Who Wants Blue Silk Roses? Sade Iverson
“Mother Jones” and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn M. C. A.
The Poetry Bookshop Amy Lowell
America, 1915 John Gould Fletcher
Poems Maxwell Bodenheim
Some Imagist Poets George Lane
Editorials and Announcements
The Sermon in the Depths Ben Hecht
“The Spoon River Anthology” Carl Sandburg
Poetry and the Panama-Pacific Eunice Tietjens
The Mob-God “The Scavenger”
The Theatre
Music
Book Discussion
The Reader Critic
Published Monthly
15 cents a copy
MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Publisher
Fine Arts Building
CHICAGO
$1.50 a year
Entered as second-class matter at Postoffice, Chicago
THE LITTLE REVIEW
Vol. II
MAY, 1915
No. 3
Copyright, 1915, by Margaret C. Anderson
Poems
MITCHELL DAWSON
Cantina
You were the flame of a Pompeian lamp,
Wavering in the sea-wind,
Cosima,
And ever to the gale of me you danced,
Flickering out of reach....
I will return to Sorrento,
To the wine-room under the cliff.
Santa Maria del Carmine
Here by the church door
A shriveled bat
Has folded his wings
And dreams of dead crepuscular delights,
Bat loves, bat orgies,
Tarantistic flittings through the dark.
O fragrant beggar blinking in the sun,
I will drop three soldi in your hat.
Harpy
O keen of scent,
You who have found me in my slough,
Not your beak, but your green eyes
Have torn to the center of me.
Ah, but I shall not slake them with a tremor.
Termaggio
In the asylum at Termaggio
Reside a dozen poets—
So many colored balloons bobbing against a black ceiling;
Will none of them be caught
By the arm of a strong wind,
Down and outward through the open window?
We cannot remove the roof at Termaggio,
In the sun our balloons would burst....
Perhaps we had better close the window.
Under the Cypresses
Under the cypresses
No nightingales will sing this spring;
For I have strewn the ground
With the shards of broken illusions,
And I will build of them a citadel of austerity
With towers whence I can search the sky
For a rainbow that is stronger than painted china.
Dear nightingales,
There are still the saccharine gardens of Verona,
Where the moon-moth waves his fragile wings.
What We Are Fighting For
MARGARET C. ANDERSON
I have been much criticised for an article on Gabrilowitsch in the last
issue. I have been told rather violently that I didn’t know what I was
talking about; that to say Gabrilowitsch had stood still artistically or
that the music critics were deaf because they didn’t like Scriabin’s
_Prometheus_ was simply to brand THE LITTLE REVIEW again as the kind of
magazine which delights in any sort of snap-shot judgment that may sound
startling or “new.” But the fact of the matter is this: if THE LITTLE
REVIEW is ready to stand behind any of its judgments (and it is very
ready), I can think of nothing that has appeared which I will so eagerly
and convincingly defend as that article on Gabrilowitsch or my remark
that _Prometheus_ was extraordinarily beautiful. I can “prove” the first
in at least three ways, and I have some one in mind (a Russian) who will
write a poem on his reactions to _Prometheus_ that will make you all
wish you had imaginations too.
But this is not important. It merely leads me to an announcement of a
series of articles—a sort of campaign—that we have been planning for the
last two months. If we are to prove that we have a real “function” it
will be this of depreciating values that have ceased to be important and
appreciating new ones that have emerged—or, as I should say, values that
_are about to become unimportant_ and those that _are about to emerge_.
In view of such a function I am quite willing to agree with my critics
that the Gabrilowitsch article wasn’t worth anything: it merely stated
things that are already quite well known, and a magazine that means to
announce transvaluations before the approximate ten-year period during
which even the uninspired come to accept them has no business to concern
itself with mere restatements. Of course the most frequent criticism
brought against THE LITTLE REVIEW is that it goes to artistic and
emotional and intellectual lengths no well-balanced person wants to go.
I only wish this were true: I mean, we haven’t gone any real
_lengths_—and that is just what’s the matter with us. We have made
statements that seemed fearfully radical and new to a lot of people who
don’t know what’s going on in the world; and I’m afraid we have listened
to these people and tried to “convert” them. We have wanted to convince
everybody—particularly those who seemed to need it most. And there is
nothing more fatal: because what everybody thinks doesn’t matter; what a
few think matters tremendously. I was brought up with a shock the other
day, at an editors’ “meeting,” when Lucien Cary said that though THE
LITTLE REVIEW had one of the requisites of the ideal magazine,—youth,—it
had the wrong kind of youth: the kind that has not yet caught up instead
of the kind that has gone ahead. After trying to face that squarely for
five awful minutes I was forced to decide that he was right. I mean in
this way: I know the quality of our youth is all right, just as I know
that people who write true things and live false ones are all wrong; but
the wisdom of it is quite another matter. And one of our big mistakes
has been a hope that preaching will help.
There’s nothing pompous in saying that the thoughts of only a few people
matter. This has always been so and always will be. Every new valuation
has come about just that way—championed by a group and then endorsed by
a majority long after it has ceased to matter much. But for a magazine
that means to count—well, I can’t decide whether our predicament of
having got into a sort of Billy Sunday slump is humorous or very sad.
Hereafter we shall pretend that there are no impossibilists in our
audience.
But the announcement: In each of the future issues of THE LITTLE REVIEW,
beginning with June if possible, we shall have a special article
attacking current fallacies in the arts or in life—getting down to the
foundations. Each one will be written by a person who knows thoroughly
what he is talking about, and each will be “true and memorable,” to use
Will Comfort’s good phrase. For instance, suppose we begin with the
modern theatre. It will be interesting to find why Clayton Hamilton
calls a play as false, as distorted, as unwholesome and demoralizing as
_The Shadow_ a great drama, and why Percy Hammond, who is looked upon
even by some of the discerning as a critic worthy to be trusted in the
work of spreading ideas, should have nothing but superlatives for the
same outrage. (To do him justice, Mr. Hammond did modify his praise with
a single naive sentence: “I could find some flaws in _The Shadow_”; and
then, to put his other foot in, “but the playing glossed them over until
they were forgivable”—which is precisely the crime and tragedy of such
productions). This type of intellectual blundering is apparent
everywhere among the critics of literature, of music, of art, of the
drama, and among the strangest of all human creatures—the historians
(“men who reserve their judgments for a hundred years”) and the
philosophers (men whose judgments are good for everything except to live
by). If you happen to be equipped with knowledge of the intricate
hypocrisies of the music schools, or the way the newspapers treat a
competent art critic, or the methods of a manager in making a good play
a bad one, or how dissatisfied the railway employees really are or ought
to be—send us an article on the subject. The conditions of acceptance
are these: You must know English prose; you must write it as though you
are talking instead of writing; you must say quite frankly and in detail
the things you would not be allowed to say in the prostituted,
subsidized, or uninteresting magazines; and you must be true. This
begins our warfare.
Echo
(_Translated from the German of Fritz Schnack by William Saphier_)
Into the forest your voice flew
Clear and light as a bird from its nest.
From your mouth the sound departed
Swinging gaily into the black forest.
It flew
Through dusky deep solitude
Mysterious quiet, pale night,
Gravely-bent tree tops, fairy-tale flowers.
It danced past
Queer animals and strange things,
It touched them with quick moves
And they were frightened by the gay bird.
Green looks stared through the night
And angry phosphor glints pierced the foliage
Where owls were moving their beaks deceitfully.
Here your gay bird was frightened
And fearfully returned
Beaten by the envy of the black branches.
Shuddering it fell into the blue day
Tired, lame-winged, dead.
America’s Ignition
WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT
... The quickened pulse of America did not appear with the outbreak of
war. It came with the winter cold, like all revival spirit—a strange and
fervent heat, breaking down the old, vitalizing the new everywhere. No
one doubts now—no one who can tear his eyes from the ground even for a
little—doubts now that the new social order is upon us.
America, in opening her breasts to the agony of Europe, in her giving of
solids and sympathy, has stumbled upon the ancient and perfect formula
for receiving the greater good. In forgetting herself a little, her own
human spirit has been ignited.
If someone announced that there lived in the Quattor Islands a man who
knew the exact way to bring into the world, not only the spirit, but the
action of _brotherhood_ and _fatherland_, there would be some call for
maps and steamship passages. If the Quattor Islands were not already on
the maps, they would presently appear, but not before the earliest
pilgrims had set out. And if someone should add that all expression of
the arts so far in the world is wumbled and imperfect compared to that
which is about to be, if a certain formula is followed; and that this
man in the Quattor group has the formula—many more would start on the
quest, or send their most trusted secretaries.
And yet the truth and the way is all here, and has been uttered again
and again by every voice that has lifted itself above the common din.
The wise men carried gifts. You would expect to give something for the
secret. You might expect to be called upon to sell all you have and give
to the poor. You would not be surprised even if the magnetic Islander
said:
“It is not your frankincense and myrrh that I want, though I thank you.
That which I have is for you. I am more anxious for you to know and live
it, than you can be to have and hold it. But the mystery is that it will
not come to abide with you, while you are passionate for possession. The
passion to give to others must be established within you before you can
adequately receive—”
You are beginning to see how ancient is the gospel. It is old, older
than that. It belongs to the foundations. Personally and nationally, the
law works the same way. That which is true, is true in all its parts.
There is an adjustment by which that which is good for the whole is good
for the part; that which is good for the nation is good for the man; but
each, whole and part, nation and man, must have for the first thought
not self-good but the general good. One nation, so established in this
conviction that its actions are automatically founded upon the welfare
of the world, could bring about the true fatherland in a generation; and
one human heart so established begins to touch from the first moment the
profound significances of life.
Personally and nationally, this plain but tremendous concept is
beginning to manifest itself here in America. I do not write as a
patriot. It is not _my country_ that is of interest, but humankind.
America’s political interests, her trade, all her localizations as a
separate and bounded people, are inimical to the new enthusiasm. The new
social order cannot concern itself as a country apart. American
predatory instincts, her self-worship, her attempt at neutrality while
supplying explosives for the European slaughter arenas, her deepening
confinement in matter during the past fifty years, have prepared her for
the outright demoralization of war, just as surely as Europe is meeting
today the red harvest from such instincts and activities. For action
invariably follows the thought.
Yet the hearts of men in America are changing. I do not write as a
religionist, but as one very much of the world. For the hearts of men do
change, and it is only through such changes that the material stagnation
of a people can be relieved without deluges of blood.
The high hope is upon us. In being apart from war, America has been
enabled to see. One must always remove himself from the ruck to see its
movement. In the past six months, within these western shores, the
voices of true inspiration have been heard. From a literary standpoint
alone, this is the most significant fact since Emerson, Whitman, and
Thoreau, took pen in hand forgetting themselves a little while each day.
There is a peculiar strength upon American production of all kinds, as a
result of this very act of getting out from under European influence.
England and France and Germany are merely national voices now. The voice
of the partisan is but a weak treble against the basic rumble of war.
War is a confession, as suicide is a confession, as every act of blood
and rage is a confession, of the triumph of the animal in the human
mind.... If you have received letters from friends in England or Germany
or France since the war; friends whom formerly you admired for their
culture and acumen, you have been struck by the dullness and misery of
the communications, the uncentered points of view, the incapacity of
human vision in the midst of the heaviness and blackness of life there;
if, indeed, you have read the recent newspapers and periodicals of these
countries, you will require no further proof of the fact—that a nation
at war is an obscene nation, its consciousness all driven down into the
physical, its voice tonally imperfect from hate and fear, its eyes open
to red illusion and not to truth.
Even in America the voice of the nationalist is a part of the old and
the unclean. The new social order does not recognize the rights and
desires of any isolated people. Humankind is basically one in meaning,
in aim and in destiny. The difference of one nation from another in
relation to the sun’s rays, in character, country, environment, race,
color and structure of mind—these are primal values, the very values
that will sum up into the essential grandeur of the whole. Personally
and nationally there are no duplicates in the social scheme. The
instruments of this magnificent orchestra are of infinite diversity, but
the harmony is one.
The spiritual source of all human achievement is already a harmonic
whole. That globe is complete. It is our business as men to make a
pattern of it in matter—to make the dream come true in flesh, each man
and each nation bringing his labor, which can only be bent into a
fitting arc, by the loss of the love of self.
It requires but a little vision to observe Nature at work upon this
concept in a thousand ways. She always seeks to preserve her balances.
If a certain plant, or bird, insect, beast, man or nation, rises by
intrinsic force and predation to dangerous increase, a destroying
parasite is invariably fostered within its shadow. In good time these
two growths turn to rend each other, a mutual cleansing. The Prussian
war-office is a counter-growth to British imperialism. That which
survives will be humbler and wiser.
I saw in a doctor’s office in Canada the picture of an English bull-dog
standing large against the background of a British flag, and beneath was
this line:
“What we have, we’ll hold.”
I found that the picture had a national acceptance in the British
colonies and at Home. Yet a child stopping to think would have seen
breakers ahead for a nation so lost in material things, as thus to
challenge the Fates.... There is a fairy-tale of a man building a great
boat for the air. It looked to win, and in the effrontery of
achievement, he set forth to conquer God. Just then a hornet stung
him....
All this to suggest that the new dimension of life must come from
America, if it comes at all; and from this vantage-point, the reality is
mightily appearing—in the new poetry, in the new novels, in music,
painting, and the crafts. The generation just coming into its own,
contains the builders whose work is to follow the destroyers of war.
They are not self-servers. They do not believe in intellect. Their
genius is _intuitionally_ driven, not intellectually. Just as steam has
reached its final limitation as a force, and is being superseded by
electricity, the limitations of which have not been sensed so far even
by the most audacious, so the intellect as a producing medium, has had
its period—a period of style-worship, vanities of speech and action, of
self-service, or parading, of surface show and short-sightedness,
without parallel in the world.
For the intellect is a product of sunlight, its energy supplied by human
blood which dies. The new dimension comes from the fountain-head of
energy, and its first realization is the unity of all nature. The
intellect is as old as your body is; the giant that is awakening from
sleep in the breasts of the rising generation is immortal.
The thing that was called genius in the last generation met a
destructive force in the material world, almost as deadly and vindictive
as that encountered by Copernicus. The voices of the few heralds were
scarcely heard, but there is a battle-line of genius in the new
generation, timed for the great service years following the chaos of
war. They will bring in the liberation of religion from mammon; they
will bring in the religion of work, the equality of women, not on a mere
suffrage matter alone, but in spirit and truth; they will bring in their
children un-accursed.
Solitude
GEORGE SOULE
I was fretted with husks of men;
I cried out to be alone,
To be free,
To run in the wind.
Solitude was to me as the dream of a country well to a fevered man.
I ran away to be alone.
And there were the stars, and the sea, and the sun coming up out of the
sea.
And I went mad with the wind’s song.
Then I chanted my ardor to the air—
But it came back clanging about my ears:
The stars were too near,
I was compressed between horizons;
I choked in the wind and the sun!
In my wrath I strode back to men
And smote the husks asunder.
From them came forth
The whole of me that I had lacked.
For the first time I was alone,
Alone with all of myself,
In splendid peace.
Remy De Gourmont
BY RICHARD ALDINGTON
The work of Remy de Gourmont is known and read in all parts of the
civilized world. Yet he has not a large circulation and a purely
commercial writer would probably be disgusted at his profits, but he has
an influence, especially over the younger and more adventuresome
spirits, which few writers today possess. One can—or rather one could in
the days before the war—hardly pick up any French review without finding
some reference to his ideas or some criticism of his work. In Russia he
appears to have a more considerable reputation than anywhere else
outside France. For, though one sees criticism and translations of him
even in languages like Hungarian and Roumanian, it is in Russia alone
that a word of praise from Remy de Gourmont seems to make a man’s
reputation. The English are far slower in their international
appreciations, and the Americans—quick though they are to seize on new
men—do not seem to have taken up de Gourmont with much understanding.
Mr. Ransome’s translation of _Un Nuit au Luxembourg_ was not received
with either appreciation or enthusiasm by English and American critics.
And though a savant like Mr. Havelock Ellis quotes from M. de Gourmont’s
work, and has, I believe, a great admiration for his personal
intellectual qualities; though Mr. Sturge Moore, in his book on Flaubert
and Blake, quotes M. de Gourmont among the great critics of France, it
must be admitted that few English-speaking critics have yet done him
justice. I question if the larger public has heard more of him than a
vague rumour of his name.
It may be that he is thought too “high-brow.” I suppose every man who
gives his life up to the task of expressing his ideas, his character,
and his genius in a purely disinterested manner is liable to this
criticism. But there is so great a fascination in his work, whether it
be criticism or fiction, philosophic dialogue or prose poem, that
whenever he gains a reader it is not for an hour but for life. In
America especially he should find readers, for America, whatever
artistic faults and drawbacks it may have, has not, as England has, a
“ring” of reviewers who unanimously “queer” any book whose originality
or genius is any menace to their own stick-in-the-mud critical methods.
The Symbolist movement in France is now almost ancient history.
Unanimists, Futurists, Paroxysts, Fantasists, and all the other “ists”
so abundantly produced by this century now face the “ists” of Germany on
the battlefield. And while they are there fighting out by bodily force
and not by words the intellectual destinies of Europe we may perhaps
consider with free minds the Symbolist poets and authors who are now too
old to take the field for their country and can only sit at home
“waiting for news.”
Some of the “children of Mallarmé” are dead; others are forgotten; a few
still remain. Maeterlinck, Vielé-Griffin, Jammes, and Remy de Gourmont
occur first to one’s mind as the best living representatives of the
great Symbolist school, and of these the subtlest, the most fascinating,
the most modern is Remy de Gourmont. Along with M. Anatole France,
though very different from him, Remy de Gourmont is an example of the
tradition of European culture. Less derivative than M. France, or
perhaps deriving from less familiar sources, with as great an irony and
with a faith that seems more sceptical than scepticism itself, he has
extracted from the literature of each country and century that part
which helped him to develop and train his own character. He presents in
one person the manifold and often conflicting opinions and ideas of
modern culture. Reading his books one sees that there is a mystical sort
of beauty even in science and under his pen mysticism itself appears
almost as exact as a science.
I said just now that M. de Gourmont was an example of the tradition of
European culture, and since Paris, we are mostly agreed, is the centre
of European culture, and since Remy de Gourmont is a Parisian of
Parisians, we may count him, I think, as one of the best examples of
Latin or West European culture now living. I rather dwell upon this
aspect of Remy de Gourmont as the man of supreme culture since that
quality has so suddenly and so startlingly come into public discussion.
It is extremely difficult to say precisely what culture is; and a
definition of culture naturally varies with differences of race and
temperaments. John Addington Symonds, in his interesting and
illuminating essay on this subject, defines culture as “the raising of
previously-educated faculties to their highest potencies by the
conscious effort of their possessors.” And it might be added to this
excellent definition that the feature of Latin or West European culture
which most distinguishes it from the culture of other countries is a
wideness of interest, a great general “cultivating” of all the faculties
of the mind and character as opposed to the extreme development of one
single faculty.
Remy de Gourmont is indeed so admirable an example of the type of
culture I have briefly indicated that it is difficult to think of any
form of intellectual activity which has not at one time or another
received his attention. He has been a founder of reviews—among them the
famous _Mercure de France_—and an editor of reviews. He has written
prefaces for modern authors and for ancient authors—both poets and
prose-writers. As a literary critic it is perhaps not too much to say
that in his time and generation he ranks as Sainte-Beuve did in his.
Under his name will be found five volumes of _Promenades Littéraires_,
collections of essays dealing with the widest possible range of literary
subjects—from Petronius to Guillaume de Machaut, from the Goliardi to
the latest “roman passionnel.” His _Livres des Masques_ are one of the
most considerable acquisitions to the criticism of French literature
during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In these two books
will be found amazingly penetrating studies of men so diverse as the de
Goncourt brothers and Maeterlinck, while American readers should be
especially interested in his studies of the two Franco-American poets,
Stuart Merrill and Francis Vielé-Griffin. As an admirer of Huysmans, M.
Remy de Gourmont was naturally interested in the mystic, Christian Latin
poets. And the fruit of several years’ study of these authors was that
notable and unique book _Le Latin Mystique_. It is no exaggeration to
say that hardly anyone else could have made these writers interesting to
anyone but the specialist. One can almost imagine M. de Gourmont being
challenged to produce a book which would appeal not only to savants but
to the lover of general culture. This mystic Latin poetry had, until
Huysmans’ day, been almost entirely neglected by students of beautiful
things. But Remy de Gourmont, treating the subject as a poet in love
with poetry—not as a pedant or a professor or a book-maker—has produced
a work which is at once a criticism and an anthology of the literature
produced during those thousand years which we ignorantly call the “Dark
Ages.”
These investigations into an almost forgotten and strangely attractive
literature were not without effect upon his purely creative work. This
effect can be best seen in his _Litanies_, a series of curious and,
verbally, extremely beautiful prose-poems, full of assonances, of
internal rhymes, of strange symbols, of sonorous rhythms and of
fantastic images. Again in his prose, in works like _Le Pèlerin du
Silence_ and _D’un Pays Lointain_; in his poetry—especially in _Les
Saints du Paradis_—this influence is most marked.
In books like _La Physique de l’Amour_, _Le Chemin de Velours_, the
series of _Promenades Philosophiques_ and _Epilogues_, we have an
entirely different kind of intellectual activity—lettered, it is true,
but with that incisiveness and clarity of style and thought which mark
French prose as the finest in the modern world. In these books problems
of philosophy, of morals, of everyday conduct and national and
international affairs, problems of music, of painting, of all the arts
and sciences, are discussed with a brilliance and an originality not
always palatable to the gloomier and duller elements of French society.
One must not ask for too clear a definition of M. de Gourmont’s
philosophy. He is just sufficient of a mystic to enjoy being
misunderstood, and of a nature so ironical that his most
innocent-looking statements are traps for the unwary. He is an
individualist—true to his type of culture. Perhaps if he were very
closely questioned he would smile and say that he belonged to the
“tradition des libres esprits.”
In addition to these many works, of so diverse a character that they
might well be the result of the labours of several men rather than of
one, he has written several novels, one or two of which at their
appearance were the literary sensation of the hour; he has devoted much
time to the study of aesthetic questions and has published two or three
volumes on the subject; beyond all this he has produced a modern French
rendering of Aucassin and Nicolette, a translation from the Spanish and
a couple of original plays! And in his little flat on the rive gauche,
not far from St. Sulpice, among his books, he still writes every day
words of encouragement for anxious Paris, still finds time to observe
and reflect and to let the rest of the world know what is happening in
France.
Words Out of Waking
HELEN HOYT
In the warm, fragrant darkness
We lay,
Side by side,
Straight;
And your voice
That had been silent
Came to me through the dark
Asking, _Do you smell the lilacs?_
You, half in sleep,
Speaking softly,—
Indistinctly.
Then it seemed to me,
A sudden moment,
As if we lay in our graves,
And you were speaking across
From your mound to mine:
In the springtime,
Speaking of lilacs,—
With muffled voice through the grass.
Who Wants Blue Silk Roses?
SADE IVERSON
The battlefields are very far away:
No friend of mine fights on them—and no foe.
I have not sickened at the battle stench,
Nor seen the tragic trenches where men die.
I am a woman, walking quietly,
And fond of peace and place and fireside cheer,
Yet here, afar from strife, the grey Uhlans
Have battered down my door, let in the rain,
And put me out, purse-empty, on the street.
Strange, say you?
Chance of war! Samaritans,
I’m past all succor;—slain in my pocket-book.
My little shop for hats—chic hats, oddities—
Is shut as tight as Juliet Capulet’s tomb.
“Bad times” has stood me up against the wall:
“Bad times” in Uhlan gear, takes certain aim.
(And firing squads have always stone cold eyes.)
All winter long, I’ve peeped out on the street,
To watch my little customers go by
In conscious rectitude and home-made hats;
Home-made to noble ends!
Not that they’ve less
Than once they had. They’ve more—a bran new creed.
Economists approve: the fashion’s set.
“How fine and sensible the women are,”
You hear the men commenting on the train.
“My wife is trimming her own hats.” “And mine.”
“I like to see the women suit themselves
To present needs.” “And I. It’s fine, I say.
Some little good comes out of this sad war.”
(Ah, yes, but half a sausage and a roll,
Was all the food I’d had in twenty hours!)
_Now_ that would seem a feast. The cupboard’s bare.
Well, here’s a chance to put my luck to test.
Who goes a-roving when the pot is full?
Say, comrades, comrades, let’s set out tonight,
And brew our mulligan behind the ties.
No more I’ll sit alone to play propriety;
I sell no more blue roses, hear me swear
But when the snows are gone, I’ll scent mayweed
Beside the fences, till some purple noon,
I find the passion flower, in panoply,
Awaiting me, and I shall stoop and pick.
But do not think I am without a friend!
I have my own familiar Imp for company—
The secret, mocking creature of my heart,
Which keeps me laughing when I’m set to cry,
And fleers the cautions I thought principles.
He’s captain now. We’ll see how he’ll provide,
For food and drink and thought, and company.
Let him advise what lens I’d best look through.
Nero, they say, chose green; fools like rose-red.
The Imp and I may stand for sun-bright truth,
And smoke our glasses if we prove too frail.
Come hunger, then, and want, or any shame.
If Chatterton dare starve, why should not we?
We’ll travel far—though without carfare, dears,
And with shoe-soles that let in pavement slush.
But now I shall find out if dry-shod feet
Discount the wet ones. Live down the superstitions,
So I say. Ducks think wet feet are best.
Come, come, my Imp. Let’s start. Our fat landlord
Has locked the door on us and taken the key.
(When you are passing by the little shop,
Remember one who wanted you for friend;
A victim of the war, without a faith,
But carrying a banner—a white field,
And no word written on it.
Yes, think of one,
Who lacks a watchword, and wears no disguise,
And arm in arm with impish laughter, seeks for Life.)
“Mother Jones” and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
MARGARET C. ANDERSON
Mother Jones and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn have been talking in Chicago and
I went to hear them both, expecting to be captivated by the former and
disappointed in the latter. But it turned out just the other way.
Mother Jones is all the things you have heard her to be—vigorous, almost
sprightly in her eighty-two years, witty, shrewd, kindly, hopeful of
great social changes, with snappy little blue eyes and a complexion like
a girl of eighteen and a tongue like an automatic revolver. You feel
you’d rather have her get after you with fire crackers, as she did to a
man in some Western hotel when she wanted to drive him out of town (and
succeeded), than to have her side against you in an argument. Right or
wrong, she would make you appear to be hopelessly wrong; and certainly
on any practical matter you would have a suspicion that she was right
anyhow. She is consistent and convincing. But there is one thing none of
the magazine articles has said about her: Mother Jones is a completely
simple human being, in the least flattering sense of the word. She
suffers because men are sent to jail and children are killed in strikes,
and she spends every day of her life working toward the prevention of
these things. But she lives on no more subtle plane of adjustments to a
difficult universe. You can’t associate her with any sort of intense
personal struggle. If temperament is the capacity to react, as I heard
some one define it the other day, then Mother Jones is as
untemperamental a person as I’ve ever seen. She acts; she doesn’t react
at all. She has neither a complex nor an interesting mind; she has a
well-informed one. She has read a lot—chiefly history and economics. She
hasn’t read philosophy or psychology, I think. She hasn’t needed to: her
knowledge of psychology is that sweeping and rather crude kind that
comes with years of hard experience in which there has been little time
for observation. If you asked her to sympathize with a man who had
killed himself because he loved too greatly, I can rather hear her say
that if men would keep busy they wouldn’t have time for such notions.
Life to her is reduced to a matter of two antagonisms: the struggle
between Capital and Labor. Other things, such as Art, for
instance,—well, she makes you feel it’s a little impertinent to expect
her to waste time like that; she is too busy trying to outwit the
“damned sewer rats,” as she calls Burns’ detectives or other obstacles
to peace and freedom. Mother Jones has a lot of effective phrases of
that sort; I think she wants to see if she can make you blanch before
she decides really to trust you; and then of course, as she says, “My
boys wouldn’t understand me if I talked nice and ladylike all the time.”
Underneath all this there is a charming old gentlewoman, full of
delicate courtesies that win for her the splendid chivalry of the rough
men she spends her life among.
The man who took me to see her made an unfortunate remark. He told her
that I wanted to write an article about her, and asked if she wouldn’t
tell me how she got started in her work. (I tried to stop him in time,
but it was no use.) She gave me one scornful look and then flashed at
him: “That’s a woman’s question. No man ever asks me such a fool thing,
but women always do. How do I know how I got started? I was always a
worker—that’s all.” Another of her simplifications is that there are two
kinds of people—those who work and those who don’t. She seemed to put me
with the latter, and it was my instinct from the first that she didn’t
approve of me. She just treated me politely, and it was rather awful.
She kept insisting that women know nothing about Labor—which is _almost_
quite true—and of course she didn’t neglect to mention her aversion for
the suffragists. But most of the time she told us stories, chuckling
heartily whenever she could say anything particularly explosive. She
described her recent trip to New York, and I remember her vivid account
of a visit she made the Colony Club. She said all the women came
tripping in on high heels, bent forward at an ominous angle that made
her think of cats ready to spring on a mouse. “I’ve got no time for such
idiots,” she finished. “And look at the crazy ones in this town, walking
in a mayor’s parade and yelling like wildcats instead of staying at home
where they might be reading and learning to educate their children.”
That night we went to hear her talk to an organization of painters and
found her irresistible. But she did little except entertain
them—particularly with stories in which she herself figured as the
white-haired heroine, wading across streams in water up to her waist to
outwit the police, or forcibly throwing a Burns detective out of her
audience. The painters shrieked with joy at that, and it really was good
to hear. She had suspected a certain man who had been going to her
meetings, so one night she asked him to leave. He refused, but she
insisted. He said, “I won’t go and I’d like to see anybody who can make
me.” “Well,” she answered, “we’ll see about that”; and she stepped down
from the platform, took him by the throat, held him so tightly “that his
tongue stuck out,” and marched him out of the hall. He didn’t bother her
any more. These things, told in her blunt, snappy way, are
overwhelmingly funny—and stirring too. But what you like most about her
is her sudden falling into seriousness, and the way she says, “Now, my
boys, _stick together_. Solidarity is the only method by which we can
beat the system.”
Mother Jones has no patience with anarchism: “Don’t talk to me about
philosophies of an ideal society that will happen some time long after
I’m in my grave. What I’m after is to do something for my class while
I’m still alive. I believe in accomplishing things.” She has none of the
anarchist’s hatred of government; she merely wants our present system
humanized. And she has a lot of little prejudices about people and
things: about Bill Haywood, for instance, who “divides Labor against
itself,” as she says—and says untruly.
On the whole she is just what you would have expected—except that she’s
more amusing. There is absolutely nothing of the artist in her. She is
imaginative in the large way a child is; in fact Mother Jones is a child
in the sense a grown-up can’t be without losing a lot.
* * * * *
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, “the girl agitator,” has an even more consistent
point of view than Mother Jones, and she has the advantage of being
without prejudices. Her face has more subtlety, more interest for the
analyst, than Mother Jones’s obvious compressed mouth and quick eyes;
but it has little of that stamp of multiple reactions which make Emma
Goldman’s face such a fascinating “subject.” There is a touch of Irish
poetry in it—something wistful and something stern.
Miss Flynn gave three talks—on Birth Control, on Violence in Relation to
the Labor Movement, and on Solidarity: Labor’s Road to Freedom—but I
could only hear the last one, which everyone said was the least
interesting of the three. There was only a handful of workers there, and
she was so informing that the place ought to have been crowded with all
the good people who think the I. W. W. is an organization of
unintelligent outcasts whose only competence lies in throwing hammers
into printing presses, etc., etc. Miss Flynn is more articulate than any
I. W. W. I have heard, and she is freer from the stock phrases that give
so many of the very earnest young workers in the movement something of
pathos. I like these I. W. W. people a lot. They are not only offering
an efficient program of labor; they are getting close to a workable
philosophy of life. They are even capable of a virtue no working-class
organization is supposed to be overburdened with: hardness of thought.
As Miss Flynn said: “Don’t pamper yourselves. It’s not a _sacrifice_ to
fight for your own freedom!” Of course this group has its camp followers
who do it no end of damage; but then the Socialists have their
“practical” fanatics who are so awfully practical they always look at
the trees instead of the forest, and the Anarchists have their soulful
members who yearn for martyrdom and blubber about the duty of suffering
for a cause. The best of the Industrial Workers are neither visionless
nor sentimental. They have no interest in being martyrs; they are
workers. Miss Flynn is of the best of these.
The Poetry Bookshop
(_35 Devonshire Street, London_)
AMY LOWELL
I well remember the first time I went to the Poetry Bookshop. It was in
July, 1913. I had read of it in a stray number of _The Poetry Review_
that had drifted my way. The idea attracted me at once, and I determined
to have a look at it during the summer. There was something alluringly
crazy about anyone’s starting a bookshop for the sale of poetry alone.
Poetry is at once my trade and my religion. All decent poets worship
their art and slave at it, and I am no exception to the rule. But I have
my “afternoons out” with their temptations, and the greatest of these is
a bookshop. Here was the combination: a poetry bookshop. I turned to it
as inevitably as a magnet to the pole.
It was after a visit to one of those large and flourishing
establishments where every sort of book is sold that you do not want to
read; where rows and rows of the classics you wish you could read again
for the first time flaunt from the shelves in gaudy leather bindings,
and a whole counter labours to support the newest and dullest novels,
and another is covered with monographs which instruct you minutely as to
how to grow fruit-trees, catch salmon, handle golf clubs, or bicycle
through the home counties. It was in one of these “emporiums,” after the
usual “We can get it for you, Madam,” that I broke into open revolt and
started off to The Poetry Bookshop.
I knew it was somewhere near the British Museum. “Off Theobald’s Road,”
I told the taxi driver, and settled down to looking out of the window,
for London, whether on foot or driving, is a never-ending interest to
me. Theobald’s Road is one of those large, busy thoroughfares, which cut
across London in all directions, and off it, to the left in my case, we
turned into a quiet, rather run-down little street, Devonshire Street. A
swinging sign about half-way down it attracted me. It was shaped like a
shield and blue, if I remember rightly, and on it were painted three
torches. All this was determined as the taxi approached. That must be my
place, I thought, and it was.
We drew up at the door of a shop—unmistakably a shop, because it had a
big shopwindow. It did not need the name, “The Poetry Bookshop” in
excellently designed, big, black letters over the window, to tell me
that I had arrived.
I did not go in at once. I like to take my temptations gradually,
nibbling at them bit by bit and tasting, before gulping them down as
full-fledged crimes. I nibbled at that window. It was broad and high,
and the books were displayed in it in the singularly fascinating manner
which American booksellers jeer at and call “English window dressing.”
All these books were poetry, or about poetry; that is, of course, all
the ones that were not plays. There were long strips of ballads hanging
down, like 18th century broadsides, each one topped by a crude woodcut
in glaring reds, and blues, and yellows. The nibbling was so delightful
that I collected quite a crowd of street urchins about me, wondering
what the lady was looking so long into the window for, before I had
done.
Then I went in, but even the window had not prepared me for the shop
inside. It was a room rather than a shop, for there was a smart fire
burning in the grate, and there were chairs, and settles, and a big
table covered with the latest publications. The walls were lined with
shelves, and under the window was a little ledge entirely filled with
reviews from all over the world. The familiar cover of _Poetry_ made me
feel quite at home, but the eclecticism of the proprietor was at once
evidenced by the presence of _The Poetry Journal_ and _Poet Lore_,
periodicals of whose existence I should not have expected him to be
aware. There was also _The Poetry Review_, from which I knew he had
severed himself, so it was obvious that the proprietor cared very much
to be fair.
I turned to the shelves, and my surprise was even greater. There were a
lot of shelves, all round the room and even over the chimney-breast.
Every volume of poetry recently published was there. That I had
expected, but what I had not expected was that all the classics were
there too. Not bound into mausoleums, “handsome editions in handsome
bindings, which no gentleman’s library should be without,” but readable
volumes, for the reader who wants to read.
There was not a bit of glass in the shop, all was open and touchable. Of
course I touched, and opened, and browsed. There were French books, too,
and Italian. It goes without saying that the book I wanted was there. I
know I bought it, and others, and came out laden and happy.
I did not meet Mr. Monro on this first visit, and I do not now remember
exactly when I did meet him. My sojourns in the shop were many, and at
this distance have become confused. But I did meet him sometime, and
found an earnest, quiet gentleman, the very opposite from the crank. But
even at the first visit I had felt the bookshop to be not “crazy” at
all, but an answer to a very real need.
It has been my experience that people who really do things (in
contradistinction to talking about them) are very straightforward,
sensible persons, without sentimentalism in the pursuit of their ideal.
Mr. Monro was exactly this. He was spending his energy to give poetry
the dignity and charm of presentation it had lost at the hands of the
commercial booksellers; he was encouraging poets and allowing their
books a chance; but he did not talk ideals, nor dress like a combination
of a fool and a wild animal. He was too busy to pose, he was just “on
the job.” And what “on the job” meant and means is best told by giving
the history of his enterprise.
For some years Mr. Monro had lived abroad, in Switzerland and Italy. But
the nostalgia of home took possession of him, and he returned to
England. Shortly after his arrival The Poetry Society asked him to edit
a magazine for them, and he consented, and _The Poetry Review_ began in
January, 1912. Mr. Monro not only edited the _Review_, but paid for it.
Now the Poetry Society, like all such bodies, is conservative, and Mr.
Monro is sown with the seeds of radicalism. So differences of policy
began, and at the end of a year, Mr. Monro seceded from _The Poetry
Review_ and founded another review, _Poetry and Drama_, to be published
quarterly.
But I am anticipating. While editing _The Poetry Review_ Mr. Monro
conceived the idea of having a bookshop, which should be at once the
office of the review and its various publications, and a shop. An old
house in Devonshire Street was leased and everything “en train,” when
Mr. Monro found that the inevitable breach with The Poetry Society on
matters of policy was imminent. He announced in _The Poetry Review_ the
foundation of a new magazine, a quarterly, and relinquished _The Poetry
Review_ into other hands after having founded it and edited it for
twelve months.
On January 8th, 1913, The Poetry Bookshop opened its doors to the
public, and the public, always caught by novelty, flocked in. Professor
Henry Newbolt gave the opening address. The first publication of the
Bookshop, _Georgian Poets_, an anthology of the work of Lascelles
Abercrombie, Rupert Brooke, W. H. Davies, Walter de la Mare, James Elroy
Flecker, Wilfred Wilson Gibson, D. H. Lawrence, John Masefield, James
Stephens, Harold Monro himself, and others, had already appeared. This
book has been extraordinarily successful, and, in two years, has gone
through ten editions.
Of course the book helped the bookshop, and the bookshop helped the
book. So delighted were the amusement hunters with the idea, that there
was some danger of the venture being swamped in the tide of fashion. But
Mr. Monro was too genuinely in earnest to be elated by his success, or
depressed when it calmed down to a normal interest. The bookshop pegged
away at its work and in March, 1913, the first number of _Poetry and
Drama_ appeared. This little quarterly is indispensable to anyone
wishing to keep abreast with what is being done in poetry abroad. The
articles on French poetry by F. S. Flint alone are worth the cost of
subscription. But _Poetry and Drama_ also publishes original poetry,
critical reviews, and English, French, Italian, and American chronicles.
It is an interesting paper, and if I easily see how it could be
bettered, that only means that I am an enthusiastic reader. Was anyone
ever sincerely devoted to a paper without feeling that with a grain of
his advice it could still be improved?