little hat

You commissioned, made of red and of brown leaves,

With a crown like sun-dried moss

In the woods where I once wandered.”

But I cannot afford to be kind,

Or strange, or mad, or merry.

She will give me purse-worn bills

For the little dream hat, the fairy-sewn hat,

And I shall say with formality:

“Thank you, madam; I am glad

You are pleased with the little hat.”

Stale, stale, flat, flat!

Will there never again come a day

When I shall be throwing kisses to the sky,

Hoping they will reach up to Him

Who made beauty, and little golden leaves,

And brown nuts falling in the Autumn woods?

Eidolons

I have been looking at the sun-ball,

Red as a Japanese lantern

Swinging low in the West

On a bed of saffron sky.

And now I have come into my room

With grey and lonely walls all about me,

And everywhere I look, behold,

Little wonderful bright balls are swinging!

My room is gay with them,

My wall is dancing.

Who could guess this little grey room could be so gay?

Voices

I awake in the night to the sound of voices—

Voices of strangers passing in the street.

I cannot hear what they are saying,

But it is easy to see that they are happy.

Perhaps they have been to a party,

Dancing to music—or remembering the birthday

Of some one whom they love.

I am glad to have heard them,

Glad they were laughing.

It fretted the silence

As the bright balls of a rocket

Fret the black sky of night.

As for me, I am shut up in silence,

Like a fly in odorous amber.

No one hails me, no one calls me;

No one tells me the day is fair

Or wishes me happy dreams.

Sometimes I fall to wondering,

What if I should run out onto the street,

Crying to some passerby:

“I would make a good friend to you!

I am one who understands friendship;

Try me and see!”

Oh, what would happen?

Should I be scorned?

Oh, silence, silence,

You are but a grey bubble, and I could break you

With one breath of impatience. Yet I dare not.

Something witholds me. Still must I waken

In the lonely night-time,

Taking joy from the voices of strangers

Passing in the street, talking, laughing.

Joy?

It mocks me like the sound of falling water

That tricks the ear of the thirst-mad wretch

Dying in the desert.

My desert is Silence!

It covers the bleak rotundity of the earth.

Ten Square Feet of Garden

Did you ever see my garden? See my mallow? See my larkspur?

My petunias like censers, snowy white and full of honey?

And my phlox, a summer snow-bank, and my haughty purple asters?

Did you ever see my flocks and herds, all my little golden creatures?

Dusky honey-bees in plenty, golden bumble-bees a few?

Have you never seen them feeding on my larkspur and my mallow?

Some day I shall have a fountain, or a tiny pool for lilies.

And I’ll sit there, hidden safely, all alone and full of fancies,

Playing I’m a lovely princess, resting by her carven fountain.

I shall like to be a princess, to have friends and lovers by me!

I can praise them, I can chide them, tell them secrets if I like,

Flinging back their happy laughter like a handful of clear water.

Oh, my little treasured garden, ten square feet of haunting perfume,

Ten square feet of tossing blossoms, all my feoff and own dominion,

How I love you, with your old-gold, noisy, honey-bearing herds!

My Friend, the Incurable

III.
Personalities: Villon; Verhaeren; Parnell; Romain Rolland; Dostoevsky

How do you do? Or, as Oscar Wilde preferred it, How do you think? It is so much more interesting. Tell me, if you can, spontaneously, freely, about your thoughts, reveal your personality, and we shall enjoy a most engaging conversation, as charming as any good novel or essay. Speak about yourself; people do this so much better than when they discuss others. To me the most enchanting reading has always been literature of Personality, such as subjective lyrics or chatty essays of the Montaigne category; but I am particularly interested in Letters and Memoirs, where the writer reaches transparency, unless he deliberately uses his pen as a masque for self-concealment, as is the case, to my mind, in De Profundis. True, an artist reveals his best in his artistic creation; you discover autobiographical contours of Goethe in Faust and Werther; Tolstoy’s restless searchings are mirrored in Besukhov, in Levin, in Nekhludov; Zarathustra and Ecce Homo allow you a glimpse into the very crater of Vesuvius-Nietzsche. Yet through this medium you see the artist in his royal garb, so to speak, in his regalia; he seldom appears to you in his unceremonious morning-gown and slippers, to let you contemplate him not at his best but in his quotidian intimate aspect. Exceptions? I admit a legion.

To be sure, Francois Villon[1] wore no stage array. His childish frankness and spontaneity account for the fact that he is to this very day an outcast among bon ton salons, and even Robert Louis Stevenson stooped to condemn him. Of course he is a disgrace for the fraternity of writers: a thief, a robber, a murderer, a tramp, a debauchee, who possessed less tact than even his by-no-means puritanic confrère, Rabelais, and chanted most exquisite verses on most base topics. Villon is not in the least detached from his poetry: he is it, his very life was a song, a ballad. Filthy fifteenth century Paris, licentious monks, mercenary courtesans, tavern sages, knights of the road and candidates of the gibbet—in such an atmosphere the poet breathed, lived, and sang in the old picturesque French. Every adventure, every experience, impression, and emotion, Villon reflected in a ballad or a rondel, with equal beauty and sincerity; with equal compassion and loyalty he chanted to his religious mother and to the faded courtesan, to the duck-thief and to the creaking gibbet; and he poured a world of tender humor and sympathy into his greatest Ballade des Pendus, an epitaph for himself and his companions expecting to be hanged. You may love him, you may condemn him, but you cannot deny his absolute truthfulness, for his soul is unreservedly denuded, a quivering, appealing, humane soul.

[1] The Poems of Francois Villon, translated by H. DeVere Stacpoole. [John Lane Company, New York.]

Ayez pitie, Ayez pitie de moy.

A tout les moins, si vous plaist, mes amis!

Villon is justly called “the father of French poetry”; his influence has been felt for nearly five centuries, from Rabelais to Verhaeren. Indeed, in the savage cosmic rhythm of the “enormous” Belgian I often hear the echo of the medieval “Pauvre Villon.” Verhaeren.... I must close my eyes when I think of this Titan. You cannot gauge him, you cannot see him in his entirety: an Atlas, bigger than our planet, detached from it. I think Verhaeren has been best loved, and perhaps best understood in Russia,—a land where realities are looked upon as symbols, else life would become a horrible absurdity. There he is endeared as the lyricist of the modern soul rent with eternal contradictions in the great task of transvaluation of values: a mystic with no God, a prophet with no blessing, a positivist without faith in man, a socialist without a political program, an anarchist without “action,” an urbanite longing for his village, a villager craving for the city. Verhaeren destroys rather than creates, wills rather than believes, yearns rather than attains. His movement lacks gracefulness; his attack, firmness; his flight, lightness; his love, tenderness; his architecture is without system, his system without method. And the more profound, the more palpitating and irresistible is the chaos of his titanic images heaped in masses, the more sincere are his wails, the more burning his tears. I think it was the admirable French critic, René Ghil, who observed that to Verhaeren the world appears as if in a flash of lightning, in an enormous, exaggerated form, and as such he embodies it in his work—also exaggerated, also enormous; that his poetry resembles the genius of Rodin hewing his Balzac out of marble and powerful dreams.

How differently is Verhaeren conceived in the Teutonic mind! The Austrian poet, Stefan Zweig,[2] has written an interesting book on the Belgian, an elaborate study of his personality and works, which substantiates my claim that people speak much more successfully about themselves than about others. Herr Zweig appreciates Verhaeren highly (and let me tell you sub rosa, my friend, that his general estimation of the Poet is but a pale echoing of the brilliant Léon Bazalgette in his book Les célébrités d’aujourd hui); he considers him the greatest poet living, he names him the European poet in the same sense as Whitman is the American poet. Soon, however, he falls into the Teutonic fallacy of preciseness-by-all-means, of violently accurate definitions which must suit the facts, else—desto schlimmer für die Fakten. He wishes us to believe with him that Verhaeren is the poet of socialism, of democracy, that he has proclaimed his great Aye to contemporary life, with its greed, factories, and smoke; that a poet who wants “to be necessary to our time must feel that everything in this time is necessary, and therefore beautiful.” Thus with the German skill in fencing with Hegelian dialectics the critic endeavors to persuade us that Verhaeren must needs love modern life in all its aspects, that he is enraptured with all manifestations of contemporary spirit, from the urban “multitude” to that most hideous platitude, the Eiffel Tower. Mr. Zweig has utterly failed to see that Verhaeren does not feel the present, the contemporary, that he lives spiritually in the past and in the future, while the fleeting present is for him but a symbol, an alphabet of monstrous hieroglyphs, the mysteries of which he interprets prophetically. Has he not expressed his endless despair and maddening grief over the tragedy of the all-absorbing monster-city? Has the world not been to him a Golgotha, “an eternal illusion”? To Mr. Zweig Verhaeren is a happy, satisfied lover of all and everything. The poet and the painter, Maximilian Voloshin (one of whose poems appeared in The Little Review), relates his impression of the Belgian: “When you see him for the first time you notice before anything else a deep furrow cleaving his brow, resembling two wide-spread wings of a flying bird. This furrow is himself. In it is his sorrow, his flight.” I wonder whether Mr. Zweig has observed the furrow; or did he deliberately overlook it in order to save his “structure”?

[2] Emile Verhaeren, by Stefan Zweig. [Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.]

Yes, my friend, people seldom succeed in their attempt to interpret others. Would you classify biographies as literature of personality? Perhaps in the sense that they reveal the personality of the biographer, but then it depends upon the value of that personality. Here is an instance. The brother of Parnell writes his Memoirs[3], bringing forth a mass of details and anecdotes of “Charley’s” life. Charles Parnell has always been a fascinating personality to me. Long ago I heard a lecturer speaking on the great Irishman before a European audience of revolutionists; the listeners (by no means Irish!) were enchanted with the figure of the unique leader, with his powerful individuality and skillful strategy. I have pondered many a time over his portrait revealing the mysterious face of a medieval sorcerer, and have looked forward to a work that would help me in gaining a clearer idea of the “uncrowned King of Ireland.” His brother’s memoirs gave me a wealth of information about their family pedigree and about each individual member (their number is considerable), particularly about the writer’s business undertakings. About Charles Parnell I have learned numerous external facts and figures, but his intrinsic self is as little known to me now as before. Of what value is such a book which succeeds merely in introducing to you Mr. John Howard, an Irish gentleman of no particular interest?

[3] Charles Steward Parnell: A Memoir, by his brother, John Howard Parnell. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]

It is totally different when you are confronted with such a wonderful individuality as Romain Rolland[4]. Apparently it is a book of essays on Berlioz, Wagner, Saint-Saëns, D’Indy, Strauss, Debussy, and on some aspects of modern music; in reality you come to know the rich personality of Rolland and the reactions of his sensitive, graceful soul on the musical productions of our best-known composers. I am delighted with his influence on my views; not that he has altered them: musical opinions do not let themselves be proved or disproved; but he has enhanced my attitudes, he has made me admire my favorites more profoundly and hate my torturers more thoroughly. Do not let your Editor know that Brahms’s symphonies prove as indigestible to Rolland as they have been to your humble Incurable. It is the reading of such a book that offers me the joy of looking into a great soul, and it reminds me of the exalted experience I have had in reading Wilde’s Intentions, or the essays of Przybyszewsky and Arthur Symons.

The unceremonious self-revealment of a great man, of which I spoke in the beginning, does not always appeal to my aesthetic sense. At times my feeling of delicacy is scalded at the sight of a repulsive negligee. It has painfully irritated me to read Dostoevsky’s letters[5] in the English translation: would that the Russians kept their dirty linen at home. The book reveals a petty tragedy of a great personality; eternal want, indebtedness, whimpering, small jealousy, narrowness, intolerance. We learn how most of his books were written in a hurry, under pressure of need, the author being aware of their inadequacy; we learn of his petty envy towards Turgeniev, his slighting of Tolstoy, his bigoted hatred of everything liberal, European, his sturdy opposition to the revolutionists, his obsequious demeanor before high officials. With the exception of a few bright spots, the pages produce the nauseating effect of a pathological museum. Such a pity.

Come, now, friend: How do you think?

Ibn Gabirol.

[4] Musicians of To-Day, by Romain Rolland. [Henry Holt Company, New York.]

[5] Letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoevsky. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]

A Note on Paroxysm in Poetry

Edward J. O’Brien

Paroxysm is the poetic expression of that modern spirit which finds its most notable expression in other arts in the sculpture of Meunier, the polyphonic music of Strauss, the philosophy of Bergson, and the American skyscraper. It is the application of dynamics to poetry. It stands midway between romanticism, which is an escape into the past, and futurism, which is a flight into the future. Paroxysm is deep-rooted in to-day.

M. Nicolas Beauduin, its most noteworthy French exemplar, has many noteworthy disciples in France and Germany, and paroxysm is a well-known force in every literature except that of America, where its unconscious expression in life has been most remarkable. Students will find its philosophy set forth and its current phases in literature duly chronicled in M. Beauduin’s quarterly review, La Vie des Lettres. It is only possible here to offer a few very brief hints as to its literary aims and materials:

It aims to be a synthesis of modern industrial and mechanical effort.

It repudiates the ivory tower.

It handles the materials of modern life directly, not in symbols.

It responds to the roar of factories and trains.

The poet is to be “an active lyric,” representing his age.

The poet’s vision is the cinematograph of modern life with its continual mechanical transfiguration.

It is not sentimental.

To art for art’s sake, and art for truth’s sake, it opposes art for life’s sake.

It discards personal sensation; it is not ashamed to be “cosmic.”

The evolution of poetry is to be as rapid and terrible henceforth as material evolution.

It will sing the new man, the man-machine, the multiplied man, the Man-Bird.

It exalts motion and repudiates equilibrium.

It is social.

It feels the need for violent motives of faith, and finds them in the passion of the cities.

It cultivates a scientific technique.

It does not reject any words in forming a vocabulary.

It seeks swift, hurtling, dynamic rhythms.

It is based on “dynamic notions of qualitative duration, of heterogeneous continuity, of multiple and mobile states of consciousness.”

It perceives the elements of poetry contained in modern cities, locomotives, aëroplanes, dreadnoughts, and submarines; in a stock exchange, a Wall Street, or a wheat pit; and in every scientific marvel and in the sonorous song of factories and railways.

It emphasizes their dynamic consciousness.

To sum up: It aims to attain and express with the quick, keen vigor and strength of steel, the whirling, audacious, burning life of our epoch in all the paroxysm of the New Beauty.

When M. Beauduin’s new volume, La Cité des Hommes, is translated and published in America, it will be less difficult to estimate the success with which paroxyst poetry may be achieved.

The New Beauty

Nicolas Beauduin

(Authorized translation from the French by Edward J. O’Brien)

Long years the poet had not understood

This powerful art bursting from forces in sight,

From the tamed element which revolts in cries,

From the victory of the spirit

Over the passive immensity of matter.

The modern beauty of joy and madness,

Of triumph and truth,

He saw her, in a passionate rhythm,

Flinging down the palaces of doubt and silence,

Vanquishing black scepticisms and torpors,

Rekindling the universe under her jets of vapor,

Destroying the vain mystery that disappears,

Covering the entire world with her network of iron,

Launching her towers, her bridges, her tunnels, her dockyards,

Over all the exasperated continents of the globe.

Ah! the new beauty, ardent, insatiate,

Strained toward conquest and the vastest life,

She was indeed the god whom nothing resists,

Dynamic beauty of swiftness and hope,

Rushing ever beyond, out of the blackness,

Dancing and paroxyst humanity.

He saw her at last, superb before him,

Entrapping error, mowing night;

She erected on the old barbaric soil

Her cathedral with its vertiginous walls,

Lit by the mad and whirling suns of the searchlights.

Beauty of brass, beauty of fire,

She was there visible as a god.

Beauty of vapor, geometric beauty,

Modern beauty who builds for her temple and landscape

High furnaces casqued with purple and gold,

Cities mad beneath their electric lamps,

Launching at conquered heaven in spirals of pride,

The rut of dynamos and the bustle of windlasses,

The multiplied brutal effort of the machines,

The fiery flight of aeroplanes in the air,

The frantic trolleys under their sheaves of lightnings,