The Little Review

Literature Drama Music Art

MARGARET C. ANDERSON
EDITOR

MAY, 1915

Published Monthly

15 cents a copy

MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Publisher
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Entered as second-class matter at Postoffice, Chicago

The Little Review

Vol. II

MAY, 1915

No. 3

Copyright, 1915, by Margaret C. Anderson

Poems

Mitchell Dawson

Cantina

You were the flame of a Pompeian lamp,

Wavering in the sea-wind,

Cosima,

And ever to the gale of me you danced,

Flickering out of reach....

I will return to Sorrento,

To the wine-room under the cliff.

Santa Maria del Carmine

Here by the church door

A shriveled bat

Has folded his wings

And dreams of dead crepuscular delights,

Bat loves, bat orgies,

Tarantistic flittings through the dark.

O fragrant beggar blinking in the sun,

I will drop three soldi in your hat.

Harpy

O keen of scent,

You who have found me in my slough,

Not your beak, but your green eyes

Have torn to the center of me.

Ah, but I shall not slake them with a tremor.

Termaggio

In the asylum at Termaggio

Reside a dozen poets—

So many colored balloons bobbing against a black ceiling;

Will none of them be caught

By the arm of a strong wind,

Down and outward through the open window?

We cannot remove the roof at Termaggio,

In the sun our balloons would burst....

Perhaps we had better close the window.

Under the Cypresses

Under the cypresses

No nightingales will sing this spring;

For I have strewn the ground

With the shards of broken illusions,

And I will build of them a citadel of austerity

With towers whence I can search the sky

For a rainbow that is stronger than painted china.

Dear nightingales,

There are still the saccharine gardens of Verona,

Where the moon-moth waves his fragile wings.

What We Are Fighting For

Margaret C. Anderson

I have been much criticised for an article on Gabrilowitsch in the last issue. I have been told rather violently that I didn’t know what I was talking about; that to say Gabrilowitsch had stood still artistically or that the music critics were deaf because they didn’t like Scriabin’s Prometheus was simply to brand The Little Review again as the kind of magazine which delights in any sort of snap-shot judgment that may sound startling or “new.” But the fact of the matter is this: if The Little Review is ready to stand behind any of its judgments (and it is very ready), I can think of nothing that has appeared which I will so eagerly and convincingly defend as that article on Gabrilowitsch or my remark that Prometheus was extraordinarily beautiful. I can “prove” the first in at least three ways, and I have some one in mind (a Russian) who will write a poem on his reactions to Prometheus that will make you all wish you had imaginations too.

But this is not important. It merely leads me to an announcement of a series of articles—a sort of campaign—that we have been planning for the last two months. If we are to prove that we have a real “function” it will be this of depreciating values that have ceased to be important and appreciating new ones that have emerged—or, as I should say, values that are about to become unimportant and those that are about to emerge. In view of such a function I am quite willing to agree with my critics that the Gabrilowitsch article wasn’t worth anything: it merely stated things that are already quite well known, and a magazine that means to announce transvaluations before the approximate ten-year period during which even the uninspired come to accept them has no business to concern itself with mere restatements. Of course the most frequent criticism brought against The Little Review is that it goes to artistic and emotional and intellectual lengths no well-balanced person wants to go. I only wish this were true: I mean, we haven’t gone any real lengths—and that is just what’s the matter with us. We have made statements that seemed fearfully radical and new to a lot of people who don’t know what’s going on in the world; and I’m afraid we have listened to these people and tried to “convert” them. We have wanted to convince everybody—particularly those who seemed to need it most. And there is nothing more fatal: because what everybody thinks doesn’t matter; what a few think matters tremendously. I was brought up with a shock the other day, at an editors’ “meeting,” when Lucien Cary said that though The Little Review had one of the requisites of the ideal magazine,—youth,—it had the wrong kind of youth: the kind that has not yet caught up instead of the kind that has gone ahead. After trying to face that squarely for five awful minutes I was forced to decide that he was right. I mean in this way: I know the quality of our youth is all right, just as I know that people who write true things and live false ones are all wrong; but the wisdom of it is quite another matter. And one of our big mistakes has been a hope that preaching will help.

There’s nothing pompous in saying that the thoughts of only a few people matter. This has always been so and always will be. Every new valuation has come about just that way—championed by a group and then endorsed by a majority long after it has ceased to matter much. But for a magazine that means to count—well, I can’t decide whether our predicament of having got into a sort of Billy Sunday slump is humorous or very sad. Hereafter we shall pretend that there are no impossibilists in our audience.

But the announcement: In each of the future issues of The Little Review, beginning with June if possible, we shall have a special article attacking current fallacies in the arts or in life—getting down to the foundations. Each one will be written by a person who knows thoroughly what he is talking about, and each will be “true and memorable,” to use Will Comfort’s good phrase. For instance, suppose we begin with the modern theatre. It will be interesting to find why Clayton Hamilton calls a play as false, as distorted, as unwholesome and demoralizing as The Shadow a great drama, and why Percy Hammond, who is looked upon even by some of the discerning as a critic worthy to be trusted in the work of spreading ideas, should have nothing but superlatives for the same outrage. (To do him justice, Mr. Hammond did modify his praise with a single naive sentence: “I could find some flaws in The Shadow”; and then, to put his other foot in, “but the playing glossed them over until they were forgivable”—which is precisely the crime and tragedy of such productions). This type of intellectual blundering is apparent everywhere among the critics of literature, of music, of art, of the drama, and among the strangest of all human creatures—the historians (“men who reserve their judgments for a hundred years”) and the philosophers (men whose judgments are good for everything except to live by). If you happen to be equipped with knowledge of the intricate hypocrisies of the music schools, or the way the newspapers treat a competent art critic, or the methods of a manager in making a good play a bad one, or how dissatisfied the railway employees really are or ought to be—send us an article on the subject. The conditions of acceptance are these: You must know English prose; you must write it as though you are talking instead of writing; you must say quite frankly and in detail the things you would not be allowed to say in the prostituted, subsidized, or uninteresting magazines; and you must be true. This begins our warfare.

Echo

(Translated from the German of Fritz Schnack by William Saphier)

Into the forest your voice flew

Clear and light as a bird from its nest.

From your mouth the sound departed

Swinging gaily into the black forest.

It flew

Through dusky deep solitude

Mysterious quiet, pale night,

Gravely-bent tree tops, fairy-tale flowers.

It danced past

Queer animals and strange things,

It touched them with quick moves

And they were frightened by the gay bird.

Green looks stared through the night

And angry phosphor glints pierced the foliage

Where owls were moving their beaks deceitfully.

Here your gay bird was frightened

And fearfully returned

Beaten by the envy of the black branches.

Shuddering it fell into the blue day

Tired, lame-winged, dead.

America’s Ignition

Will Levington Comfort

... The quickened pulse of America did not appear with the outbreak of war. It came with the winter cold, like all revival spirit—a strange and fervent heat, breaking down the old, vitalizing the new everywhere. No one doubts now—no one who can tear his eyes from the ground even for a little—doubts now that the new social order is upon us.

America, in opening her breasts to the agony of Europe, in her giving of solids and sympathy, has stumbled upon the ancient and perfect formula for receiving the greater good. In forgetting herself a little, her own human spirit has been ignited.

If someone announced that there lived in the Quattor Islands a man who knew the exact way to bring into the world, not only the spirit, but the action of brotherhood and fatherland, there would be some call for maps and steamship passages. If the Quattor Islands were not already on the maps, they would presently appear, but not before the earliest pilgrims had set out. And if someone should add that all expression of the arts so far in the world is wumbled and imperfect compared to that which is about to be, if a certain formula is followed; and that this man in the Quattor group has the formula—many more would start on the quest, or send their most trusted secretaries.

And yet the truth and the way is all here, and has been uttered again and again by every voice that has lifted itself above the common din.

The wise men carried gifts. You would expect to give something for the secret. You might expect to be called upon to sell all you have and give to the poor. You would not be surprised even if the magnetic Islander said:

“It is not your frankincense and myrrh that I want, though I thank you. That which I have is for you. I am more anxious for you to know and live it, than you can be to have and hold it. But the mystery is that it will not come to abide with you, while you are passionate for possession. The passion to give to others must be established within you before you can adequately receive—”

You are beginning to see how ancient is the gospel. It is old, older than that. It belongs to the foundations. Personally and nationally, the law works the same way. That which is true, is true in all its parts. There is an adjustment by which that which is good for the whole is good for the part; that which is good for the nation is good for the man; but each, whole and part, nation and man, must have for the first thought not self-good but the general good. One nation, so established in this conviction that its actions are automatically founded upon the welfare of the world, could bring about the true fatherland in a generation; and one human heart so established begins to touch from the first moment the profound significances of life.

Personally and nationally, this plain but tremendous concept is beginning to manifest itself here in America. I do not write as a patriot. It is not my country that is of interest, but humankind. America’s political interests, her trade, all her localizations as a separate and bounded people, are inimical to the new enthusiasm. The new social order cannot concern itself as a country apart. American predatory instincts, her self-worship, her attempt at neutrality while supplying explosives for the European slaughter arenas, her deepening confinement in matter during the past fifty years, have prepared her for the outright demoralization of war, just as surely as Europe is meeting today the red harvest from such instincts and activities. For action invariably follows the thought.

Yet the hearts of men in America are changing. I do not write as a religionist, but as one very much of the world. For the hearts of men do change, and it is only through such changes that the material stagnation of a people can be relieved without deluges of blood.

The high hope is upon us. In being apart from war, America has been enabled to see. One must always remove himself from the ruck to see its movement. In the past six months, within these western shores, the voices of true inspiration have been heard. From a literary standpoint alone, this is the most significant fact since Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau, took pen in hand forgetting themselves a little while each day. There is a peculiar strength upon American production of all kinds, as a result of this very act of getting out from under European influence.

England and France and Germany are merely national voices now. The voice of the partisan is but a weak treble against the basic rumble of war. War is a confession, as suicide is a confession, as every act of blood and rage is a confession, of the triumph of the animal in the human mind.... If you have received letters from friends in England or Germany or France since the war; friends whom formerly you admired for their culture and acumen, you have been struck by the dullness and misery of the communications, the uncentered points of view, the incapacity of human vision in the midst of the heaviness and blackness of life there; if, indeed, you have read the recent newspapers and periodicals of these countries, you will require no further proof of the fact—that a nation at war is an obscene nation, its consciousness all driven down into the physical, its voice tonally imperfect from hate and fear, its eyes open to red illusion and not to truth.

Even in America the voice of the nationalist is a part of the old and the unclean. The new social order does not recognize the rights and desires of any isolated people. Humankind is basically one in meaning, in aim and in destiny. The difference of one nation from another in relation to the sun’s rays, in character, country, environment, race, color and structure of mind—these are primal values, the very values that will sum up into the essential grandeur of the whole. Personally and nationally there are no duplicates in the social scheme. The instruments of this magnificent orchestra are of infinite diversity, but the harmony is one.

The spiritual source of all human achievement is already a harmonic whole. That globe is complete. It is our business as men to make a pattern of it in matter—to make the dream come true in flesh, each man and each nation bringing his labor, which can only be bent into a fitting arc, by the loss of the love of self.

It requires but a little vision to observe Nature at work upon this concept in a thousand ways. She always seeks to preserve her balances. If a certain plant, or bird, insect, beast, man or nation, rises by intrinsic force and predation to dangerous increase, a destroying parasite is invariably fostered within its shadow. In good time these two growths turn to rend each other, a mutual cleansing. The Prussian war-office is a counter-growth to British imperialism. That which survives will be humbler and wiser.

I saw in a doctor’s office in Canada the picture of an English bull-dog standing large against the background of a British flag, and beneath was this line:

“What we have, we’ll hold.”

I found that the picture had a national acceptance in the British colonies and at Home. Yet a child stopping to think would have seen breakers ahead for a nation so lost in material things, as thus to challenge the Fates.... There is a fairy-tale of a man building a great boat for the air. It looked to win, and in the effrontery of achievement, he set forth to conquer God. Just then a hornet stung him....

All this to suggest that the new dimension of life must come from America, if it comes at all; and from this vantage-point, the reality is mightily appearing—in the new poetry, in the new novels, in music, painting, and the crafts. The generation just coming into its own, contains the builders whose work is to follow the destroyers of war. They are not self-servers. They do not believe in intellect. Their genius is intuitionally driven, not intellectually. Just as steam has reached its final limitation as a force, and is being superseded by electricity, the limitations of which have not been sensed so far even by the most audacious, so the intellect as a producing medium, has had its period—a period of style-worship, vanities of speech and action, of self-service, or parading, of surface show and short-sightedness, without parallel in the world.

For the intellect is a product of sunlight, its energy supplied by human blood which dies. The new dimension comes from the fountain-head of energy, and its first realization is the unity of all nature. The intellect is as old as your body is; the giant that is awakening from sleep in the breasts of the rising generation is immortal.

The thing that was called genius in the last generation met a destructive force in the material world, almost as deadly and vindictive as that encountered by Copernicus. The voices of the few heralds were scarcely heard, but there is a battle-line of genius in the new generation, timed for the great service years following the chaos of war. They will bring in the liberation of religion from mammon; they will bring in the religion of work, the equality of women, not on a mere suffrage matter alone, but in spirit and truth; they will bring in their children un-accursed.

Solitude

George Soule

I was fretted with husks of men;

I cried out to be alone,

To be free,

To run in the wind.

Solitude was to me as the dream of a country well to a fevered man.

I ran away to be alone.

And there were the stars, and the sea, and the sun coming up out of the sea.

And I went mad with the wind’s song.

Then I chanted my ardor to the air—

But it came back clanging about my ears:

The stars were too near,

I was compressed between horizons;

I choked in the wind and the sun!

In my wrath I strode back to men

And smote the husks asunder.

From them came forth

The whole of me that I had lacked.

For the first time I was alone,

Alone with all of myself,

In splendid peace.

Remy De Gourmont

By Richard Aldington

The work of Remy de Gourmont is known and read in all parts of the civilized world. Yet he has not a large circulation and a purely commercial writer would probably be disgusted at his profits, but he has an influence, especially over the younger and more adventuresome spirits, which few writers today possess. One can—or rather one could in the days before the war—hardly pick up any French review without finding some reference to his ideas or some criticism of his work. In Russia he appears to have a more considerable reputation than anywhere else outside France. For, though one sees criticism and translations of him even in languages like Hungarian and Roumanian, it is in Russia alone that a word of praise from Remy de Gourmont seems to make a man’s reputation. The English are far slower in their international appreciations, and the Americans—quick though they are to seize on new men—do not seem to have taken up de Gourmont with much understanding. Mr. Ransome’s translation of Un Nuit au Luxembourg was not received with either appreciation or enthusiasm by English and American critics. And though a savant like Mr. Havelock Ellis quotes from M. de Gourmont’s work, and has, I believe, a great admiration for his personal intellectual qualities; though Mr. Sturge Moore, in his book on Flaubert and Blake, quotes M. de Gourmont among the great critics of France, it must be admitted that few English-speaking critics have yet done him justice. I question if the larger public has heard more of him than a vague rumour of his name.

It may be that he is thought too “high-brow.” I suppose every man who gives his life up to the task of expressing his ideas, his character, and his genius in a purely disinterested manner is liable to this criticism. But there is so great a fascination in his work, whether it be criticism or fiction, philosophic dialogue or prose poem, that whenever he gains a reader it is not for an hour but for life. In America especially he should find readers, for America, whatever artistic faults and drawbacks it may have, has not, as England has, a “ring” of reviewers who unanimously “queer” any book whose originality or genius is any menace to their own stick-in-the-mud critical methods.

The Symbolist movement in France is now almost ancient history. Unanimists, Futurists, Paroxysts, Fantasists, and all the other “ists” so abundantly produced by this century now face the “ists” of Germany on the battlefield. And while they are there fighting out by bodily force and not by words the intellectual destinies of Europe we may perhaps consider with free minds the Symbolist poets and authors who are now too old to take the field for their country and can only sit at home “waiting for news.”

Some of the “children of Mallarmé” are dead; others are forgotten; a few still remain. Maeterlinck, Vielé-Griffin, Jammes, and Remy de Gourmont occur first to one’s mind as the best living representatives of the great Symbolist school, and of these the subtlest, the most fascinating, the most modern is Remy de Gourmont. Along with M. Anatole France, though very different from him, Remy de Gourmont is an example of the tradition of European culture. Less derivative than M. France, or perhaps deriving from less familiar sources, with as great an irony and with a faith that seems more sceptical than scepticism itself, he has extracted from the literature of each country and century that part which helped him to develop and train his own character. He presents in one person the manifold and often conflicting opinions and ideas of modern culture. Reading his books one sees that there is a mystical sort of beauty even in science and under his pen mysticism itself appears almost as exact as a science.

I said just now that M. de Gourmont was an example of the tradition of European culture, and since Paris, we are mostly agreed, is the centre of European culture, and since Remy de Gourmont is a Parisian of Parisians, we may count him, I think, as one of the best examples of Latin or West European culture now living. I rather dwell upon this aspect of Remy de Gourmont as the man of supreme culture since that quality has so suddenly and so startlingly come into public discussion. It is extremely difficult to say precisely what culture is; and a definition of culture naturally varies with differences of race and temperaments. John Addington Symonds, in his interesting and illuminating essay on this subject, defines culture as “the raising of previously-educated faculties to their highest potencies by the conscious effort of their possessors.” And it might be added to this excellent definition that the feature of Latin or West European culture which most distinguishes it from the culture of other countries is a wideness of interest, a great general “cultivating” of all the faculties of the mind and character as opposed to the extreme development of one single faculty.

Remy de Gourmont is indeed so admirable an example of the type of culture I have briefly indicated that it is difficult to think of any form of intellectual activity which has not at one time or another received his attention. He has been a founder of reviews—among them the famous Mercure de France—and an editor of reviews. He has written prefaces for modern authors and for ancient authors—both poets and prose-writers. As a literary critic it is perhaps not too much to say that in his time and generation he ranks as Sainte-Beuve did in his. Under his name will be found five volumes of Promenades Littéraires, collections of essays dealing with the widest possible range of literary subjects—from Petronius to Guillaume de Machaut, from the Goliardi to the latest “roman passionnel.” His Livres des Masques are one of the most considerable acquisitions to the criticism of French literature during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In these two books will be found amazingly penetrating studies of men so diverse as the de Goncourt brothers and Maeterlinck, while American readers should be especially interested in his studies of the two Franco-American poets, Stuart Merrill and Francis Vielé-Griffin. As an admirer of Huysmans, M. Remy de Gourmont was naturally interested in the mystic, Christian Latin poets. And the fruit of several years’ study of these authors was that notable and unique book Le Latin Mystique. It is no exaggeration to say that hardly anyone else could have made these writers interesting to anyone but the specialist. One can almost imagine M. de Gourmont being challenged to produce a book which would appeal not only to savants but to the lover of general culture. This mystic Latin poetry had, until Huysmans’ day, been almost entirely neglected by students of beautiful things. But Remy de Gourmont, treating the subject as a poet in love with poetry—not as a pedant or a professor or a book-maker—has produced a work which is at once a criticism and an anthology of the literature produced during those thousand years which we ignorantly call the “Dark Ages.”

These investigations into an almost forgotten and strangely attractive literature were not without effect upon his purely creative work. This effect can be best seen in his Litanies, a series of curious and, verbally, extremely beautiful prose-poems, full of assonances, of internal rhymes, of strange symbols, of sonorous rhythms and of fantastic images. Again in his prose, in works like Le Pèlerin du Silence and D’un Pays Lointain; in his poetry—especially in Les Saints du Paradis—this influence is most marked.

In books like La Physique de l’Amour, Le Chemin de Velours, the series of Promenades Philosophiques and Epilogues, we have an entirely different kind of intellectual activity—lettered, it is true, but with that incisiveness and clarity of style and thought which mark French prose as the finest in the modern world. In these books problems of philosophy, of morals, of everyday conduct and national and international affairs, problems of music, of painting, of all the arts and sciences, are discussed with a brilliance and an originality not always palatable to the gloomier and duller elements of French society.

One must not ask for too clear a definition of M. de Gourmont’s philosophy. He is just sufficient of a mystic to enjoy being misunderstood, and of a nature so ironical that his most innocent-looking statements are traps for the unwary. He is an individualist—true to his type of culture. Perhaps if he were very closely questioned he would smile and say that he belonged to the “tradition des libres esprits.”

In addition to these many works, of so diverse a character that they might well be the result of the labours of several men rather than of one, he has written several novels, one or two of which at their appearance were the literary sensation of the hour; he has devoted much time to the study of aesthetic questions and has published two or three volumes on the subject; beyond all this he has produced a modern French rendering of Aucassin and Nicolette, a translation from the Spanish and a couple of original plays! And in his little flat on the rive gauche, not far from St. Sulpice, among his books, he still writes every day words of encouragement for anxious Paris, still finds time to observe and reflect and to let the rest of the world know what is happening in France.

Words Out of Waking

Helen Hoyt

In the warm, fragrant darkness

We lay,

Side by side,

Straight;

And your voice

That had been silent

Came to me through the dark

Asking, Do you smell the lilacs?

You, half in sleep,

Speaking softly,—

Indistinctly.

Then it seemed to me,

A sudden moment,

As if we lay in our graves,

And you were speaking across

From your mound to mine:

In the springtime,

Speaking of lilacs,—

With muffled voice through the grass.

Who Wants Blue Silk Roses?

Sade Iverson

The battlefields are very far away:

No friend of mine fights on them—and no foe.

I have not sickened at the battle stench,

Nor seen the tragic trenches where men die.

I am a woman, walking quietly,

And fond of peace and place and fireside cheer,

Yet here, afar from strife, the grey Uhlans

Have battered down my door, let in the rain,

And put me out, purse-empty, on the street.

Strange, say you?

Chance of war! Samaritans,

I’m past all succor;—slain in my pocket-book.

My little shop for hats—chic hats, oddities—

Is shut as tight as Juliet Capulet’s tomb.

“Bad times” has stood me up against the wall:

“Bad times” in Uhlan gear, takes certain aim.

(And firing squads have always stone cold eyes.)

All winter long, I’ve peeped out on the street,

To watch my little customers go by

In conscious rectitude and home-made hats;

Home-made to noble ends!

Not that they’ve less

Than once they had. They’ve more—a bran new creed.

Economists approve: the fashion’s set.

“How fine and sensible the women are,”

You hear the men commenting on the train.

“My wife is trimming her own hats.” “And mine.”

“I like to see the women suit themselves

To present needs.” “And I. It’s fine, I say.

Some little good comes out of this sad war.”

(Ah, yes, but half a sausage and a roll,

Was all the food I’d had in twenty hours!)

Now that would seem a feast. The cupboard’s bare.

Well, here’s a chance to put my luck to test.

Who goes a-roving when the pot is full?

Say, comrades, comrades, let’s set out tonight,

And brew our mulligan behind the ties.

No more I’ll sit alone to play propriety;

I sell no more blue roses, hear me swear

But when the snows are gone, I’ll scent mayweed

Beside the fences, till some purple noon,

I find the passion flower, in panoply,

Awaiting me, and I shall stoop and pick.

But do not think I am without a friend!

I have my own familiar Imp for company—

The secret, mocking creature of my heart,

Which keeps me laughing when I’m set to cry,

And fleers the cautions I thought principles.

He’s captain now. We’ll see how he’ll provide,

For food and drink and thought, and company.

Let him advise what lens I’d best look through.

Nero, they say, chose green; fools like rose-red.

The Imp and I may stand for sun-bright truth,

And smoke our glasses if we prove too frail.

Come hunger, then, and want, or any shame.

If Chatterton dare starve, why should not we?

We’ll travel far—though without carfare, dears,

And with shoe-soles that let in pavement slush.

But now I shall find out if dry-shod feet

Discount the wet ones. Live down the superstitions,

So I say. Ducks think wet feet are best.

Come, come, my Imp. Let’s start. Our fat landlord

Has locked the door on us and taken the key.

(When you are passing by the little shop,

Remember one who wanted you for friend;

A victim of the war, without a faith,

But carrying a banner—a white field,

And no word written on it.

Yes, think of one,

Who lacks a watchword, and wears no disguise,

And arm in arm with impish laughter, seeks for Life.)

“Mother Jones” and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

Margaret C. Anderson

Mother Jones and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn have been talking in Chicago and I went to hear them both, expecting to be captivated by the former and disappointed in the latter. But it turned out just the other way.

Mother Jones is all the things you have heard her to be—vigorous, almost sprightly in her eighty-two years, witty, shrewd, kindly, hopeful of great social changes, with snappy little blue eyes and a complexion like a girl of eighteen and a tongue like an automatic revolver. You feel you’d rather have her get after you with fire crackers, as she did to a man in some Western hotel when she wanted to drive him out of town (and succeeded), than to have her side against you in an argument. Right or wrong, she would make you appear to be hopelessly wrong; and certainly on any practical matter you would have a suspicion that she was right anyhow. She is consistent and convincing. But there is one thing none of the magazine articles has said about her: Mother Jones is a completely simple human being, in the least flattering sense of the word. She suffers because men are sent to jail and children are killed in strikes, and she spends every day of her life working toward the prevention of these things. But she lives on no more subtle plane of adjustments to a difficult universe. You can’t associate her with any sort of intense personal struggle. If temperament is the capacity to react, as I heard some one define it the other day, then Mother Jones is as untemperamental a person as I’ve ever seen. She acts; she doesn’t react at all. She has neither a complex nor an interesting mind; she has a well-informed one. She has read a lot—chiefly history and economics. She hasn’t read philosophy or psychology, I think. She hasn’t needed to: her knowledge of psychology is that sweeping and rather crude kind that comes with years of hard experience in which there has been little time for observation. If you asked her to sympathize with a man who had killed himself because he loved too greatly, I can rather hear her say that if men would keep busy they wouldn’t have time for such notions. Life to her is reduced to a matter of two antagonisms: the struggle between Capital and Labor. Other things, such as Art, for instance,—well, she makes you feel it’s a little impertinent to expect her to waste time like that; she is too busy trying to outwit the “damned sewer rats,” as she calls Burns’ detectives or other obstacles to peace and freedom. Mother Jones has a lot of effective phrases of that sort; I think she wants to see if she can make you blanch before she decides really to trust you; and then of course, as she says, “My boys wouldn’t understand me if I talked nice and ladylike all the time.” Underneath all this there is a charming old gentlewoman, full of delicate courtesies that win for her the splendid chivalry of the rough men she spends her life among.

The man who took me to see her made an unfortunate remark. He told her that I wanted to write an article about her, and asked if she wouldn’t tell me how she got started in her work. (I tried to stop him in time, but it was no use.) She gave me one scornful look and then flashed at him: “That’s a woman’s question. No man ever asks me such a fool thing, but women always do. How do I know how I got started? I was always a worker—that’s all.” Another of her simplifications is that there are two kinds of people—those who work and those who don’t. She seemed to put me with the latter, and it was my instinct from the first that she didn’t approve of me. She just treated me politely, and it was rather awful. She kept insisting that women know nothing about Labor—which is almost quite true—and of course she didn’t neglect to mention her aversion for the suffragists. But most of the time she told us stories, chuckling heartily whenever she could say anything particularly explosive. She described her recent trip to New York, and I remember her vivid account of a visit she made the Colony Club. She said all the women came tripping in on high heels, bent forward at an ominous angle that made her think of cats ready to spring on a mouse. “I’ve got no time for such idiots,” she finished. “And look at the crazy ones in this town, walking in a mayor’s parade and yelling like wildcats instead of staying at home where they might be reading and learning to educate their children.”

That night we went to hear her talk to an organization of painters and found her irresistible. But she did little except entertain them—particularly with stories in which she herself figured as the white-haired heroine, wading across streams in water up to her waist to outwit the police, or forcibly throwing a Burns detective out of her audience. The painters shrieked with joy at that, and it really was good to hear. She had suspected a certain man who had been going to her meetings, so one night she asked him to leave. He refused, but she insisted. He said, “I won’t go and I’d like to see anybody who can make me.” “Well,” she answered, “we’ll see about that”; and she stepped down from the platform, took him by the throat, held him so tightly “that his tongue stuck out,” and marched him out of the hall. He didn’t bother her any more. These things, told in her blunt, snappy way, are overwhelmingly funny—and stirring too. But what you like most about her is her sudden falling into seriousness, and the way she says, “Now, my boys, stick together. Solidarity is the only method by which we can beat the system.”

Mother Jones has no patience with anarchism: “Don’t talk to me about philosophies of an ideal society that will happen some time long after I’m in my grave. What I’m after is to do something for my class while I’m still alive. I believe in accomplishing things.” She has none of the anarchist’s hatred of government; she merely wants our present system humanized. And she has a lot of little prejudices about people and things: about Bill Haywood, for instance, who “divides Labor against itself,” as she says—and says untruly.

On the whole she is just what you would have expected—except that she’s more amusing. There is absolutely nothing of the artist in her. She is imaginative in the large way a child is; in fact Mother Jones is a child in the sense a grown-up can’t be without losing a lot.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, “the girl agitator,” has an even more consistent point of view than Mother Jones, and she has the advantage of being without prejudices. Her face has more subtlety, more interest for the analyst, than Mother Jones’s obvious compressed mouth and quick eyes; but it has little of that stamp of multiple reactions which make Emma Goldman’s face such a fascinating “subject.” There is a touch of Irish poetry in it—something wistful and something stern.

Miss Flynn gave three talks—on Birth Control, on Violence in Relation to the Labor Movement, and on Solidarity: Labor’s Road to Freedom—but I could only hear the last one, which everyone said was the least interesting of the three. There was only a handful of workers there, and she was so informing that the place ought to have been crowded with all the good people who think the I. W. W. is an organization of unintelligent outcasts whose only competence lies in throwing hammers into printing presses, etc., etc. Miss Flynn is more articulate than any I. W. W. I have heard, and she is freer from the stock phrases that give so many of the very earnest young workers in the movement something of pathos. I like these I. W. W. people a lot. They are not only offering an efficient program of labor; they are getting close to a workable philosophy of life. They are even capable of a virtue no working-class organization is supposed to be overburdened with: hardness of thought. As Miss Flynn said: “Don’t pamper yourselves. It’s not a sacrifice to fight for your own freedom!” Of course this group has its camp followers who do it no end of damage; but then the Socialists have their “practical” fanatics who are so awfully practical they always look at the trees instead of the forest, and the Anarchists have their soulful members who yearn for martyrdom and blubber about the duty of suffering for a cause. The best of the Industrial Workers are neither visionless nor sentimental. They have no interest in being martyrs; they are workers. Miss Flynn is of the best of these.

The Poetry Bookshop

(35 Devonshire Street, London)

Amy Lowell

I well remember the first time I went to the Poetry Bookshop. It was in July, 1913. I had read of it in a stray number of The Poetry Review that had drifted my way. The idea attracted me at once, and I determined to have a look at it during the summer. There was something alluringly crazy about anyone’s starting a bookshop for the sale of poetry alone. Poetry is at once my trade and my religion. All decent poets worship their art and slave at it, and I am no exception to the rule. But I have my “afternoons out” with their temptations, and the greatest of these is a bookshop. Here was the combination: a poetry bookshop. I turned to it as inevitably as a magnet to the pole.

It was after a visit to one of those large and flourishing establishments where every sort of book is sold that you do not want to read; where rows and rows of the classics you wish you could read again for the first time flaunt from the shelves in gaudy leather bindings, and a whole counter labours to support the newest and dullest novels, and another is covered with monographs which instruct you minutely as to how to grow fruit-trees, catch salmon, handle golf clubs, or bicycle through the home counties. It was in one of these “emporiums,” after the usual “We can get it for you, Madam,” that I broke into open revolt and started off to The Poetry Bookshop.

I knew it was somewhere near the British Museum. “Off Theobald’s Road,” I told the taxi driver, and settled down to looking out of the window, for London, whether on foot or driving, is a never-ending interest to me. Theobald’s Road is one of those large, busy thoroughfares, which cut across London in all directions, and off it, to the left in my case, we turned into a quiet, rather run-down little street, Devonshire Street. A swinging sign about half-way down it attracted me. It was shaped like a shield and blue, if I remember rightly, and on it were painted three torches. All this was determined as the taxi approached. That must be my place, I thought, and it was.

We drew up at the door of a shop—unmistakably a shop, because it had a big shopwindow. It did not need the name, “The Poetry Bookshop” in excellently designed, big, black letters over the window, to tell me that I had arrived.

I did not go in at once. I like to take my temptations gradually, nibbling at them bit by bit and tasting, before gulping them down as full-fledged crimes. I nibbled at that window. It was broad and high, and the books were displayed in it in the singularly fascinating manner which American booksellers jeer at and call “English window dressing.” All these books were poetry, or about poetry; that is, of course, all the ones that were not plays. There were long strips of ballads hanging down, like 18th century broadsides, each one topped by a crude woodcut in glaring reds, and blues, and yellows. The nibbling was so delightful that I collected quite a crowd of street urchins about me, wondering what the lady was looking so long into the window for, before I had done.

Then I went in, but even the window had not prepared me for the shop inside. It was a room rather than a shop, for there was a smart fire burning in the grate, and there were chairs, and settles, and a big table covered with the latest publications. The walls were lined with shelves, and under the window was a little ledge entirely filled with reviews from all over the world. The familiar cover of Poetry made me feel quite at home, but the eclecticism of the proprietor was at once evidenced by the presence of The Poetry Journal and Poet Lore, periodicals of whose existence I should not have expected him to be aware. There was also The Poetry Review, from which I knew he had severed himself, so it was obvious that the proprietor cared very much to be fair.

I turned to the shelves, and my surprise was even greater. There were a lot of shelves, all round the room and even over the chimney-breast. Every volume of poetry recently published was there. That I had expected, but what I had not expected was that all the classics were there too. Not bound into mausoleums, “handsome editions in handsome bindings, which no gentleman’s library should be without,” but readable volumes, for the reader who wants to read.

There was not a bit of glass in the shop, all was open and touchable. Of course I touched, and opened, and browsed. There were French books, too, and Italian. It goes without saying that the book I wanted was there. I know I bought it, and others, and came out laden and happy.

I did not meet Mr. Monro on this first visit, and I do not now remember exactly when I did meet him. My sojourns in the shop were many, and at this distance have become confused. But I did meet him sometime, and found an earnest, quiet gentleman, the very opposite from the crank. But even at the first visit I had felt the bookshop to be not “crazy” at all, but an answer to a very real need.

It has been my experience that people who really do things (in contradistinction to talking about them) are very straightforward, sensible persons, without sentimentalism in the pursuit of their ideal. Mr. Monro was exactly this. He was spending his energy to give poetry the dignity and charm of presentation it had lost at the hands of the commercial booksellers; he was encouraging poets and allowing their books a chance; but he did not talk ideals, nor dress like a combination of a fool and a wild animal. He was too busy to pose, he was just “on the job.” And what “on the job” meant and means is best told by giving the history of his enterprise.

For some years Mr. Monro had lived abroad, in Switzerland and Italy. But the nostalgia of home took possession of him, and he returned to England. Shortly after his arrival The Poetry Society asked him to edit a magazine for them, and he consented, and The Poetry Review began in January, 1912. Mr. Monro not only edited the Review, but paid for it. Now the Poetry Society, like all such bodies, is conservative, and Mr. Monro is sown with the seeds of radicalism. So differences of policy began, and at the end of a year, Mr. Monro seceded from The Poetry Review and founded another review, Poetry and Drama, to be published quarterly.

But I am anticipating. While editing The Poetry Review Mr. Monro conceived the idea of having a bookshop, which should be at once the office of the review and its various publications, and a shop. An old house in Devonshire Street was leased and everything “en train,” when Mr. Monro found that the inevitable breach with The Poetry Society on matters of policy was imminent. He announced in The Poetry Review the foundation of a new magazine, a quarterly, and relinquished The Poetry Review into other hands after having founded it and edited it for twelve months.

On January 8th, 1913, The Poetry Bookshop opened its doors to the public, and the public, always caught by novelty, flocked in. Professor Henry Newbolt gave the opening address. The first publication of the Bookshop, Georgian Poets, an anthology of the work of Lascelles Abercrombie, Rupert Brooke, W. H. Davies, Walter de la Mare, James Elroy Flecker, Wilfred Wilson Gibson, D. H. Lawrence, John Masefield, James Stephens, Harold Monro himself, and others, had already appeared. This book has been extraordinarily successful, and, in two years, has gone through ten editions.

Of course the book helped the bookshop, and the bookshop helped the book. So delighted were the amusement hunters with the idea, that there was some danger of the venture being swamped in the tide of fashion. But Mr. Monro was too genuinely in earnest to be elated by his success, or depressed when it calmed down to a normal interest. The bookshop pegged away at its work and in March, 1913, the first number of Poetry and Drama appeared. This little quarterly is indispensable to anyone wishing to keep abreast with what is being done in poetry abroad. The articles on French poetry by F. S. Flint alone are worth the cost of subscription. But Poetry and Drama also publishes original poetry, critical reviews, and English, French, Italian, and American chronicles. It is an interesting paper, and if I easily see how it could be bettered, that only means that I am an enthusiastic reader. Was anyone ever sincerely devoted to a paper without feeling that with a grain of his advice it could still be improved?

Yet I have a sneaking feeling that Mr. Monro runs his paper better than I should, better than any of us would. It requires a singularly unselfish and dispassionate devotion to run a paper and have it favor all schools, and criticise all cliques, equally. Nobody is quite pleased by that method, but the public gets what it pays for, and I, for one, admire a man with this quality of justice in him. Poetry and Drama ran until December of this year, when it was suspended during the continuance of the war, and the lack of it is so noticeable that it shows very well what a position it had already achieved.

The Poetry Bookshop publishes as well as sells. Georgian Poetry was followed by Anthologie des Imagistes, Poems by John Alford, Anthology of Futurist Poetry, and various small ventures such as The Rhyme Sheet (the broadsides I have spoken of before), and a number of little chap books called Flying Fame Publications, of which one I have seen, Eve by Ralph Hodgson, is enchanting.

Many though Mr. Monro’s activities were, the house was too big for them. So Mr. Monro fitted up some of the attic rooms as bedrooms, and there his clientele of poets hailing from the country find a welcome and inexpensive lodgings. Other rooms are used as reading rooms, for readings are held every Tuesday and Thursday at 6 P. M. Sometimes the poets read their own poems, sometimes other people read them. Verhaeren and Marinetti have read there and many other poets, well-known and still unknown. Mr. Monro invites those he desires, and as he runs his readings as he runs his shop there is great and stimulating variety. The difficulty with this sort of thing is the hangers-on, the horde of the sentimental of both sexes who fasten upon an artistic endeavor and seriously hurt it. It is inevitable that some of these parasites should drift into the readings, as I noticed on one occasion that I was there. But time will weed them out, for such people can never bear to realize that art is as hardworking as, say, stonecutting.

Since the war The Poetry Bookshop has been printing chap books, published at sixpence. Among them are Maurice Hewlett’s Singsongs of the War, Antwerp by Ford Maddox Hueffer, The King’s Highway by Henry Newbolt, The Old Ships by James Elroy Flecker; and for unmartial relief, Spring Morning by Frances Cornford, Songs by Edward Shanks, The Contemplative Quarry by Anna Wickham, and Children of Love by Harold Monro.

Mr. Monro is so stern in his idealism that, although a poet of originality and feeling, he willingly minimizes his own production for the sake of advancing poetry “en masse.” That is remarkable, and his enterprise deserves all the success which the poets and the general public can give it.

America, 1915

John Gould Fletcher

From the sea coast, from the bleak ravines of the hills that lift their escarpments towards the sky that pours down pitiless threads of sunlight, whirls over chill, clinging tentacles of rain, smashes hard buffets of huge wind, sifts fine, quivering drifts of snow, thrashes with thunder and with hail, uncurls its great sodden, flapping curtains before the gale—from the marshlands, from the banks of slow rivers, from the still brown plateaus, from the midst of steaming valleys, from the wide bays ringed with peaks, a thousand cities reek into the sky. Through a million vents the smell of cookery overflows. It rises upward day and night in strange, tragic black rows of columns that glow and make the stars quiver and dance and darken the sunlight.

Green rivers of corn, golden seas of wheat, white lakes of cotton meet and fuse and inter-cross. Cattle string across in frightened procession: multitudes on multitudes of horses, black, dun, grey, gallop away after them, jarring the earth with their hoofs, beating up dust in heavy, fluffy masses. Far away the sun lies still over broad patches of silence, sparsely green, where an eagle hovers, or an antelope starts up, or a sly, half-starving coyote is seen. The sun looks into yellow castles wedged in the cliff that were old when the first explorers saw them, and on white bulging palaces tinselled with marble and gold. The sun sees engines that rattle and cough, black derricks that wave their arms in arcs aloft, crazy log cabins that topple into the marsh. On every side are symbols of man’s desire, made with his hands, hurried, glorious, sordid, tragic, clashing, insane; the sun looks and does not understand but pours over them its heat and cold, and rain and light, and lightning, always the same.

Immense machines are clamoring, rattling, battling, wheeling, screaming, heaving, weaving. The wheels bound and groan and roar and waver and snap—and go on as before. Between the cities, over plain and hill, reel double paths of shining steel, where screaming locomotives pass like black shuttles leaving great trails of smoke amid the wheat, the cattle, the corn, the cotton, the sordid, hideous factory shafts, the fleet masses of plunging and galloping stallions. Their forces are never spent or tired, for, nervously above them, earth is laced and wired with crackling, chattering, singing, whispering electricity. They fly from city to city, and the sky is scribbled above them with childish grey gigantic scrawls, amid which the sun wabbles and crawls. And over all shoot backward and forward words that walk in air, and perhaps not long will the upper spaces be still, but soon be filled with racing lines of strong black bird-machines bearing men on their backs. Purring autos squawk and squeal, and spray and flutter, pale flashes through the rack. Red, and black and yellow, the earth takes on its coat of colors, from the struggle of a hundred million hands. It is a palimpsest which no one reads or understands, which none has time to heed, a loom-frame woven over with interspersed and tangled threads of which the meaning is lost, from which the pattern hangs in shreds.

Amid all this, men struggle, surge, call out, fall choking, toil with backs bent over the earth in black arcs. Crowds of them clatter, scramble, bustle, push, and drift away. They creep, black, greasy masses, out of the earth like ants; they swing out on great frozen blocks of steel or marble; they saunter in some forgotten place; they yawn with the weariness of little towns. Men, brown, black, yellow, pallid with fatigue, ruddy with gluttony, blotched with disease, swarm and waver back and forth, east, west, south, north. Crackling twigs of dripping forests mark their feet. Red wet furrowed plains receive their pains. Grey, hungry factory towns bellow out through steam-filled lungs for them each morning. Prison gates grate slowly, hospital beds spread stateliness, insane asylums gibber through their windows. They hustle and shovel, piling heaps of hovels, and now and then, as if in mockery, some coppery tower that seems as if it would split its sky with its majesty. They are in a great shallow sea, crinkling uneasily as if some giant’s body were wallowing beneath. Some single impulse creaks through them, pouring out its breath through the chimneys, scattering itself over the fields, closing itself in behind the doors. It is one great, vague, inchoate organism, scarcely feeling its pulse as yet, rolling in the belly of the world, waiting its hour of birth. Earth is heaped about it; still it eats the earth away, red covering after red covering, day on day. Now it half timidly peeps out, now withdraws itself again. And ever the sky pours on it heat and rain, and wind, and light, and lightning, and hail, shaping it, making it less frail, more fit to wake and take its place in the world.

But over there, beyond the seas, where for years the war flags have been stacked and furled, comes the crack of a pistol followed by faint cheers. And now a smeary gloom appears; it seems to swell from out the earth; it bulges in greenish folds above the horizon, and in its depths are flashes from far-off guns. Suddenly from the heart of the cloud, which the cowed world watches, holding its breath, come thick insensate hammer-blows that split the core of earth asunder—the iron cannon unleashed for the dance of death. Deeper and deeper the noise unrolls in a vast salute to the new world from the old. It rises higher and higher, covering the sea with its tumult, and filling the sky with gouts and spatters of crimson fire. North, south, east, west, all the craters are emptying out their vitals on earth’s breast. But the immensity of the troubled continent stirs not, nor gives to the world the life that is restlessly heaving beneath it.

The centuries sit with hands on their knees, wearing on weary foreheads their iron-crowned destinies. The sun glares, the rain spatters, the thunder tramples his drums, the wind, rushing, hums its scorn; but the being—the thing that will master all the ages—still hesitates to be born. The great derricks, black and frozen, lift their arms in mid air; the locomotives hoot and mutter in despair; the shuttles clatter and clamor and hammer at the woof day and night. The black flight of priceless instants reels and rebounds and shivers and crawls, while without the uproar of the cannon calls like black seas battering the earth, grinding, sweeping, flickering, pounding, pounding, pounding, in the increasing throes of birth. But still the thing will not arrive. Still it refuses at the very gates of life. America—America—blood-stained and torn with choked, convulsive sighs, perhaps too late thou shalt arise, perhaps in vain shalt seek to rule the earth!

Poems

Maxwell Bodenheim

Silence

The wordless dream of the fire;

The white clock dropping gray minutes from its placid lips;

The breathing of women, like the birth of little winds;

The muttering of the man in the next room, painting a landscape;

I threw them together with a jerk of my soul-wrist,

And had silence—a swaying sound

Made of the death of the others.

A Head

Her head was a morning in April.

Loose, livid mist arose from cold ground

And revealed two tired shepherds with lanterns,

Standing above the wrinkled red blankets they had lain on...

Then came the morning light—her smile.

The Operation

With eyes of radium, and beard the color of wet sand,