Vibrate in the heat.
Silently, easily we sway through braying traffic,
Down the crowded street.
The tumult crouches over us,
Or suddenly drifts to one side.
Mr. Flint’s work is always delightful. He has a winning way of taking
his reader into his confidence. This, and his love of nature, which he
paints with real affection, gains our sympathy at once. It must be
admitted that none of Mr. Flint’s seven poems quite equal two of his in
the first anthology, _London My Beautiful_ and _The Swan_. One feels in
these two poems a groping quality, as though the poet were not quite
satisfied with them himself. As though the first _élan_ with which he
adopted the _vers libre_ medium were passing away, and he were beginning
to realize that the form has its limitations.
If there is any truth in this, it is evident, however, that Mr. Flint
has not yet made up his mind to try anything else. It would be almost a
pity if he did, for few _vers librists_ understand the manipulation of
cadence as he does. Perhaps the following is the one of these poems
which has most of his characteristic charm:
Lunch
Frail beauty,
green, gold and incandescent whiteness,
narcissi, daffodils,
you have brought me Spring and longing,
wistfulness,
in your irradiance.
Therefore, I sit here
among the people,
dreaming,
and my heart aches
with all the hawthorn blossom,
the bees humming,
the light wind upon the poplars,
and your warmth and your love
and your eyes ...
they smile and know me.
_Malady_ strikes a stronger note than anything of Mr. Flint’s that I
have read before. It is excellent psychology, and steadily, astringently
done.
It is this constant change and growth which makes the progress of this
little group so interesting to watch. Mr. Flint’s work in the first
anthology seemed quite successful and finished. He had done what he had
done excellently, and he would go on doing it to the end of the chapter.
But here we see Mr. Flint, dissatisfied with mere success, daring a
wider horizon. From the point of view of adequacy of technique, his
poems suffer, as is natural; but the technique is sure to follow the
widened thought, before long. _Malady_ and the poem called _Fragment_
show the direction in which Mr. Flint is moving. His next work will be
interesting to see.
Mr. D. H. Lawrence is the best known of the poets in this book, although
a newcomer to the anthology. No modern writer is more vigorous than he,
and none is more entirely, almost brutally sincere. In Mr. Lawrence’s
novels this brutality is sometimes excessively evident, but always one
feels that the author inflicts pain upon himself as well as his readers;
that he says what he sees and is concerned not to shirk and be a coward
for his own comfort.
In his poetry, Mr. Lawrence seems to be more lenient with himself. It is
as though he allowed the moralist in him a day out. Not that he ever
ceases to be a moralist, really. But he permits himself to lay a slight
covering over the stark nakedness of disagreeable facts. This covering
is poetry, and very beautiful and original poetry it is.
Green
The sky was apple-green
The sky was green wine held up in the sun,
The moon was a golden petal between.
She opened her eyes, and green
They show, clear like flowers undone,
For the first time, now for the first time seen.
Mr. Lawrence has solved the problem of _vers libre_ for himself, by
writing in a rhymed metre which usually defies all scansion, but which
gives a queer, and most satisfactory effect, of elasticity and strength.
For this reason, and for its novelty, Mr. Lawrence’s manner is very
interesting, but his matter is still more so. Read _The Mowers_, a
common tragedy, but put so newly and strikingly that it comes upon one
with all its original force.
_Fireflies in the Corn_ and _A Woman to Her Dead Husband_ are new in
subject as well as in presentation, and they have a bald reality about
them which I have never met in any other poem. But never once does Mr.
Lawrence make the mistake of being only a realist; he never ceases to be
a poet. In _Fireflies in the Corn_ there are these lines:
And those bright fireflies wafting in between
And over the swaying cornstalks, just above
And all their dark-feathered helmets, like little green
Stars, come low and wandering here for love
Of this dark earth.
The _Ballad of Another Ophelia_ is probably his best poem. In it we see
his peculiar style at its very best.
Mr. Lawrence is the singer of truth, the lover of humanity. His
inclusion into the Imagist group shows that the school is broad and real
enough not to desire to shut itself up in the cupboard of precocity, as
in the beginning there was some fear of its doing.
Where Mr. Lawrence gives us the broadest view of Imagism from an English
standpoint that this newer, more vital group has offered us, Miss Lowell
does the same service for the American side. The qualities that make her
work noteworthy are first, a virtuoso command of language that fits
itself to the most diverse themes, and second, a sort of fantastic,
curious irony that is essentially American. This irony is perhaps at its
finest in _The Traveling Bear_ and _The Letter_, but these are too long
to quote. I choose instead _Bullion_, which may be taken for a very
modern type of love poem, in which love itself becomes a burden:
My thoughts
Chink against my ribs
And roll about like silver hail-stones.
I should like to spill them out,
And pour them, all shining,
Over you.
But my heart is shut upon them
And holds them straitly.
Come, You! and open my heart;
That my thoughts torment me no longer,
But glitter in your hair.
Miss Lowell always looks at things from an angle. Her mind reflects the
unusual aspect and that most vividly. As she says of herself:
When night drifts along the streets of the city,
And sifts down between the uneven roofs,
My mind begins to peek and peer.
It plays at ball in old, blue Chinese gardens,
And shakes wrought dice-cups in Pagan temples,
Amid the broken flutings of white pillars.
It dances with purple and yellow crocuses in its hair,
And its feet shine as they flutter over drenched grasses.
How light and laughing my mind is,
When all the good folk have put out their bed-room candles,
And the city is still!
Miss Lowell has the ability which is rare among present-day poets of
recognizing that beauty does not belong to an epoch or a period, but is
always the same, under whatever strange form it may present itself.
Doubtless her most remarkable poem is that called _The Bombardment_.
Whether the technique adopted here by Miss Lowell is destined to work a
revolution in verse-writing remains for the future to settle. But here,
at least, it perfectly justifies itself. No one should permit, however,
a question of technique to obscure the deep tragedy, the splendid
humanity, of this poem. War has only one beauty: that of its terrible
destructiveness of all beauty. _The Bombardment_ is the best statement
of this aspect of war I know. It must be read in its entirety, and so I
will not attempt piecemeal quotation of this most fitting conclusion to
the volume.
This book is so provocative of thought, the poets in it are so
suggestive, each one by him—or herself, that each really requires a
separate review. But I have said enough to show what an important volume
this little book is. We are told that it is to be an annual, and
certainly we shall watch its succeeding appearances with great interest.
It is certainly best to separate an artist so far from his work
as not to take him as seriously as his work.—_Nietzsche._
Editorials and Announcements
_The Murder of a Poet_
It is reported that Rupert Brooke died of sun-stroke last month in the
Dardanelles. There is nothing to be said in the face of such monster
horrors.... And it is also reported that Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson
has burned up his production of Shaw’s _Caesar and Cleopatra_, not being
able to bear the strain of acting in a play written by his unpatriotic
countryman who protested against such horrors.
_Emma Goldman’s Lectures in May_
At a recent meeting of the Chicago Woman’s Club, when all the editors of
Chicago magazines explained the virtues of their respective journals,
Lucien Cary said, politely but in effect, that THE LITTLE REVIEW was no
good. “The only striking thing it has done (beside coming out at all) is
to discover Emma Goldman, a nice woman with views less radical than
Emerson’s and certainly far less well expressed.” I quote this because
it is so exhilarating to catch Mr. Cary in a half-truth—the kind of
thing that makes for the confused thinking he is so valiantly in arms
against. If THE LITTLE REVIEW had been alive about twenty-five years ago
I hope we would have had the sense to discover that a great woman was
beginning to work in this country. As it is, we could only try to point
out how difficult and how fine has been Emma Goldman’s living of the
things Emerson thought it would be good to live. It was not for the
people who know their Emerson that we tried it, but for those who have
forgotten him, like Mr. Cary.... Since we failed so miserably we shall
have to try again. But in the meantime you may hear Emma Goldman herself
and discover just how she is helping to make Emerson’s essays livable.
She is to lecture for a week in Chicago, in the most delightful lecture
room in the city—the Assembly Room in the Fine Arts Building. Her
subjects are as follows, at 8:15 in the evening:
_Sunday, May 9_:
“Friedrich Nietzsche, the Intellectual Storm Centre of the European
War.”
_Monday, May 10_:
“Is Man a Varietist or Monogamist”?
_Tuesday, May 11_:
“Jealousy” (Its Cause and Possible Cure).
_Wednesday, May 12_:
“Social Revolution vs. Social Reform.”
_Thursday, May 13_:
“Feminism” (A Critique of the Modern Woman’s Movements).
_Saturday, May 15_:
“The Intermediate Sex” (A Study of Homosexuality).
_Sunday, May 16_:
“The Limitation of Offspring” (A Discussion of How and Why Small
Families Are Desirable).
“_Dionysion_”
One of the most stirring things that has come to this office lately is a
small journal with the word “Dionysion” on its cover. It is the first
volume of a magazine for the furtherance of Isadora Duncan’s work in
America, and the committee that has helped make this rather amazing
thing possible includes such names as John W. Alexander, Percy MacKaye,
Theodore Dreiser, Will Levington Comfort, Max Eastman, Robert Henri,
Edith Wynne Mathison, Julia Culp, Witter Bynner, John Drew, Walter
Damrosch, and many others. On the first page is Whitman, then Nietzsche
on Dionysian Art, and then Robert Henri with a little article on the new
education in which he says: “I was tremendously impressed one day in
Isadora Duncan’s studio, by the look in the faces of the children. As
they passed by me in the dance I saw great dignity, balance, ease. I was
impressed, too, throughout the entire time by the fact that they seemed
absolutely secure in their happiness. They appeared to know
unconsciously that they would receive a full measure of praise and that
in no case would there be blame or punishment. In each little upturned
face was a rare look of freedom—the look of people on a higher plane of
self-consciousness, an aloofness from the common thought. I saw in their
expression the impress of the measures of great music.” And he goes on
that “to inspire courage in children, to stimulate them with the work of
those who have the courage to create, to make of them frank facers of
the emotional problems of life, to start them on the way toward a great
constructive life, we must take care not to impose our wisdom and our
ignorance on them, but to give them the benefit of the best we have
through a frank response to their natural interrogation.” Isadora
Duncan’s idea is that “the expression of the modern school of ballet
wherein each action is an end, and no movement, pose, or rhythm is
successive or can be made to evolve succeeding action, is an expression
of degeneration, of living death. All the movements of our modern ballet
school are sterile movements because they are unnatural; their purpose
is to create the delusion that the law of gravitation does not exist for
them.” I know a man from Russia who came to this country knowing only
two words of English: “Isadora Duncan.” He had seen Miss Duncan dance
once in St. Petersburg and from that moment he looked forward to America
as the country of “highest intelligences in the freest bodies.” We may
sometime become worthy of this remarkable woman. _Dionysion_ ought to
help....
_Isaac Loeb Peretz_
Last month, under the strain of relief work for the Jewish families
driven from the war zone, there died in Warsaw a great poet, Isaac Loeb
Peretz, almost unknown to the English reader, if we do not count one
volume of his _Tales_, issued by the Jewish Publication Society. His
poetry, written in Hebrew and in Yiddish, may be compared to that of
Heine in its gracefulness, but it bears in addition the melancholy of
Polish skies. His sketches in prose and his dramas are too subtle in
their profound symbolism to be appreciated by the Jewish masses, who
nevertheless, worship him as one of the few great artists who had not
gone over to till strange fields, richer and more remunerative. The
Jewish stage in America flourishes on Gordin’s melodramas and on cheap
farces; the theatrical managers are too business-like to produce such a
high play as Peretz’s _Golden Chain_.
_The St. Patrick’s Affair_
Emma Goldman sent me this letter about the two Italian boys, Abarno and
Carbone, who have been found guilty of trying to blow up St. Patrick’s
Cathedral: “Our efforts for the Italian victims were in vain. They were
found guilty, although every bit of evidence brought out how the
provocateur induced, urged the act, bought the material, made the bombs,
and placed them in the cathedral. But the judge said that an officer has
the right to do all this since he does it not out of criminal intent but
‘out of duty.’ Imagine what sort of sentence the boys will get from this
cruel machine! I was in court all day until ten that night. I was near a
collapse, so terribly had the day impressed me. At midnight they
telephoned to tell me of the verdict. The horror of it all to me is the
material which Polgnani chose—two typical proletarian slaves, one a boot
black, the other a cobbler, both underdeveloped from malnutrition,
irresponsible in their youthful inexperience, like two frightened deer
driven at bay. To hear the lawyers refer to them as ‘fools,’
‘degenerates,’ ‘ignoramuses,’ without a sign of protest on their part,
almost drove me crazy. I had to restrain myself from pulling them to
their feet to cry out against the cruelty and humiliation of it all.
Life is terrible....”
_More Censorship_
A book called _Fewer and Better Babies: The Limitation of Offspring by
the Prevention of Conception_, by William J. Robinson, has just been
published by the Critic and Guide Company of New York. In looking
through it I came upon several mysterious blank pages, and then found a
foot-note explanation to the effect that the chapters on preventives had
been completely eliminated by the censorship: “Not only are we not
permitted to mention the safe and harmless methods,” says the poor
author; “we cannot even discuss the unsafe and injurious methods.” But
it probably won’t be long before Mr. Comstock is suppressed....
The Sermon in the Depths
(_Phosphorescent Gleams of Spiritual Putrefactions_)
BEN HECHT
Since reading the recent translation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s book which
is called _The House of the Dead_[1] I have suffered from a distressing
ambition. I would like to go to Russia and there commit some naive
atrocity and be sent to a Siberian prison for at least ten years. I have
an unpatriotic prejudice and a lack of illusion concerning American
criminals or I would commit my atrocity on American soil. They, American
criminals, are as a rule a petty lot given to sentimental regrets and
griefs and reforms and periodicals. There is nothing which reflects the
smugness of a people so much as the manner and temperament of its vice.
And the temperament of American vice is more distinctly and monotonously
bourgeois than any of its virtues. The American citizen even when about
to be hanged is unable to rise above the commonplace reactions
“imagined” for his predicament by such authors as belong to the Indiana
Society.
I have hunted the American criminal with the police, been present at his
confession, watched him at his trial, sat with him in his death cell and
listened to him recite psalms and sermonize as the nervous sheriff
adjusted the noose around his neck. He is an artificial and
uninteresting disappointment. It would be as extreme a punishment to
spend ten years in his society behind the bars as to live in a State
Street Studio Building or join the Y. M. C. A. for a similar period.
But the “prison that stood at the edge of the fortress grounds close to
the fortress wall” and the primitive, debauched children who inhabited
it! The swaggering monstrosities that swilled on vodka and wept at the
stars. The bestial grotesques who delighted in the murder of infants for
the sake of the warm blood that bathed their hands. The filthy saints
and nonchalant parricides. The Herculean villains, the irritable
gargoyles innocently steeped in insatiable perversion and dripping with
infamy. The arrogant, sadistic artists of torture, human as children,
with their pitifully crippled souls; praying before the prison ikons,
stealing their comrade’s clothes and washing his feet; hating and loving
with the simplicity of Pagan gods and the ramified cunning of
continental diplomats. The nerveless flagellants, the heartbreaking
humorists, the fierce, fanciful executioners. There’s a company for you!
A purifying company in the very dregs of its depravities.
They stand alone in literature. Only Christ could have written of them
as well as Dostoevsky. Was Dostoevsky dreaming of a new religion when he
filled the pages with his human crucifixions? Probably not. But his
artistry and his painstaking, searching minute psychology have illumined
_The House of the Dead_ so that for him who is not afraid it is as holy
and human a source of inspiration as the loving sacrifices of the
Nazarene Thaumaturgist.
And yet it is a simple book. There are very few writings so direct and
simple, so easy to read and to understand. The terrifying lusts and
passions and distorted rages make the mind quiver, but they never
mystify. The harrowing morbidities pierce the intelligence like hot
lances, but they never blunt or deprave the moral senses. The fierce
pathos so exquisitely written, the blood-soaked restraints, the
consumptive dying in his iron fetters too weak to support the weight of
the little cross on his chest, the wild, inhuman humanness—they sizzle
away the nerve cuticles and burn the emotions with a strange fire.
It is the peculiar paradox of reaction. I visited once a Home for
Crippled Children and came away happier and cleaner. There the little
misshapen bodies and the unconscious holiness of their suffering
suddenly revealed to me things I had scoffingly overlooked in the
popular words of accepted divines. And it is the same way with the
company that writhes through the pages of Dostoevsky’s book. A more
material illustration of this paradox is the very rhapsodics I have
indulged in to convey what I have read. There are no rhapsodies in the
book. There is no “dramatic action” at all in the book. It is the most
inactive book I ever have read, barring not certain memoirs and diaries.
Nothing happens in the book, yet from its start a demoralized pageant
marches thunderingly across the pages, and somehow, by a psychological
process it would take Dostoevsky again to reveal, lifts the spirit to
heights as lofty as its itinerary is low. As for the style of its
writing, there are no secrets in the art for the great Russian. And here
he chooses the grim, gripping reiteration, the tragic calm and human
poesy of simple words to build up his staggering effects.
What will Americans think of the book providing it becomes popular?—and
it may. (The idolatrous regard born in this country for Russian art
instances the possibilities of American hysteria directed in the proper
channels.) The great majority of them, however—particularly those with
whom I have mentioned my horror of spending ten years—will feel it
incumbent upon them to be outraged, none more so than the criminal
fraternity. It is perhaps stretching a point to say that even so were
the highly and lowly estimable backbones of an earlier period of less
comparative moribund piety outraged by the Sermon on the Mount. But
there is a promising likelihood that their ectypes will never read the
volume and will thus be saved or lost or whatever you will. And those
who see the light from this Sermon in the Depths can effect an
exclusiveness which will merit them the flattering curses and derisions
of their fellow men for many sweet years to come.
The translation is by Constance Garnett and is excellently done. Mrs.
Garnett, more than any linguist, has in her work conveyed the atmosphere
and idiom and temperament of the Russian into English. She is
responsible for the remarkable translations of Turgeniev which have
carried his art unchanged into another tongue, as well as for the
Dostoevsky novels. For the benefit of readers who will be puzzled by her
footnote on page 11, the “Green Street” which she is unable to define is
the avenue formed between two ranks of prison soldiers through which the
condemned convict is wheeled and beaten. The soldiers stand armed with
fresh, green sticks which flash brightly in the sun as they swish down
on the naked back—hence the jocular name.
[1] _The Macmillan Company, New York._
Notes For a Review of “The Spoon River Anthology”
CARL SANDBURG
_The Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters. (The Macmillan
Company, New York)_
I saw Masters write this book. He wrote it in snatched moments between
fighting injunctions against a waitresses’ union striving for the right
to picket and gain one day’s rest a week, battling from court to court
for compensation to a railroad engineer rendered a loathsome cripple by
the defective machinery of a locomotive, having his life amid affairs as
intense as those he writes of.
At The Book and Play Club one night Masters tried to tell how he came to
write the Anthology. Of course, he couldn’t tell. There are no writers
of great books able to tell the how and why of a dominating spirit that
seizes them and wrenches the flashing pages from them. But there are a
few forces known that play a part. And among these Masters said he
wanted emphasis placed on _Poetry_, voices calling “Unhand me,” verses
and lines from all manner and schools of writers welcomed in Harriet
Monroe’s magazine.
Once in a while a man comes along who writes a book that has his own
heart-beats in it. The people whose faces look out from the pages of the
book are the people of life itself, each trait of them as plain or as
mysterious as in the old home valley where the writer came from. Such a
writer and book are realized here.
Masters’ home town is Lewiston, Illinois, on the banks of the Spoon
River. There actually is such a river where Masters waded bare-foot as a
boy, and where the dead and the living folk of his book have fished or
swam, or thrown pebbles and watched the widening circles. It is not far,
less than a few hours’ drive, from where Abraham Lincoln was raised.
People who knew Lincoln are living there today.
Well, some two hundred and twenty portraits in free verse have been
etched by Masters from this valley. They are Illinois people. Also they
are the people of anywhere and everywhere in so-called civilization.
Aner Clute is the immortal girl of the streets. Chase Henry is the town
drunkard of all time. The railroad lawyer, the corrupt judge, the
prohibitionist, the various adulterers and adulteresses, the Sunday
School superintendent, the mothers and fathers who lived for sacrifice
in gratitude, joy,—all these people look out from this book with
haunting eyes, and there are baffled mouths and brows calm in the facing
of their destinies.