THE LITTLE REVIEW
_Literature_ _Drama_ _Music_ _Art_
MARGARET C. ANDERSON
EDITOR
DECEMBER, 1914
Poems Richard Aldington
A Great Pilgrim-Pagan George Soule
My Friend, the Incurable: Ibn Gabirol
On Germanophobia; on the perils of
Monomania; on Raskolinkov and Alexander
Berkman; on surrogates and sundry
subtleties.
On Poetry:
Aesthetics and Common-Sense Llewellyn Jones
In Defense of Vers Libre Arthur Davison Ficke
The Decorative Straight-Jacket Maxwell Bodenheim
Harriet Monroe’s Poetry Eunice Tietjens
Scharmel Iris Milo Winter
The Poetry of T. Sturge Moore Llewellyn Jones
Amy Lowell’s Contribution M. C. A.
Star Trouble Helen Hoyt
Parasite Conrad Aiken
Personality George Burman Foster
The Prophecy of Gwic’hlan Edward Ramos
Editorials and Announcements
Winter Rain Eunice Tietjens
Home as an Emotional Adventure The Editor
A Miracle Charles Ashleigh
London Letter E. Buxton Shanks
New York Letter George Soule
The Theatre, Music, Art
Book Discussion
Sentence Reviews
Published Monthly
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MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Publisher
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Entered as second-class matter at Postoffice, Chicago.
THE LITTLE REVIEW
Vol. I
DECEMBER, 1914
No. 9
Poems
RICHARD ALDINGTON
On a Motor-Bus at Night
(Oxford Street)
The hard rain-drops beat like wet pellets
On my nose and right cheek
As we jerk and slither through the traffic.
There is a great beating of wheels
And a rumble of ugly machines.
The west-bound buses are full of men
In grey clothes and hard hats,
Holding up umbrellas
Over their sallow faces
As they return to the suburban rabbit-holes.
The women-clerks
Try to be brightly dressed;
Now the wind makes their five-shilling-hats jump
And the hat-pins pull their hair.
When one is quite free, and curious,
They are fascinating to look at—
Poor devils of a sober hell.
The shop-lamps and the street-lamps
Send steady rayed floods of yellow and red light
So that Oxford street is paved with copper and chalcedony.
Church Walk, Kensington
(Sunday Morning)
The cripples are going to church.
Their crutches beat upon the stones,
And they have clumsy iron boots.
Their clothes are black, their faces peaked and mean;
Their legs are withered
Like dried bean-pods.
Their eyes are as stupid as frogs’.
And the god, September,
Has paused for a moment here
Garlanded with crimson leaves.
He held a branch of fruited oak.
He smiled like Hermes the beautiful
Cut in marble.
A Great Pilgrim-Pagan
GEORGE SOULE
Shakespeare in red morocco seems always wan and pathetic. I see him
looking gloomily out of his unread respectability, bored with his
scholarly canonization and his unromantic owners. How he longs for the
irresponsible days when he was loved or ignored for his own sake! Now he
is forever imprisoned in marble busts and tortured in Histories of
English Literature. There is no more tragic fate in the annals of
imagination. Terrible is the vengeance taken by institutional culture on
those who are great enough to command its admiration.
Therefore, a genius who has not been tagged unduly by the pundits
inspires me with a profound delicacy, in a sense akin to the reverence
for a beautiful child. Here is a virtue which the world needs. One would
like to proclaim it from the housetops. Yet there are the rabble, ready
with their election-night enthusiasm, and the scholars, with their
pompous niches. If one could only find all those whom the man himself
would have selected as friends and whisper the right word in their ears!
But, after all, we must speak in public, remembering that even
misunderstanding is the birthright of the genius. It is better that
power should be expressed in devious and unforeseen channels than not at
all.
A flippant friend once told me that he had never had the courage to read
William Vaughn Moody because the poet had such a dark brown name. That
is important because of its triviality. I have no doubt that if the
gospel hymns had never been written, and if we had never on gloomy
Sunday evenings seen those pale books with the scroll-work
Moody-and-Sankey covers, bringing all their dismal train of musical and
religious doggerel, we should have been spared many misgivings about the
evangelist’s vicarious name-sake. Let it be firmly understood,
therefore, that there is nothing dark brown, or evangelistic, or
stupidly sober-serious about the new poet of the Fire-Bringer. May he
never go into a household-classics edition!
But there is a tinge of New England about him, just the same. Only one
who has in his blood the solemn possibilities of religious emotion can
react against orthodox narrowness without becoming trivial. It is the
fashion to blame all modern ills on puritan traditions. We should be
wise if in order to fight our evils we should invoke a little of the
Pilgrim Fathers’ heroism. Too many of us take up the patter of
radicalism with as little genuine sincerity as a spearmint ribbon-clerk
repeats the latest Sunday-comic slang. If you have ever walked over a
New England countryside the endless miles of stone walls may have set
you thinking. Every one of those millions of stones has been laboriously
picked out of the fields—and there are still many there. Before that the
trees had to be cleared away, and the Indians fought, and the ocean
crossed without chart or government buoy. For over two centuries our
ancestors grimly created our country for us, with an incessant summer-
and winter-courage that seems the attribute of giants. What wonder if
they were hard and narrow? We scoff at their terminal morraine; but we
should be more deserving of their gift if we should emulate their stout
hearts in clearing away the remaining debris from the economical and
spiritual fields. In spite of injurious puritan traditions there is
something inalienably American and truly great about old New England. It
is the same unafraid stoutness of heart that is at the bottom of Moody’s
personality. It gives him power; it gives him unconscious dignity.
Yet Moody was indeed a rebel against the religious and social muddle in
which he found himself. Something red and pagan poured into his veins
the instinct of defiance to a jealous god and to pale customs. The best
of the Greek was his; instinctively he turned at last to Greek drama for
his form and to Greek mythology for his figures. There was in him that
σπονδη which Aristotle believed essential for the poet—a quality so rare
among us that the literal translation, “high seriousness,” conveys
little hint of its warmth, its nobility and splendor. He believed in the
body as in the soul; and his conception of the godly was rounded and not
inhuman. Dionysus was every bit as real to him as the man of sorrows. Is
not this the new spirit of America which we wish to nourish? And is
there not a peculiar virtue in the poet who with the strong arm of the
pilgrim and the consecration of the puritan fought for the kingdom of
joy among us? In _The Masque of Judgment_ he pictures a group of heroic
unrepentant rebels against divine grace who have not yet fallen under
the sword of the destroying angel. Of them one, a youth, sings:
Better with captives in the slaver’s pen
Hear women sob, and sit with cursing men,
Yea, better here among these writhen lips,
Than pluck out from the blood its old companionships.
If God had set me for one hour alone,
Apart from clash of sword
And trumpet pealéd word,
I think I should have fled unto his throne.
But always ere the dayspring shook the sky,
Somewhere the silver trumpets were acry,—
Sweet, high, oh, high and sweet!
What voice could summon so but the soul’s paraclete?
Whom should such voices call but me, to dare and die?
O ye asleep here in the eyrie town,
Ye mothers, babes, and maids, and aged men,
The plain is full of foemen! Turn again—
Sleep sound, or waken half
Only to hear our happy bugles laugh
Lovely defiance down,
As through the steep
Grey streets we sweep,
Each horse and man a ribbéd fan to scatter all that chaff!
How from the lance-shock and the griding sword
Untwine the still small accents of the Lord?
How hear the Prince of Peace and Lord of Hosts
Speak from the zenith ’mid his marshalled ghosts,
“Vengeance is mine, I will repay;
Cease thou and come away!”
Or having seen and hearkened, how refrain
From crying, heart and brain,
“So, Lord, Thou sayest it, Thine—
But also mine, ah, surely also mine!
Else why and for what good
The strength of arm my father got for me
By perfect chastity,
This glorious anger poured into my blood
Out of my mother’s depths of ardency?”
So the sanctity of the warrior. And the sanctity of other passions is
there, too. A woman says:
O sisters, brothers, help me to arise!
Of God’s two-hornéd throne I will lay hold
And let him see my eyes;
That he may understand what love can be,
And raise his curse, and set his children free.
But quotations crowd upon me. Most of Moody’s best work bears witness to
his glorification of man’s possible personality in rebellion against
man’s restrictive conception of society and god. We have had many such
rebels; the peculiar significance of Moody lies in the fact that he
lacks utterly the triviality of the little radical, and that his is a
power which springs from the most heroic in American quality.
Of course all this would be worth nothing unless Moody had the authentic
utterance of the poet. His fulness of inspiration, combined with his
sensitive editing, has left us scarcely a line which should have gone to
oblivion. As an example of his magic take three lines from _I Am the
Woman_, in which the woman is walking with her lover:
But I was mute with passionate prophecies;
My heart went veiled and faint in the golden weather,
While universe drifted by after still universe.
Or the woman’s response to Pandora’s singing in _The Fire-Bringer_:
Hark, hark, the pouring music! Never yet
The pools below the waterfalls, thy pools,
Thy dark pools, O my heart—!
Fragmentary, mystic, unrelated with the context; yet who that has heard
perfect music can fail to understand that cry? It is indeed this mystic
richness, these depths below depths, that make a large part of Moody’s
individual fascination. He rarely has the limpid clarity or the soaring
simplicity which make the popular lyricist such as Shelley. There is too
much grasp of the mind in his work for the large public; only those who
have in some degree discovered the beauty of the wide ranges can feel at
home in him. One breathes with the strength of great virility,—an able
and demanding body, a mind which conquers the heights, and those
infinitely subtle and vibrating reaches of spirit which belong
especially to the poet.
To me the thought of Moody is satisfying not only because he typifies
those qualities which I like to think we ought to find in American
literature, but because he exemplifies my ideal of a poet. There have
been many insane geniuses; men whose glory has shone sometimes fitfully
through bodily or mental infirmity. Some of us are accustomed to the
idea that genius is in fact insanity or is akin to it. Certainly the
words “wholesome” and “healthy” have been applied so many times to
mediocre productions that we are wary of them. But is not the insanity
of genius after all merely the abnormal greatness and preponderance of a
single quality in a man? If by some miracle his other qualities could
have been equally great, would he not have been a still nobler artist?
To me the Greek impulse of proportionate development has an irresistible
appeal. To be sane, not by the denial of a disproportionate inspiration,
but by the lifting of all the faculties to its level: that is a dream
worthy of the god in man. To be an artist not by the denial of competing
faculties, but by the fullest development of all faculties under an
inexorable will which unites them in a common purpose: that is a rich
conception of personality. The perfect poet should be the perfect man.
He should be not insane, but saner than the rest of us. Moody not only
expressed this ideal in his life, but in his work. He was strong and
sound, physically, mentally, spiritually. No one who has read his
letters can miss the golden roundness of his humor, his humanity, his
manliness. Yet never for a moment did he make a comfortable denial of
the will to soar. In his poem _The Death of Eve_ he has burningly
expressed the development of personality. Eve, an aged woman, has not
succumbed to the view that she committed an unforgivable sin in
disobeying God to taste the apple. Taking old Cain with her, she
fearlessly enters the garden again to show herself to God before she
dies. In her mystic song she sings:
Behold, against thy will, against thy word,
Against the wrath and warning of thy sword,
Eve has been Eve, O Lord!
A pitcher filled, she comes back from the brook,
A wain she comes, laden with mellow ears;
She is a roll inscribed, a prophet’s book
Writ strong with characters.
Behold, Eve willed it so; look, if it be so, look!
And after singing of her life and of how she had been sensitive to the
love of her husband and children, she goes on:
Still, still with prayer and ecstasy she strove
To be the woman they did well approve,
That, narrowed to their love,
She might have done with bitterness and blame;
But still along the yonder edge of prayer
A spirit in a fiery whirlwind came—
Eve’s spirit, wild and fair—
Crying with Eve’s own voice the number of her name.
Yea, turning in the whirlwind and the fire,
Eve saw her own proud being all entire
Made perfect by desire;
And from the rounded gladness of that sphere
Came bridal songs and harpings and fresh laughter;
“Glory unto the faithful,” sounded clear,
And then, a little after,
“Whoso denyeth aught, let him depart from here!”
And only thus does Eve find god—in her perfect self—
Ready and boon to be fulfilled of Thee,
Thine ample, tameless creature,—
Against thy will and word, behold, Lord, this is She!
Here, indeed, is the religion of our time. A faithfulness that is deeper
than the old faithfulness; and that challenge which of all modern
inspiration is the most flaming:
Whoso denyeth aught, let him depart from here!
This is not the balance of a personality that denies itself! Like
Nietzsche, Moody is shaken with the conviction that the most deadly sin
is not disobedience, but smallness.
There is a striking similarity between the religious attitude of Moody
and that of Nietzsche. Moody mentions Zarathustra only once in his
published letters. Certainly he was not obsessed by the German, or a
confessed follower. Nor did Moody elaborate any social philosophy,
beyond a general radicalism quite different from Nietzsche’s
condemnation of socialism. But, like Nietzsche, Moody was in reaction
against a false and narrow culture. And like him, Moody found in
Hellenic ideals a blood-stirring inspiration. He found not the external
grace of the Greek which Keats celebrated, not the static classical
perfection which has furnished an anodyne for scholars. It was the
deeper, cloudy spirit of Aeschylus, the heaven-scaling challenge of
Euripides, the Dionysiac worship of joy and passion. Take, for instance,
the chorus of young men in _The Fire-Bringer_ which Professor Manly has
called “insolent”—though it seems to me of a divine insolence:
Eros, how sweet
Is the cup of thy drunkenness!
Dionysus, how our feet
Hasten to the burning cup
Thou liftest up!
But O how sweet and how most burning it is
To drink the wine of thy lightsome chalices,
Apollo! Apollo! To-day
We say we will follow thee and put all others away
For thou alone, O thou alone art he
Who settest the prisoned spirit free,
And sometimes leadest the rapt soul on
Where never mortal thought has gone;
Till by the ultimate stream
Of vision and of dream
She stands
With startled eyes and outstretched hands,
Looking where other suns rise over other lands,
And rends the lonely skies with her prophetic scream.
Moody, too, transvaluates values everywhere. _The Death of Eve_ is an
example of it. It is to “The Brute” that he looks for the regeneration
of society. Prometheus is a heroic saviour of mankind; rebellion is his
virtue, not his sin. Pandora is not a mischievous person who through her
curiosity lets out all the troubles on the world, but a divine,
wind-like inquirer, the inspiration of Prometheus. The God of
judgment-day is himself swept away by the destruction of mankind for the
sins of commission. And the insignificance of man compared with what he
might be is satirically shown in _The Menagerie_.
But let me not create the impression that Moody cannot be delicate. From
_Heart’s Wild Flower_:
But where she strays, through blight or blooth, one fadeless
flower she wears,
A little gift God gave my youth,—whose petals dim were fears,
Awes, adorations, songs of ruth, hesitancies, and tears.
From the gentle poem of motherhood, _The Daguerreotype_:
And all is well, for I have seen them plain,
The unforgettable, the unforgotten eyes!
Across the blinding gush of these good tears
They shine as in the sweet and heavy years
When by her bed and chair
We children gathered jealously to share
The sunlit aura breathing myrrh and thyme,
Where the sore-stricken body made a clime
Gentler than May and pleasanter than rhyme,
Holier and more mystical than prayer.
Or from _The Moon-Moth_:
Mountains and seas, cities and isles and capes,
All frail as in a dream and painted like a dream,
All swimming with the fairy light that drapes
A bubble, when the colors curl and stream
And meet and flee asunder. I could deem
This earth, this air, my dizzy soul, the sky,
Time, knowledge, and the gods
Were lapsing, curling, streaming lazily
Down a great bubble’s rondure, dye on dye,
To swell that perilous clinging drop that nods,
Gathers, and nods, and clings, through all eternity.
Here, surely, is an American poet who speaks in eternal terms of the new
inspiration; one who was sane and blazing at the same time; one who in
order to be modern did not need to use a poor imitation of Whitman,
screech of boiler factories and exalt a somewhat doubtful brand of
democracy; one who was uncompromisingly radical without being feverish;
above all, one who succeeded in writing the most beautiful verse without
going to London to do it. When one is oppressed with the doubt of
American possibilities it is a renewal of faith to turn to him. If
Whitman is of our soil, Moody is no less so; through these two the best
in us has thus far found its individual expression.
The temptation to quote is one that should not be resisted. And I can
think of no better way to send readers to Moody in the present world
crisis than to quote the song of Pandora:
Of wounds and sore defeat
I made my battle stay;
Wingéd sandals for my feet
I wove of my delay;
Of weariness and fear
I made my shouting spear;
Of loss, and doubt, and dread,
And swift oncoming doom
I made a helmet for my head
And a floating plume.
From the shutting mist of death,
From the failure of the breath,
I made a battle-horn to blow
Across the vales of overthrow.
O hearken, love, the battle-horn!
The triumph clear, the silver scorn!
O hearken where the echoes bring,
Down the grey disastrous morn,
Laughter and rallying!
If they (men) were books, I would not read them.—_Goethe._
My Friend, the Incurable
II.
On Germanophobia; on the perils of Monomania; on Raskolnikov and
Alexander Berkman; on surrogates and sundry subtleties
Ἑυρηκα!—shouted the Incurable, when I came on my monthly call. I have
solved the mystery that has baffled your idealists since the outbreak of
the War. The puerile effusions of Hardy, Galsworthy, and other Olympians
who in the mist of international hostilities confused Nietzsche with
Bernhardi, are quite explainable. It is well known that our successful
writers have no time or inclination to read other fellows’ books: they
leave this task to journalists and book-reviewers. Hence their splendid
ignorance of Nietzsche. The advent of great events showered upon the
innocent laymen problems, names, and terms that have been a _terra
incognita_ to most of them, and justly so: for what has the artist to do
with facts and theories,—what is Hecuba to him? But of late it has
become “stylish” for men of letters to declare their opinions on all
sorts of questions, regardless of the fact that they have as much right
to judge those problems as the cobbler has the right to judge pastry. To
the aid of the English novelists who wanted to say “something about the
war,” but whose information on the subject was zero, came the dear
professor Cramb. A quick perusal of his short work[1] supplied the
students with an outlook and a view-point, and out came the patriotic
cookies to the astonishment of the world. Such, at least, is my
interpretation of the mystery.
[1] _Germany and England_, by J. A. Cramb. [E. P. Dutton and
Company, New York.]
Professor Cramb’s lectures are not an answer to Bernhardi, as the
publisher wants us to believe, but rather a supplement to the work of
the barrack-philosopher whose theory of the biological necessity of war
is beautifully corroborated with numerous quotations from the most
ancient to the most modern philosophers, historians, statesmen, and
poets. The general splendidly demonstrates the efficiency of German
mind, the ability to utilize the world culture for the Fatherland, to
make all thinkers serve the holy idea of war, from Heraclitus’s πὸλεμος
πατήρ πάντων to Schiller’s Bride from Messina. Yet I, in my great love
for Germany, should advise the Kaiser’s government to appropriate a
generous sum for the purpose of spreading far and wide Cramb’s “Answer,”
as the highest glorification of Teutonia. No German has expressed more
humble respect and admiration for Treitschke, Bernhardi, and other
eulogists of the Prussian mailed fist than this English dreamer of a
professor. For what but a fantastic dream is his picture of modern
Germany as that of a land permeated with heroic aspirations, a mélange
of Napoleonism and Nietzscheanism? Nay! it is the burgher, the
“culture-philistine” that dominates the land of Wilhelm and Eucken, the
petty Prussian, the parvenu who since 1870 has been cherishing the idea
of _Weltmacht_ and of the Germanization of the universe.
Pardon me, friend, I cannot speak _sina ira_ on this question; out of
respect for Mr. Wilson’s request, let us “change the subject.” Come out
where we can observe in silence the symphony of autumnal sunset. The
Slavs call this month “Listopad,” the fall of leaves; do you recall
Tschaikovsky’s _Farewell Ye Forests_? Sing it in silence, in that
eloquent silence of which Maeterlinck had so beautifully spoken. I say
_had_, for my heart is full of anxiety for that Belgian with the face of
an obstinate coachman. His last works reveal symptoms of Monomania, that
sword of Damocles that hangs over many a profound thinker, particularly
so if the thinker is inclined towards mysticism. Maeterlinck, as no one
else, has felt the mystery of our world; his works echoed his awe before
the unknown, the impenetrable, but also his love for the mysterious, his
rejoicing at the fact that there are in our life things unexplainable
and incomprehensible. His latest essays[2] show signs of dizziness, as
of a man who stands on the brink of an abyss. I fear for him; I fear
that the artist has lost his equilibrium and is obsessed with phantasms,
psychometry, and other nonsense. The veil of mystery irritates him, he
craves to rend it asunder, to answer all riddles, to clarify all
obscurities, to interpret the unknowable; as a result he falls into the
pit of charlatanism and credulity.
[2] _The Unknown Guest_, by Maurice Maeterlinck. [Dodd, Mead and
Company, New York.]
If there were no more insoluble questions nor impenetrable
riddles, infinity would not be infinite; and we should have
forever to curse the fate that placed us in a universe
proportionate to our intelligence. All that exists would be but a
gateless prison, an irreparable evil and mistake. The unknown and
unknowable are necessary to our happiness. In any case I would
not wish my worst enemy, were his understanding a thousand times
loftier and a thousandfold mightier than mine, to be condemned
eternally to inhabit a world of which he had surprised an
essential secret and of which, as a man, he had begun to grasp
the least atom.
These words were written by Maeterlinck a few years ago in his essay,
_Our Eternity_. He has surely gone astray since. The last book is
written in a dull pale style, in a tone of a professional table-rapper,
enumerating legions of “facts” to prove the theory of psychometry or
whatever it may be, forgetting his own words of some time ago: “Facts
are nothing but the laggards, the spies, and camp followers of the great
forces we cannot see.” What a tragedy!
Was Dostoevsky a mystic? Undoubtedly so, but not exclusively so. Far
from being a monomaniac, he applied his genius to various aspects of
life and wistfully absorbed the realistic manifestations of his
fellow-beings as well as the inner struggles of their souls. Dostoevsky
is the Cézanne of the novel. With the same eagerness that Cézanne puts
into his endeavor to produce the “treeness” of a tree, brushing aside
irrelevant details, does Dostoevsky strive to present the “soulness” of
a soul, stripping it of its veils and demonstrating its throbbing
nudeness before our terrified eyes. We fear him, for he is cruel and
takes great pleasure in torturing us, in bringing us to the verge of
hysteria; we fear him, for we feel uneasy when we are shown a nude soul.
Perhaps he owed his wonderful clairvoyancy to his ill health, a feature
that reminds us of his great disciple, Nietzsche. I do not know which is
more awesome in Raskolnikov[3]: his physical, realistic tortures, or his
mysterious dreams and hallucinations. In all his heroes: the winged
murderer who wished to kill a principle; the harlot, Sonya, who sells
her body for the sake of her drunkard father and her stepmother; the
father, Marmeladov, whose monologues in the tavern present the most
heart-gripping rhapsody of sorrow and despair; the perversed nobleman,
Svidrigailov, broad-hearted and cynical, who jokingly blows out his
brains—in the whole gallery of his morbid types Dostoevsky mingles the
real with the fantastic, makes us wander in the labyrinth of illusionary
facts and preternatural dreams, brings us in dizzily-close touch with
the nuances of palpitating souls, and leaves us mentally maimed and
stupefied. I think of Dostoevsky as of a Demon, a Russian Demon, the
sorrowful Demon of the poet Lermontov, the graceful humane
Mephistopheles of the sculptor Antokolsky.
[3] _Crime and Punishment_, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. [The Macmillan
Company, New York.]
The tragedy of Raskolnikov is twofold: he is a Russian and an
intellectual. The craving, religious soul of the child of the endless
melancholy plains, keened by a profound, analytic intellect seeks in
vain an outlet for its strivings and doubtings in the land where
interrogation marks are officially forbidden. The young man should have
plunged into the Revolution, the broad-breasted river that has welcomed
thousands of Russian youth; but Dostoevsky willed not his hero to take
the logical road. The epileptic Demon hated the “Possessed”
revolutionists; he saw the Russian ideal in Christian suffering. “He is
a great poet, but an abominable creature, quite Christian in his
emotions and at the same time quite _sadique_. His whole morality is
what you have baptised slave-morality”—this from Dr. Brandes’s letter to
Nietzsche,—a specimen of professorial nomenclature.
I am thinking of a threefold—nay, of a manifold—tragedy of a young man,
who, besides being a Russian and an intellectual, is a revolutionist and
is a son of the eternal Ahasver, the people that have borne for
centuries the double cross of being persecuted and of teaching their
persecutors. What makes this tragedy still more tragic is the element of
grim irony that enters it as in those of Attic Greece: the
Russian-Jewish-Anarchist is hurled by Fate into the country of
Matter-of-Fact, your United States. The boy is poetic, sentimental,
idealistic; imbued with the lofty traditions of the Narodovoltzy, the
Russian saints-revolutionists, he craves for a heroic deed, for an act
of self-sacrifice for the “people.” “Ah, the People! The grand,
mysterious, yet so near and real, People....”[4] He attempts to shoot an
oppressor of the people, is delivered to the Justice, and is sentenced
to twenty-two years of prison confinement. The curtain falls, but does
the tragedy end here? No, it only begins.
[4] _Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist_, by Alexander Berkman.
[Mother Earth Company, New York.]
For he who lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die.
Raskolnikov wanted to kill a principle; he wanted to rid the world of a
useless old pawnbroker, in order to enable himself to _live_ a useful
life. He failed; the principle remained deadly alive in the form of a
gnawing conscience. “I am an aesthetic louse,” he bitterly denounces
himself. Alexander Berkman wanted to _die_ for a principle, to render
the people a service through his death. He has failed. At least he has
thought so. The Attentat produced neither the material nor the moral
effect that the idealist had expected. Society condemned him, of course;
the strikers, for whose benefit he eagerly gave his life, looked upon
his act as on a grave misfortune that would augment their misery; even
his comrades, except a very few, disapproved of his heroic deed. The icy
reality sobered the naïve Russian. Was it worth while? For the “people?”
The _Memoirs_ have stirred me more profoundly than Dostoevsky’s _Memoirs
from a House of the Dead_, far more than Wilde’s _De Profundis_: the
tragedy here is so much more complex, more appalling in its utter
illogicality. On the other hand the book is written so sincerely, so
heartedly, so ingenuously, that you feel the wings of the martyr’s soul
flapping upon yours. Berkman becomes so near, so dear, that it pains to
think of him. You are with him throughout his vicissitudes; you share
his anguish, loneliness, suicidal moods; your spirit and your body
undergo the same inhuman tortures, the same unnecessary cruelties, that
he describes so simply, so modestly; you rejoice in his pale prison
joys, your heart goes out to the gentle boy, Johnny, who whispers
through the dungeon wall his love for Sashenka; you weep over the death
of Dick, the friendly sparrow whose chirping sounded like heavenly music
to the prisoner; you are filled with admiration and love for the Girl
who hovers somewhere outside like a goddess, “immutable,” devoted,
noble, reserved; you are, lastly, out in the free, and how deeply you
sympathize with the sufferer when he flees human beings and solicitous
friends.... When I read through the bleeding pages, I felt like falling
on my knees and kissing the feet of the unknown, yet so dear, martyr.
Surely, thou hast known suffering....
Don’t sneer at my incurable sentimentality, you happy normal. The
tragedy of Alexander Berkman is common to all of us, transplanted wild
flowers. It is the tragedy of getting the surrogate for the real thing.
Berkman and the Girl passionately kissing the allegorical figure of the
Social Revolution—isn’t this the symbol of the empty grey life in this
normal land? What do you offer the seeking, striving, courageous souls
but surrogates, substitutes? Your radicals—they are nauseating! They
chatter about Nietzsche and Stirner and Whitman, wave the red flag and
scream about individual freedom; but let one of them transgress the
seventh commandment or commit any thing that is not _comme il faut_
according to their code, and lo, the radicalism has evaporated, and the
atavistic mouldy morality has come to demonstrate its wrinkled face. Has
not John Most repudiated the act of his disciple, Berkman, because it
was a _real_ act and not a paper allegory? Of course, Most was
German....
Hush! Were we not going to observe in silence the purple-crimson
crucifixion of autumnal Phoebus? I have been as silent as the Barber of
Scheherezade. Woe me, the Incurable!
IBN GABIROL.
Sufficience
HELEN HOYT
I wish no guardian angel:
I do not seek fairies in the trees:
The trees are enough in themselves.
On Poetry
Aesthetics and Common-Sense
LLEWELLYN JONES
Poetry, we are often told, cannot be defined but—by way of
consolation—can always be recognized. Unfortunately the latter half of
that statement seems no longer true, especially of latter-day poetry.
Fratricidal strife between makers of _vers libre_ and formalists goes on
merrily, while the people whose contribution to poetry is their
appreciation of it—and purchase of it—are not unnaturally playing safe
and buying Longfellow in padded ooze.
I always thought I could recognize authentic poetry on most themes and
even flattered myself that I had some little understanding of the
psychology of its production. Latterly two voices have come to me, one
affirming that I was right in my prejudice that all durable verse should
have content as well as form, should have meaning as well as
sound—though in closest union with the sound,—that, in short, the poet
should be a thinker as well as a craftsman; an emotional thinker, of
course, if that term be permitted, but not a mere clairaudient wielder
of words. And then I heard a voice which bid me forget all that and list
to
Long breaths, in a green and yellow din.
Hastening to give credit where it is due, let me remind the readers of
THE LITTLE REVIEW that this is the last line of a poem by Maxwell
Bodenheim in the last number of that periodical. I trust that Mr.
Bodenheim will forgive me for using him to point a moral and adorn a
critical article, especially as I shall have to compare him with
Wordsworth before I get through, and shall have to ask him whether he is
not carrying the Wordsworthian tradition just a little too far into the
region of the individual and subjective, into the unknown territory of
the most isolated thing in the world: the human mind in those regions of
it which have not been socially disciplined into the categories which
make communication possible between mind and mind.
The other voice which I have mentioned is that of Professor S. B. Gass,
of the University of Nebraska, who writes on Literature as a Fine Art in
_The Mid-West Quarterly_ for July.
Professor Gass takes the very sane position that words are the
socially-created tools—arbitrary symbols, he calls them—to give us “not
the thing itself, but something about the thing—some relationship, some
classification, some generalization, some cause, some effect, some
attribute, something that goes on wholly in the mind and is not
sensuously present in the thing itself.” And that work, he continues, is
thought, and it proceeds by statement. But undoubtedly words have
sensuous sounds and sensuous denotations and connotations. Professor
Gass admits this, but regards their sensuous properties—and especially,
I imagine he would insist, their sensuous sounds based on physiological
accident—as secondary. Hence, to him, Imagism would be a use of words
for purely secondary results. And that is decadence: “Decadence arises
out of the primary pursuit of secondary functions.” Now Wordsworth and
the romantic school generally used words in this way, and so, logically
enough, Professor Gass classifies Wordsworth as a decadent. In doing so
we fear he exhibits an intellect too prone to dichotomize. He cuts human
psychology up into too many and too water-tight compartments. When he
quotes Wordsworth’s
... I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
he seems to forget that there is more in that poem than its imagism—as
we would call it now; that it is record of a personal experience, that
is not only a trespass on the domain of the painter (to speak as if we
agreed with our critic) but that it is a personal reaction to the
picture painted in those words, that it tells us something that no mere
picture could do. The poem, in fact, is a picture plus a story of the
effect of the picture upon a human soul.
But the point in which I agree with Professor Gass is that—whatever the
ultimate purpose of literature, including the lyric; whether, as he
says, it is “a reflection of human nature, intellectual in its mode,
critical in its spirit, and moral in its function”; or whether it is
legitimate to regard its rhythms in words and “secondary” connotations
and associations of words as materials for an art rather than for a
criticism of life—the point beyond all this that I think fundamental is
that literature does what it does—inform, enlighten, or transport—by
understandable statement.
Certainly all appreciation of literature that dares to voice itself—that
is all criticism—must proceed on this supposition, and it is just this
supposition that is flouted by some of Mr. Bodenheim’s poems.
Take the following, for instance:
TO ——
You are a broad, growing sieve.
Men and women come to you to loosen your supple frame,
And weave another slim square into you—
Or perhaps a blue oblong, a saffron circle.
People fling their powdered souls at you:
You seem to lose them, but retain
The shifting shadow of a stain on your rigid lines.
Now obviously there is no sense in this in the ordinary
intellectualistic meaning of the word sense. Unlike most poetry, it
cannot be analyzed into a content which we might say was expressed
suitably or unsuitably in a form. If, then, it be a good poem, we must
look elsewhere for its excellence. I would hesitate to find that
excellence in the mere sound of the words. Is it then in their
associations? Arthur Ransome, the English critic, accounts for the
peculiar effect of poetry by its use of what he calls potential
language—of words which by long association have come to mean more than
they say, that have not only a denotation like scientific words, but a
sometimes definite, sometimes hazy, connotation, an emotional content
over and above what is intellectually given in their purely etymological
content. Does this help us here? I am afraid not. Personally I have
always associated sieves with ashes and garden-earth (there is also a
little triangular sieve that fits into kitchen sinks). Blue oblongs and
saffron circles remind me of advertising posters and futurist pictures;
while—I admit a certain poetic quality of a sort here—powdered souls
remind me of Aubrey Beardsley.
But, perhaps, the ultimate objection to this poem as it stands is the
fact that I have an uneasy suspicion that some printer may have
transposed some of these expressions. For would it not really have made
better sense if the poem had spoken of a saffron oblong and a blue
square? Certainly if I choose to think that that is what it must have
been originally no other reader, on the face of the matter, could
convince me otherwise. While, if another reader told me that Mr.
Bodenheim had once studied geometry and therefore could not possibly
have written about a “slim square”, I would be quite unable to convince
him otherwise.
But—it will be objected—it is quite unfair to any poem to analyze it
word by word. It spoils its beauty. I challenge the assertion, and even
assert the opposite. As a matter of fact, it is only by analysis that we
can tell good poetry from bad poetry. For instance:
Crown him with many crowns
The lamb upon his throne.
Analyze that and it straightway appears the nonsense that it really is.
But, on the other hand, take this poem of Francis Thompson’s (I quote
only a part):
Does the fish soar to find the ocean,
The eagle plunge to find the air—
That we ask of the stars in motion
If they have rumour of thee there?
Not where the wheeling systems darken,
And our benumbed conceiving soars!—
The drift of pinions, would we hearken,
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.
The angels keep their ancient places;—
Turn but a stone, and start a wing!
’Tis ye, ’tis your estrangèd faces,
That miss the many-splendored thing.
Now that poem, it will be observed, is not unrelated in subject to the
two lines quoted just above it. And yet, how it defies any effort to
analyze it out into anything else than itself. Rhythm, cosmic
picturings, the homely metaphors of the dusty road, all combine to place
us in an attitude toward, to give us a feeling for, reality, which is
different from, and nobler than, those of the man who has either never
read this poem, never read the same message in other poetic language,
or—what is more to the point—never managed to get for himself the same
experience which dictated that poem.
For, after all, if I were to agree with Professor Gass that poetry (as a
part of literature) is not a fine art, it would be because I think it
more than a fine art. Because I think the function of poetry is not
merely to be a verbal picture art or a verbal music art, but to be an
organon of reconciliation between art and life. The best poems, I think,
will be found to be those which alter our consciousness in such a way
that our inward, and even our outward, lives are altered. The poet sees
the world as we do not see it. Consequently, he can put a new complexion
on it for us. The world is pluralistic, and so are we. Intellectually we
may be of the twentieth century, but emotionally we may be born out of
our due season. Then let the poet of that due season mediate to us the
emotional life that we need. Living in America, we may, through him,
reach Greece or India. By his aid we may conquer the real world; by his
aid we may flee from it if it threatens to conquer us. By his aid alone
we may get outside of our own skins and into the very heart of the
world.
What, then, shall we say, when poetry offers to conduct us into a world
of growing sieves, slim squares, powdered souls, cool, colorless
struggles, the obstetrical adventures of white throats, and green and
yellow dins?
I have heard of a book which explains the fourth dimension. If I ever
get a chance to read that book, and if I find that I can understand the
fourth dimension, I shall have another shot at the appreciation of this
poetry. For I have a slumbering shadow of a pale-gray idea (if I, too,
may wax poetic) that in the sphere of the fourth dimension a slim square
would be a perfectly possible conception.
I shall arise and go home now and read some poems by the late Mr.
Meredith who is popularly supposed to be obscure.
In Defense of Vers Libre
ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE
(_A reply to “Spiritual Dangers of Writing Vers Libre” by Eunice
Tietjens in the November issue of The Little Review_)
The properly qualified judge of poetry can have no doubts about _vers
libre_; if he doubts it, he is no judge. He belongs to that class of
hide-bound conservatives who are unwilling to discard the old merely
because it is old. He does not yet understand that the newest is always
the best. Worst of all, he does not appreciate the value of Freedom.
Freedom is the greatest of boons to the artist. The soul of the artist
must not be hampered by unnecessary constraints. The old fixed
verse-forms—such as the sonnet, blank verse, and all the other familiar
metres—were exactly as cramping to the free creating spirit of the poet
as the peculiar spaces and arches of the Sistine Chapel were to the
designing instinct of Michael Angelo. Lamentable misfortune! that his
Sibyls had to occupy those awkward corners. How much would they not have
gained in grandeur could they have had all outdoors to expand in!
All outdoors is just what _vers libre_ affords the poet of today. He is
no longer under the necessity of moulding his thought into an artificial
pattern, compressing it to a predetermined form; it can remain fluent,
unsubjugated, formless, like a spontaneous emotional cry. No longer need
he accept such fatal and stereotyped bondage as that under which Milton
labored when the iron mechanics of blank verse forced him to
standardize, to conventionalize, his emotion in such lines as—
O dark dark dark amid the blaze of noon,
Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse
Without all hope of day!...
To be honest, we must admit that there was something sickly and
soul-destroying about the earlier verse-forms. The too-honeyed sweetness
and metrical constraint of _Paradise Lost_ has always secretly repelled
the true judge of poetry; and Shakespeare’s Sonnets have never been
thoroughly satisfactory just because of the fatal necessity under which
the author worked, of rhyming his lines in conformity with a fixed
order. How could spiritual originality survive such an ordeal?
It would be unwise, however, to condemn the whole body of past poets;
for certain of the earlier practitioners did, in their rudimentary way,
see the light. Milton in _Sampson Agonistes_, in the midst of passages
of the old-fashioned regular blank verse, introduced several choruses in
_vers libre_; and these could perhaps hardly be surpassed by any English
or American poet now living. As everyone knows, Walt Whitman (see _The
Poets of Barbarism_ by George Santayana) used _vers libre_ profusely. In
fact, there extends backward from us an unbroken chain of distinguished
_vers libre_ tradition, through Whitman, Matthew Arnold, Southey,
Shelley, Milton, and many others; the chain ends only with that first
“probably arboreal” singer just antedating the first discoverer of
regular rhythm. _Vers libre_ is as old as the hills, and we shall always
have it with us.
The one defect of the earlier practitioners of _vers libre_ was that
they did not have the wit to erect it into a cult. They used the free
form only when it seemed to them essentially appropriate to the
matter:—that is to say, they used it sporadically, desultorily. Today we
know better. Today we know that the free form must be used ever and
always. _In hoc signo vinces!_
As a modern poet admirably says—
Those envious outworn souls
Whose flaccid academic pulses
Beat to no rythms of more Dionysiac scope
Than metronomes,—
Or dollar-twenty-five alarm-clocks,—
They will forever
Cavail at novelty, at beauty, at freshness;
But, hell!—
But, a thousand devils!—
But, _Henri Quatre_ and the _Pont Neuf_!—
We of the new age, who leap upon the mountains like goats upon the
heaps of tin cans in the vacant lots, and butt the stars,—
We know they are liars,
And that we are what we are.
Could that be expressed in a sonnet? I think not. At least, it could not
be expressed so vigorously, so wisely, so well.
There is, however, one obvious peril against which the enthusiast must
guard himself. _Vers libre_ is not of itself a complete warranty of
success; because a poem is in this form, it is not necessarily fine
poetry. “Love is enough,” says William Morris; he would not have said
the same about _vers libre_. A certain power of conception, beyond the
brilliant and original idea involved in the very employing of the free
verse-form, is requisite for real importance in the finished product.
Nor is the statement of the poet’s own unique and terrifying importance
a sufficient theme to constitute the burden of all his work. Several of
our most immortal living _vers librists_ have fallen into such an error.
This “ego über alles” concept, though profound and of a startling
originality, lacks variety if it be indefinitely repeated. Should the
poet, however, feel deep in his soul that there is nothing else worth
saying except this, let him at least take care to beautify his idea by
the use of every artifice. After saying “I am I, and great,” let him not
forget to add variety and contrast to the picture by means of the
complementary idea: “You, O world, are you, and contemptible.” In such
minglings of light and shade lies poetry’s special and proper beauty.