present marriage customs are changed. She is emphatic in the need of
young people being enlightened in regard to marital experiences and
problems, but her suggestions are indefinite and inconclusive. However,
much may be overlooked for her emphasis of the fact that sex is an
active principal and that the best love-life is that which makes the
best use of love’s activities. She admonishes us to “play fair alike in
loving and unloving,” which means that love is not a light thing of a
day, but must be great enough and strong enough to control itself, even
to sacrifice itself for the greatest racial good—and never to sell
itself from a motive of personal selfishness, or for the bliss of an
hour.
The highway that Mrs. Austin lays out for love is rough and stony in
spots, and yet its goal of racial betterment through achievement as well
as by means of offspring is not to be despised.
MARY ADAMS STEARNS.
Dutch Bourgeoisie
_Small Souls_, by Louis Couperus. [Dodd, Mead and Company, New
York.]
Rain, rain.... It is always raining in Holland; the skies are ever
hidden behind muddy clouds, and in the damp, bleak atmosphere straggle
grey figures with stony faces. It is painful to follow Couperus through
the four hundred odd pages of his gloomy novel, to meet only “small
souls,” petty men and women whose sole interest lies in dinner parties
and endless gossip. Empty, tedious, stupid “society,” without even the
piquant vice that makes attractive the bourgeoisie of Balzac,
Maupassant, or Zola. The least boring figure among the asinine menagerie
is that of the heroine, Constance, whose sole virtue consists in the
fact that she had committed adultery in her early life. The author has
not brought in a single positive type of Holland’s artistic or
intellectual circles to counteract the general gloom of the picture; he
has evidently determined to hold his readers within the frame of a
family-epic, to focus their attention on one particular aspect of life
in the Hague, the shallowest, the palest. As this novel presents the
translation of the first part of the author’s tetralogy, we must be
patient and consider the book as a prelude to the developing drama.
Already we see at the end of this volume promising symptoms of a new,
real life, to be manifested in the growing boy, Adrian—big, healthy,
sturdy, who despises his petty relatives with their noisy intrigues, and
whose “boyish lips, with their faint shading of dawn, curve into a
scornful smile as he says: ‘It’s all about nothing!’” We shall eagerly
look forward to the following volumes, for Couperus is an artist, a deep
psychologist, a follower of Zola; his method may be old, arch-realistic,
but, as I say, he is an artist, hence thrilling.
K.
James Stephens: Poet and Pagan
_The Demi-Gods_, by James Stephens. [The Macmillan Company, New
York.]
God’s most high messengers and certain Irish loafers nest well together.
James Stephens was the first man to discern this and other plain, albeit
unique, facts; and in the _Demi-Gods_ he takes the reader into a
delightful confidence, telling him the inmost thoughts of three angels,
their two companions (also Irish), a philosophic donkey, an ecstatic
crow, and the like of them. The angels learn table-manners and similar
ethics from the two Celtic vagabonds, whom they chance upon when they
touch foot to earth, one dark night. The father-vagabond gets daily food
for the party, paying for it when he isn’t temperamentally swept into
stealing; the other, who is the dearest kind of an Irish girl, naturally
in love with the youngest angel, does the cooking and mothering for them
all,—and celestial wisdom is shelved during the acquirement of so much
worldly knowledge.
How can the astonishing charms of this book be described? In the first
place, there is poetry—neither cadent nor decadent poetry, but the sort
of prose that conveys the most finely imagined poetic thought. And there
is contrast. Such contrast! From the calm conversation of angels to the
braying of an ass is the easiest jump for Stephens. It is a gentle slide
from paragraphs of delicate dawn-picturing to a peasant’s narration of
brawls and thieving, or a description of the angels attired in Pat
McCann’s trousers. And, given the latitude of half a dozen quotations,
one might prove that this same Stephens was a deep-gazing mystic. Nor
would his extreme paganism be difficult to establish. But to avoid all
the inevitable shruggings of literary shoulders, if one really said
these things about the man, let it be quickly stated that James Stephens
is before all else an artist, a writer with a superlative sense of humor
and a pleasantly incomprehensible imagination.
While a deeper probing of his mysticism or paganism (as such) would
perhaps bring about a sudden discounting of his humor and his poetic
sensibilities, it is necessary to remember that Stephens is Irish, with
all the implied values of that temperament. Therefore, it is well to
consider the author of _The Demi-Gods_ to be this day’s most unique
literary light. The combination stands alone.
HERMAN SCHUCHERT.
Unfulfilled Expectations
_A Lady of Leisure_, by Ethel Sidgwick. [Small, Maynard and
Company, Boston.]
Long, diffuse, sometimes clever, sometimes pointless conversations mark
this latest book of an author from whom we had come to expect only the
best. Miss Sidgwick could not write anything that did not have passages
of keen insight and shrewd handling of our commonplace humanity, but
here their value is hidden under an avalanche of words—words—words. The
slight plot—which of course is no fault—deals with the whims of the
daughter of a great London surgeon. She overcomes parental objection and
enters a dressmaking establishment; but we are given no particularly
vital picture of this life. There are several young people whose love
affairs become mutually mixed, but ultimately untangled—all of which is
done by means of conversations, jerky, exclamatory, unrestrained. This
method is true to life because such chatter is exactly the way modern
people talk, but nevertheless our ears ache with it, and we find
ourselves longing for a paragraph of straightaway description or
narration, which never comes.
The frivolous and empty atmosphere is all well enough for a relish, but
it is unsatisfying as a total, particularly from one who can give too
much that is worth while. It is like a continuous afternoon tea, or a
lemon meringue pie with nothing but the meringue.
M. A. S.
Interpretation of Music
_Nature in Music_, by Lawrence Gilman. [John Lane Company, New
York.]
Its thin divine kinkiness ...
I felt it undulate my soul—
Lavender water, pitted and heaved to huge, uneasy circles.
The readers of THE LITTLE REVIEW may remember these lines: they were
meant to interpret Debussy. I challenge Llewellyn Jones to “object” to
this gem and to question its “sense”! The staunchest conservative will
agree that of all arts music presents the widest liberty for subjective
interpretation, especially for such an autonomous artist as a poet.
“There is some music which should be described by poets rather than
exposed by inquisitive aestheticians. Of such is the magical music of
Debussy.” This from Lawrence Gilman’s latest book. Mr. Gilman evidently
considers himself a good member in both categories, for he follows up
the quoted remark with unrestrained effusions of colorful descriptions
of Landscape-music, Sea-music, Death-music. It is charming reading,
though at times the unbridled Pegasus causes you dizziness; not that you
are encountered with daringly-new views or dazzling ideas: Mr. Gilman is
too much of an American for such extravagance. It is the manner of his
exposition, the ravishing richness of his style, that endangers your
mental equilibrium. Judge for yourself:
Debussy, when he wrote this delectable and adorable music
(_Rondes de Printemps_), sent his spirit into the woods and
fields, through gardens and orchards and petal-showered lanes,
and upon the moors and hills; he trod the brown soil of the
earth, but he also looked long up into the green branches and the
warm, gusty sky of May, and savored the fragrant winds.
Is it not enchanting? But when you are treated to such nectar on nearly
every page, you sigh for the elegant, reserved Romain Rolland, who
expresses his enthusiasm for Debussy in a cooler, yet by no means less
convincing, way.
Aside from this purely external characteristic the book contains very
interesting remarks on the treatment of natural elements and phenomena
by various composers. The invention of new instruments, the development
of the art of orchestration, and general new conceptions of our age,
have drawn a sharp line of distinction between the old and the new
interpretations of nature in music. While the old composers (among the
old the author places not only Hayden and Beethoven, but also Wagner and
Grieg) approached Nature either as a subject to be faithfully rendered,
or as a provocator of direct emotional reactions in themselves, to the
new composers (Debussy, d’Indy, Loeffler, MacDowell) Nature “is a
miraculous harp, an instrument of unlimited range and inexhaustible
responsiveness, upon which the performer may improvise at his pleasure,”
to quote the inimitable original. The classification is rather
hazardous; the importance of Loeffler is greatly exaggerated, but as a
purely subjective view the work of Mr. Gilman is interesting.
K.
A Pasteurized “Man and Superman”
_The Raft_, by Coningsby Dawson. [Henry Holt and Company, New
York.]
_The Raft_ is based on the same idea as Shaw’s—_minus_ moral shocks,
mental exhilaration, and the Superman. The theory is served as strong
drink in the one, as good boy’s tea in the other. The same idea receives
such different treatment that the person who would pronounce _Man and
Superman_ a “corrupt play” might speak of _The Raft_, as a beautiful
story, provided a few courageous truths which it was necessary for the
author to state in order to refute, could be forgiven. It is a harmless
compromise between the belief that no literature has a right to exist
that is not suitable for a girl in her teens, and the conviction that
men and women must face life as it is.
In _The Raft_, we read this figurative suggestion of the theory:
We’re girls adrift on a raft and we can’t swim. Over there’s the
land of marriage with the children, the homes and the husbands;
we’ve no means of getting to it. Unless some of the men see us
and put out in boats to our rescue, we’ll be swept into the
hunger of mid-ocean. But they’re too busy to notice us.... Always
wanting, wanting, wanting the things that only men can give....
Did men ever want to be married or was it always necessary to
catch them?
In _Man and Superman_ we find a more liberal statement:
To a woman, a man is only a means to the end of getting children
and rearing them. Vitality in woman is a blind fury of creation.
What other work has she in life but to get a husband? It is a
woman’s business to get married as soon as possible, and a man’s
to keep unmarried as long as he can.... You think that you are
the pursuer, and she pursued. Fool, it is you who are the
pursued, the destined prey.
During the last few years stories and plays exploiting this doctrine
have been hurled thick and fast in the attempt to batter down so-called
romantic love, romantic though fortified not only by the fancies of the
poets and novelists but also by the analyses of the scientists and the
experiences of life. According to these stories, love is nothing more or
less than a passion for reproduction, a desire for children. This idea
is being emphasized by two very different types for two very different
reasons: one tries to make a Don Quixote of romantic love and hopes by
ridicule to eliminate it as the great motive and to give some of the
other passions a chance in literature; the other considers everything
even suggestive of sex unmoral, and so searches for an excuse to justify
the gratification of a natural craving. Neither satire nor platitudes
can alter nature.
Love, they say, considered as intense personal affection is an idea
purely fanciful, romantic. If so to consider it is romantic, scientists
are romantic; for such men as Lankester and Pycraft say “the view that
the sequel of mate hunger is the dominant instinct has no foundation in
fact. Desire for the sake of the pleasure of its gratification, not its
consequences, is the only hold on life which any race possesses. Love is
the attribute upon which this preservation of the race depends.”
In other words it is a case of cause and effect. That the joy of
motherhood is greater than any other joy in a woman’s life has
absolutely nothing to do with the question as to whether or not the hope
of that joy was the reason for the selection of a mate. The question is
not one of superiority but priority; not which is the greater, but which
came first; which is the cause and which the effect. If the desire for
children is the cause of what we call love, the only logical outcome is
that in selection any woman could not refuse any man fit to be the
father of her children on the ground that he did not appeal to her
personally. Life does not support such a conclusion.
Why woman’s choice is not impersonal is only one of the many things that
cannot be explained by the theory that makes her desire for children the
sole cause of attraction. It does not explain too many things: faithless
wives, some childless marriages, children found on door-steps,
abortions, some prostitution, why some women never marry for fear of
children, or why man is not the coy, reluctant, elusive creature
defined, though not pictured, by Dawson and Shaw.
No wonder it fails to explain; for children, instead of being the whole
cause are the result of only a part of the cause, mate hunger—a hunger
of body, mind, and spirit. Love is the feeling for the one that seems to
supply those needs, the impulse toward that one. The sooner we realize
that the attraction between men and women is not all physical any more
than it is all mental and spiritual, and that sex is in all three
phases, the sooner shall we reach the truth; the sooner shall we hear
the last of one type that prudishly denies physical attraction or else
tries to “purify” it by making it a means to an end, and of the other
type that sees in marriage only physical union.
The theory will not stand either a logical or an emotional test. Not
only can it not explain this confusion of cause and effect, this
mistaking the part of love for its whole; but it also cannot answer why
it should look to the future for a cause when love is so vitally a thing
of the present; nor why it was ever thought necessary to find any
explanation outside of itself for the attraction between men and women.
If there is any passion in the world that does not need a justification
other than its mere existence, it is love. For though realizing the
exaltation of moral passion, the exhilaration of mental passion, no one
can deny that it is through love we know intense, vivid personal
happiness—happiness that is vibrant, full of color, rapturous.
But it is absurd to try to analyze it; it is even more so to argue about
it: but really women have grown very tired of having men tell them why
they marry, tired of this confusion of result with cause, of a part with
the whole, tired of the belittling of love by people who have never
experienced it, tired of this sex obsession. It is doubly absurd to
waste time in arguing when the best argument I can offer against the
Raft theory is the book itself, where the author spends most of his time
disproving his own definitely-stated idea through the actions of his
characters. It is interesting to see that both Dawson and Shaw should,
by methods diametrically opposite, show how fallacious is their
statement by exactly the same circumstance,—that is, by having the woman
care passionately for _the_ man, not _a_ man. That fact alone routs the
whole theory. Certainly Cherry and Jehane have very decided personal
preferences regardless of the next generation; moreover the Golden Woman
and “heaps of other well-bred women” will not marry for fear of
children; and Peter, Ockey, and the Faun Man insist on being ardent
lovers that vainly pursue.
Notwithstanding these contradictions throughout the book, the author
keeps on bravely and inartistically reiterating his Raft motives, as if
to keep up his courage. Possibly because he realizes that he is losing
his theme, he starts another which is really the one consistently
developed. This second theme is that love is never reciprocal: that at
the best it is a case of one loving, the other allowing; that usually it
is a case of one loving and the other not even allowing. He starts an
endless chain of unrequited affection: Glory loves Peter; Peter loves
Cherry; Cherry, the Faun Man; the Faun the Golden Woman; the Golden
Woman, herself—or is it Peter? That is one chain; and another is Ockey
loves Jehane; Jehane, Barrington; Barrington, Nan.
These two themes working at cross purposes are typical of the book which
is a mass of contradictions of this author’s own definitely expressed
ideas, and of life. So many things do not ring true: the labored,
morbid, commonplace treatment of Peter, “the ’maginative child,” as an
exponent of the artistic temperament; the lack of love as the sole cause
of Ockey’s failure, when he needs so many other things to make a man of
him; the marriage of Nan and Barrington as the ideal union, when neither
one has a nature intense enough to feel a great love, when even such
love as they know has never been put to the merciless tests that life
uses; the brooding, year in and year out, of the unmarried women over
the loss of the joys of motherhood, and their lack of interest in any
other phase of life; Jehane’s unworthiness, emphasized by the author in
person and through his characters, when her actions with different
treatment might have made her almost a heroine; the declared finality of
so many things that are really only initial steps; platitudes as answers
to the vital questions of life.
Most of these false notes come from the fact that the theories of the
author and the actions of his characters are not in harmony. Whenever I
hear writers talking of such discords and saying that they are obliged
to let their characters work out their own salvations, I always consider
the attitude an affectation. But I have changed my mind. Dawson seems to
be left alone on his Raft, shouting his untenable theories till he is
hoarse; while his characters, ignoring him, have reached land and are
living their own lives. I found myself in the absurd position of
resenting the author’s interference with those vivid, distinctive,
powerful characters he had created; of wanting to tell him to keep his
hands off, and let them tell their own story.
And left to themselves they tell it unflinchingly. What if the treatment
is obvious and conventional? It is obvious treatment of the great
mysteries of life; conventional treatment of its beauties.
The advancement of science at the expense of man is one of the
most pernicious things in the world. The stunted man is a
retrogression in the human race: he throws a shadow over all
succeeding generations. The tendencies and natural purpose of the
individual science become degenerate, and science itself is
finally shipwrecked: it has made progress, but has either no
effect at all on life or else an immoral one.—_Nietzsche._
Sentence Reviews
_Gustave Flaubert_, by Emile Faguet. _Balzac_, by the same author.
[Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.] Emile Faguet is a critic of the old
school, an academician. He analyzes the writers thoroughly, profoundly,
comprehensively, applying a uniform scholarly method. He gives the
biographies of Flaubert and Balzac, reviews their works, and finally
discusses their general importance for literature. You do not find any
sparkling revelations or extraordinary insight, but you form an adequate
opinion of the chief characteristics of the two great Frenchmen. The
translations are good; Mr. Thorley, who did the Balzac, has proved that
in the rôle of a translator he runs less risk than when undertaking to
interpret Verlaine.
_Bahaism: The Modern Social Religion_, by Horace Holley. [Mitchell
Kennerley, New York.] Another example of overestimation of Oriental
thought. The success of Tagore’s second-rate allegories gave Mr. Holley
the idea of displaying before the ever-thirsting Western mind another
Eastern “great”. Bahaism, as interpreted by the writer, is one of the
“57 varieties” of the blessed Christian Socialism. The world must be
reformed, nicely, humbly, altruistically, without causing any damage to
State and Society. Naive and dull like a Sunday sermon at an Ethical
Society.
_Woman and War_, by Olive Schreiner. [Frederick A. Stokes Company, New
York.] A timely pamphlet, reprinted as a fragment from the famous book
_Woman and Labor_. The author claims that woman can carry on war as well
as man, considering modern war implements; but as a sculptor would
resent the idea of hurling his creations on the ramparts to stop the
breaches made by the enemy, so does the human child-bearer instinctively
antagonize the reckless destruction of that which she has at so much
cost produced; for “men’s bodies are our woman’s work of art.”
_Appearances_, by G. Lowes Dickinson. [Doubleday, Page and Company, New
York.] The title vindicates the author’s superficiality. Impressions of
India, China, Japan, America, are bewilderingly crowded in a dazzling
bouquet, revealing charming brilliance on the part of the observer, but
lack of profound insight. A rapidly-changing panorama of faces and
places, a cinematograph. “All America is Niagara. Force without
direction, noise without significance, speed without accomplishment.”
Such aphorisms lavishly scattered throughout the pages make the book
ideal train reading.
_Psychology General and Applied_, by Hugo Münsterberg. [D. Appleton and
Company, New York.] This new text-book by the Harvard professor
summarizes various aspects of psychology and will be of help to the
student who seeks facts rather than speculation. Mr. Münsterberg is at
his best when he deals with a college audience; his reputation and
prestige would be quite safe if he limited his activity to that field
and did not indulge in pro-German pamphleteering.
_The Story-Life of Napoleon_, by Wayne Whipple. [The Century Company,
New York.] The life of the “Man of Destiny” is an inexhaustible source
for historians and biographers. Mr. Whipple has compiled a new biography
of the Corsican, based exclusively on stories and anecdotes as related
by various authorities. Those for whom Napoleon is the grandest
phenomenon in history will feel grateful to the author for his enormous
work performed lovingly and inspiringly.
_Stories from Northern Myths_, by Emilie Kip Baker. [The Macmillan
Company, New York.] I enjoy reading Greek mythology in spring, Hindu
legends in summer, the Bible at any time, Norse sagas in winter nights.
This book is a skillful composition of the most interesting myths of the
North, written with irresistible charm. It is ideal reading in the
blissful moments of mental relaxation, when you dismiss temporarily all
“problems” and plunge into the enchanting abyss of the Non-Real.
_The Architecture of Humanism_, by Geofry Scott. [Houghton Mifflin
Company, Boston.] A cold, merciless wielding of the scythe that the
author admits is dogmatic criticism. Even the crucified Ruskin has more
thorns added to his crown; but still we fail to see the object of this
book in holding up all architectural ideals as “fallacies”.
_Father Ralph_, by Gerald O’Donovan. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.]
Ralph O’Brien was born to be a priest. One might almost say, considering
his mother’s attitude, that he was a priest before he was born, and his
bringing up was single-eyed to that end. Only as he grows older does he
begin to find flaws in the supposedly flawless church of God. Then as he
brings his keen young mind to these problems he fights against the
religious decadence of Ireland, and causes the author’s pen to rush
along through a torrent of socialistic and revolutionary indignation.