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?
We come from where the wind blows
And the young stars die.
Why do you move so fast, so fast
Across the white moon's breast?
The cruel wind is at our heels
And we may not rest.
Are you not weary, fleeing shapes,
That never cease to flee?
The forkéd tree's chained shadows are
Less weary than we.
Whither do you go, O shadow-shapes,
Across the ghastly sky?
We go to where the wind blows
And the old stars die.
This is just a short and rather exuberant message to LITTLE REVIEW
readers, because I think they really deserve the pleasure of discovering
Cronyn for themselves.
* * * * *
_Songs for the New Age_, by James Oppenheim. [The Century Company,
New York.]
One of the phenomena of the evolution of man is the constant broadening
of consciousness. We become accustomed to the sharing of our feelings
with larger and larger numbers of people; our identity with the
race,--and even with inanimate things,--becomes increasingly plain to us
through both the findings of science and heightened emotional
receptivity.
And yet this wider consciousness by no means lessens the value or
quality of personality. By a splendid paradox, the more we realize our
inseparability with all life the more does our selfhood become
accentuated. Thus is achieved the marriage of Democracy and
Individualism. We find that, in the end, the cultivation of one is the
nourishing of the other. I need hardly mention that I am not alluding to
that similacrum of equality: political democracy.
This must be known to appreciate the message of James Oppenheim. For it
is pre-eminently as a message that these poems should be treated. They
are of essential value as one of the most articulate efforts to
translate that which in most people is mute.
There is an unmistakable kinship with Whitman in this work; not merely
in the form,--which is here termed "polyrhythmic,"--but in the spirit,
without hint of plagiarism or of abject imitation. Also we have the same
breezy contempt for the petty trappings of civilization.
Here is an extract from the poem, _Tasting the Earth_, which has beauty
as well as truth:
O dark great mother-globe so close beneath me....
It was she with her inexhaustible grief,
Ages of blood-drenched jungles, and the smoking of craters, and the
roar of tempests,
And moan of the forsaken seas,
It was she with the hills beginning to walk in the shapes of the
dark-hearted animals,
It was she risen, dashing away tears and praying to dumb skies, in
the pomp-crumbling tragedy of man....
It was she, container of all griefs, and the buried dust of broken
hearts,
Cry of the christs and the lovers and the child-stripped mothers,
And ambition gone down to defeat, and the battle overborne,
And the dreams that have no waking.
My heart became her ancient heart:
On the food of the strong I fed, on dark strange life itself:
Wisdom-giving and somber with the unremitting love of ages....
There was dank soil in my mouth,
And bitter sea on my lips,
In a dark hour, tasting the Earth.
This is enough to make one grateful to Mr. Oppenheim. But not always
plays the cosmic symphony; sometimes the spheric strains relax for a few
slender lyrics to a moving-picture lady or for the tender song to Annie,
the working-girl. We leave the book with the conception of a manly and
impressionable personality with a healthy lust for life, a deep insight
into the world-soul and his own soul (which, after all, are the same),
and great power to communicate his findings to us through a plastic and
peculiarly individual medium.
CHARLES ASHLEIGH.
An American Anarchist
_Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre._ [Mother Earth Publishing
Association, New York.]
Into every generation are born certain personalities that have the gift
of attracting vast multitudes within their orbit, dominating them,
animating them with a single purpose, directing them to a common goal.
There are other personalities more richly gifted, of more extended
vision, who nevertheless live and die unknown to the greater number of
their contemporaries. Aristocrats of the mind, these latter disdain to
practice the arts by which popularity is gained and held. They attract,
but do not seek to dominate. They persuade, but never command. Their
passion is without hysteria; their moral indignation is without personal
rancor. They cherish ideals, but harbor no illusions. They will gladly
surrender life itself for an idea, but they will not shriek for it. Our
popular leaders are not seldom led by those who seem to follow. These
others advance alone. If they are followed it is without their
solicitation. To say that the individualist writer and lecturer whose
collected writings are now before us was such a personality may seem
exaggerated praise. If so, I have no apology to offer. I only ask that,
until you have read the lectures, poems, stories, and sketches which
this book contains you will suspend judgment.
Voltairine de Cleyre belonged to the school of thinkers that has
suffered most from the misrepresentations and misunderstanding of the
unthinking crowd; the school which numbers among its adherents men like
Stirner, Ibsen, and, in some aspects of his teaching, Nietzsche; the
school that sees hope of social regeneration only in the sovereignty of
the individual and the total abolition of the state. She belonged to it
because she was at once logician and poet, with a temperament abnormally
rebellious against tyranny and an imagination abnormally responsive to
every form of suffering.
It has often been remarked that anarchism takes root most readily in
those minds that have endured most oppression. Thus Russia, the home of
absolute political despotism, is also the birthplace of Bakunin,
Hertzen, Kropotkin, and Tolstoy. In America, where what Mencken calls
"the new puritanism" operates more oppressively than political
government, it is in behalf of sex freedom that most frequent and
vehement protest is heard.
In the case of Voltairine de Cleyre this reaction declared itself
neither because of political nor of sexual restraint. It came about in
the realm of religion. It began from the moment when, at the age of
twelve, the sensitive gifted girl was placed in the hands of a Roman
Catholic sisterhood, presumably that her education might be safe. For
four years the young Voltairine lived at the convent of Our Lady of Lake
Huron at Sarnia, Ontario, heartsick with loneliness, writhing under the
padded yoke of conventual discipline, gathering within her soul that
flame which was never destined to be quenched save in death. Out of that
experience she came with a mind wholly emancipated from the dogmas of
religion. Not long afterward she entered upon what promised to be a
brilliant career as a secularist lecturer.
That a nature like hers would long confine itself to labor in the barren
field of theological controversy was not to have been expected. She was
too vital, too human. It is possible that the delicacy of her own health
intensified her sense of the world pain. Her sympathies are not alone of
the intellect but of the nerves. One feels the nerve torture of an
imaginative and poetic invalid in her confession of the reasons which
had drawn her to adopt the anarchist propaganda. She pictures herself as
standing upon a mighty hill from which she writes:
I saw the roofs of the workshops of the little world. I saw the
machines, the things that men had made to ease their burden, the
wonderful things, the iron genii, I saw them set their iron teeth
in the living flesh of the men who made them; I saw the maimed
and crumpled stumps of men go limping away into the night that
engulfs the poor, perhaps to be thrown up in the flotsam and
jetsam of beggary for a time, perhaps to suicide in some dim
corner where the black surge throws its slime. I saw the rose
fire of the furnace shining on the blanched face of the man who
tended it, and knew surely, as I knew anything in life, that
never would a free man feed his blood to the fire like that.
I saw swart bodies, all mangled and crushed, borne from the
mouths of the mines to be stowed away in a grave hardly less
narrow and dark than that in which the living form had crouched
ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day; and I knew that in order that
I might be warm--I and you, and those others who never do any
dirty work--those men had slaved away in those black graves and
been crushed to death at last. I saw beside city streets great
heaps of horrible colored earth, and down at the bottom of the
trench from which it was thrown, so far down that nothing else
was visible, bright gleaming eyes, like a wild animal hunted into
its hole. And I knew that free men never chose to labor there,
with pick and shovel, in that foul, sewage-soaked earth, in that
narrow trench, in that deadly sewer gas ten, eight, even six
hours a day. Only slaves would do it.
I saw deep down in the hull of the ocean liner the men who
shoveled the coal--burned and seared like paper before the grate;
and I knew that "the record" of the beautiful monster, and the
pleasure of the ladies who laughed on the deck, were paid for
with those withered bodies and souls. I saw the scavenger carts
go up and down, drawn by sad brutes and driven by sadder ones;
for never a man, a man in full possession of his selfhood, would
freely choose to spend all his days in the nauseating stench that
forces him to swill alcohol to neutralize it. And I saw in the
lead works how men were poisoned, and in the sugar refineries how
they went insane; and in the factories how they lost their
decency; and in the stores how they learned to lie; and I knew it
was slavery made them do all this.
And against such slavery this young Amazon of the spirit (for at this
time, 1887, she was only twenty-one) declared a life-long warfare. In so
doing she separated herself from those who would otherwise have been her
natural allies and cut off those opportunities for worldly success which
must in the ordinary course of things have come to her.
Finding the cause of economic slavery not in capitalism, as do the
socialists, but in the government of man by man through which capitalism
is made possible, she was isolated still further from her
contemporaries. Hence the obscurity in which her life was passed. Hence
the fact that until her death in 1912 she lived quietly, teaching
English to the newly-arrived immigrant, scattering about her the
treasure of a richly-stored mind as freely as the south wind scatters
the perfume it has gathered from the garden in its path. If she had
lived nearer to the plane of the generally-accepted culture Voltairine
de Cleyre might have gained a recognized place among the foremost women
of her time.
As it was she gave us in her lectures, now for the first time offered to
the public, the most comprehensive exposition of philosophical anarchism
that has appeared since the days of Proudhon and Stirner.
LILIAN HILLER UDELL.
The Growth of Evolutionary Theory
_Evolution Old and New_, by Samuel Butler. [E. P. Dutton and
Company, New York.]
When _The Origin of Species_ was published the world grouped itself into
two main camps. By far the larger of these took the attitude that Darwin
was an impious propounder of disgusting and dangerous heresy. The
smaller group hailed him as the bringer in of a new era.
Samuel Butler allied himself with neither group, but took the attitude
of a constructive critic. In these pages he attacks contemporary
Darwinism--using the term in the narrow sense--on two grounds. That it
is not the novelty it is generally supposed to be, on the one hand, and
that the mechanism implied by its theory is not true, on the other hand,
are his main points.
In so far as Butler treats the first contention, his book is even today
of value. He describes the pre-Darwinian theories of evolution,
especially those of Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, and he strives to show
that their explanations or provisional explanations were sometimes more
near the truth than was Darwin's over-emphasis upon the struggle for
existence as the controlling factor in the evolution of species.
Butler's own point of view is that evolution takes place in accordance
with a design, and it is this part of his book that will be of least
importance at the present day. He quotes Paley, the celebrated English
theologian and advocate of the deified architect idea of God, to show
that animal organisms do show evidences of what is, strictly speaking,
design, and which cannot be referred to the ordinary Darwinian
explanations.
Butler differs from Paley, however, in placing the designer not outside
the cosmic flux of his working materials, but within the organism. Not
God, he says, but the ancestral memory of man is the designer. The
individual perishes, but his memory endures in his offspring and alters
them in accordance with the lessons of ancestral experience.
We have said that this is the least valuable part of the book, and it is
so for the reason that later biologists and philosophers with the
biological approach have considerably enlarged the field of speculation
in this particular realm. The theory of "entelechies" of Hans Driesch
practically does for organisms what Butler does in his idea of
unconscious memory. On the other hand, the new "imminent teleology" of
Bergson gives us a new angle on the whole question of design in nature.
At the same time, however, the majority of biologists are harking back
to a conception of evolution as a kind of mathematical proposition in
which all is given to start with, and in which the new is neither a new
design nor a spontaneous creation, but is simply a liberation from
inhibition of what was always implicit in the old. And the men of this
school would never consent to write a book like this of Butler's. "To
the seed pan and the incubator" is their cry. The time is not here when
synthesis is either advisable or even possible, they tell us. And until
we hear further from these modern experimenters the wise man will read
Butler for his history and prospective,--and for his humor,--but will
not be guided by his theories, which are the work, indeed, of a
brilliant intellect, but one working without our new data, and without
experimental backing.
Of course, the style of the book is delightful, and all who enjoy
controversy and the play of dialectic should read it. Another class to
whom it can be recommended is that large class of people who accept
their view of evolution in the same spirit that an old lady accepts the
Episcopalian creed and are twice as dogmatic over it.
ILLIAM DHONE.
Emma Goldman and the Modern Drama
_The Social Significance of the Modern Drama_, by Emma Goldman.
[Richard G. Badger, Boston.]
[_The points in which we disagree with the reviewer will be
discussed in a coming issue.--The Editor._]