THE LITTLE REVIEW
_Literature Drama Music Art_
MARGARET C. ANDERSON
EDITOR
APRIL, 1914
"The Germ" 1
Rebellion George Soule 3
Man and Superman George Burman Foster 3
Lines for Two Futurists Arthur Davison Ficke 8
A New Winged Victory Margaret C. Anderson 9
Correspondence:
Two Views of H. G. Wells 12
Rupert Brooke and Whitman 15
More About "The New Note" 16
Sonnet Sara Teasdale 17
Sonnet Eunice Tietjens 18
The Critics' Critic M. H. P. 18
Women and the Life Struggle Clara E. Laughlin 20
"Change" 24
The Poetry of Alice Meynell Llewellyn Jones 25
An Ancient Radical William L. Chenery 28
Equal Suffrage: The First Real Test Henry Blackman Sell 30
Education of Yesterday and Today William Saphier 31
Some Book Reviews 33
New York Letter George Soule 46
William Butler Yeats to American Poets 47
Letters to the Little Review 49
The Best Sellers 55
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THE LITTLE REVIEW
Vol. I
APRIL, 1914
No. 2
Copyright, 1914, by Margaret C. Anderson.
"The Germ"
In 1850 an astounding thing happened in England. A little group of
artists and poets, known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, began the
publication of a magazine. It was to be given over to "thoughts towards
nature in poetry, literature, and art"; and it was called _The Germ_.
The idea was Dante Gabriel Rossetti's, who was then just twenty-two
years old. Thomas Woolner, of the same age, and Holman Hunt and Millais,
both somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty, were dragged willingly
into the plan. William Michael Rossetti, aged nineteen, was made editor;
James Collinson and Frederick George Stephens were added to the four
original P. R. B.'s; John Lucas Tupper, Ford Madox Brown, Walter Howell
Deverell, William Cave Thomas, John Hancock, and Coventry Patmore were
intimately connected with the project; and Christina, then eighteen,
offered her poems for publication therein.
_The Germ_ was published for four months, and then it died. Like all
serious things it could find no immediate audience; like all
revolutionary things it was called juvenile and regarded with shyness;
and like all original and beautiful things it has managed to stay very
much alive. For, in 1899, a limited edition of _The Germ_ in facsimile
was brought out, and William Michael Rossetti wrote an extensive
introduction for it in which he described minutely the whole glorious
undertaking. It is these facsimiles that we have been looking through
with such awe, and which tell such an interesting story.
Here was a league of "unquiet and ambitious young spirits, bent upon
making a fresh start of their own, and a clean sweep of some effete
respectabilities." On the night of December 19, 1849, when the first
issue of the magazine was impending, they met in Dante Rossetti's studio
at 72 Newman Street to discuss a change of title. _The P. R. B. Journal
and Thoughts Towards Nature_ (the "extra-peculiar" suggestion of Dante,
according to his brother) had been discarded, and Mr. Cave Thomas had
drawn up a list of sixty-five possibilities, among them _The Seed_, _The
Scroll_, _The Harbinger_, _First Thoughts_, _The Sower_, _The
Truth-Seeker_, _The Acorn_, and _The Germ_. The last was decided upon
and the first issue came out about the first of January. Seven hundred
copies were printed and about two hundred sold. This wasn't encouraging,
so the second issue was limited to five hundred; but it sold even less
well than the first, and the P. R. B.'s were at the end of their
resources. Then the printing-firm came to the rescue and undertook the
responsibility of two more numbers. The title was changed to _Art and
Poetry, being Thoughts towards Nature, conducted principally by
Artists_; but "all efforts proved useless.... People would not buy _The
Germ_, and would scarcely consent to know of its existence. So the
magazine breathed its last, and its obsequies were conducted in the
strictest privacy."
It did attract some critical attention, however. _The Critic_ wrote: "We
cannot contemplate this young and rising school in art and literature
without the most ardent anticipation of something great to grow from it,
something new and worthy of our age, and we bid them godspeed upon the
path they have adventured." Others remarked that the poetry in _The
Germ_ was all beautiful, "marred by not a few affectations--the genuine
metal, but wanting to be purified from its dross"; "much of it of
extraordinary merit, and equal to anything that any of our known poets
could write, save Tennyson...."
Well--the situation demands a philosopher. We might undertake the rôle
ourselves, except that we're too near the situation, having just started
a magazine with certain high hopes of our own.
On the cover of each issue of _The Germ_ appeared this poem by William
Rossetti, the mastery of which, some one said, would require a Browning
Society's united intellects:
When whoso merely hath a little thought
Will plainly think the thought which is in him--
Not imaging another's bright or dim,
Not mangling with new words what others taught;
When whoso speaks, from having either sought
Or only found,--will speak, not just to skim
A shallow surface with words made and trim,
But in that very speech the matter brought:
Be not too keen to cry--"So this is all!--
A thing I might myself have thought as well,
But would not say it, for it was not worth!"
Ask: "Is this truth?" For is it still to tell
That be the theme a point or the whole earth,
Truth is a circle, perfect, great or small?
Patmore's _The Seasons_, Christina Rossetti's _Dream Land_, Dante's _My
Sister's Sleep_ and _Hand and Soul_, Woolner's _My Beautiful Lady_ and
_Of My Lady in Death_, Tupper's _The Subject in Art_, William Rossetti's
_Her First Season_, and a long review of Clough's _Bothic of
Toper-na-fuosich_ make up the first number. In the others are _The
Blessed Damozel_, Christina's _An End_ and _A Pause of Thought_,
Patmore's _Stars and Moon_, John Orchard's _Dialogue on Art_, and many
other things of value, concluding with a review of Browning's _Christmas
Eve and Easter Day_, in which William Rossetti establishes with
elaborate seriousness, through six pages of solemn and awesome
sentences, that "Browning's style is copious and certainly not other
than appropriate"; that if you _will_ understand him, you shall.
All this came to our mind the other day when some one accused us of
being "juvenile." What hideous stigma was thereby put upon us? The only
grievous thing about juvenility is its unwillingness to be frank; it
usually tries to appear very, very old and very, very wise. _The Germ_
was quite frankly young; otherwise it could not have been so full of
death poetry, for it is youth's most natural affectation to steep itself
in death. But _The Germ_ might have been even more "juvenile" and so
avoided some of the heavy, sumptuous sentences in that Browning review.
It would have gained in readableness without any possible sacrifice of
beauty or truth. In their poetry the Pre-Raphaelites were as simple and
spontaneous as children; in their criticism they were rhetorical. Our
sympathy is somehow very strongly with the spontaneity--whatever dark
juvenile crimes it may be guilty of--in the eyes of those who merely
look but do not see.
Rebellion
GEORGE SOULE
Sing me no song of the wind and rain--
The wind and the rain are better.
I'll swing to the road on the gusty plain
Without any load,
And shatter your fetter.
And when you sing of the strange, bright sea,
I'll leave your dark little singing
For the plunging shore where foam leaps free
And long waves roar
And gulls go winging.
Sorrow-dark ladies you've dreamed afar;
I stay not to hear their praises.
But here is a woman you cannot mar,
In life arrayed;
Her spirit blazes.
I shall not stiffen and die in your songs,
Flatten between your pages,
But trample the earth and jostle the throngs,
Try out life's worth--
And burst all cages!
Man and Superman
GEORGE BURMAN FOSTER
In his voluptuous vagabondage Rousseau at length halted at Paris, where
he managed to worry through some inconstant years. The thing that saved
the day for him was the fragment of a pamphlet that blew across his path
in one of his rambles, announcing a prize to be awarded by the Academy
of Dijon for the best answer to an extraordinary question. Had the
renascence of the arts and sciences ennobled morals? That was a flash of
lightning which lit up a murky night and helped this bewildered and
lonely wanderer to get his bearings. Thoughts came to him demoniacally
which shaped his entire future and won him no small place in the history
of humanity.
Answer is "No!" said Rousseau. And his answer was awarded the academic
prize.
It seems strange that the history of his times sided with Rousseau's
"No." Certainly it was the first fiery meteor of the French revolution.
It pronounced the first damnatory sentence upon a culture that had
already reached the point of collapse. In his own body and soul Rousseau
had bitterly experienced the curse of this culture. It was largely
responsible for his heart's abnormal yearning whose glow was consuming
him. Instead of ennobling morals this culture had inwardly barbarized
man. Then it galvanized and painted the outside of life. And then life
became a glittering lie.
Thus Rousseau became prophet in this desert of culture, and called men
to repentance. "Back from culture to nature," was his radical cry; back
from what man has made out of himself to what nature meant him to be.
Nature gave man free use of his limbs; culture has bound them with all
sorts of bindings, until he is stiff, and short-winded, and crippled.
According to nature man lives his own life; man is what he seems and
seems what he is; according to culture he is cunning, and crafty, and
mendacious.
The eighteenth-century man of culture hearkened with attentive soul to
the dirge in which one of its noblest sons vented his tortured heart.
The melancholy music bruised from this prophet's heart silenced the wit
and ridicule of even a Voltaire, who wanted to know, however, whether
"the idea was that man was to go on all fours again." In a few decades
the feet of revolutionary Frenchmen were at the door ready, with few and
short prayers, to bear to its last abode that culture whose moral worth
even a French Academy had called in question, and for whose moral
condemnation had awarded the first prize.
Now it is our turn! What is the good of our culture? Such is the query
of a host of people who know nothing thereof save the wounds it has
inflicted upon them--a host of people who face our culture with the
bitter feeling that they have created it with the sweat of their brows,
but have not been permitted to taste its joys. Such, too, is the query
of others who, satiated with its beneficence, have been its pioneers,--a
John Stuart Mill, political economist, who doubts whether all our
cultural progress has mitigated the sufferings of a single human being;
a Huxley, naturalist, who finds the present condition of the larger part
of humanity so intolerable today that, were no way of improvement to be
found, he would welcome the collision of a kindly comet that would smash
our petty planet into smithereens.
Also, there is your proletariat. And there is your culture on summits
far out of his reach. The more inaccessible it is, shining there with a
radiance that never falls upon him, the less does he reflect that all is
not gold that glitters. Then there is your philanthropist, foremost in
culture of mind and heart, surveying the masses far beneath him, in the
slime and grime of life, and doubting at last whether any labor of love
can lift men up to where he thinks men ought to be; whether, after all,
it can bring joy to men who are sick and sore with the load of life.
Not to be partial, one may magnanimously cite your philistine also--the
man of "the golden mean," the "man of sanity," as mediocrity has ever
brand-marked itself, who "hates _ultra_." For the life of him your
philistine cannot understand how a "reasonable" man can have any doubt
about our culture. Does he not read in his favorite newspaper how
gloriously we have progressed? Does he not encore the prodigious
achievements of our technique? Has he not heard his crack spellbinder
orate on the cultural felicity that follows our flag? Down with the
disloyalty of highbrow doubters!
Now it was from an entirely different side, indeed it was from an
entirely different standpoint, that Friedrich Nietzsche contemplated
modern culture, particularly the national culture of the German
Fatherland. What horrified him was not simply the _content_, but the
_criterion_, of our culture. He sharply scrutinized the _ideals_ which
we set ourselves in our culture. He found not simply our achievements
but our ideals, _ourselves_ even, so inferior, so vulgar, so
contemptible, that he began to doubt whether even the Germans could be
recognized as a culture people or not. Hence Nietzsche became the most
ruthless iconoclast of our culture. Unlike the majority, unlike the
scholars, the philanthropists, the philistines, Nietzsche was not moved
by the misery of the masses, by the great social need of our time. He
did not regret that the boon of our culture was shared by so few,
inasmuch as, in his opinion, this boon was of very doubtful value. He
found our life so barbarous, so culture-hostile, that he still missed
the first elements of a true culture among us.
Hence Nietzsche lunged against _status quo_. He did what he himself
called "_unzeitmässig_," untimely. He flung a question, more burning
than any other, into our time--more burning than even the social
question, constituting indeed the main part of that question. It was the
question as to how _man_ fared in this culture--the question as to what
_man_ got out of it and as to what it got out of man.
Never before had this question been put as Nietzsche put it. We should
recall that Nietzsche was not one of those who had experienced the
extremes of either plenty or want, nor was he one of those who filled
the wide space between the two. To him, the pessimism of the
discontented and the optimism of the fortunate and the satisfied were
alike superficial, if not impertinent. It was not a question of
"happiness" at all. In bitter, biting sarcasm he says, with reference to
the English utilitarian "happiness morality": "I do not seek my
happiness; only an Englishman seeks his happiness; I seek my _work_."
No; his was a question which his conscience put to culture. Was it a
"culture of the _earth_, or of _man_?" Here Nietzsche probes home. And
he alone did it. The most diverse censors of our time had not seen and
said that no matter how desirable, no matter how gloriously conceived
the new order of things might be, _man_ must be the decisive thing;
_man_ must tip the scales. It was this that went against the grain.
Mightier machines, larger cities, better apartments, bigger schools,
what was the good of it all, _et id omne genus_, if new and greater men
did not arise? So said Nietzsche. And he said it with high scorn to a
generation which had forgotten that man is not for "culture," but
culture for man; of man, by man, for man.
Every people seems to pass through a period in which it is obsessed with
the idea that the causes of popular prosperity are at once motive and
criterion of culture; that the natural laws of economics are the
universally valid norms of the ebb and flow of human values; that a
balance on the balance sheet to the good, the satisfactoriness of the
statistics of exports and imports to the wishes of the interested
parties, are an occasion for jubilation over the ascent which life has
compassed. Harbor some scruple as to whether the jubilation be warranted
or not, and you are at once pilloried as a pessimist and a malcontent.
And yet had there been no Nietzsche there would still remain Cicero's
warning: "Woe to a people whose wealth grows but whose men decay." But
there was a Nietzsche, and he dared to call even his Fatherland Europe's
"flat country"--flat was a hard word for a land that could once boast of
so many poets and thinkers. But now the flatter the better! But now no
peaks to scale, no yawning abysses on whose edges one grows dizzy!
Nothing a single step removed from the ordinary, the conventional! Now
heights and depths, distinctions and distances, these are valid in the
world of quantity, not of quality; of possession, not of being; of tax
tables, not of human essence and human power! Now all men are equal! But
Nietzsche knew that if men are equal they are not free; if free they are
not equal. With a fury and a fire that literally consumed him, he
dedicated himself to the task of leading men up out of this flatness,
away from this leveling--up to an appreciation of the potential--not the
actual--greatness of man's life. Greatness is not yet man's verity but
his vocation, his true and idiomatic destiny. Greatness? This is a man's
strength of will; the unfolding of a free personality. To say _I will_
is to be a man. All human values are embraced in this _I will_. To
produce men who can say _I will_ is at once the task and the test of
culture. This _I will_ is the climax and goal of man. In this _I will_
vanishes every fearsome and disquieting _I must_, every compulsion of
outer necessity. Not the passive adjustment of man to nature, but the
active adjustment of nature to man; nature outside of him and nature
inside of him--that is human calling and human culture. Vanishes, also,
every _I ought_. Man refuses to be ridden by a duty spook, but
subordinates even duty to himself. Duty, too, is for the sake of man,
not man for the sake of duty. In the depths of his own being, man
reserves the sovereign right to speak his _yes_ and his _no_ to duty. To
his own will he subjects all good and all evil taught him by others,
past or present, and thus occupies a standpoint "beyond good and evil."
Lord of the Sabbath? Yes, but lord also of standards sanctified by their
antiquity; lord of all the standards of life; lord of all that has been
written or thought or done. "And thou, O lord, art more than they!"
Thou--thou alone--art central and supreme and sacred and inviolable.
"Bring forth the royal diadem and crown him lord of all!"
But not yet! Alas, there are no such lords, no such will-men,
personality-men! Such men are not _Gegenwartsmenschen_, present day men,
but _Zukunftsmenschen_, future day men; not reality but task--our task.
That future man will surpass present man as much as present man
surpasses the monkey which he in his development has left behind. We are
bridges from monkey to superman. Superman! In him at last, at last, all
that is unliving, unfree, withered and weak, all that is sickly in man,
shall be obliterated; and all the forces that are great and creative
shall be unfolded and molded into cultural values.
This is the meaning of the superman of Friedrich Nietzsche. Malice and
ignorance have vied--vainly we may now hope--in caricaturing it. The way
to superman is the rugged, steep mountain path up to conscious deed and
mighty achievement; not the gentle incline down to stupid indulgence,
indolent disposition, enervating or bestial impulsive life. Not that!
Superman is precisely the man who overcomes the man of today aweary of
life and athirst for death.
This preaching of Superman might be called Messianic. It is the bold
faith that we are not the last word of the Word of life; it is the glad
hope that the best treasures, the greatest deeds, the supreme goals of
humankind are still in the future. Nietzsche's message is a breath of
spring blowing over the land proclaiming the advent of an issue from the
womb of time of something greater, better than anything we have been,
than anything we have called good or great; the advent of a new day when
our best songs now will be our worst then; our noblest thoughts now our
basest then; our highest achievements now, our poorest by-products then.
We shall usher in that day; superman shall be our will, our deed!
Superman gives our life worth. Ours is the new, exhilarating
responsibility, swallowing up and nullifying all the petty
responsibilities which fret us today. We have to justify our lives to
that great future, to that coming one, to our children. They, through
us, must be greater, better, freer, than all of us put together. We are
worth our contribution to the achievement of future man. Nay, only
superman can justify the history of the cosmos! Consider pre-human and
sub-human life, red in tooth and claw; consider human life, often not
much better and sometimes much worse; consider ourselves, our meanness
and our mediocrity. Is this all? Is this warrant for the long human and
pre-human story? Can you escape the conviction that but for superman the
eternal gestation and agony of cosmic maternity admits of no rational
vindication?
Breed, then, with a view of breeding supermen. Marriage? Let this be not
for ease, not for the propagation of yourselves; the pushing of
yourselves into your children, parents, but for the creation of
something new, of superman! Education? Not to assimilate the children to
us, to the past, but to free them from us; not _Vaterland_, but
_Kinderland_, must be our concern. Children shall not "sit at our feet"
but stand upon our shoulders, that they may have a freer and broader
sweep of the horizon. And in our children we shall love the Coming One,
prepare the way for Superman, that free, great man who shall have
conquered present petty man with all his slave instincts! Such, at all
events, are the dreams of the great poetic and prophetic philosopher of
the German Fatherland of today.
All great things have first to wander about the earth as enormous
and awe-inspiring caricatures.--Nietzsche in _Beyond Good and
Evil_.
Plato will always be an object of admiration and reverence to men
who would rather see vast images of uncertain objects reflected
from illuminated clouds, than representations of things in their
just proportions, measurable, tangible, and convertible to
household use.--Walter Savage Landor in _Imaginary
Conversations_, Vol. 2.
Cultivation will breed in any man a certainty of the uncertainty
of his most assured convictions.--Samuel Butler in _Life and
Habit_.
Knowledge is in an inchoate state as long as it is capable of
logical treatment; it must be transmitted into that sense or
instinct which rises altogether above the sphere in which words
can have being at all, otherwise it is not yet vital.--Samuel
Butler in _Life and Habit_.
Lines for Two Futurists
ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE
Why does all of sharp and new
That our modern days can brew
Culminate in you?
This chaotic age's wine
You have drunk--and now decline
Any anodyne.
On the broken walls you stand,
Peering toward some stony land
With eye-shading hand.
Is it lonely as you peer?
Do you never miss, in fear,
Simple things and dear,
Half-remembered, left behind?
Or are backward glances blind
Here where the wind
Round the outposts sweeps and cries--
And each distant hearthlight dies
To your peering eyes?...
I too stand where you have stood;
And the fever fills my blood
With your cruel mood.
Yet some backward longings press
On my heart: yea, I confess
My soul's heaviness.
Me a homesick tremor thrills
As I dream how sunlight fills
My familiar hills.
Me the yesterdays still hold--
Liegeman still unto the old
Stories sweetly told.
Into that profound unknown
Where the earthquake forces strown
Shake each pilèd stone
Look; and exultance smites
Me with joy; the splintered heights
Call me with fierce lights.
But a piety still dwells
In my bones; my spirit knells
Solemnly farewells
To safe halls where I was born--
To old haunts I leave forlorn
For this perilous morn.
Yet I come! I cannot stay!
Be it bitter night, or day
Glorious,--your way
I must tread; and on the walls,
Where this flame-swept future calls
To fierce miracles,
Lo, I greet you here! But me
Mock not lightly. I come free--
But with agony.
A New Winged Victory
_Angel Island_, by Inez Haynes Gillmore. [Henry Holt and Company,
New York.]
_Angel Island_ is several rare things: original, profound, flaming. It
leaves you with a gasping sense of having been swept through the skies;
and also with that feeling of new life which comes with a plunge into
cold, deep seas. _Angel Island_ is a new kind of Winged Victory!
Innumerable books have been written about the conflict of the sexes,
about the emergence of the new woman. Most of them are dull books. But
Mrs. Gillmore's is beautiful and exciting. I kept thinking as I read it:
here is something absolutely new, absolutely authentic; something so
full of vision and truth that it's like getting to the top of a mountain
for the sunrise. Its freshness and its clearness are like cool morning
mists that the sun has shot through.
But to discard vague phrases and get to the story--for it is not a
tract, but a novel--or rather a poetic allegory--that that Mrs. Gillmore
has written. Five men of representative modern types--a professor, a
libertine, a soldier of fortune, a "mere mutt-man," and an artist--are
shipwrecked on a tropical island. After a few days their attention is
caught by what appears to be huge birds flying through the heavens. The
birds come nearer and prove to be winged women! Then comes the story of
their wooing, their capture, their ultimate evolution into what modern
women have decided they want to be: humanists.
However, this is going too fast. The only way to appreciate _Angel
Island_ is to be conscious of the art of it as you read. Beginning with
the shipwreck, Mrs. Gillmore creates a series of brilliant pictures that
culminate in the flying orgies of the bird-women.
... All this was intensified by the anarchy of sea and sky, by
the incessant explosion of the waves, by the wind which seemed to
sweep from end to end of a liquefying universe, by a downpour
which threatened to beat their sodden bodies to pulp, by all the
connotation of terror that lay in the darkness and in their
unguarded condition on a barbarous, semi-tropical coast....
The storm, which had seemed to worry the whole universe in its
grip, had died finally but it had died hard. On a quieted earth,
the sea alone showed signs of revolution. The waves, monstrous,
towering, swollen, were still marching on to the beach with a
machine-like regularity that was swift and ponderous at the same
time.... Beyond the wave-line, under a cover of foam, the jaded
sea lay feebly palpitant like an old man asleep....
They had watched the sun come up over the trees at their back.
And it was as if they had seen a sunrise for the first time in
their lives. To them it was neither beautiful nor familiar; it
was sinister and strange. A chill, that was not of the dawn but
of death itself, lay over everything. The morning wind was the
breath of the tomb, the smells that came to them from the island
bore the taint of mortality, the very sun seemed icy. They
suffered--the five survivors of the night's tragedy--with a
scarifying sense of disillusion with Nature....
The sun was racing up a sky smooth and clear as gray glass. It
dropped on the torn green sea a shimmer that was almost dazzling;
but there was something incongruous about that--as though Nature
had covered her victim with a spangled scarf. It brought out
millions of sparkles in the white sand; and there seemed
something calculating about that--as though she were bribing them
with jewels to forget....
Dozens of waves flashed and crashed their way up the beach; but
now they trailed an iridescent network of foam over the
lilac-gray sand. The sun raced high; but now it poured a flood of
light on the green-gray water. The air grew bright and brighter.
The earth grew warm and warmer. Blue came into the sky,
deepened--and the sea reflected it. Suddenly the world was one
huge glittering bubble, half of which was the brilliant azure sky
and half the burnished azure sea.
All this is gorgeous enough--this clear, vivid painting of nature. But
when Mrs. Gillmore turns her hand to the supernatural, she is simply
ravishing. For instance:
The semi-tropical moon was at its full. Huge, white, embossed,
cut out, it did not shine--it glared from the sky. It made a
melted moonstone of the atmosphere. It faded the few clouds to a
sapphire-gray, just touched here and there with the chalky dot of
a star. It slashed a silver trail across a sea jet-black except
where the waves rimmed it with snow. Up in the white enchantment,
but not far above them, the strange air-creatures were flying.
They were not birds; they were winged women!
Darting, diving, glancing, curving, wheeling, they interwove in
what seemed the premeditated figures of an aerial dance.... Their
wings, like enormous scimitars, caught the moonlight, flashed it
back. For an interval, they played close in a group inextricably
intertwined, a revolving ball of vivid color. Then, as if seized
by a common impulse, they stretched, hand in hand, in a line
across the sky--drifted. The moonlight flooded them full, caught
glitter and gleam from wing-sockets, shot shimmer and sheen from
wing-tips, sent cataracts of iridescent color pulsing between.
Snow-silver one, brilliant green and gold another, dazzling blue
the next, luminous orange a fourth, flaming flamingo scarlet the
last, their colors seemed half liquid, half light. One moment the
whole figure would flare into a splendid blaze, as if an inner
mechanism had suddenly turned on all the electricity; the next,
the blaze died down to the fairy glisten given by the moonlight.
As if by one impulse, they began finally to fly upward. Higher
and higher they rose, still hand in hand.... One instant,
relaxed, they seemed tiny galleons, all sails set, that floated
lazily, the sport of an aerial sea; another, supple and sinuous,
they seemed monstrous fish whose fins triumphantly clove the air,
monarchs of that aerial sea.
A little of this and there came another impulse. The great wings
furled close like blades leaping back to scabbard; the
flying-girls dropped sheer in a dizzying fall. Half-way to the
ground, they stopped simultaneously as if caught by some
invisible air plateau. The great feathery fans opened--and this
time the men got the whipping whirr of them--spread high,
palpitated with color. From this lower level, the girls began to
fall again, but gently, like dropping clouds.... They paused an
instant and fluttered like a swarm of butterflies undecided where
to go.... Then they turned out to sea, streaming through the air
in line still, but one behind the other. And for the first time,
sound came from them; they threw off peals of girl-laughter that
fell like handfuls of diamonds. Their mirth ended in a long,
eerie cry.
To me, that is wonderful work--one jeweled word after another. And it's
sustained through the whole book. But of course, after this first sense
of ravishment with her pictures, you touch upon the deeper wonder of
Mrs. Gillmore--her ideas. There are enough ideas in _Angel Island_ to
equip the women who are fighting for selfhood with armour that is
absolutely hole proof.
The winged women differ in type as widely as the men; and each man
chooses very quickly the type that appeals to him most. The libertine
wants the big blond one, whom they've named "Peachy"; the professor
likes Chiquita, the very feminine, unintellectual one; Billy, the mere
man, falls violently and reverently in love with the radiant Julia, the
leader of the group and the one your interest centers in immediately.
Julia has a personality: she appears to be "pushed on by some
intellectual or artistic impulse, to express by the symbols of her
complicated flight some theory, some philosophy of life." She seems
always to shine. She is a creator. In short, Julia thinks.
The men plan capture and finally accomplish it by a time-honored method:
that of arousing the women's curiosity. Then follows a tragic episode
when they cut the captives' wings, making flight impossible. Of course,
marriage is the next step, and later, children are born on Angel
Island--little girl children with wings, and boys without them. But all
this time Julia has refused to marry Billy, though she's in love with
him. Her only reason is that something tells her to wait.
Inevitably the women mourn the loss of their wings; and just as they
become reconciled to a second-hand joy in their daughters' flights,
Peachy's husband informs her that flying is unwomanly--that woman's
place is in the home, not in the air (!)--and that their daughter must
be shorn of her wings as soon as she's eighteen.
What next? Rebellion, with Julia shining gloriously as leader. She had
been waiting for this. And in ten pages of profound, simple, magnificent
talk--if only every woman in the world would read it!--she explains to
the others that they must learn to walk. Peachy objects, because she
dislikes the earth. "There are stars in the air," she argues. "But we
never reached them," answers Julia. The earth is a good place, and they
must learn to live in it. Besides, their children will fly better for
learning to walk, and walk better for knowing how to fly; and she
prophesies that _then_ will be born to one of them a boy child with
wings.
The women hide and master the art of walking. While they're doing this
their poor wings have a chance to grow a little, and by the time the men
are ready to capture and subdue them a second time they have achieved a
combination of walking and flying that puts them beyond reach. Then the
men submit ... and Julia asks Billy to marry her.
That's all, except one short chapter about Julia. She has a son with
wings! And then she dies--radiant, white, goddess-woman, whose life had
been so fine a thing. The beauty of it all simply overwhelmed me.
All of which points to several important conclusions. First, that Mrs.
Gillmore is a poet and prophet of golden values. Second, that prejudice
is the most foolish thing in the world. A general prejudice against that
obvious form of comedy called farce might cause you to miss _The Legend
of Leonore_. And a stubborn caution in regard to allegories--which, I
concede, generally _are_ unsubtle--might keep you from _Angel Island_.
Correspondence
Two Views of H. G. Wells
I am just reading _The Passionate Friends_, and every time I read
anything of Wells's I wonder why it is I don't like him better. _The
World Set Free_ that has been running in _The Century_ was intensely
worth while, I thought--really prophetic. One tasted something almost
divine; human nature is capable of such wonderful undreamed of things!
It was like Tennyson prophesying the Federation of the World, airships,
etc. Wells does seem inspired in some ways. But every time I read any of
his novels--well, you remember I have a distinct mid-Victorian flavor
that has to be reckoned with. I wasn't brought up in a minister's family
for nothing! I suppose it's what we used to call our conscience. Mine
isn't much good, alas; I sometimes think of it as a little old Victorian
lady. She sits in the background of my consciousness and knits and knits
and nods her head. Meanwhile I go blithely about, espousing all sorts of
causes and thinking out all sorts of theories--imagining, you know, that
I'm perfectly free. Suddenly she wakes up--she lays aside her knitting
with a determined air and says, "Mary Martha, _what_ are you thinking
about! Stop that right now; I'm ashamed of you." And she has authority,
too, you know. I stop. Ridiculous, isn't it?--but so it is.
And every time I read a Wells novel my little old lady folds her hands
and sits up very primly and says, "Aha, you're reading something of that
man's again. Well, I'm not asleep--I'm right on the job and I know just
what I think of _him_." So you see! And the worst--or the best--of it is
that I agree with her. I can't like him. I read along and it's all so
reasonable--he's so clever and he _thinks_; but his conclusions are all
so weak--if he comes to any. One passage in _The Passionate Friends_ has
made me furious. How can a man who's at all worth while be so really
wicked--(another word gone out of style). I mean this:
It is manifestly true that for the most of us free talk, intimate
association, and any real fellowship between men and women turns
with extreme readiness to love. And that being so, it follows
that under existing conditions the unrestricted meeting and
companionship of men and women in society is a notorious sham, a
merely dangerous pretence of encounters. The safe reality beneath
those liberal appearances is that a woman must be content with
the easy friendship of other women and of one man only, letting a
superficial friendship towards all other men veil impassable
abysses of separation, and a man must in the same way have one
sole woman intimate.... To me that is an intolerable state of
affairs, but is reality.
Now can you suppose that is Wells's own reasoning that he puts into the
mouth of his unfortunate hero? Talk about Edith Wharton being
thin-lipped in the pursuit of her heroines--that's a great deal better
than being loose-lipped; don't you agree with me? It may be true, and I
rather think to some extent it is true, that a man cannot have an
absorbing friendship with a woman and not run the risk of falling in
love. But what does that prove? That he should be allowed free rein and
carry on as many _liaisons_ veiled under the name of friendship as he
chooses? Or unveiled, rather, for Wells seems to want everything in the
open. He's like a child who says: Here's a very dangerous beast in a
flimsy, inadequate cage. Frequently he escapes from it and has to be put
back in. Let's abolish the cage and let the beast run about openly,
doing what it wants. And the good old-fashioned word for that beast is
lust, and it should be caged; if the cage is getting more and more
inadequate it's only a piece with what Agnes Repplier calls our loss of
nerve. How I liked that article of hers! What in the name of sense are
we in this world for if not to build up a character? That's all that
amounts to anything, and it comes from countless denials and countless
responses to duty. And what Goethe said, some time ago, is still
everlastingly true: "_Entbehren sollst Du, sollst entbehren!_" (Deny
yourself, deny, deny.) He ought to know, too, because he tried
indulgence, goodness knows, and knew the dregs at the bottom of that
cup. And I can't forgive Wells. He knows better than to let people make
all manner of experiment with such things. They wouldn't even be happy;
for happiness is built of stability, loyalty, character, and again
character. My husband said, after reading that passage in _The
Passionate Friends_, "The trouble with him and the class he writes of is
that they aren't busy enough. Let 'em work for a living, be interested
in something vitally for ten hours out of the twenty-four, and they'll
forget all about their neighbors' wives and be content with good men
friends and casual women friends."
The trouble lies with poor old human nature, I guess, and the way it
wants what it cannot and ought not to have. But Wells says all unreality
is hateful to him. Let's tear down the barriers, let's show up for what
we are. Poor Smith wants something his neighbor has--well, let's give it
to him, whether it's his neighbor's success or his wife or his
happiness. Nature is still unbearably ugly in lots of ways. When we can
train it to be unselfish and disinterested then it will be time to tear
down barriers.
Lady Mary in _The Passionate Friends_ is an unconvincing character, too.
I can conceive of a woman who will take all of a man's possessions,
giving him nothing in return, not even fidelity, but I cannot conceive
of her justifying herself unless she is an utter moral degenerate. The
danger of such writers as Wells is that they are plausible enough till
you look below the surface. He tries to represent Lady Mary as charming,
but she, it seems to me, even more than modern society which he
arraigns, is "honeycombed and rotten with evil."
"M. M."
The description of a "little old Victorian lady" who sits in the
background of our consciousness and plays conscience for us is charming;
but.... She's a sweet-faced little lady to whom the universe is as clear
as crystal and as simple as plane geometry. She is always knitting, and
what she knits is a fine web of sentimentality with which to cover the
nakedness of truth--"for it is not seemly, my dear, that anything, even
truth, should be naked."
This web of hers is as fine as soft silk and as strong as chain mail.
It's sticky, too. And it clothes truth so thoroughly that she grows
unrecognizable to any but the most penetrating searcher--to H. G. Wells,
for instance. It's natural enough that the old lady should dislike
Wells, for he's found her out; he's made the astonishing discovery that
underneath the web life is not sentimentally simple. He discloses to her
scandalized eyes various unfortunate facts which she has done her best
to conceal, as for instance the fact that there is such a thing as sex.
"Sex," says Wells in effect in every one of his novels, "is a disturbing
element, _the_ disturbing element, in life. So long as sex exists it is
a physical impossibility that life should be the sweetly pretty parlor
game our little Victorian lady would have it."
Right here the husband of the little lady has something to say: "The
trouble with him and the class he writes of," he announces, "is that
they aren't busy enough. Let 'em work for a living, be interested in
something vitally for ten hours out of the twenty-four, and they'll
forget all about their neighbors' wives and be content with good men
friends and casual women friends." This is an excellent example
of what Wells finds the next most disturbing element in
life--"muddle-headedness," the lack of ability to think straight, to
think things through. "Let Wells be vitally interested in something for
ten hours of the twenty-four!" Doesn't he see that if Wells had ever
limited himself to ten hours of interest he would be making shirts
today? It is because Wells works twenty-five hours of the twenty-four at
being "vitally interested in something" that he is one of the major
prophets of our time. And the thing in which he is interested is life
itself, the great unsolvable mystery, life which extends below the
simple, polished surface that is all the Victorian lady knows as the sea
extends below its glassy smoothness on a summer day.
One of the greatest things that Wells has done for some of us who came
on him young enough so that our minds did not close automatically at his
first startling revelation, is this: he taught us to look at life
squarely, without moral cant, and with a scientific disregard as to
whether it pleased us personally or not. We may not always agree with
him--very likely we don't--but at least we must face the issue squarely
and not take refuge in the vague sentimentality and slushy hopefulness
of the Victorian lady.
Wells states facts and very frequently lets it go at that. Witness the
shock this method is to our little old lady. She asks how anyone at all
worth while can be so "really wicked" as to write about sex and society
as he does.
She admits that what he says is a fact, _but_--it sticks out like a
jagged, untidy rock from the smooth surface of things; therefore it is
wicked. As a matter of fact that statement of his has no more to do with
morality, is no more wicked, or virtuous, than the statement of a
physical fact--to say, for instance, that glass breaks when hurled
against a stone wall. It is unfortunate, but it is not "wicked."
No, the day of Victorianism is past. We are slashing away the web, we
are learning to _think_. It is a slow and painful process and we know
not yet where the struggle will end. But at least we shall be nearer to
the divine nakedness of truth. If Wells has done nothing else than to
prove to us how much of our thinking is dictated not by our own souls
but by the artificially-imposed sentimentality of the "little old
Victorian lady" he has done a full man's work. And we who owe our
emancipation largely to his vision can never be too thankful to him.
FRANCES TREVOR.
Rupert Brooke and Whitman
You treated Brooke in a masterly way in the last issue. I saw many
things I hadn't seen before, and understood the _Wagner_ better. But I
disagree with you in one way.
The _Wagner_ and the _Channel Passage_ are merely clever realistic
satire--that's always worth while. But it's the thought behind the
_Menelaus and Helen_ sort of thing that I don't like. Of course there's
no doubt that Helen grew wrinkled and peevish. But to say that therefore
Paris in his grave was better off than Menelaus living is just a bit
decadent, isn't it? I'm forced to picture Brooke as the sort of chap who
couldn't enjoy a good dinner if he had to wash the dishes
afterward:--instead of regarding dishwashing as a natural variety of
living that could be thoroughly enjoyable with shirtsleeves and a pipe.
I'm afraid he wouldn't play American football for fear of getting his
face dirty. He's just a bit finicky about life. He's afraid to commit
himself for fear he'll have to endure something about which he can't
weave golden syllables. That's the reason I don't agree with you about
Whitman liking all of him. Whitman was frank about the whole world, dirt
and all, and he accepted it enthusiastically. Brooke writes about dirt
in such a way as to make it seem horrible.
This poem of Whitman's will prove my point:
Afoot and light hearted, I take to the open road;
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose.
Henceforth I ask not good fortune--I myself am good fortune;
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, heed nothing;
Strong and content I travel the open road.
The earth--that is sufficient;
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are;
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.
Still, here I carry my old delicious burdens;
I carry them, men and women--I carry them with me wherever I go.
I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them;
I am filled with them and I will fill them in return.
You road I enter upon and look around! I believe that you are
not all that is here;
I believe that much unseen is also here.
Here the profound lesson of reception, neither preference nor
denial;
The black and his woolly head, the felon, the diseased, the
illiterate person, are not denied;
The birth, the hasting after the physician; the beggar's tramp, the
drunkard's stagger, the laughing party of mechanics,
The escaped youth, the rich person's carriage, the fop, the eloping
couple,
The early marketman, the hearse, the moving of furniture into town,
the return back from town,
They pass--I also pass--anything passes--none may be interdicted;
None but are accepted--none but are dear to me.
_Mon enfant!_ I give you my hand!
I give you my love more precious than money;
I give you myself before preaching or law;
Will you give me yourself? Will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?
Beside this, doesn't the _Menelaus and Helen_ seem like an orchid?--a
very beautiful, rich orchid, to be sure, but not of the Whitman family.
GEORGE SOULE.
More About the "New Note"
The idea of "the new note" might be worked out more fully, but after all
little or nothing would be gained by elaboration. Given this note of
craft love all the rest must follow, as the spirit of self-revelation,
which is also a part of the new note, will follow any true present-day
love of craft. You will remember we once discussed Coningsby Dawson's
_The Garden Without Walls_. What I quarreled with in that book was that
the writer looked outside of himself for his material. Even realists
have done this--as, for example, Howells; and to that extent have
failed. The master Zola failed here. Why do we so prize the work of
Whitman, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Twain, and Fielding? Is it not because as
we read we are constantly saying to ourselves, "This book is true. A man
of flesh and blood like myself has lived the substance of it. In the
love of his craft he has done the most difficult of all things: revealed
the workings of his own soul and mind"?