The Little Review

Literature Drama Music Art

MARGARET C. ANDERSON
EDITOR

OCTOBER, 1914

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The Little Review

Vol. I

OCTOBER, 1914

No. 7

Copyright, 1914, by Margaret C. Anderson.

Poems

Witter Bynner

Two Churches on Sunday

They stand and bark like foolish dogs,

“O notice us! O notice us!”

And then they stand and whine....

As if to say, “The good kind God

That made the world made even us,

All in the scheme divine.”

And then they bark like foolish dogs,

And then they stand and whine.

The Last Words of Tolstoi

Awhile I felt the imperial sky

Clothe a sole figure, which was I;

Then, lonely for democracy,

I hailed the purple robe of air

Kinship for all mankind to share;

But now at last, with ashen hair,

I learn it is not they nor I

Who own the mantle of the sky,—

Silence alone wears majesty.

Apollo Sings

Here shall come forth a flower

and near him ever grow.

But his ear heeds me not,

and my hot tears mean nothing

to him who was dearer to me

than Daphne, he whose clear eye,

that dazed the sun, now droops near earth....

O hyacinthine flower, grow here!

Sweet were his lips as a flower touching

the feet of a bee in Spring, his lips

would repeat the word, “Love, love,”

all that was sweet in the world was reborn.

Death could not defeat him,

for his young lips, completing love, were eager.

His youth shall ever be fleet, evading death....

O hyacinthine flower, be sweet!

To the Innermost

Margaret C. Anderson

The popular translation of that dangerous term, individualism, is “selfishness.” Self-dependence is a pompous phrase, and self-completion a huge negation. The average mind seems never to grasp the fact that individualism and democracy are synonymous terms; that self-dependence is merely the first of one’s intricate obligations to his universe, and self-completion the first step toward that wider consciousness which makes the giving-out of self valuable.

I am always feeling that some one will point out to me, with the most embarrassing justice, the obviousness of observations like these. But invariably, after a resolve to keep to those high levels which stretch out beyond the boundaries of the accepted, some one engages me in a discussion—some one who still believes in the antique theory that life proceeds for the sake of immortality, or that a woman must choose between her charm and the ballot; and I emerge therefrom convinced that the highest mission in life is the dedication of oneself to the obvious, and that a valiant preaching of truisms is the only way to get at the root of intellectual evils. It has its fascinations, besides: to convince a reactionary (not that I’ve ever done it) that renunciation is not an ultimate end, or that truth is a good thing for all people, is better than discovering a kindred soul. And so I proceed, without further apology: that human being is of most use to other people who has first become of most use to himself.

It is the war that has emphasized so overwhelmingly the triviality of trivial things. Out of such utter dehumanization one has a vision of the race which might emerge—a race purified of small struggles, small causes, small patriotisms; a race animated by those big impulses which have always made up the dreams of men. And then would come the more subtle personal development: a race of human units purged of small ideals and ambitions, cleansed to the point where education can at least proceed with economy—that is, without having to destroy two ounces of superstition to produce one ounce of knowledge. And at the foundation of such a race structure, I believe, will be a corner stone of Individualism—or whatever you may choose to call it. What it means is very simple: it is a matter of heightened inner life.

Our culture—or what little we have of such a thing—is clogged by masses of dead people who have no conscious inner life. The man who asked, “Did you ever see an old artist?” put a profound question. People get old because they have no vision. And they have no vision because they have no inner life. Of course, any sort of inner life is impossible to the man or woman who must be a slave instead of a human being. And this brings us, of course, to a discussion of economic emancipation—which I shall not take advantage of; because I want to talk here not of what the individual should have done for him, but of what he might very well do for himself. There are so many slaves whose bondage can be traced to no cause except their refusal or their inability to come to life; and the significance of the fact that spiritual resourcefulness is most rare among those persons who have the most leisure to cultivate it need not be emphasized even in an article devoted to the apparent.

Human weakness is reducible to so many causes beside that much-abused one of “circumstance.” We talk so much nonsense about people not being able to help themselves. The truth is that people can help themselves out of nine-tenths of all the trouble they get into. (We’ll leave the other tenth to circumstance.) If they could only be made to realize this, or that if they are helped out by some one else they might as well stay in trouble! To be dragged out is more desirable than starving to death, because it is more sensible, and because people are so sentimental in their attitude toward receiving that one welcomes almost any emergency which drives them to accepting aid with grace and honesty: anything to teach a man that he need not smirk about taking what he himself would like to give without being smirked at! But in spite of this, one must help himself to anything which is to be of positive value to him; and must learn that personality gets what it demands. However, this begins to sound like a pamphlet from East Aurora....

As a result of our shabby thinking on the subject of self-dependence we have lowered our standards of the exceptional to an alarming degree. We call that person exceptional who does what almost any one might do—but doesn’t. For instance:

The average girl of twenty in a conventional home hates to be told that she must not read Havelock Ellis or make friends with those dreadful persons known vaguely as “socialists,” or that she must not work when she happens to believe that work is a beautiful thing. She is submerged in the ghastly sentimentalities of a tradition-soaked atmosphere—and heaven knows that sentimentalities of that type are difficult to break away from. It takes not only brains, but what William James called the fundamental human virtue—bravery—to do it. And so the girl gives up the fight and moans that circumstances were too much for her. The next stage of her development shows her passing around gentle advice to all her friends on the noble theme of not being “hard” and living only for oneself; how one must sacrifice to the general good—never having had the courage or the insight to find out what the general good might really be. Thus are our incapacities extended. The girl who did break away she regards secretly as remarkable—which is not necessarily true. It is not that the second girl is remarkable, but that the first one is inadequate.

The average man of thirty-five slaves all day in an office and comes home at night to wheel the baby around the block and fall asleep over the newspaper. He has lost any feeling of rebellion, simply because he feels that he must. His permanent attitude is that all men are more or less in the same condition (or should be, if they’re well-behaved), and that to part with a vision after college is what any man of sense must do. His neighbor with an eye on something beyond an office desk and a go-cart is a dreamer or a fool; if the neighbor makes good with his dream, then he is a remarkable man of extraordinary capabilities. Which is not necessarily true, either; the dreamer has simply scorned that attitude which has been so aptly epitomized as “the second choice.”

There are as many phlegmatic radicals as there are conservatives; and there is no type among them more exasperating than the one that is content to sit around and be radical—and be nothing else. The lazy evasiveness of the “revolutionary” with his the-world-owes-me-a-living air positively sicken me. Why should the world owe anybody anything except a protection against that lack of struggle which cramps one’s intellectual muscles so hideously?

And then there is that most unpleasant type of all—the man who boasts of how he will use his chance when he gets it. He always gets it, of course; but he doesn’t know it. And when it comes out boldly and takes him by the ear he becomes terrified and slips back under the cover of things as they are. His is the most unattractive kind of intellectual cowardice, because it involves so many lies; it is simply a rapid sequence of boasting and fright and refusing to meet the truth.

Here they all are—the uncourageous company of the second choice: the half-people, the makeshifts, the compromisers, the near-adventurers. How pale and ambling they look; how they crawl through the world with their calculating side looks, ready to take any second-rate thing when the first-rate one costs too much. Oh, it is a sad sight!

We must be more brave! We must be more fine! We must be more demanding! The saddest aspect of the whole thing is that choice is such a tiny element in the process of becoming. It is after one has chosen highly that his real struggle—and his real joy—begins. And only on such a basis is built up that intensity of inner life which is the sole compensation one can wrest from a world of mysterious terrors ... and of ecstasies too dazzling to be shared.

Souls are weighed in silence, as gold and silver are weighed in pure water, and the words which we pronounce have no meaning except through the silence in which they are bathed.—Maeterlinck.

A Letter from London

Amy Lowell

August 28, 1914.

As I sit here, I can see out of my window the Red Cross flag flying over Devonshire House. Only one short month ago I sat at this same window and looked at Devonshire House, glistening with lights, and all its doors wide open, for the duke and duchess were giving an evening party. Powdered footmen stood under the porte-cochère, and the yard was filled with motors; it was all extremely well-ordered and gay.

I watched the people arriving and leaving, for a long time. It was a very late party, and it was not only broad daylight, but brilliant sunshine, before they went home. They did have such a good time, those boys and girls, and they ended by coming out on the balcony and shouting and hurrahing for fully ten minutes. How many of those young men were among the “two thousand casualties” at the Battle of Charleroi, of which we have just got news?

Devonshire House is as busy this afternoon, but it is no longer gay. In the yard is a long wooden shed, with a corrugated iron roof; there are two doors on opposite sides, like barn doors, and black against the light of the farther door I can see men sitting at a table, and boy scouts running upon errands. The yard is filled with motors again, and there is a buzz of coming and going. Yesterday a man brought a sort of double-decked portable stretcher, with a place above and below, and a group stood round it and talked about it for a long time. For this is the headquarters of the Red Cross Society. So, in one short month, has life changed, here in London.

A month ago I toiled up the narrow stairs of a little outhouse behind the Poetry Bookshop, and in an atmosphere of overwhelming sentimentality, listened to Mr. Rupert Brooke whispering his poems. To himself, it seemed, as nobody else could hear him. It was all artificial and precious. One longed to shout, to chuck up one’s hat in the street when one got outside; anything, to show that one was not quite a mummy, yet.

Now, I could weep for those poor, silly people. After all they were happy; the world they lived in was secure. Today this horrible thing has fallen upon them, and not for fifty years, say those who know, can Europe recover herself and continue her development. Was the world too “precious”, did it need these violent realities to keep its vitality alive? History may have something to say about that; we who are here can only see the pity and waste of it.

So little expectation of war was there, so academic the “conversations” between the powers seemed, that on the Friday, preceding the declaration of war, we went down to Dorchester and Bath for a week-end outing. It was rather a shock to find the market-place at Salisbury filled with cannon, and the town echoing with soldiers. The waiter at the inn, however, assured us that it was only manœuvres. But the next day our chauffeur, who had been fraternizing with the soldiers, told us that it was not manœuvres; they had started for manœuvres, but had been turned round, and were now on their way back to their barracks.

As we came back from Bath, on Monday, we were told that gasolene was over five shillings a can. That was practically saying that England had gone to war. But she had not, nor did she, until twelve o’clock that night. When we reached our hotel we found a state bordering on panic. There was no money to be got, and all day long, for two days, people (Americans) had been arriving from the Continent. Without their trunks, naturally. There was no one to handle trunks at the stations in Paris. These refugees were all somewhat hysterical; perhaps they exaggerated when they spoke of disorder in Paris; later arrivals seemed to think so. But we are untried in war—war round the corner. It is a terrifying nightmare which we cannot take for reality. Or could not. For it is now three weeks since the war burst over us, and already we accustom ourselves to the new condition. That is perhaps the most horrible part of it.

But that first night in London I shall never forget. A great crowd of people with flags marched down Piccadilly, shouting: “We want war! We want war!” They sang the Marseillaise, and it sounded savage, abominable. The blood-lust was coming back, which we had hoped was gone forever from civilized races.

But the Londoners are a wonderful people. Or perhaps they have no imagination. London goes on, and goes on just as it did before, as far as I can see. I understand that the American papers, possibly taking their cue from the German papers, say that London is like a military camp, that soldiers swarm in the streets, and that its usual activities are all stopped. It is not true. “Business as usual” has become a sort of motto. And it is as usual,—perhaps a bit too much so. The mass of the people cannot be brought to realize the possibility of an invasion. In vain the papers warn them, they believe the navy to be invincible. And Heaven grant that it is!

When, that first week of the war, bank holiday was extended to four days instead of one; when the moratorium was declared, which exempted the banks from paying on travellers cheques and letters-of-credit; and when, to add to that, so many boats were taken off, and there were no sailings to be got for love or money, something closely approaching a panic broke out among the Americans. And what wonder! They felt caught like rats in a trap, with the impassable sea on one side and the advancing Germans on the other. For Americans have not been brought up with the tradition of England’s invincibility at sea. They have heard of John Paul Jones and the “Bonhomme Richard.” And they have imagination. I was told that one woman had killed herself in an access of fear, and I have heard of another who has had to be put in an asylum, her mind given way under the strain. Many of these people had no money, and they could not get any; they came from the Continent and had to find lodgings, and they could offer neither money nor credit. The Embassy had no way of meeting the strain flung upon it. The Ambassador is not a rich man, and the calls for money were endless. Finally some public-spirited American gentlemen started a Committee, with offices at the Hotel Savoy, to help stranded Americans. And the work they have done has been so admirable that it is hard to find words to describe it. The Committee cashes cheques, gets steamship bookings, suggests hotels and lodgings, provides clothes, meets trains. I cannot write the half it does, but it makes one exceedingly proud. I do not believe that there is an American in London who has not helped the Committee with time or money, or been helped by it.

Perhaps the panicky ones have all been cared for and gone home, or perhaps man is a very adaptable animal. But we who are still in London have settled down and accepted things. The town is not like a camp, but still regiments of soldiers in khaki pass along fairly often. And during the few days when it was my duty to meet trains at Victoria Station, no train from the South Coast either arrived or left without its quota of soldiers. We motored down to Portsmouth last Sunday, and we were stopped at the entrance to the town and asked to prove that we were not Germans. It was not a very difficult task. Portsmouth is swarming with soldiers, but until we reached it, the only evidence of changed conditions was the strange absence of cyclists and motor-cyclists on the roads.

The other day I was waiting on a street corner. I was going to cross over and buy a paper. (The papers bring out new editions all day long, and in taxis, on buses, walking along the street, every one is reading a paper.) Suddenly I heard someone shout my name, and there were Richard Aldington and F. G. Flint. They were in excellent spirits; Richard Aldington had just been down to put his name on the roster of those willing to enlist. Flint cannot enlist; he is already serving his country in the Post Office, and sits all day long in the most important and most dangerous building in the world next to the Bank of England. It is guarded by soldiers and surrounded by bomb-nets, but London is full of spies! I thought of the exquisite and delicate work of these two men in the Anthologie Des Imagistes, and it seemed barbarous that war should touch them—as cruel and useless as the shattering of a Greek vase by a cannon ball. I remembered the letters of Henri Régnault I had read, long ago. I remembered how he gave up his studio in Algiers and came back to fight for France, and died in the trenches. We read of these things, but when we find ourselves standing on a street corner talking to two young poets who are preparing to face the same experiences—Well! It is different!

This is one side. There is, unhappily, another. Something that one feared, and is not glad to see. There is not that realization that there should be of the danger England is in, nor that rush to defend her that one associates with the English temper. They are not enlisting as they should, and that is the bare truth of the matter.[1] And there is a certain hysteria beginning to show, which is terribly un-English, as “English” has hitherto been. The appeal to men to enlist has become almost a scream of terror. The papers are full of it, in editorials, in letters from private persons. And still the Government delays to declare general mobilization. Instead, it adopts measures which seem positively childish. Lord Kitchener asks the taxi-cabs to carry placards urging enlistment, and when some of the union cab-drivers refuse, the papers solemnly urge a patriotic public to boycott the placardless cabs. And all England is supposed to be under martial law! Could anything be more miserably humorous? It is hard to imagine Wellington asking favors of cabmen, and, when he was refused, begging the populace to punish the offenders. The following advertisement in this morning’s Times illustrates the enthusiasm and the apathy which are rife at the same time:

Doctor’s wife, middle-aged, will undertake to perform the work of any tramway conductor, coachman, shop-assistant, or other married worker with children, provided that worker will undertake to enlist and fight for his country in our hour of need. All wages earned will be paid over to the wife and family.—Apply Mrs. Lowry, 1, Priory-terrace, Kew Green, S.W.

Perhaps one of the saddest evidences of a changed England is Mr. H. G. Wells’s letter to Americans in The Chronicle of August 24th. For an Englishman to implore a foreign country to do or not to do anything, is new. Englishmen have not been used to beg weakly, with tears in their eyes. Whatever one may think of Mr. Wells’s contention in this letter, the tone in which it is written is a lamentable evidence of panic. Panic has never been an English trait, and neither has whining servility. And the Americans are the last people in the world to be moved by it. We are a just people, and we admire valor. I think Mr. Wells need not have stooped to ask us for justice or sympathy.

After all, it purports little to point out the spots on the sun. England is still the mother-country of most Americans, even if that was a good while ago. And we love her. She has given us not only our blood, but our civilization. Since this war broke out she has harbored us and kept her ships running for us. In Paris, one must get a permit from the police to stay or leave. In England, one is free and unmolested. England has always been the refuge of oppressed peoples. Does she need to ask our sympathy now that she is, herself, oppressed? Neutral we must be, and neutral we shall be, but we are not a military nation, and despotism can never attract us.

Every American would rather a bungling democracy than the wisest despot who ever breathed.

[1] This condition has somewhat improved since above was written.

Cause

Helen Hoyt

As the surprise of a woman

When she knows that she is pregnant,

Is the surprise of a murderer

Beholding that he has killed.

That so small a moment of time,

That so slight an act should suffice!

No plan, no purpose, ordained what befell,

Only the wild urging blood and muscle

And swift desire.

These,

In an instant,

Beyond retraction,

Could set in motion all the long inexorable processes of life:

All the long inexorable processes of death.

Could establish that which may not be effaced,

Which alters the world.

New Wars for Old

Charles Ashleigh

The Mob, by John Galsworthy. [Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York.]

I confess to a certain disappointment at this play. Not that it is a bad play. It would be hard for Galsworthy to write badly. But, both dramatically and philosophically, it might have been better, and, judging by Galsworthy’s previous work, could easily have been better. Justice, Strife and The Pigeon, for instance, are immeasurably superior to this play.

The theme of the play is the protest of an upper-class statesman against a war of conquest with a small nation in which his country is engaged. His wife and family are all normally patriotic and his stand estranges them. His governmental position is lost, as is also his parliamentary membership. Sir Stephen More makes a magnificent stand for his ideal. His courage and consistency result in his death at the hands of the victory-drunken mob. And yet,—I was left cold.

It must have been my realization of the futility of his cause which killed my warmth; and yet I am an admirer of forlorn hopes and their leaders. It was, perhaps, more the artificiality of his espousement of peace, and the grounds for this espousement, which failed to move me.

To begin with, More belongs to the class which really benefits by war: the monied, aristocratic and governing class. To such people patriotism is a natural and inevitable source of action, as it is rooted in their very substantial stake in the country. Love of the fatherland, which has given them so much, and the duty of fighting its wars, or of encouraging others to fight them, is a very vital and vigorous thing in them. Against this, More had nothing to advance but a very negative propaganda: an appeal to the strong to act “honorably” by pitying and sparing the weak (a perfectly sickening reason); and the invoking of a hazy abstract idea of “justice” which has about as much power to influence men’s actions as a policeman has to maintain morality.

More was a member of the imperial class; and he became a “Little Englander.” He was a member of a soldierly class; and he became an advocate of peace for peace’s sake. He opposed a cloudy concept of conduct,—utterly unrelated to the facts of life,—to a deep-rooted instinct founded on the material benefit of his own class. And this was the reason of his failure. He had nothing grippingly affirmative to give the people, and he should have realized that to appeal to the rulers was hopeless.

A great, popular, full-blooded thing like war must have a great, popular, full-blooded thing to counteract it. Also, we must remember that the life of the masses of people is not such a beautiful and colored thing that death on the battle-field is such a very dreadful alternative. Painting the horrors of war,—its sordid and unheroic side,—is not enough. Nothing could be more sordid and unheroic than the gray existence of the factory hand. A new, full gospel of affirmation, revolt, and militancy must be set against the war-passion. The spirit of conflict is good; it is essential to continuity; it is the breaker of old forms and the releaser of new life. It can, however, be directed along newer and more gainful channels than that of international market-struggles.

The people who can stop wars are the people who fight wars. And they can stop them by the divinely simple method of refusing to fight; and by refusing to provide food, clothing, and transportation to any that do fight. The worker operates industry and can shut off supplies if he will. Anyone who preserves a faith that the governors may end war is sustaining himself with a straw.

But if the people, the mass of producers, are to stop war, they must first be stirred; and a negative pacific preaching will never stir them. Only a call to a greater and more vital war can move them.

Such a war exists. It is the hand-to-hand struggle against exploitation, against the economic bondage which has fettered the minds and bodies of the larger portion of the race for ages past. This conflict is affirmative: it calls for courage, endurance, and comradeship. Also it is true, because it has its roots in the biological basis of life—love and hunger. The stir of passion is in it: the passion of hate and the passion of love, and also the love of a good fight; and without these elements there is no war worth the while.

But all this, it seems, More did not realize. And, had he realized it, he could have done but little. He was too removed from the “mob” to speak their tongue, too far from them to share their feeling, too alien for his words to gain a foothold in the crannies of their being.

The mob that killed More had made More, and all others of his kind. The despised mob had fought his battles on the field of war and on the field of industry. For the one they killed they had nurtured thousands. Inchoate and all but inarticulate, in this mob is the divine stuff out of which shall be formed the master-people to come, when once they decide to fight their own war instead of that of their task-masters.

Nothing, not even conventional virtue, is so provincial as conventional vice; and the desire to bewilder the middle classes is itself middle-class.—Arthur Symonds.

Ante-Bellum Russia

Alexander S. Kaun

The effects that the European War will have—and is having already—on the internal conditions in Russia are merely conjecturable, considering the fact that since the first week in August we have had no sterling news from the embroiled countries. I believe that a study of the pre-war situation in Russia, of her recent moods and aspirations, will enable us to venture a guess or two as to the potential results of the present imbroglio. The forthcoming is by no means an attempt to exhaust the problem: it is barely a bird’s-eye view of contemporary Russian reality as reflected in life and literature.

I

In a recent article an eminent Russian publicist thus characterizes the modern literature of his native land:

It is quite clear: With the death of Tolstoy our literature also expired. Not orphaned, bereaved; it died, came to an end, perished....

In fact, what does our modern literature teach us? It positively preaches all the instincts, the complete “credo” of the bestialized criminal. Self-despite, sacrilege, sexual licentiousness, political mutiny, commendation of crime, hooliganish all-negation, stalest individualism, morals of an outlaw, the ideology of fratricide-Cain, the codex of an apache and Jack-the-Ripper.

Taking the above philippic cum grano salis, we must, however, consider it as a characteristic phenomenon illustrating the contemporaneous moods of Russian society in the process of its prolonged morbid crisis. For if literature is supposed to be the mirror of life; if in literature we find the true reflection of a people’s feelings, cravings, ideals, struggles,—then Russia presents the most vivid demonstration of this truth. In no other country has literature reflected real life with such a consequential and accurate preciseness as has that of the land of the Czar in all its epochs and stages. If, therefore, the modern Russian literature has a morbid aspect; if its heroes preach adultery, crime, free love, and praise the lowest mob instincts; if it does, and to a large extent it unquestionably does represent a base degradation, then we must needs look into the very life of that unhappy country in search for the causes of its mental affliction, then “something is the matter” with holy Russia.

II

As a pendant to the quoted jeremiad, I shall cite another distinguished Russian publicist, whose keen observation equals his absolute truthfulness:

A filthy torrent flows over wide Russia—a torrent of savageness, bloodthirstiness, cruelty, sexual wantonness, intoxicated cynicism. The torrent overflows and deluges and infects all spots of life and ruins the soul of the nation.... The man, the person is of no value or consideration. There is no self-respect nor respect for others. The provoked instincts know of no hold-back. The sexual passion intermingles with the passion to torture and to tyrannize. The atmosphere is veiled in a bloody fog. The venom has penetrated all over, through all ranks of the population. Bloody and shameful deeds have become an every-day occurrence not only among the higher society—army officers, bureaucrats, noblemen, cultured and uncultured capitalists; you meet with the same crimes likewise among the poor urban populace, among the lower strata, the so-called “masses”; similar dramas occur also in the village.... The same all over. Everywhere the nonchalance disposition. Everywhere the morbid passion in the first place. “I want—and I must. And to the devil with the whole world and with myself.”

Exaggeration? Hardly.

The Russian dailies give amazing material for the student of sociology. The impartial chronicling of daily events tells us a dreadful story of a people that have lost every sense of moral sensitiveness and value of life. Facts of wildest debauchery and corruption, murder and suicide, defloration and parricide, to the accompaniment of governmental executions, hanging and shooting, fill up column after column of the periodical press. A Russian journalist remarks:

And this is our every-day life. This occurs every day, every hour. It is not any more a sensation or a crying extraordinary occasion that awakens general attention and astonishment. It is—daily happenings. It is the general tone of our life. Oftentimes one does not notice such items of news—so trivial have they become. “Ah, another bloody drama! How tedious, by God!” And the “citizen” lays aside the paper with a dull yawn.

Such is life in that strange country, and consequently such is its literature, life’s mirror, its product and interpretation.

III

The definition of Russian literature as Heroic was perfectly true until a few years ago. The literature, like the life itself, had been a continuous heroism. The harder the oppressions from above, the more resolute was the fighting spirit below; the wilder the reaction that raged over the throbbing country, the loftier were the ideals of the struggling people; the more acute the sufferings of the gloomy present, the brighter and the more attractive appeared the perspectives of the future.

Ever since the first revolutionary outbreak in 1825, the so-called Insurrection of the Decembrists, the Russian populace has had one great ideal, one ardent all-embracing aim—the overthrow of the autocracy, the impersonification of evil, injustice, and tyranny. This goal has been the sense of life, the justification of man’s existence, the holy spirit elevating and purifying the miserable subjects of the Czar, the solace for the eternal humiliation, the compensation for the unique martyrdom of that unfortunate nation.

A great, an inestimable rôle has been played by Russian literature in the education of the public. Though restricted by draconic rules of the bigoted state censorship, it succeeded in speaking to the public in an Aesopic tongue, training the readers in the gentle art of understanding between the lines. It preached idealism, self-sacrifice, unbounded devotion and love to their suffering compatriots, and unlimited deadly hatred for the common foe—the Tyrant.

The elevating influence of that idealistic literature has been displayed most manifestly upon Russian youth, particularly upon university students. The susceptible young souls followed the call of their great teachers and guides, and plunged with zeal and ardor into the battle. Selfishness, life’s diversions and conventionalities had no place in their puritanic minds. To fight for freedom was their only “sport”; to enlighten the masses, their sole “amusement”; to die on the scaffold for the Ideal, the climax of happiness.

In that enduring bitter struggle there have been but two sides, two antagonistic camps—the government and the people. On one side rude force, violence, and outspoken retrogression; on the other—notwithstanding minute differences in party platforms and theoretical principles—an all-uniting ocean of lofty ideals, spiritual forces, great hopes, boundless altruism.

Noblesse oblige. The great common cravings and aims must needs have cultivated a high standard of morals and intercourse among the people. The able correspondent of The London Daily Chronicle, Henry W. Nevinson, who had had the opportunity of closely observing Russian life during the unforgettable red years of 1905-1906, justly remarked:

To have a cause like that (the Revolution), to dwell with danger for the sake of it every day and night, to confront an enemy, vital, pitiless, almost omnipotent, and execrable beyond words—what other cause can compare to that, not only in grandeur, but in the satisfaction of intellect and courage and love and every human faculty? So tyranny brings its compensations.

IV

The general strike and uprising of October, 1905, compelled the obstinate Czar to “grant” a tolerable constitution. It seemed that the long struggle had come to an end, that the desired goal having been reached, the bitterly fought-for concession having been attained, there was no reason for continuing the bloody war between the government and the people. The Manifesto of 30 (17) October, 1905, pledged liberty of speech, press, and public meetings, equal rights for all, and a representative government with a comparatively liberal election-system.

Only those who happened to abide in Russia during the autumn months of 1905 are able to comprehend the indescribable joy of the population at the announcement of the Manifesto. An intoxication of happiness reigned all over the country, strangers embraced and kissed each other, everyone was addressed with the hearty “comrade,” a sincere feeling of brotherhood and mutual love overfilled all hearts, and from Finland to farthest Siberia, from the polar regions to the Black Sea, over the entire vast empire thundered the exalted cry: “Long live liberty!”

The enchantment, however, was of a short duration. The people soon found out that they had put too much confidence in the paper pledge of the Czar, and that they should not have laid their weapons aside. The solemn promise declared from the heights of the throne was broken. One after one the pledged liberties were taken away, and a wave of brutal repression and massacre swept over the tormented land. Only too late one could recollect with the American Russologue Joubert, the ever-new aphorism of Bertrand: “The tree of liberty can grow only when it is watered with the blood of the tyrants.”

The government recovered its senses after the first collapse, and decided to play its game on the obscurity and ignorance of the army. The simple-minded soldiers, themselves miserable peasants or workingmen, were ordered to shoot and flog their fathers and brothers, their friends and defenders; and they fulfilled their official duty with incomparable brutality. The revolution was betrayed and strangled. Its leaders were shot, hanged, or banished; the free press shut up, liberal parties and meetings forbidden, and once more the monster-bureaucracy held in its claws the palpitating unhappy land.

V

Let us return to the problem: What is the matter with Russia? What is the cause of its general decay and demoralization? The revolution proved a failure. The masses—the army particularly—were unprepared for carrying out the long cherished ideal. But that was not all. The Russian revolutionary movement has been used to failures and temporary collapses, the organizations have been destroyed and abolished many a time, and yet like a Phœnix they would arise from out the ashes and manifest their significant existence again and again. The cause, to all appearances, lies with the modernized system applied by the bureaucracy in its war with the people—the demoralization of the people. What Nicolas I. could not attain through his iron despotism; what Alexander III. failed to accomplish by means of crudest oppressions and restrictions carried through by such arch-tyrants as Pobyedonostzev, D. Tolstoy, Muravyov, etc.; what had been beyond the reach of Nicolas II. during the dictatorships of his genial assistants of the type of Plehve, the hero of Kishinev, or General Trepov, the man of Bloody Sunday (January, 1905),—this important point was won by the gentleman-butcher, the hangman in the frock-coat, the late premier Stolypin. The credit for having succeeded in breaking the spirit of the nation and for having brought it to the verge of demoralization is largely due to his policy.

To accomplish a coup d’état, to abolish the Douma and reinstall the old order of things, was the easiest attainable measure for Stolypin at the time of his appointment to the highest post in the state. The opposition was silenced by military force, the servile European financiers renewed their enormous credit to the “pacified” Czardom which had been on the brink of bankruptcy, and it seemed an obvious step to declare urbi et orbi the successful restoration of the ancient autocracy. But Mr. Stolypin was a politician of Bismarck’s school. He loathed the laurels of a Pyrrhic victory. The rich experience of his ill-famed predecessors had taught him that the more harshly he suppressed the opposition the deeper it would grow and develop in the “Underground”; that the closer he stopped up the yawning crater the more intense and terrible would be the inevitable explosion. A complete return to the old regime would again unite the entire nation within and the civilized world from without in common hatred for the outworn Asiatic despoty. Instead the shrewd premier chose the old Cæsarean maxim, Divide et impera.

To incite racial hatred among the heterogeneous strata of the one hundred and thirty millions population; to provoke the meanest mob instincts and to flatter the lowest chauvinistic sentiments; to create mutual ill feelings in all ranks of society by various provocative means; to incarnate espionage in the national life as a virtue; to corrupt and prostitute all state institutions, so as to kill every sense of confidence in the mercenary justice and respect for all authorities; to arrest intellectual progress by barring and banishing the best professors, by forbidding enlightenment organizations, by distracting young minds from social problems through unscrupulous patronage of nationalistic societies in the high schools and universities, of “easy amusements” and all but clean sports; to augment crude force to the degree of absolute right and sole law,—these have been the chief strategic measures of the modernized absolutism.

It is true that a similar course, although on a considerably smaller scale, has been pursued by the Russian government all through the nineteenth century. The originality of Stolypin’s methods and of those of his less original successors lies in their up-to-dateness, their quasi-modernism, their pseudo-constitutionalism, their hypocritical jesuitism. Actually Russia represents the same old Asiatic despotism as of olden days. Officially, however, it wears with a clumsy awkwardness the European frock-coat of parliamentarism. It is a modern Janus, with an artificial human expression towards the outside world, and with its natural primitive bestial front at home.

The Douma, the long-cherished ideal of the people, was transformed from a house of representatives into an ante-room of the government, into a shameful profanation of parliamentarism. The first two Doumas gave an overwhelming opposition to the government, and the latter found an easy way to get rid of its disagreeable opponents by dissolving the Assemblies and suing the deputies as rebels. The unscrupulous Senate issued a series of “modifications” to the electoral laws, and thus insured for the later Doumas a “desirable” element. Having deprived the majority of the populace of voting rights, giving all means of assistance and protection to the “Black Hundreds”—criminal societies flourishing under the standard of patriotism, terrifying the average voter and driving him into political absenteeism, the government succeeded in gaining a majority of obsequious manikins who have sold the people for a pottage of lentils and have debased the Douma to a purely instrumental force in the hands of Stolypin & Co.

Even the moderate liberals of the type of Professor Paul Milyoukov or Prince Eugene Troubetzkoy, who have been ardent supporters of the Douma as a means of educating the people on constitutional ideas,—even they are gradually losing their rosy expectations. Representative Maklakov, a man to whom even the late Stolypin, his bitterest antagonist, paid the highest respect, in his report on the Douma cried in despair: “One could have hoped that the Douma was useless. Alas! It is getting harmful.”

VI

About a year ago the writer of these lines thus summarized the “Contemporaneous Russian Nihilism”:

The bureaucracy celebrates its victory over the people. The heretofore united forces are divided, the sacred ideal polluted, the bitterly-fought-for constitution brought down to a mocking buffonade, and the “Mighty Ham,” whose coming was predicted a few years ago by the illustrious Merezhkovski, has his day in the degradated country. The Russian giant who had temporarily awakened after a slumber of centuries, snores again hopelessly. Over the vast continent reigns a suffocating atmosphere of despair, decay, and demoralization. A thick fog of nihilism, not the Nihilism of Turgenyev’s times, but nihilism in its direct negative meaning, enwraps the martyred land of the Czar, and one can hardly discern a bright spot on the cloudy horizon.

In the past year the “cloudy horizon” has slightly brightened. Grave symptoms have appeared in the seemingly calm atmosphere which suggested Vereshchagin’s All is Quiet on Shipka. Notwithstanding the strict censorship of dispatches one could easily discern from the news items that the volcano has not been extinguished yet. True, the orgy of the reactionary forces has not abated; freedom of spoken and written word is still a myth; the majority of the Douma is “a trillion times blacker than black”—to use a Bodenheimesque figure; the revolutionary organizations are dragging a pitiful existence in the underground, and the average citizen is still seeking safety from the cossack’s knout in phlegmatic splein. Yet signs of gratifying unrest have been manifestly displayed of late in various camps of the Empire. The rapidly developing capitalistic class has come to realize the deadening effect of the bureaucratic regime on industry and commerce, and resolutions have been passed at numerous conventions of manufacturers, bankers, and other big business-men, condemning the stifling policy of the archaic government. The tragicomedy of the Beilis process which revealed the puerile helplessness of the rotten State justice, has united all cultured Russia in a tremendous protest against the existing order; lawyers, journalists, physicians, artists, teachers, and men of other liberal professions, signed fiery resolutions whose leit-motif was Chekhov’s sad verdict—“Such life is impossible!” The unrest among the army, and particularly among the navy, has had a great symptomatic significance. Multitudinous arrests among soldiers and sailors, sporadic trials of revolutionary military organizations, frequent transportations and transfers of regiments and vessels, declaration of martial law in some important ports,—such have been the albatrosses of the oncoming storm. After the crash of the proletarian uprising of 1905 the remnants of the revolutionists have concentrated all their forces against the stanchest citadel of Czardom—the army and the navy, justly considering that only a military coup d’état could change things in present day Russia. The situation became definitely threatening last July, during the visit of President Poincaré, when the Russian proletariat, defying all manners and bon ton towards “allied France,” suddenly and unexpectedly marred the display of friendly demonstrations by an epidemic outburst of general strikes in St. Petersburg (or must we, by order of Nicolas II., say—Petrograd?) and in other metropolises.

Amidst these pregnant preludes burst out the war bomb. For the tottering absolutism it came most timely as the saving trump. Whether we believe the press informations about the mad wave of patriotism overflowing Russia or not, there can be no doubt that in view of the threatening national catastrophy internal differences will lose their keenness and will give way to easily drummed-up imperial solidarity, as far as the average citizens are concerned. The uncompromising revolutionists will hardly have a considerable following, especially when we consider the fact that the Czar has been showing surprising tact and foresight of late by granting concessions to his subjects and lavishly extending tempting promises to the oppressed nationalities. The constantly humiliated and insulted citizen; the empoverished overtaxed moujik; the flogged workingman; the bleeding, robbed, deprived-of-rights Pole, Finn, Armenian, Caucasian, Jew, Lithuanian, Little-Russian,—all these elements that make up the abstraction “Russia” would have to possess a great deal of optimism in order to take seriously the spasmodic ejaculations of the drowning “Little Father” who has beaten the world’s record as a perjurer. Yet one need not be a specialist in mass psychology to predict the success of Nicholas’s bait. We may further prophesy that, whatever the outcome of the war, Russia will emerge purged and electrified, stirred and volcanized. Surely, “such life,” pre-war life, will be “impossible.”

The Silver Ship

Skipwith Cannéll

A silver ship with silken sail

Fled ghost-like over a silver sea,

Swift to an island leper pale

Where dead hands furled the silken sail.

Then to the island bore they me,

And left me, stricken, there to see

My silver ship with silken sail

Fade out across a silent sea.

The Butterfly

Skipwith Cannéll

One day in the lean youth of Summer, a butterfly was born upon the earth. To a brief day of beauty she was born, and to a long night.

Timidly her purple wings unfolded in the kind warmth of the sun. When they had grown strong, she began to flutter hither and thither, from flower to flower, a wingéd dream flitting as perfumes called her, from dream to dream.

At last, when the dark fingers of the night were clutching at the fields, from the brief stillness of twilight arose a brief summer storm. Only a few puffs of wind ruffled the grass, only a few growls of thunder silenced the birds, only a few warm drops of rain pattered among the trees. Then the storm passed and the sun shone over the wet earth as a sweetheart shines through her tears with promise of pardon.

But the warm wind had blown the butterfly against a twig, so that her wings were broken; and the soft summer rain had crushed her to the earth, so that she died. But there had been one passing, whose dreams were in music, and he had felt her beauty in his own. And he spun a web of harmony from the rainbow of his sorrow and the skeins of her beauty, so that men who had lost their dreams were snared in his net, and women whose hearts were buried wept for the death of a butterfly....

The Tidings

Skipwith Cannéll

Once upon a time, in a certain secret city of the East, lived a woman who was a sorceress. And she awaited tidings of great joy or tidings of terrible sorrow.

All day long, from her housetop, she had peered across the desert, seeking the messenger who did not come. At nightfall her servants returned to her with rumors gathered in the market place. With rumors of sorrow they returned and stood in a row before her with averted faces.

When she had heard their fears, she thanked them, and going down from the housetop, she sought a hidden chamber where she could be alone and silent. When she had pondered for awhile, she piled rare herbs in a brazier, and wet them with strange liquors, and touched fire to them. The flames flickered and smoked, singing a soft happy little song all to themselves. But she could read no answer in the singing, and no meaning in the coils of smoke; and she was very sad. At last, with a despairing gesture, she took certain secret things from the chest whereof she alone had the key, and those things she laid upon the fire and watched until they were consumed.

As soon as the embers were cold and gray, she took from the carven chest a vial of jade and a jade cup. From the vial she poured out a pale green potion, and raising the cup in her hands, she drank it to the end. Then she lay down upon the marble couch. In a little while she slept.

A sweet, heavy vapor rose from the cup, filling the room with perfume. The dregs glowed with dull evil light, for the potion had been poison, and her sleep was death.

In the morning came a messenger, bearing tidings of great joy.

Longing

George Burman Foster

It was indeed a world-historical movement, that old reformation of the Sixteenth century, snapping as it did the fetters of a Church that arrogated to itself all power in heaven and on earth, and defiantly asserting supremacy over the papacy. But the reformation of our day is much more radical and universal. Ours ends what that began, destroys what that established. The critical spirit of our time, this nothing can withstand unless it is in a position to justify and verify itself to the moral and rational judgment of mankind. In our time of day, what is church, what is state, what are society and law and sanctified custom—things that the old reformation partly inherited, partly organized, and wholly bequeathed to us? At best, tones for the musician’s use, clay in the hands of the potter, or stuff for the sculptor’s shaping, materials all, ductile or refractory, to be kneaded into forms for the habitation of man’s free spirit, man’s soul, man’s life. This critical spirit of an all-inclusive reform of life, to which everything belonging to life is subject, for which science works and art as well, living and active in the heart of modern humanity in countless problems, like the woman problem, the labor problem, like national and international social problems, with all their subdivisions,—this critical spirit gives our time a prophetic character. It summons all progressive spirits to the great struggle against a common foe, against all those forces which have banded together for a standstill of life and have made a lucrative and social-climbing business out of retrogression.

Can there be any doubt as to the stand we ought to take with reference to these great movements? May we not greet them as a new spring-time of humanity whose light and warmth shall vanquish winter, and bring life, joy and peace into the land? “When the Day of Passover was fully Come”—may we not see this day in these movements, when a spirit of truth and soul and freedom shall brood over men, and lead them to higher goals and greater tasks of human being?

To be sure, our era is not arbitrarily made, not excogitated and invented by man. To be sure, great elementary forces of life will come, must come, to their unfolding in these movements. To be sure, the matter of real concern is a new structure of humanity, new cultural and social forms, new world-views, new life-views. No doubt these forces of life will carry the individual along with them, will come upon him and coerce him when he does not so will, will not at all even ask him what he wills, what he has to say to them, or how he regards them. But on this very account, in surveying the great whole of our life development we easily lose sense for what is individual and special. Where classes and masses of men encounter each other, where world-moving thought jolt and undermine thousand-year-old traditions and customs, removing their very foundations, there the individual human soul suffers abridgement, there we forget that even the largest number consists of units, and that the greatest numerical worth is judged according to the worth of these units.

Therefore a great social thinker must reflect ever anew that man is the significant thing in every new social culture—is beginning and goal. To understand how to trumpet a word respecting man and his personality into this social movement and seething, this is to do an essential service to the modern way of viewing life, this is to warn us that we are not entirely impersonal in the presence of pure objectivity.

No one has done such service to our age in so signal a manner, as Friedrich Nietzsche. He is not the preacher of social, but of personal, man. However, fundamental hater of socialism that he was, he yet became a mighty moving and impelling force for socialism. He, too, wills a new culture, but he wills it through a new man. Therefore, he shows us the way to this new culture in that which is most personal to man, in man’s Longing, or yearning, or craving,—in man’s Sehnsucht,—a word of profound import to which none of these English words does justice.

To many ears that program does not sound provocative, promising, alluring. Sehnsucht is not a feeling that makes one happy and blissful—not a feeling to which one would like to accord a constant and abiding possession of one’s heart. “Only he who knows Sehnsucht knows what I suffer”—so sighed Goethe’s Mignon, one of the most impressive and marvelous characters the poet-genius ever created, an Incarnate Yearning, self-consumed in unquieted longing of soul, in Heimweh for a dreamily visioned distance, to walk in whose sunny beauty her feet were never destined. To preach Sehnsucht is to preach hunger. To hunger is to ache. The gnawing of a hungry stomach—but what is that compared with the gnawing of a hungry heart, when everything that seems good and great and worth striving after becomes elusive, unattainable, unintelligible, to passionate longing? Sehnsucht is not anxiety, it is worse than anxiety. Anxiety is petty; Sehnsucht is great and deep. In anxiety, life is dark, and darkness terrifies and distresses man. In Sehnsucht, life is luminous, but the light blinds the soul. Sehnsucht sees all light in a magical radiance, yet cannot clasp it; feels its overpowering attraction, yet cannot satisfy the eye with it. Prometheus chained to a rock, after he had filched the celestial spark from the gods! Tantalus, the luscious fruit just over his head, but wafted away as soon as he longs to grasp it with greedy hands! Yes, all the human heart’s deepest pain, this is Sehnsucht. Whoever names a pain that is not Sehnsucht has not peered to the bottom of pain’s chalice.

“Woe to that man through whom Sehnsucht comes!” we might almost cry. If you love me, do not stir up this yearning for the impossible that is in me, this hot, fervent craving, which can never find satisfaction, which can never enjoy the pleasures of life, or its own self. If you love men, save them from their very youth up in the presence of that tempestuous storm and stress into the Afar, where all solid shores vanish, all safe harbors are closed—save men, trembling, untranquil, from the everlasting question: Knowest thou the land? Knowest it well? Leave men their peace of mind, add no fuel to the flame of their discontent. Do not wrong them by letting them eat of the tree of knowledge. Do not show them the infinite expanse unrolling behind and beyond the narrow confines of their petty lives, thus spoiling the pleasure of their contentment, the joy they have in their limited and longingless life. Paradise is better than Wilderness. The familiar murmur of the brook in the meadow by the old home is more restful than the roar of the cataract or than the eternal haunting mystery and melody of the great sea. Such is the common cry of the lackadaisical, the longingless, the laissez-faire people to all of us who “turn the world upside down.”

Yes, we make all men sufferers—we who pilot their minds to what is not yet there, and to what they not yet are—we who show them a land lying undiscovered in mist or azure ahead of them. We make man seekers, we become disturbers of the peace—this is what they call our crime and blasphemy. Therefore, men give us a wide berth, warn others against our society, afraid of the yearning and hot hunger of soul which would come over them, were they once to hanker after a different fare from what they light upon in their troughs every morning, gorging themselves to an easy satiety—a different fare that would make them hunger ever anew, and arouse them to new longings. No, comfort men; free them from their painful Sehnsucht; teach them the foolishness of hitching their wagons to stars; tell them that all is well with them and make them content with any lot in life that may by chance be theirs! Then you will be their true benefactors; then you will heal the wounds from which the heart would otherwise so easily bleed!

Really? That is a good thing to do for men? The wise thing to say to the heart is: Break your wings in two, so you will not be tempted to brave the blue, to keep company with “the distant sea,” to explore the Afar? The comforting thing to do for the slave is to gild his chains, so that he may have joy in their glittering splendor and show them off as worth their weight in gold? How easy it would be then for the Czar of all the Russias “to go to Berlin if it costs me my last peasant!” How easy for the Vatican to silence the modernist! Throne and altar, an entente cordiale indeed, could then enjoy by “divine right” an unmolested and unworried repose upon a world of dumb, blind, brute peasants. But—

If I’m designed yon lordling’s slave—

By nature’s law design’d—

Why was an independent wish

E’er planted in my mind?

Why did God implant Sehnsucht in the heart of man? “Thou hast made us for Thyself and the heart is restless until it rests in Thee,” said Augustine long ago. Indeed, God is but another human name for Eternal Yearning.

All yearning is love—love that silently and secretly celebrates its triumphal entry into the soul. If you stood at the grave of a joy and felt pain over that which was lost, would not the pain of yearning be the measure, the consciousness, of your newly-awakened, ever-waking love? Would you like to calculate this yearning and exchange therefor coldness and indifference of heart? And if you felt a love so full and deep that moments had eternities concealed in them, even so, on the basis of this love yearning would live more than ever, it would open up to the soul new vistas, new goals, it would give love her life; and a love without yearning, which did not see beyond itself, did not love above itself, finished in that which it was, or it called its own—would quickly cease to be love. Yes, yearning redoubles all genuine love to man; it involves something becoming, something greater, purer, for which love lays the foundation and gives the impulse. Only he who knows yearning, knows what I love, so Mignon might have also said. There is something unslaked, unslakable, in every love, an insatiable hunger for more love, for better and purer love.

It is this yearning that saves love from being blind; it gives love the strength and courage of veraciousness; it plunges the heart into a struggle of desperation when a man of our love does not keep his promise, when he becomes pettier and baser than we had believed of him; and yet in this struggle it achieves the victory of faith which mounts above all the pettiness and baseness of the man, to the certainty of its strength, that love faileth never. In every love we love something higher than itself, something for which the heart is destined and endowed. This is the yearning in our love, a will, which stirs in all deep feeling of the heart, and guards against the death which every moment, sufficient only for itself, harbors. Every love, therefore, is itself a yearning: love for truth is the power to grow beyond a truth; love for righteousness is hunger and thirst after righteousness. In all the beauty that greets the eye and awakens exultation and joy in the heart, the soul ripens new sensitivity for new visions of the wonders of life, the heart widens so that it absorbs strength for new beauty and sees new beauty even in the darkness and dust of earth. A man without yearning is a man without love. And if one would guarantee man that satisfaction which one prizes as the most beautiful and most blissful lot on earth, then one must first stifle his heart or tear it from his breast; for as long as this heart still beats, and announces in every beat its insatiable hunger for love, so long will the man harbor and feel his yearning, which will not let the beating heart be satisfied.

But yearning is therefore not simply suffering, not simply love—of these we have been thinking—it is also life, the true life of man. The man who lives only for himself, and for the passing moment, does not live at all. And this is what Nietzsche says of man—man a transition and an end—yearning always interring an Old, always swinging a bridge across to a New—love loving the most distant and most future—vision sweeping up the ages to higher man. This, then, is man’s hour of great self-contempt. All his happiness, his wealth, his knowledge, his virtue, seems too little to fill his soul. There is insufficiency, nausea, as to all that he esteems, a cry of wrath from the deep of his being, a cry that sounds like madness to all who call themselves good and righteous, to all who call their execrable smugness a delight.

But this is the great tumultuous yearning, the thunder of whose soaring wings is forever in modern ears. It proffers man a new table of values; forward, not backward, shall he look; love Kinderland, the undiscovered land in distant oceans, that he may make amends to the children for their being the children of their fathers!

In this song of jubilee of yearning, who does not hear the old ring, which was once preached as glad tidings, as gospel of humanity! There, too, it was the seeking that were saved, the hungering and not the sated, the starving and not the full. And they, too, had their Higher Man—the Christ they called Him, their Yearning, their Love, their Life. They sang: For me to live is Christ; I live, yet not I; Christ lives in me. And as long as this Yearning lived in them, they were creative spirits. They put a new face upon the world. They transformed the world after the image of their Higher Man. A living, a socially organized Yearning, this is what the whole Middle Age was, with its Below and its Above, where each lower man had in each higher man a rung of the heavenly ladder on which he should climb to a higher existence. A yearning hewn in stone, that was their dome; yearning they sang in their most impressive hymns and masses; and yearning breathed all those celestial figures as they lifted their glorified eyes to the Higher Man of Heaven, the Man Thorn-crowned, Crucified and Risen.

Then the glow of this yearning was cooled by the cold north wind of reality. Yearning petrified. There was no inclination to keep it from dying. They were swift to deal it a deadly blow. They thought they had accomplished marvels to have torn themselves loose from it. “No more Sehnsucht now,” they said, “for we have found happiness!” They smirked and they blinked. Their Higher Man died along with their yearning. The scholars indeed had discovered that this Higher Man was only “man,” a Jewish rabbi whom the people of his day mistakenly held to be a Higher Man, a Messiah, but who now to them themselves and to all moderns belongs to Lower Man, to Past Man. To be sure, it goes against the grain of all of them for their Higher Man to vanish from life, from the yearning of man. Therefore, they seek painfully and anxiously for a “Dignity” which they may still claim for their human Jesus. Above all, they thus forget that the Higher Man can never lie behind us, but only before us, not beside us, on a level with us, but only above us. Therefore, all their scholarship cannot rescue the Higher Man for us, and cannot give us back the Great Yearning. Only the living heart can do this, the heart that creates out of its own mystery a yearning. That heart with this yearning will overcome and retire the man of today—all who play the game as lords of today. The modern man of yearning looks beyond himself, works beyond himself, for a Man as high above present-day man as once the Christusbild was above the men of the long-lost past—a Man who will bear all the deeps of the world and all the deeps of its woes in his heart, while at the same time thirsting in its deepest depths for the eternities. This great yearning, this suffering and loving yearning, this is more than all the wisdom of the scribes, all the subtleties and hairsplittings of the theologians, this is the sacred womb from which a Christ life is born ever and ever again. “Only he who knows yearning, knows what I live!”—so might Mignon’s dear words be changed yet again. To save the Sehnsucht is to save the soul. Also sprach Goethe—Nietzsche!

The Wicked to the Wise

Arthur Davison Ficke

“A brilliant mind, gone wrong!” ...

O tell me, ye who throng

The beehives of the world, grow ye not ever weary of this song?

“The way our fathers went.” ...

Yes, if our days were spent

Sod-deep, beside our fathers’ bones, wise, needless were your argument.

“The wisdom of the mass.” ...

Thank God, it too shall pass

Like the breathed film hiding the face grayly within the silvered glass.

“All’s surely for the best!” ...

Aye, so shall be confessed

By your sons’ sons, marking where down we smote you as we onward pressed.

The Viennese Dramatists

Erna McArthur

One does not know quite how the modern literary movement in Vienna arose. Suddenly, some twenty years ago, there were some active young writers called “Young Vienna,” in a collective way, who were supposed to be revolutionary and bent on originality. In reality these young people had no definite literary program such as had been issued in Berlin by the leaders of the new naturalist movement. They were a circle of friends, who had heard of the new and wonderful things that had been done. They came to know Ibsen and the great Russian and French novelists; they were of the generation which was to be moved to the utmost by the philosophy of Nietzsche. Of course these influences had been working in the whole German-speaking world. Art was being taken seriously again and the young people were yearning to produce something new and original of their own.

Hauptmann had started a kind of revolution in Germany by his first play, Before Sunrise, and the Viennese, who lived a little isolated in their town, grew excited and enthusiastic over these doings.

A young writer, Hermann Bahr, was a kind of apostle for the new art in Vienna. He was a man of agility, capable of unbounded enthusiasm, who could go into ecstasy for all kinds of movements—for realism as well as neo-romanticism, for Ibsen and Zola, for Maeterlinck and d’Annunzio. He had been traveling about in Europe, had come in touch with all the leading personalities, and had brought the news home to his Viennese friends; he wanted to make a new Vienna in every way. A few years later he was active in organizing the young painters, sculptors, and architects, who evolved a very original and striking art.

So it came to pass that Hermann Bahr was considered the leader of everything modern—which meant “crazy” to the good citizen of the day. It was this same milieu of the citizen, the bourgeois, that produced all the young writers. In consequence, they were absolutely anti-bourgeois in their way of looking at things, in the very natural contrast of fathers and sons. Hence, too, they had a certain culture, good manners, and a predominant interest in æsthetic questions, as there had been no occasion for them to know the primitive cares of life. But they were tired of the narrowness and tastelessness of their milieu; they wanted to do things differently—to live and love differently; to put art into their surroundings, their dwellings, their dress; good taste—this had been a tradition of the old Vienna, lost in the transition-state when the middle-class element obtained its precedence over the old aristocracy—was now to take its place again.

Apart from the dislike of these Viennese young men for the bourgeoisie there were really very few positive tendencies that could join them into a group. Consequently very different artistic individualities developed. Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the two most representative, have very little in common in their work. But there was a spirit of friendship among all of them; they liked to meet in the cafés, which had always been Vienna’s center of social life, and to talk things over—the lightest and the deepest. A certain café used to be famous as the center of the young literary world. The old people who didn’t like the whole business called it the café of the crazy self-worshippers (something to that effect), and this title has stuck to it since. Today, the house has been demolished, its glory has passed, but there are still legends and stories told of the wonderful talk, the hot and breathless debates that once filled these rooms from morning till night—and till morning again.

In all this there was no real rebellion against any local literary tradition. The great Austrian writers of the past always held their own places; but the great dramatists did not reign on the stage of that day. It was nearly exclusively devoted to the French salon-play—Dumas, Augier, and their German imitators. Naturally a generation which looked for the true and real in art could not have much in common with these.

But there were certainly some features in Grillparzer and Anzengruber felt as congenial by the moderns. Grillparzer had possessed a sensuous softness, a musical beauty of language foreign to the contemporary North German. Thus an element of color and light—the soul of modern impressionism—entered in his creations, breaking through the severe contours characteristic of his generation, though in general he set great value on the strict architectonic upbuild of his dramas. In his tragedy of Hero and Leander perhaps the warmest love tragedy ever written in the German language, a strongly realistic description of Viennese type is hidden among the Greek clothing. Hero, consecrated priestess, who forgets her vows when she sees Leander, first full of reserve, then letting herself go in a full passion, might be the grandmother of Schnitzler’s sweet girl out of the suburb. Here she wears a charming Greek dress, her lonely tower stands on the seashore, and her lover, Leander, must swim through the whole Hellespont to reach her. The modern poet makes it easier for his heroes; the tower gets to be a little room in a Viennese suburb and a walk in the twilight through a few quiet streets brings him to his goal without much exertion. (And so you might find other parental traits between the two Austrians.)

There is a melancholy strain in Grillparzer’s personality and work which Schnitzler seems to have inherited. Side by side with the light-mindedness and ease of the Austrian, a certain tired melancholy and resignation seem to dwell. This sounds through many creations of Austrian artists. We hear it in Schubert’s music and feel it in the charming plays of Ferdinand Plaimund, who saw the harmony only in an upper sphere of fairies and magicians, whereas the life of the human beings seemed tumultuous and disordered to him.

Austria did not make it easy for her gifted children, and Grillparzer suffered all his life in his official career. It oppressed him and warped his creative power. Ludwig Anzengruber had to suffer under the same disadvantages, but he had a greater fund of good humor to set against it. He was a man of vigor and lebensbejahung (affirmation of life). Anzengruber was called the herald of naturalism and the Berlin people counted him as one of their number, producing his plays together with those of Ibsen and Hauptmann on the Berlin Free Stage.

Anzengruber applied the heightened sense for reality characteristic of modern art—be it called naturalistic or neo-romantic—to his own work and introduced a new material to the drama. The peasant story had been treated up to now in a moralizing way. The idyl of country innocence was to be shown and towns-people were to see the purer heart’s sentiment under the dirtier shirts. Anzengruber showed the peasants in their reality, neither better nor worse. His fingers are unnatural and stiff in representing types of the cultured classes speaking the literary German; his peasant types are of wonderful vitality. There is the old stone-cutter who has thought out a deep pantheistic philosophy. He relates it in his simple way: how it all came to him—how he was lonely, poor, lying in his cottage up in the mountains, how he saw the sun lying on the meadow and wanted to live in the sunshine, not in his miserable hut when he felt near dying. And then, out in the sunny meadow, it comes to him like a revelation that he is not really ill, not really poor, because nothing can happen to him—because everything around belongs to him and he belongs to everything. This deep pantheistic feeling expressed in this unpathetic way gives him from now on a perfect good humor not to be disturbed. He goes among the peasants looking on at their quarrelings and grumblings and helps them out of their worst plights in a good-natured way, but without bothering them in the least with his philosophy or any tendency toward improving them or the world in general.

Anzengruber, with such religious views as he expressed here, had to be opposed to the Catholicism in which he was brought up. He fights against the clericalism which was weighing so heavily on the peasants. He could feel their needs, for, though he was born in Vienna and lived there nearly all his life, there was more country than town blood in his veins. This connects him closer with Hauptmann, the Silesian, so deeply influenced in his art by home environment, than with any of the young Austrian writers who were all born in the big towns and did not know what firm rooting in the soil means. Anzengruber’s traditions could not be followed by them and there is the greatest contrast between his strong energetic work and the dainty, tender, delicate things produced by Schnitzler as the first product of the young Viennese school just a year after Anzengruber’s death. This was Anatol, a little work full of grace, charm, and playfulness. The loose way in which the seven scenes were connected only by Anatol’s figure was perfectly original. It was really nothing but little sketches put into dialogues characteristic of Vienna, the town whose special glamour consist in the dialogue of ordinary conversation; the pretty chat of the drawing room, the café raised to the dignity of a fine art; and with all this, having a lightness, a delicacy, a frothiness, a wit, and a quality of sadness not found anywhere else.

Women’s influence penetrated this art—in Austria just as in the Latin countries the cult of women had always been a factor of culture and with this generation of poets her triumphal epoch started. She was put into the center. It was written around her and it was written for her. Anatol belongs to those, for our days, improbable beings who only live for love; erotics are his sole occupation, his only profession. But he is not the victorious Don Juan full of self-confidence; he is rather quiet, with a shade of agreeable modesty,—a melancholic of love, he calls himself.

The young Hofmannsthal wrote an introduction to the work of his friend in dainty verses. They expressed the spirit of this art extremely well, so I will quote them partly, though it would require an artist to translate them in good form. He says:

Well, let’s begin the play,

Playing our own piece

Early matured, sad and tender,

Our own soul’s comedy;

Our feelings past and present,

Dark things lightly said,

Smooth words, joyous pictures,

Vague emotions, half experienced,

Agonies and episodes.

The sense of reality, which had been acquired in the school of Zola and Ibsen, was used here to make travels of discovery into the most interesting and unknown land of all—the over soul. And here the complicated, the unusual inmoods and feelings and emotions fascinated the young artists. Personality itself, though the center, took rather a passive part,—it simply came to be the scene of action, the meeting-place of all different impressions. People of the earlier time had been expressionists who projected their own ego into the outward world, whereas now they held themselves open to new impressions, observed them and their effect on the I and then reproduced their observations in artistic form. Impressionism, predominant in painting at that time, had taken hold of literature. Of course, this passivity could only be a stage of transition, because each artistic individuality tends from the passive to the active; but this impressionism was a good means of assimilating all the new possibilities in the inside and outside world.

Schnitzler, born as the son of a famous Viennese physician, and prepared to be a physician himself, was trained to observe. He had a sure scientific eye for human problems, a kind, objective benevolence, and tender forbearance for all sides of human life.

Anatol, his first work, is typical of all the following. Here we see the principal figures, the complicated lover as hero, a friend as the raisonneur,—a remembrance of the French play,—and seven different types of womanhood. Here they all are—the simple sweet girl, loving with her whole heart; the woman, who loves to play with men; the lady of the world, she who would like to love, but has not courage to do it.

The long line of his dramas, novels, and novelettes—for he tried to express himself in all these forms—all speak of love and death. For the pathetic element soon creeps into Anatol’s frivolousness. The presentiment of the transitory dwells in his creation—the end of love, the end of enjoyment and of passion, the end of life itself. But this permanent thought of death, not searching beyond the limits of this earth, gives a new intensity to the enjoyment of this life while it lasts. This feeling for life, for the simple joy of breathing, of seeing the spring once more, is one of Schnitzler’s most elementary conceptions. You may look at any of his plays and find this true—the call of Life, expressed with the utmost intensity. A young girl hears the call of life—she is fettered to the bedside of her ill father who never lets her out of his sight. She must stay with him—always—without the smallest pleasure, and suddenly she hears that the man she loves, a young officer whom she has seen only once, when she has danced in his arms a whole night long, must away to the war never to return. She can stand it no longer; she gives her father poison, the whole sleeping potion, and rushes away to him who is her only thought. And now events go in a mad rush; she in his room, unknown to himself, hidden behind a curtain, she sees the woman he loves, the beautiful wife of his colonel, come to him. She wants him to stay away from the war, save his life for her sake, and then suddenly the colonel stands between the two and shoots down his wife. The officer he leaves to judge himself. Over the corpse of the other woman the girl rushes into the arms of the man, who can belong to her for the few hours left to him. And after all these breathless events, she remains alone, bewildered, as if after a heavy dream. She lives on and cannot understand that there is still room for her in the world, with all her crime and grief and joy. But a wise and kind friend explains the connection and wins her over to life once more. These are his words—the drama’s conclusion: “You live, Marie, and it was. Since that night too and that morning, the days and nights go on for you. You walk through field and meadow. You pluck the wayside flowers and you talk with me here under the bright, friendly, midday sky. And this is living—not less than it was on that night when your darkened youth beckoned you toward gloomy adventures, which still today appear to you to be the last word of your being. And who knows, if later, much later, on a day like today, the call of the living will not cry within you much deeper, and purer, than on that day in which you have lived through things which are called by such terrible and glowing names as murder and love.”

The whole play seems to be written for the sake of the last beautiful words. It is Schnitzler’s greatest art to lift us to a sphere where everything seemingly important is solved, where tragedy and melancholy and sadness melt together into a wonderful serenity. His technique is full of subtlety; every little word and gesture has its place, its importance; we feel the weight of the smallest happening, the reality of a seemingly unmeaning fact, the deep consequence of a hasty word.

The milieu was nearly always Vienna. Here his over-cultivated, refined men were at home, here his soft and loving women. All the several circles, aristocrats, artists, physicians, business men, furnished material for his work; and even more than the people, the town itself grew to life. The elegant vivaciousness of the inner city, where the fashionable society meets at certain hours and fashionable little shops line the streets, the lonely little streets of the suburb, the wonderful charm of the Wiener Wald embracing the town with its soft rounded lines—all this rich flowering beauty that had surrounded him from childhood he gathered in his work. Perhaps more forcibly than any one else he brought Vienna’s charm to our consciousness. And so he returned to Vienna what he had received from her.

Only two of his plays are outside the Viennese milieu—The Green Cockatoo, a grotesque that puts us marvelously well in the Parisian atmosphere shortly before the outbreak of the French Revolution; and Beatrice’s Veil, a Renaissance drama which tempted almost every artist in those days. This epoch’s refinement, the powerful personalities peopling it, the intensity concentrated on the enjoyment of their life—in all this they saw something akin to their own life’s ideal.

Schnitzler’s plays have nothing of the fresco; they are more like Manet’s small landscapes with their richness of color and their soft contours diffused in light.

He made one attempt at a drama in big, unusually big, dimensions. It takes about six hours to perform on the stage, longer than the second part of Goethe’s Faust; it is a historic play of the Napoleonic time called The Young Medardus, but the Emperor himself remains in the background and only his shadow lies on the events. These take place in Vienna at the time that Napoleon had reached Austria on his triumphal march and resided for the time in Schonbrun, the Hapsburg’s castle near Vienna. The Viennese people as a mass are characterized—these people so easily moved, so easily influenced, growing enthusiastic now for Napoleon, now in a hasty patriotic emotion for their own Emperor, principally wanting one thing: to see some exciting spectacle, to hear news, to speak over interesting happenings. The broadest part of the drama is occupied by a love episode between the hero Medardus—a cousin, if not a brother of Anatol, only about a hundred years back—and the beautiful, proud, cold Duchess of Valois, who is in Vienna to intrigue against Napoleon, claiming the right to the French throne for herself and her own family. The work is full of beautiful and interesting episodes, but there is not enough architectonic power to join them together to a unity.

It is too early to view Schnitzler in a historic way—he is fifty years old and in the middle of his work; certainly he signified much for his own generation, for they felt themselves understood by him and he influenced and even formed their attitude and feeling. Whether his figures have enough of the timelessness, of the deep, full-rounded humanity which will give them power to speak to future generations I do not know. In a mood of paradoxical humor, Schnitzler himself criticised his own creation more severely than any critic could. We see a marionettes’ theater on the stage; the public there, eager for the play; the marionettes appear—all Schnitzler’s own figures: the complicated hero, the sweet girl, the demonic woman, and so on. The poet is there, full of excitement. The marionettes are to give his new play, but there is a rebellion. The marionettes want to do what pleases them, live their own life. In the midst of confusion, a mysterious man appears on the stage with a long naked sword in his hand; he cuts through the threads; the marionettes fall in a heap. The poet asks, half grateful, half bewildered, “Who are you?” But the unknown man cannot tell him; he is an enigma to himself. He wanders through the world and his sword makes it apparent who only is a doll, who a man. Schnitzler doomed his figures with more severity to the fate of dolls than is due them.

The second Viennese writer whose name became known beyond the town’s limits is Hugo von Hofmannsthal. He is a very different person from Schnitzler; both have the sensitive, refined, exclusively aesthetic valuation of things in common. But what was expressed more naively in Schnitzler came to be a program with Hofmannsthal. He joined a group of men with a strict “Art for Art’s sake” program, exclusive and intended only for the few. The principal of this group was Stefan George, a lyric poet who had fashioned the German language into poems of such beauty of form as to rival the poetry of the French lyricists, like Baudelaire or Verlaine. It was an art that irritated people somewhat, like that of the Cubists and Futurists. It was extremely hard to understand; the sense organs were mixed up, as he spoke of sounding colors, fragrant tones, and colored sounds. Hofmannsthal, with a great feeling for language and form, grew to be his follower.

These poets called themselves Neo-Romanticists, because their art was crowded full of symbols. The older Ibsen, with his symbolic world, Maeterlinck, with his mysterious little plays, were their models; with these the great artists of form, Swinburne and d’Annunzio. It was an eclectic, much-traveled type, assimilating old and modern cultures equally well.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal is characteristic of the type of the aesthete, with a rather priestly, exclusive bearing still found today frequently in Germany. These were no more the old Bohemians with a preference for a deranged toilette and way of living, but elegant young gentlemen who liked to appear in frock coats with ties and waistcoats fabulously gay of color. Also, in their surroundings their liking went to the utmost refinement and luxury. They loved the dignified, the sensational, the sonorous. Hugo von Hofmannsthal certainly blessed his parents for giving him a well-sounding, sonorous name.

He had a great talent as a lyricist, and as an essayist, with the finest understanding for all foreign cultures as long as they responded to something in his own soul. His dramas are not in any way related to Vienna. He perused all history’s epochs and took the material for his dramas from the Orient, out of the Italian Renaissance (his favorite epoch), and the classic art of the Greek. Many of his plays are not intended as original creations, but arrangements of older works. So he did with an old pre-Shakespearean English play by Thomas Otway and with the old mystery play Everywoman. Some of his little plays are lovely—the death of Titian gives a vision of the dead extravagance of Venice equalled by few modern productions. His most interesting attempt is an arrangement of Elektra for the modern stage. His Greeks are barbarous, wild, full of unbroken primitive instincts. They are under the influence of an extreme nervous hysteria. Nietzsche had spoken of the Greek hysteria, which slumbered under their apparent serenity. Hofmannsthal put a picture of horror on the stage that keeps the spectator spellbound from the first to the last minute. Through the concentration in one act this intensity is still increased.

Since Richard Strauss put Elektra into music, Hofmannsthal has devoted his art entirely to this composer. His last works are written as libretti for Strauss operas, and go through the world now in the wake of his music.

Finally, I would like to tell of a strange Viennese personality, no dramatist, but just as little a novelist, epic or lyric poet. The name of this man, who cannot be put into any of the ordinary literary compartments, is Peter Altenberg. He thought that most of the things told in dramas of five, or three, or only one act, were superfluous; the essential could be told in three lines as a rule. He wishes to give the extract and the reader might work it out for himself. He only writes very short sketches, apparently perfectly usual things, out of every-day life. But he discovered a little secret, namely, that the ordinary is really the most wonderful. Miracles do not exist any more, but the miraculous is there, everywhere. Fairy Tales of Life he calls one of his books (in which he collects a number of sketches); but he might call them all by the same name. As in Maeterlinck’s Blue Bird the wonderful is everywhere, but we have not the eyes to see it. Well, Peter Altenberg has these eyes. His little sketches would seem untranslatable. They might seem, in a different language, perfectly banal little things, not worth the relating,—but suddenly a veil is removed and we see the world and things in a new light.

Peter Altenberg uses the most original style—one might call it a telegram style; it is very abrupt without any endeavor at a connected literary form. He wants, as he says himself, to describe a man in one sentence; an event of the soul on one page; a landscape with one word.

Everybody in Vienna knows Peter Altenberg. He is a poet of the street, who goes around and writes down his little sketches wherever he may be—principally in the cafes.

All the women must love him—for he has sung their praises all his life, like a minnesinger of the Middle Ages.

Editorials

Some Emma Goldman Lectures in Chicago

Beginning October 25, and continuing for three weeks, Miss Goldman is to give a series of new lectures in the Assembly Hall of the Fine Arts Building—an event which has already filled us with the keenest anticipations. There will be three on the war:—Woman and War, War and Christianity, and The Sanctity of Property as a Cause of War. There will be a series on the drama, as the mirror of rebellion against the tyranny of the past:—an introductory one on the significance of art in its relation to life, and others on the new Scandinavian, Italian, German, French, Russian, Yiddish, American, and English drama. These will be given on Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday nights, and offer sufficient richness for one season. But there is even more. On Monday and Wednesday nights, at East End Hall on Erie and Clark Streets, Miss Goldman will deliver six general propaganda lectures, all dealing with the labor problem and the sex question. Tickets will be on sale at the office of The Little Review; at The Radical Book Shop, 817½ North Clark Street; and may be had also from Dr. Reitman, 3547 Ellis Avenue. How interesting it will be to watch that part of the audience which attends the war and the drama talks as perfectly “safe” subjects making its discovery that the lecturer is a woman of simple nobility and sweetness, and that her propaganda is a matter of truth rather than of terror.

The Philistinization of College Students

A very interesting correspondent sends us the sort of letter we should rather have received than any other sort we can conceive of. It is quoted in full on another page of this issue. In it he asks if The Little Review will not succeed in creating a Drang und Sturm epoch; if it will not “stir the hearts of college men and women—those who have not yet been completely philistinized by their ‘vocational guides’; college men and women who in other countries have always been the torch-bearers, the advance-guard and martyrs in the fights for truth and ideals.” It was a definite impulse in this direction which gave birth to The Little Review; and while, after seven months, we cannot hope to have turned the world inside out the way it should be turned, we are sufficiently sanguine to believe that we have made a beginning. We are so close to the Drang und Sturm ourselves that perhaps we cannot see clearly. But we can hope, with that intensity which makes The Little Review our religion, that these things will come to pass. Incidentally, we believe in colleges on the same general basis that we believe in many other disciplines: it is impossible ever to learn too much on any subject. But we know there is something seriously wrong with the colleges; and a far graver danger than philistinization seems to us to lie in that hysterical confusion of values which causes our college students to see small things as big ones and to let the big ones slip by.

Witter Bynner on the Imagists

In sending us Apollo Sings, Mr. Bynner remarks that it is more fun, for the moment to take a classic theme and mix it, with a little Whitman, into an anagram of rhyme than to imitate the Japanese and try to found a school. He goes on: “In spite of several lovely attempts, Pound’s chiefly, the rest seeming to me negligible, they’ve not approached the poetess Chiyo’s lines to her dead child:

I wonder how far you have gone today,

Chasing after dragonflies—

or Buson’s

Granted this dewdrop world is but a dewdrop world,

This granted, yet—

I’m ungrateful to look critically toward an attempt to plant in English these little oriental flowers of wonder. If only they would acknowledge the attempt for what it is and not bring it forward with a French name and curious pedantries! Isn’t the old name for this sort of poem Haikai or something of that sort? At any rate, there is a name. I ought to know it. And so ought they.”

A Rebel Anthology

William D. Haywood, veteran of many labor battles and foremost exponent of the militant unionism in America, is adding to his manifold activities that of compiler and editor. He purposes the formation of an anthology of poems by social rebels, principally of those who have been connected with the activities of the Industrial Workers of the World. In the book will be included poems by Arturo Giovannitti, Covington Hall, Francis Buzzell, George Franklin, Charles Ashleigh, and others. Mr. Haywood wishes to show, by this publication, the spirit of art which is manifesting itself in the working-class movement. He maintains that the heightened consciousness of the workers is beginning to express itself through an adequate and distinctive poetical medium.

New York Letter

George Soule.

Eastern publishers have been much amused by the advertising of The Eyes of the World spread over full pages of the recent magazines. The burden of the appeal to the public is, first, that we have been overrun with immoral books; second, that clergymen, editors, and all other forces of decency are powerless to stop the flood; third, that Mr. Harold Bell Wright has sprung to the front as the great leader against the vicious influence of the other writers by the production of his latest novel; and fourth, that the whole battle will be won if the public will step into the nearest bookshop and pay $1.35 net for Mr. Wright’s book. From the glowing moral tone of the advertisement one might think it the work of an uplift committee; but in small type at the bottom is a copyright notice bearing the name of the president of Mr. Wright’s publishing house. This gentleman is undoubtedly deeply sincere in his admiration of Mr. Wright’s work and its influence, but in this case his admiration has led him to a somewhat ingenuous confusion of moral and business motives. It reminds one of the tactics of the billboard advertising men who, when they discovered that billboard advertising was being strongly attacked by those who object to the disfigurement of our countryside, put up a large number of biblical posters to curry favor with simple religious souls—and were afterwards so injudicious as to boast of their cleverness in Printer’s Ink.

The effectiveness of Mr. Wright’s plea is somewhat prejudiced by his own case. His novel sets forth the thesis that in order to make an artistic or literary success it is necessary only to resort to flattery and corruption. But his own novels have for some years been far more popular than those of most competitors. Is it pure perversity that makes his hated rivals reject his obviously successful methods in favor of the despicable ones which he so vehemently attacks?

We wish only that someone with an equal enthusiasm for artistically moral literature would try a similar advertising campaign for a genuine artist. Such advertisements might set forth the facts that the bookshops are being overrun with mediocre novels which make successes by pandering to untruth and public prejudice, that the work of genius is in danger of being choked out by the insincere product of commercial writers, and that the best way to promote the interests of good literature would be to buy in large quantities the novels of John Galsworthy or Romain Rolland! But, alas, such a campaign is impossible in a commercial democracy—it wouldn’t pay!

A respectable number of the best publishers have already aroused themselves to the impropriety—or at least to the eventual ineffectiveness—of announcing extreme praises of their own publications even in the critical vein. Surely the book-reading public can’t be made to believe that four or five “great novels” are issued every year. Surely they would be grateful for a little genuine information about the books they are asked to buy. And so these publishers have issued for two years a monthly circular entitled New Books, which contains descriptions of important new publications without praise of any kind. It would be telling tales out of school to say how carefully the publishers’ copy-writers must be watched in order to prevent them from slipping dubious phrases into their notes. Some advertising men seem to have principles against giving any candid information about what they have for sale. But the task has been accomplished so far, and it remains to be seen whether this civilized form of advertising can make much progress against the advertising vandalism which destroys the effectiveness of all publicity by extravagant statements. One begins to suspect that the effort is pitifully Utopian in a state of economic savagery like the present, where every man’s attention is more naturally directed to his profits than to the honesty of his work. The chances would be better if the majority of the public knew what intellectual honesty is and really wanted it.

There is hope among the magazines in the form of The Metropolitan. That is making a commercial success and is also attempting to publish genuine work—not necessarily “highbrow,” but at least genuine. An expert on an important subject recently wished to write a magazine article. The first editor he approached recast the material to suit his own ideas. A second and a third told him that his message was good, but over the heads of the public; they ordered “popular” and ephemeral trivialities. The Metropolitan is the only magazine that wanted him to write, in his own way, what he really had to say. Another writer submitted the outline of an article to a Metropolitan editor. It was on a subject ordinarily considered somewhat “dangerous.” The editor said: “That is new, and interesting. It ought to make a good article. You must be careful of only one thing. Be absolutely frank. Don’t try to gloss over anything that is a plain matter of fact.” Such directness is astounding to one accustomed to the ways of editors.

An editor has recently confessed to me that now for the first time he begins to believe that the popular magazines may have a really good reason for existence, aside from furnishing amusement in hours of train and family boredom. He thinks that the tremendous events in Europe are likely to bring forth literature of worth and quickened emotion which nevertheless cannot wait for book publication, and that so we shall find use for the more ephemeral medium. It certainly is true that the keen public interest in the war is likely to decline even before the war is over. We are bound to experience a reaction in favor of reading matter at the opposite pole of thought.

An incredible rumor that Hearst has bought The Atlantic Monthly is as startling as many of the war headlines which occur when no authentic news is available. In spite of the absurdity of the idea, it has possibilities of momentary amusement. What a retribution to overtake the spinsterly Bostonese journal which tries with such a brown and wren-like conscience to be judiciously radical!

Book Discussion

Two Finds

Poems, by George Cronyn. [The Glebe. Albert and Charles Boni, New York.]

I am very sorry indeed that this book arrived when most of our space was pre-empted. I need room for the sort of appreciation that I feel for these poems.

That extraordinary, delightful, and Quixotic institution, The Glebe, which insists on publishing stuff on its merits, apart from considerations of popularity, has had divine luck in finding Cronyn,—whoever he is.

For Cronyn is a poet. Not just a versifier, but a poet. His verse has a facility which does not detract from its beauty. I have encountered sheer beauty more often in his book than in any volume of modern poetry that I have read for some time.

Here is a sample:

Clouds

Whence do you come, oh silken shapes,

Across the silver sky?