distinct from both the writers of his race and from the Western writers.
We observe a dualism in his art, an eternal collision between fact and
fiction, between realism and symbolism. His inborn Slavic mysticism is
weighed down by the ballast of his rich experiences, and he continually
wavers between the Scylla of lyric melancholy and the Charybdis of
picturesque plot, preserving the equilibrium at times more and at times
less skilfully. The reader thus finds in Conrad that which he is after.
For my part, I am rather distracted by the over-complex plot of
_Victory_; I should much prefer to meet Heyst and Lena in less dizzy
surroundings, for then the interesting psychology of the quaint lovers
would appear accentuated, like the flame of a candle, and would not be
blurred by a pyrotechnic mass of startling coincidences and marvellous
adventures. The atmosphere of Doom that breathes throughout the story is
reduced in the end to a sensational Eugène Sue-like climax—a heap of
dead bodies.
K.
SICK IDEALISM
_Erdgeist (Earth-Spirit): A Tragedy in Four Acts; Pandora’s Box, by
Frank Wedekind. New York: Albert and Charles Boni._
Poor, foolish Frank Wedekind. Hapless Idealist. Luckless dreamer. Have
you read _Der Erdgeist_ and _Pandora’s Box_? He wrote them—this
enfevered fancier. In two kindred flashes of madness he illuminated
several hundred sheets of paper and out of them—out of their blood-shot
words and illegitimate truths—a new figure is born for the bookshelf.
Not an old figure in new binding and fresh rouge. Not a Lescaut or a
Thaïs or a Nana. This mocking idealist of virtue removes indeed the
eighth veil from Salome. He hurls into the midst of the twittering
parlor thinkers and sex chatterers a most disturbing answer to the
eternal question, “What is woman?” It didn’t disturb me because I don’t
believe it. And anyway, I don’t mean that kind of disturbance. I mean,
virtuous reader, it is impossible to consume Wedekind without blushing.
If you were disappointed in Shakespeare and Balzac and Casanova and
Jacques Tournebrouche and could find nothing to blush at in them, do not
despair. Here is a fellow, this Wedekind, who will daub a real blush out
of a rouge pot, a miserable fellow whom you can condemn and ostracize
and, having relegated him to his proper place, enjoy thoroughly or
secretly or not at all.
It was Wedekind who first made people blush by a tasteless dissertation
on the ignorant smugness recognized by society as the proper state for a
young woman’s mind. He called it _Spring’s Awakening_. It was chiefly
instrumental in awakening theatrical writers and managers. They spread
the blush at $2 a head and waxed fat. But how did they spread the blush?
Did they talk like Wedekind did? Did the mawkish plagiarist Cosmo
Hamilton talk like Wedekind—tastelessly, vilely, brutally,
and—horrors!—indelicately? Not he. Mr. Hamilton and the other
get-rich-quick propagandists wouldn’t talk that way for the world. They
are nice gentlemen. Not for them the idealist’s leer. Rather the
bathroom wink. They will reveal a delicious girl in her delicious
boudoir wearing a delicious nightie. They will make her out a virtuous
girl, charmingly endowed but utterly stainless.
Having established this fact they roguishly introduce into her boudoir
an estimable young man and permit him to caress her dramatically. But
the whole proceeding is stainless. It is drolly suggestive of
unspeakable things—see box office receipts. But suggestiveness is
necessary to bring home to people the blindness of virtue and the
dangers that beset the underpaid young women who ignorantly make it its
own reward—(if that means anything). Anyway, when the audience leaves it
has been enlightened. Its taste has not been offended. Virtue has been
shown to be a dangerous thing—that is, uneducated virtue has. Everyone
agrees. And if not they disagree. In either case the discussion properly
conducted (under the auspices of the “Amalgamated Virgins of the 21st
and 22nd Wards”) is pleasing and improving. The press argues delicately
and in good taste about sex hygiene. A new physiology is placed in the
public schools containing information on the most effective way of
brushing the teeth of the young and preserving the hair of the old.
And last week Coroner Hoffman told me that it was impossible to estimate
how many girls were killed annually in Chicago by abortive operations.
He put the number in the hundreds. Hooray! Death is the wages of sin.
But all quibbling aside, what does this low fellow Wedekind whom I
started out by calling an idealist (I will prove it shortly) do? To
begin with, he talks about sex. Not about stockings and undergarments
and perfumed kisses, ankles, asterisks and anomalies. Everyone knows
that this kind of talk, particularly when produced in drama form, is in
the first place inexcusable, and in the second place unnecessary, and in
the third place vulgar. And in the fourth place, instead of making the
best of a bad job—that is, making his contributions a mental stimulus
for snickering roués and ladies sensitive of their status—he insists
upon being nasty without being covert. Is there anything more
unpardonable? Nobody can enjoy nastiness. The argument is an endless
one. It leads to nothing except blows or blushes.
As for the plays—I almost forgot I was reviewing them—Wedekind explodes
volcanically on the subject he treats, and blows the question mark out
of woman. He takes all the crimes a policeman ever heard of, rolls them
up in a package of soft warm flesh and labels it “Woman.” He cracks his
showman’s whip and calls attention to the texture of her skin and the
white meat of her body. And then he sends her forth to ruin, to sweep
like a polluted and wreck-strewn wave through life, breaking at last in
a dirty crest on a foreign shore and leaving a scum behind her. Are
these the worst things Wedekind could find to label woman—incest,
butchery, lecherous animalism, bloody business and abandonment? Who but
a sick idealist would pick a careless and care-free prostitute as a
flaming example of woman at her worst? And is the power to destroy the
most terrible power woman possesses?
Wedekind imagines that people idealize sex and hold it a beautiful
force. Poor Wedekind, where did he get such an idea? And then he
imagines that in reality sex passion is a smashing force that knocks
people into each other’s arms, tumbles their heavens, smears their
lives. He imagines that men and women love without thought, mate with
the irresponsibility of hyenas. And imagining all this Wedekind creates
a sort of droll fiend to prove it. Behold her—a creature to confound
saints and sinners, to tear the beauty out of men’s souls and dance with
muddied feet upon the finery of life. He dangles her before our eyes,
naked and glorious—the diseased siren of the ages. And he calls her
Lulu, the earth spirit.
He introduces her fresh and joyous and vibrating with tabooed emotions.
She is in love with her own beauty. Her body thrills her with its
whiteness and its movement. She already has felt its power. Were I in
these plays I would as soon think of kissing Lulu as biting a stick of
dynamite. But I am not an ideal conception. There are other men—Wedekind
digs them up from every corner of life—who fall at her feet and who
shoot each other and themselves for the sake of being contaminated by
her caresses. Queer men, idealists. They tumble about her, whining,
cursing, chanting, forswearing their Gods, their souls and their
vanities.
And she tumbles with them, from one precipice down to another, faithful
only to her nervous system. Her only virtue is a complete absence of the
quality. If only Wedekind had invested her with a single human moral
conviction—merely for the sake of completing her diabolically. If only
he had made it possible for her to sin against something. But she hasn’t
anything to sin against—not a conviction, not a moral. In this country
she would be tried for her murders and treasons and sent to an asylum
for incomplete people. What she does she does simply. When this hussy
kills the father who owned her in order to save herself from his threats
and then throws herself laughingly into the arms of the son, she does it
all without malice. It is all natural, spontaneous. When she rebukes her
own father for making love to her (she tells him he’s getting too old
for such tricks), when she murders, deceives and pollutes she hasn’t any
feeling of doing wrong, any reaction except one of satisfaction. If this
isn’t an ideal I’d like to know what is. If everybody was like she is
there would be no sorrow or suffering in the world. We would all be
simple animals dashing around, biting each other, drinking from each
other’s throats, feeling pain only when our nerves were touched and joy
only when our nerves were touched. Wedekind imagines that this state is
the true reflection of today. He exaggerates what according to his
experience may be a logical prejudice and hurls it brutally behind the
footlights and into the bookcase.
Lulu, bedraggled, walking the streets of London in the rain, looking for
prey, Lulu wheedling quarters out of ragged sensualists, hiding her
father and her lover and the woman who desires her while she
“entertains” her victims, Lulu spreading disease, and then Lulu running
wildly around the dirty garret in her chemise pursued and killed by a
red-eyed, nail-bitten Jack the Ripper—that is the end of woman. Poor
Wedekind. What an exaggerated opinion of virtue he must have,—an
idealist’s. There is but one more thing. It is Wedekind’s master stroke.
He introduces a note of unselfishness and poetry as a climax. Lulu lies
stabbed by the delighted and enthusiastic Ripper. And kneeling before
the picture of her in her hey-dey is the “Countess,” the woman who loved
her—a homo-sexualist—an irritating creature.
“I love you, you are the star in my heavens,” she cries purely. I don’t
remember whether the Ripper kills her or not. _What a mess!_
B. H.
_Rabindranath Tagore: A Biographical Study, by Ernest Rhys._ _New
York: The Macmillan Company._
Shrill Chicago and thousands of similar examples of Western civilization
have more to learn from a book of this sort than can be readily
explained. Taking Chicago as fairly representative of the swiftest
modernity, one must blush for the city of “I Will” whenever he picks up
Ernest Rhys’s keen and quiet study of the talked-about Hindu. The
blushes are for the vast herds whose only ventures upon new paths are to
trample and set back, whose only ideals center in or near the stomach.
In the white light of this book—reflected radiance from a
first-magnitude luminary—Chicago and her kind appear as blundering
heedless egotists who never listen. Their ears have not developed, their
eyes are turned to the ground. “I Will”—what? To grow strong,
high-minded, clean of heart, and wise of soul? Anything but this.
Tagore, by his very tolerance and avoidance of condemnation, seems
vehemently to remind the thinker of all this—by force of the law of
contrast. The clear-eyed Easterner even points out a scant virtue or two
in Western civilization, such as the value of mastering materials, which
the Westerner himself overlooks when in self-defense; and no blame is
placed on the feverish civilizees. Tagore moves in a state of peace
which is the very essence of activity, and has no part in the fanatics’
plan which begins with lassitude and ends in stagnation. He is a man of
action, forceful, definite, wasting no energy nor sparing the use of it.
Modern methods of doing things and “getting there” become mere feeble
noises by comparison. This is not the tragedy, that Westerners blunder
and fail,—the East has its failures,—but it lies in the fact that
America arrogantly chooses not to listen, not to see and learn. A few
scattered listeners must catch the harmonies intended for a whole
nation, the majority having been sophisticated to extinction. The herds
in Chicago and elsewhere will go on indefinitely in their own swaggering
way, blind and deaf, sure beyond correction that the chief desirability
lies in digestion, decoration, and diversion ... while Rabindranath
Tagore and the beautiful element he personifies are ever-present,
waiting within reach of all, working out the biggest things in the
world, and living the last word of true joy.
Ernest Rhys is very gentle and sparing in making comparisons. He leaves
this to his reader, and is mainly occupied with the re-creation of the
steady magnetic atmosphere which is a natural attribute of Tagore. The
paragraphs devoted to the boys’ school at Bolpur give one a feeling of
something lost, at least to those who thirsted through the schools of
the U. S. Rhys is successful in giving out an excellent idea of the
great man and his works.
HERMAN SCHUCHERT.
Militarism is the German spirit.
Militarism is the self-revelation of German heroism.
Militarism is the heroic spirit raised to the spirit of war. It
is Potsdam and Weimar in their highest combination. It is _Faust_
and _Zarathustra_ and Beethoven’s score in the trenches.
For even the _Eroica_ and the _Egmont_ Overture are nothing but
the truest militarism. And just because all virtues which lend
such a high value to militarism are revealed to the fullest
extent in war, we are filled with militarism, regarding it as
something holy—as the holiest thing on earth—_Werner Zombart_.
Have You Read——?
(_In this column will be given each month a list of current
magazine articles which, as an intelligent being, you will not
want to miss._)
The Imagist Number of _The Egoist_, May 1.
H. D. and Imagism, by May Sinclair. _The Egoist_, June 1.
Redemption and Dostoevsky, by Rebecca West. _The New Republic_, June 5.
Back of Billy Sunday, by John Reed. _The Metropolitan_, May.
The Old Woman’s Money, by James Stephens. _The Century_, May.
Quack Novels and Democracy, by Owen Wister. _The Atlantic_, June.
Can You Read——?
(_In this column will be given each month a resumé of current
cant which, as an intelligent being, you will go far to avoid._)
Fiction reviews by Llewellyn Jones in _The Chicago Evening Post_.
A typical literary judgment from _The Dial_: “But, in the main, his
wholesomely harsh utterances ought to be, and must be, in some degree,
tonic and bracing and curative.”
An editorial from _The New Republic_, a journal of opinion whose
function, we believe, is to circulate ideas:
During the past ten months the German Ambassador at Washington
has done nothing to promote a better understanding between his
own government and nation and the American government and nation.
He is consequently all the more to be congratulated upon his
behavior at a moment of acute and dangerous contention between
the United States and Germany. He has on his own initiative and
perhaps at his own risk intervened on behalf of a possibly
peaceful solution of the differences between the two governments.
He has sought by means of a frank talk with President Wilson to
break through the barrier of misunderstanding which the exchange
of notes was building up between the two governments and to
re-establish a genuine vehicle of communication. The conversation
may not lead to agreement, but at the top of a peculiarly
forbidding crisis it has at least made an agreement seem not
impossible. Everybody who detests war, everybody who hopes that
the friendship between the United States and Germany will not be
involved in the wreckage of the hideous conflict, will be
grateful to Count von Bernstorff for his enterprise.
The Reader Critic
_Mrs. Jean Cowdrey Norton, Hempstead, Long Island_:
Since coming in contact with THE LITTLE REVIEW last December, I have
more than enjoyed each issue with your own impulsive, warm-hearted,
dauntless personality coming through its pages; and it is for that
reason I do not hesitate to ask you for an explanation of a sentence
that you wrote in the April number, which led me to subscribe for that
horrible output, viz., _The Masses_. You pronounced it indispensable to
intelligent living. On that I sent in a subscription, and whereas I am
not so awfully stupid I cannot understand how you, who are evidently an
artist with high ideals, could possibly have such a magazine on your
desk. The cartoons are so untrue, so damnably vulgar,—which good art
never is,—the insistent harping on the shadows of life, the exaggerated
outlook which tinges the whole paper—quite as one-sided on its side as
other papers are on theirs; all of which I know must be in complete
contradiction to your self. It fills me with astonishment. We
acknowledge with our ever-increasing complex civilization that we must
more than ever perhaps help each other; but I don’t just understand
which class this perfectly rotten sheet is intended to reach. If it’s
the so-called down trodden, they are apt to have so much unhappiness any
way I should say a good brace up does more good than harping on
injustice in general; as for the class that “does not think,” its
inartistic drawings alone would be enough to queer it. When I am down
and out—I happen to be a working woman too—I most decidedly _do not_
want to be made more down and out by more woes, that often spring from
lack of intelligence, that both rich and poor suffer alike from. You
will see I believe in the responsibility of the individual, that you
Socialists rather avoid. I do not expect you to answer this letter, but
I shall look in THE LITTLE REVIEW for a stray line that will give me
some idea of your outlook.
[I have so much to say in answer to this letter, and so little
time to say it that I have asked someone who shares my view to do
it for me. Mr. Davis says it much better than I could, anyhow.
And I must add that I am not a Socialist. I am an Anarchist—which
means, an Individualist; which means everything that people
think it doesn’t mean.—_The Editor._]
_F. Guy Davis, Chicago_:
I will try to indicate very briefly why I think so much of _The Masses_.
The group that is getting it out are real students who know the crowd
with all its hope and despair, much better than the crowd knows itself.
They are interpreting the crowd. The mass would never like _The Masses_.
It is too true. It is not got up for them. _The Cosmopolitan_ is the
ideal of the mass. _The Masses_ is for the few brave spirits who want to
know life as it is, the shadows as well as the flights up into the
sunshine. _The Masses_ to my mind has as broad a range of feeling
reflected in its pages as any magazine I know of. Humor, tragedy, light,
shade, drama, color, yes, and mud too, as you say. But isn’t mud a part
of life? In some respects mud is the condition of life. The great need
of the sensitive mind of today is contact with the vital life-giving
things and ideas which come from the earth. The life of such a mind is
like the life of a plant. Its roots must go down beneath the surface or
it will die. _The Masses_ to my mind is the spirit of the earth put into
magazine form, and to read it understandingly is to put the roots of the
soul down into the earth where they should be if a healthy growth is
desired. One could get too much of that contact of course, but that is
another matter.
_FREE POETS v. FREE VERSE._
[As Mr. Carter suggests in the following letter, reprinted from
_The Egoist_, I hope THE LITTLE REVIEW agree with Mr. Aldington’s
point of view. I hope the latter may be induced to answer Mr.
Carter at length in the same issue.—_The Editor._]
_To the Editor, The Egoist_
Madam,—I notice that in his contribution to the Imagist number of _The
Egoist_ Mr. Harold Monro, writing on the history of the Imagist
movement, states that the movement owes its origin to the large
discovery of “Poetry as _an_ art” [my italics]. He then proceeds to
point out that the Imagist verse fails as poetry not because the writers
love poetry less, but because they love expression more. Being what it
is it would be no better if Tennyson had written it, and no worse if it
proved to be by, say, Mr. Rudyard Kipling. Indeed, it is not poetry any
more than little Congreve’s tiresome stream of depreciation is comedy,
despite what certain hopeless apprentice play critics assert to the
contrary. Poetry, I suppose Mr. Monro would say, is not expression but
the thing expressed. All this is good and true. But Mr. Monro fails to
make one thing quite clear. The Imagists have been mistaken in their
very conception of poetry which lives alone by the power to see it as
Art and not as “_an art_.” I am convinced that some at least of the
Imagists are not without the secret of this power, and if they will be
guided by the vision they gain thereby, to the extent of forgetting
their literary erudition, it will transform their conception of poetry.
The strict literature at which they aim is not proper poetry. In fact,
literary technicians do not, as a rule, write poetry for the simple
reason that even if they dream the poet’s dream of reality they at once
proceed to smother it under literary form. We must look to those rich in
poetical experience, and free to express it, for the true expression of
poetry. In plain words, “Poetry as _an_ art” (that is, as expression or
form) is not the same as Poetry as Art (that is, the thing expressed).
The distinction is so big and vital and so necessary to be maintained at
this moment, that I propose to consider it in an article in THE LITTLE
REVIEW. I hope to prove that what poetry needs nowadays is free poets,
not free verse.
HUNTLY CARTER.
[As the nearest available Imagist, perhaps I may be permitted to
comment (without prejudice to the other Imagists) on Mr. Carter’s
letter. I am not quite sure that I know what Mr. Carter means,
but I think he means that it is useless for a man to study
classic quantity and mediaeval rhyme and modern free verse, if he
has no particular impulse or mood to make those studies valuable
as a means of expression. If that is what Mr. Carter means I
agree with him. I will also agree that it is useless to try and
teach a dumb man to lecture or a lame man to break the hundred yards
record. If a man is to lecture, if he is to be an athlete, we take
for granted that in the first case he has ideas and a certain
eloquence, and in the second a good physique and an aptitude for
sprinting. Mr. Carter would be a rotten trainer if he didn’t make
his man diet, take cold baths and long walks and an occasional
sprint; he ought even to make him do a little boxing. I feel,
somehow, that Mr. Carter never went in for violent exercise or
that he relied upon his “Soul-Flow” or “Art-Ebb” to get him
through.
Now poetry is not so very unlike athletics. You may have no aptitude
for it, and then all the training in the world won’t get you in
first; you may shape very well, but if you don’t train you will
be an “also ran.” I believe in having an aptitude and in training
it; Mr. Carter believes in having an aptitude and not training it.
I object to Mr. Carter informing us of the existence of our “of
courses.” We take for granted that a man is sincere, that he has
lots of impulses and that he is “free.” All that is the stuff out
of which poetry is made. The making of it, the “training” is what
we are immediately interested in. We take for granted that we
have the essentials of poetry in us or we should not attempt to
write it. We are now after clarity of form, precision of
expression. Mr. Carter, like the majority of our fellow citizens,
does not value these things; we find them present in every work of
art which is beautiful and permanently interesting; hence our
anxiety to attain by practice that clarity and that precision
which practice alone can give.]
RICHARD ALDINGTON.