time ago, while we were still advancing, noted a remarkable
discrepancy in the peculiar whine produced by the different
shells in their rapid flight through the air as they passed over
our heads, some sounding shrill, with a rising tendency, and the
other rather dull, with a falling cadence. A short observation
revealed the fact that the passing of a dull sounding shell was
invariably preceded by a flash from one of our own cannon in the
rear on the hill, which conclusively proved it to be an Austrian
shell. It must be understood that as we were advancing between
the positions of the Austrian and Russian artillery, both kinds
of shells were passing over our heads. As we advanced the
difference between shrill and dull shell grew less and less
perceptible, until I could hardly tell them apart. Upon nearing
the hill the difference increased again more and more until on
the hill itself it was very marked. After our trench was finished
I crawled to the top of the hill until I could make out the flash
of the Russian guns on the opposite heights and by timing flash
and actual passing of the shell, found to my astonishment that
now the Russian missiles had become dull, while on the other
hand, the shrill sound was invariably heralded by a flash from
one of our guns, now far in the rear. What had happened was this:
Every shell describes in its course a parabolic line, with the
first half of the curve being ascending and the second one
descending. Apparently in the first half of its curve, that is,
its course while ascending, the shell produced a dull whine
accompanied by a falling cadence, which changes to a rising
shrill as soon as the acme has been reached and the curve points
downward again. The acme for both kinds of shells naturally was
exactly the half distance between the Austrian and Russian
artillery and this was the point where I had noticed that the
difference was the least marked. A few days later, in talking
over my observation with an artillery officer, I was told the
fact was known that the shells sounded different going up than
when going down, but this knowledge was not used for practical
purposes. When I told him that I could actually determine by the
sound the exact place where a shell coming from the opposing
batteries was reaching its acme, he thought that this would be of
great value in a case where the position of the opposing
batteries was hidden and thus could be located. He apparently
spoke to his commander about me, for a few days later I was sent
on a reconnoitering tour, with the object of marking on the map
the exact spot where I thought the hostile shells were reaching
their acme, and it was later on reported to me that I had
succeeded in giving to our batteries the almost exact range of
the Russian guns. I have gone into the matter at some length,
because it is the only instance where my musical ear was of value
during my service.
Ruby kept on explaining Kreisler while we were making our way through
picturesque ravines. Then we stormed a steep bluff that made a difficult
climb, and I had to pull and push my gentle co-adventurer. “Be brave,
little Kreisler!” He turned to me with serious eyes, and proceeded to
point out the greatness of his god, who throughout the book does not
even once show any national narrowness or hatred for the enemy, who
speaks with equal sympathy of the Russians and of the Austrians, who
relates his terrible experiences in the swampy trenches in such a calm,
modest tone, making your heart bleed with sorrow for the hardships and
suffering of the belligerents. What a terrible calamity it would have
been had the Cossack slashed Kreisler’s hand instead of his leg! Ruby
smiled with joy reading the last page in which the violinist regrets
that he had been pronounced “invalid and physically unfit for armed
duty” and had “to discard his well-beloved uniform for the nondescript
garb of the civilian.” Ruby does not share his big brother’s regret.
K.
Book Discussion
QUASI-RATIONALISTIC MORALIZING
_Criticisms of Life, by Horace Bridges._ [_Houghton Mifflin
Company, Boston._]
Some time ago, at a meeting of the Book and Play Club, Mr. Bridges
complained against THE LITTLE REVIEW wherein a certain book was
criticised and labeled “naive and dull as the sermon of an Ethical
Society preacher.” “Ladies and gentlemen, _I am naive and dull_!”
protested Mr. Bridges. The reviewer of that unfortunate book, who
happened to be present, expressed his surprise at the complainer’s
unmodest assumption that those epithets were meant for him, as if he had
monopolized the characteristic features of all ethical preachers. Now
that Mr. Bridges’ book is out, the reviewer wishes to make amends and
apologize; verily, the distinguished preacher was justified in claiming
the honorary titles.
The author analyzes his problems through the prism of empirico-pragmatic
rationalism, if such a combination is thinkable. Whether it be
Chesterton’s theological views, or Ellen Key’s marriage theory, or
Maeterlinck’s mysticism, or Sir Lodge’s ideas on immortality—the author
applies to them the same apparatus for testing their validity and truth:
Are they provable? Are they workable? Are they in harmony with Mr.
Bridges’s ethical standard? A few citations will illustrate the critic’s
method and sense of humor.
He takes Gilbert Chesterton very seriously, and indignantly reproves him
for such typically Chestertonian offences as misquoting his opponents,
as paradoxical buffooneries, “unpardonable tricks” and “inexcusable
mistakes”; he offers him a few lessons in theology, explains to him in
an earnest tone the meaning of miracles, the Fall of Man, and finally
comes to the astounding discovery that the readers “will see in Mr.
Chesterton’s amateur apologetics nothing but a psychological curiosity,
to be read, like his novels, for amusement, in some slight degree
perhaps for edification, but not at all for instruction.” Horribile
dictu!
Mr. Bridges’s heaviest cannon are directed against Ellen Key. He totally
destroys her and Shaw’s opposition to marriage with one humorous stroke,
arguing that if that institution were really bad it would either have
destroyed humanity, or the revolted conscience of mankind would have
“risen and annihilated the abominable thing.” This optimistic argument
needs as little comment as the author’s logical conclusion that “free
love” is equivalent to prostitution and that free divorce is synonymous
with adultery, or as these pearls:
I am decidedly of opinion that in a more enlightened age divorce
will be as completely obsolete as duelling is to-day in England.
I am opposed to divorce on this ground (incompatibility of
temper) for two reasons: first, because if people’s tempers are
really so incompatible as to make their lifelong companionship
intolerable, they can, and therefore ought to, know this in time
to prevent their union. And, secondly, because such
incompatibility as can remain entirely concealed before marriage
cannot possibly be so great but that it may be overcome and
harmonized after marriage by means of proper self-discipline and
true grasp of the idea of duty.
No soldier would be pardoned for deserting from the army on the
ground that he found his temper hopelessly incompatible with that
of his comrades and his officers. No party to a business contract
would be absolved from observing its terms upon any such
consideration.
The right to renounce marriage because of unhappiness would
logically involve the right to commit suicide for the same
reason.... Who are we that we should repudiate the universe
because it will not devote itself to securing our petty pleasures
and happinesses?... Marriage, like every other great social
ordinance, is instituted not primarily to secure our happiness,
but to enable us to discharge our duty, in the matter of the
perpetuation and spiritual development of the human species.
I am confident that the reader will appreciate the reviewer’s gallantry
in not taking issue with the quoted statements: it would be too easy a
task to exercise one’s humor over such threadbare niceties. My only
apology for devoting so much space to Mr. Bridges’s book is the fact
that Mr. Bridges is one of the moulders of public opinion in Chicago,
hence ... I shall owe one more apology for my unrestrainable desire to
quote the closing lines of the author’s sermon on the War:
May she (this country) preserve her unity, and that nobly
disinterested foreign policy manifested, to the admiration of all
Europe (indeed!!) in Cuba and Mexico: so that, when the vials of
apocalyptic wrath beyond the seas are spent, she may enter to
motion peace—the welcome arbitress of Europe’s dissensions, the
trusted daughter, first of England, but in lesser degree of all
the nations now at strife, called in to cover their shame and to
mediate the purgation of their sins.
Hm—but I promised to refrain from comments.
K.
SOPHOMORIC MAETERLINCK
_Poems, by Maurice Maeterlinck._ [_Dodd, Mead and Company, New
York._]
The publisher of Maeterlinck’s _Poems_ states apologetically that there
has been a demand for a complete edition of the Belgian’s works, hence
his justification in publishing a translation of the poems that
originally appeared twenty years ago. The service rendered thereby to
the author is of doubtful value: great writers are inclined to forget
their youthful follies; as far as the English reading public is
concerned the little book may be of some interest as a pale suggestion
of an early stage in the development of Maeterlinck’s talent. I say a
pale suggestion, for with all the conscientious labor of the translator
the poems Anglicised have lost their chief, if not sole value—their
Verlainean musicalness. If as a verslibrist Maeterlinck was obviously
influenced by Whitman, his rhymed verses bear the unmistakable stamp of
the poet who preached: “De la musique avant toute chose.... De la
musique encore et toujours!” Back in the eighties Maeterlinck belonged
to the Belgian group of Symbolists, who, like Elskamp, Rodenbach, van
Lerberghe, Verhaeren, reflected the French school which began with
Baudelaire and culminated through Rimbaud and Verlaine in Mallarmé. Yet,
unlike his great friend, Verhaeren, the Mystic of Silence directed his
genius into a different channel and abandoned verse as a medium of
expression. In the collected poems, the _Serres Chaudes_ and the
_Chansons_, despite the mentioned influences, we discover the
Maeterlinckian key-note—the languor of the oppressed soul, helplessly
inactive in “a hot-house whose doors are closed forever.” We are dazzled
frequently with such beautiful lines as “O blue monotony of my heart!”;
“Green as the sea temptations creep”; “the purple snakes of dream”; “O
nights within my humid soul”; “My hands, the lilies of my soul, Mine
eyes, the heavens of my heart.” A friend confessed to me that these
similes reminded him of Bodenheim; to be sure, this compliment should be
laid at the door of the translator.
K.
“THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL.”
_The Harbor, by Ernest Poole._ [_The Macmillan Company, New York._]
In America today, other things being equal, that novelist first achieves
success who writes—let us say—of the social fabric, rather than of the
eternal verities. Thus, in the case of two undoubtedly great artists,
John Galsworthy and Joseph Conrad, the former had to wait but half the
latter’s time before he came to enjoy real popularity.
And so it is not difficult to understand the noteworthy and deserved
success of _The Harbor_—a book so good that one would be inclined to
wonder if it _could become popular_. Mr. Poole writes with charm and a
passionate earnestness of the growth through young manhood of his hero.
He knows the New York water-front well and it furnishes an original and
interesting background. The boy goes through college, to Europe for a
happy year or two and returns to become a successful magazine writer—a
worshipper at the shrine of “big” men. Gradually his social conscience
is awakened and his entire life is transformed—his allegiance is
transferred from the presidents of the corporations who own the steamers
to the striking stokers and their fellows. On the whole the picture is
impressively convincing and Mr. Poole has caught in his pages much of
the most glowing thought of idealistic youth.
His work is so very good that criticism may appear ungracious—still, if
one may be allowed: some of the young men at college speak Mr. Poole’s
thoughts and not their own. College men do not think as Mr. Poole would
have you believe they do—at least not until a year or two after they
have graduated. And isn’t Eleanore, the hero’s wife, just a little too
perfect—even for the role she has to play? How well an amiable weakness
would become her! Finally, _The Harbor_ has the commonest fault of
almost all first novels that have for their subject the social fabric:
there is too much thought (or too little action)—the author wants to
give his opinion on all the things he has ever seriously thought about.
When Mr. Poole has tempered his fine seriousness with just a little more
of the creative artist’s austerity he will produce a greater novel than
_The Harbor_, and one that will fulfill the splendid promise of this
first book.
ALFRED A. KNOPF.
THE $10,000 PLAY
_Children of Earth: A Play of New England, by Alice Brown._ [_The
Macmillan Company, New York._]
Frankly, I do not like the spectacle of a collection of New Englanders,
well past middle age, splashing about in a puddle of sex. And that is
what _Children of Earth_ is. Of course sex is interesting—most of the
time; New Englanders are interesting sometimes (especially when as
skilfully drawn as Miss Brown draws them); but the combination is rather
too much.
In the first place what happens to these people of Miss Brown’s play
never seems of any real importance—it isn’t simply that they are
unsympathetic. Nor need one believe for a moment in the old idea that in
true tragedy the great must suffer. But at least either the great or the
typical must, and I cannot feel that these children of earth are either.
The play is well enough done; it may be compounded of fact; but I doubt
if it exhibits that finer thing by far—truth. How much better work might
Winthrop Ames’ money have purchased.
ALFRED A. KNOPF.
_American Thought, by Woodbridge Riley._ [_Henry Holt and
Company, New York._]
A historical analysis of American philosophical theories, from
Puritanism to New Realism, through the stages of Idealism, Deism,
Materialism, Realism, Transcendentalism, Evolutionism, and Pragmatism.
The work lacks the strict impartiality of a text-book, which it
evidently intends to be. The author reveals a tendency to prove that
American thought has developed independently of European influences;
this appears to be true to a certain extent in regard to Pragmatism, as
the philosophy of practicality.
THE POETRY OF A. E.
_Collected Poems, by A. E._ [_The Macmillan Company, New York._]
A friend of mine once expressed pained surprise on hearing that A. E.
was among the poets I delighted to read. Having just heard me dissent
from occultism, he could not understand how one who did not believe in
theosophy, esoteric Buddhism, or any of the many modern forms of
Mumbo-jumboism could possibly take delight in a poet who, according to
him, was a theosophist, or revere poems which had first appeared in a
theosophical journal.
Poetry, however, is not a record of one’s beliefs; it is a record of
one’s experiences; and while the existence of God may be asserted and
just as easily disproved, in the medium of rhyming language, there is no
question of poetry involved. But it is equally true that when a poet
describes a spiritual experience, though he may draw his images from
Neo-Platonic philosophy, Christian tradition or even the animatism of
the primitive poets, there is no question of theological belief implied.
When, therefore, we open Mr. Russell’s book at random, as I actually did
when this volume reached me, and come across the following lines, we
must be blind to a wide-spread experience of mankind if we cannot see
that it expresses poetic truth as well as poetic beauty:
Unconscious
The winds, the stars, and the skies, though wrought
By the heavenly King, yet know it not;
And the man who moves in the twilight dim
Feels not the love that encircles him,
Though in heart, on bosom, and eyelids press
Lips of an infinite tenderness,
He turns away through the dark to roam
Nor heeds the fire in his hearth and home.
But Mr. Russell’s mysticism—and mysticism, being an attitude rather than
an intellectual belief, is something that is legitimately expressible in
poetry, and is moreover something that Mr. Russell constantly and
beautifully expresses—is no mere world-flight. Even the Beatific Vision
he would only accept on terms becoming a man whose life is implicated in
humanity. Hence, under the title of _Love_ we find him singing:
Ere I lose myself in the vastness and drowse myself with the
peace,
While I gaze on the light and beauty afar from the dim homes of men,
May I still feel the heart-pang and pity, love-ties that I would not
release;
May the voices of sorrow appealing call me back to their succor
again.
Ere I storm with the tempest of power the thrones and
dominions of old,
Ere the ancient enchantment allure me to roam through the star-misty
skies,
I would go forth as one who has reaped well what harvest the earth
may unfold;
May my heart be o’erbrimmed with compassion; on my brow be the crown
of the wise.
I would go as the dove from the ark, sent forth with wishes
and prayers,
To return with the paradise blossoms that bloom in the Eden of light:
When the deep star-chant of the seraphs I hear in the mystical airs,
May I capture one tone of their joy for the sad ones discrowned in
the night.
Not alone, not alone would I go to my rest in the heart of the
love:
Were I tranced in the innermost beauty, the flame of its tenderest
breath,
I would still hear the cry of the fallen recalling me back from
above,
To go down to the side of the people who weep in the shadow of death.
One of Mr. Russell’s poems suggests in its very first line a lyric from
Shelley’s _Hellas_, and the two poems form an interesting contrast
between the temperaments of the poet of sentimental Platonism and this
later singer who adds to Shelley’s lyric vision a firmer stationing on
the substance of earth. While Shelley began on a high note of joy that
The world’s great age begins anew,
The golden years return, ...
but ends on the note of disenchantment:
O, cease! must hate and death return?
Cease! must men kill and die?
Cease! Drain not to its dregs the urn
Of bitter prophecy.
The world is weary of the past;
Oh, might it die or rest at last!
—while Shelley thus descends, Mr. Russell in _The Twilight of Earth_
begins more or less where Shelley left off with:
The wonder of the world is o’er,
The magic from the sea is gone;
There is no unimagined shore,
No islet yet to venture on.
The Sacred Hazel’s blooms are shed,
The Nuts of Knowledge harvested.
Oh, what is worth this lore of age
If time shall never bring us back
Our battle with the gods to wage,
Reeling along the starry track.
The battle rapture here goes by
In warring upon things that die.
Let be the tale of him whose love
Was sighed between white Deidre’s breasts;
It will not lift the heart above
The sodden clay on which it rests.
Love once had power the gods to bring
All rapt on its wild wandering.
But while
The Paradise of memories
Grows fainter day by day ...
there is no need to cease from life or from aspiration on that account:
The power is ours to make or mar
Our fate as on the earliest morn,
The Darkness and the Radiance are
Creatures within the spirit born.
Yet, bathed in gloom too long, we might
Forget how we imagined light.
Not yet are fixed the prison bars;
The hidden light the spirit owns
If blown to flame would dim the stars
And they who rule them from their thrones:
And the proud sceptred spirits thence
Would bow to pay us reverence.
Oh, while the glory sinks within
Let us not wait on earth behind,
But follow where it flies, and win
The glow again, and we may find
Beyond the Gateways of the Day
Dominion and ancestral sway.
While in few or none of these poems is mystic thought absent it is never
present at the expense of poetry, and many of the poems find in nature
both their occasion and their material. A. E.’s vision is preeminently
for the evanescent aspect of things, especially for the colors of the
changes that come over earth and firmament. The poem beginning
When the breath of twilight blows to flame the misty skies,
All its vaporous sapphire, violet glow and silver gleam,
With their magic flood me through the gateway of the eyes;
I am one with the twilight’s dream.
is typical of his response to the vision of the outer world.
The same sturdy sense of actual values that leads Mr. Russell to write
prose works on co-operation and nationality, seeing in these matters no
less than in religious ecstasy the ground for the free life of man, is
evident in the poem _On Behalf of Some Irishmen not Followers of
Tradition_. But lest sturdy commonsense be thought a grotesque piece of
praise for a poem, let me add that it is a commonsense illuminated by
the purest idealism. How close to earth this idealism moves is shown in
the little sketch _In Connemara_ describing the peasant girl:
With eyes all untroubled she laughs as she passes,
Bending beneath the creel with the seaweed brown ...
and enmeshing her in the nature mysticism of her race and country.
William Morris somewhere speaks of the cultured man as one who is in
sympathy with past and present and future—a contrast indeed to much
latter-day doctrine—and one is reminded of the phrase by this poet who
with such lyrical skill not only embodies all three for us, but knits
them together in that unity which alone can bestow on man the values of
life which are timeless.
LLEWELLYN JONES.
The Reader Critic
_A Chicago Reader_:
I don’t like what THE LITTLE REVIEW or any one else I have read says
about Sanine. Too analytic, too professional.... Whatever all the
worthies say about the book being dangerous, it will not affect any soul
a jot if he is not already afflicted.
What I can say is very inferior critically—only a hurried resume of
images after I had finished:
A garden like a dull green cloud descended to earth, twilight skies with
supple moving figures, gardens kaleidoscopic, hills covered with woods,
odors of leaves and grasses, a dark abandoned slimy wolf cavern of
counterfeiters, dew-laden grass, shadows, dusk, whispers, eyes in the
gloom, skies pale green with faint silver stars and dark birds, night
fluttering bats, gardens filled with the melody of nightingales, a
little dying frog, lush river banks with wet reeds bending, mysterious
wood nymph smiles, mystic rays of sunlight illuminating frail flowers,
crimson morning-starred heavens, woods and streams with lithe shining
bodies of humans transformed into nymphs and satyrs—a storm that almost
breathes of the one in the Pastoral Symphony and Sanine in a flash of
lightning is revealed apostrophizing it.
It hurts and one shrinks into one’s skeleton to think that perhaps a
setting is obviously made in order to be to the spirit of voluptuous
indulgence. But that feeling goes, because it is the objective thing
after all—the colors and odors and atmosphere remain.
THREE WOMEN
_F. Guy Davis, Chicago_:
There is one kind of worker active in the life of today whose work is
not often regarded in the light of art. There is a good reason for this
in the fact that the work they are attempting is so vast and vague in
character that many people do not even know it is being undertaken. They
cannot understand effort on such a scale that the final completed work,
if it is ever to be completed, will be nothing less than a new social
order, a new conception of social values, actualizing itself in the
shape of finer cities and grander and braver citizens on a world scale.
There are various groups of men and women in this work of
reconstruction, some compactly organized, others not, some more militant
in their attitude and some less so, but all tending in the same
direction toward a better, freer, and fuller social life. This movement
is confused and uncertain as far as a definite structural goal is
concerned because of the contradictory and sometimes seemingly
antagonistic elements that go to make it up. Some of the groups have
specific architectural plans which they defend with the artist’s passion
against all other plans, or against no plan; but the movement as a whole
is pragmatic and makes its plans as it goes along, and whatever may be
the outcome the aim is at a better world, a world of beauty and goodness
in the deepest meaning of those terms.
If the modern feminists understood great women, which they do not often
do, they would contend that there is a great significance in the fact
that three women stand out prominently in this movement and in a measure
at least are representative of three groups which more or less dominate
the whole. Listing them according to age,—for on any other basis
comparisons are difficult, each being effective in her own
sphere,—Mother Jones, Emma Goldman, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn are
social artists, working in different directions, yet in the same
direction, now seeming to exclude each other entirely, and now, no
doubt, sustaining each other in spirit across the separating gaps in the
common purpose, just as old age, middle age, and youth do sometimes in
life, or just as three mountains may have separate and distinct
characters and yet be a part of the same range.
Old Mother Jones is a “character.” In her eighty-two years she has seen
life’s storm, has lived its hope, fear, love, and hate, and has mastered
it. She will die happy with the knowledge that she did her part in the
fight for better things, which she may not see but which she believes
are coming.