at first be loyal to is not our self at all. It is foreign wares, loaded
upon us,--first even in the nursery, slyly slipped subsequently upon our
shoulders,--foreign words, foreign worths! Loyalty to what satiates, not
the better loyalty to our hunger! We begin to live only when we live in
our hunger; our hunger is we ourselves. It is a good satiety only if a
new hunger comes from it. Loyalty to our self--this is to keep our life
alive in us--a young glad life, that never grows old, because the old is
ever transmuted into a new. This loyalty to ourself,--it is to expel
from every truth its error, from every boundary its limit which blocks
the vision into the wide world, the blue sky, and the distant sea.
Loyalty to men? Would that it might be so! But such loyalty costs so
much trouble and toil. For the faithfulness that is genuine and living,
there is no law, no binding _I must_, only a glorious _I will_. One day
we shall have done with the loyalty which means master and servant,
leader and led--the loyalty of the dog that is loyalest to him who feeds
him best or beats him hardest. One day we shall understand what the
loyalty of man means--this new loyalty toward man, in which souls meet
and chime and work together, and live in each other, yet each remains
itself and true to itself.
So, then, the law of change and of growth is the law of the new loyalty,
as the law of fixedness and finishedness and finality was of the old. It
is the duty of such new loyalty to protect itself against the deadening
force of habit and of petrifaction, to guard itself against any
obedience by which it would become disloyal to itself. Such loyalty is
too honorable to humor inertia and laziness under its banner, too
courageous to conceal cowardice behind a slave's patience.
But thought on our theme is usually lifted up to where the sky keeps
company with the granite and the grass, to a religious elevation. Nor do
we need stop short here. Ultimately the new loyalty is loyalty to God,
the new God, of whom something must be said later. The God in whom all
fulness dwells summons us to ever new truths, and reveals underground
wells of living water throwing its spray aloft on life's ferns and
flowers. To be loyal to him is never to sunder ourselves from his
fulness and freshness, but to co-work with him who is forever making all
things new.
And now I think we are at the end. The result? It is needless to state
it, but I would not shrink from the thankless task. In a word, then, the
new loyalty--in harmony with the whole great changed view of the world
and of life--is loyalty to change and becoming rather than to
finishedness and finality; to the future rather than to the past; to
ideals rather than to conventions; to freedom rather than to authority;
to personality rather than to institution; to character rather than to
respectability; to our hunger rather than to our satiety; to the God
that is to be rather than to the God that is. Thus the loyalty abides,
but the objects of loyalty change and pass.
THE MILLINER
SADE IVERSON
All the day long I have been sitting in my shop
Sewing straw on hat-shapes according to the fashion,
Putting lace and ribbon on according to the fashion,
Setting out the faces of customers according to fashion.
Whatever they asked for I tried to give them;
Over their worldly faces I put mimic flowers
From out my silk and velvet garden; I bade Spring come
To those who had seen Autumn; I coaxed faded eyes
To look bright and hard brows to soften.
Not once, while they were looking in the glass,
Did I peep over their shoulders to see myself.
It would have been quite unavailing for me,
Who have grown grey in service of other women,
To have used myself as any sort of a model.
Had I looked in the mirror I should have seen
Only a bleached face, long housed from sunshine,
A mouth quick with forced smiles, eyes greyly stagnant,
And over all, like a night fog creeping,
Something chill and obscuring and dead--
The miasmatic mist of the soul of the lonely.
When night comes and the buyers are gone their ways,
I go into the little room behind my shop.
It is my home--my silent and lonely home;
But it has fire, it has food; there is a bed;
Pictures are on the walls, showing the faces
I kissed in girlhood. I am myself here;
All my forced smiles are laid away with the moline
And the ribbon and roses. I may do as I please.
If I beat with my fists on the table, no one hears;
If I lie in my bed, staring, staring,
No one can know; I shall not suffer the pity
Of those who, passing, see my light edge the grey curtain.
One night, long ago, merely for madness
I stripped myself like a dancing girl;
I draped myself with rose-hued silks
And set a crimson feather in my hair.
There were twists of gold lace about my arms
And a girdle of gold about my waist.
I danced before the mirror till I dropped!
(Outside I could hear the rain falling
And the wind crept in beneath my door
Along my worn carpet.)
I folded my finery
And prayed as if kneeling beside my mother.
Whether there was listening I cannot say.
There was praying! There was praying!
Never again shall I dance before the mirror
Bedizened like a dancing girl--never, my mother!
I have a low voice and quiet movements,
And early and late I study to please.
As long as I live I shall be adorning other women,
I shall be decking them for their lovers
And sending them upon women's adventures.
But none of them shall see behind this curtain
Where I have my little home, where I weep
When I please, and beat upon the table with my fists.
"NUR WER DIE SEHNSUCHT KENNT"
MARGARET C. ANDERSON
In one of Chicago's big department stores of the cheaper type you
may--provided you're something of a poet--walk straight into the heart
of a musical adventure. It is that amazing, resentful, and very
satisfying adventure of discovering genius at work, under the by no
means unique condition of being unrecognized.
You go to one of the upper floors where the big lunch-room is. You find
a table near a platform in the center, on which sit four musicians--a
pianist, a 'cellist, a clarinet_ist_ (if there is such a thing), and a
second violinist. You expect the usual clamor....
Suddenly you notice a fifth figure who has been sitting quietly in the
background. She comes forward with a violin in her hand, and stands
ready to play. There is something still about her--that quality of
stillness which is invariably the first thing you notice in any dynamic.
She seems not scornful of her surroundings, but quite indifferent to
them; not arrogant, but sure of power; not timid, and yet incredibly
soft and shy and serious. She is plainly foreign; she is German, looks
French, and plays like a Viennese. Or, to be exact, she merges the
German "heaviness" with the Viennese gay-sadness, and the result is a
sensuousness that is both deep and clear, with the haunting wail that
distinguishes all the music which comes from Vienna. She looks almost
like a little girl; but you would notice her any place because of that
stillness and the haunting appeal that always attaches to a certain type
of eyes and mouth--the kind which seem to say: "I will make music for
you; I will take you to a new world. I will do it because I can dream
intensely."
She begins to play, and you understand why you watched her. The depth of
it startles you at first--it is so big, so moving, so almost uncanny
coming from such a small person, whose hands seem scarcely large enough
to hold a violin. It is playing of the Mischa Elman type, without his
emotional extravagances and with something that is more soul-shaking. If
I were an Imagist I could find the right word; but this music eludes me.
It is sure and simple. It grips you till you don't know whether you are
listening to music or to the urge of some hidden inner self. It is a
divine thing.
In the midst of it the waitresses rush back and forth, the patrons eat
their food with interest, only pausing to applaud when some tawdry
vaudevillian sings a particularly vulgar song. The dishes clang, some
one upsets a tray with a great crash, and at intervals there is a tango
outrage by a couple who know nothing about dancing. Underneath it all
the violin throbs its deep accompaniment.
I wish I could make a poem of it. I have thought of taking my poet
friends there and having the thing done. But almost without exception
the poets I know don't care for music essentially; though why a mind
keyed to the tone qualities of words should be so tone-deaf in another
medium has always been a mystery to me. And what a poet's opportunity
here: "the boom and squeal," and out of it music that is as sacred as an
organ meditation and as passionate as a Russian slave song!
However, generalizations will not serve to give any musician's special
quality, and this one is so emphatically individual as to make
description easy. To begin with, she was concertising in Europe as a
wonder-child at the age of six. For a number of years her playing
brought forth a chorus of superlatives from the critics: "her full
blooming tone, her great taste in phrasing, economic use of the bow,
glowing passion of interpretation; her fiery temperament, remarkable
earnestness and will power, the soul, life, and emotion in her
presentations." The verdict of a "a veritable artist soul" appeared to
be unanimous; and one man summed up with admirable insight and
simplicity: "Her chief excellence is in this: that she seeks her main
task to be an artist in the real and earnest sense of the word, and
whosoever comes to hear music does not go empty from her."
Friedrich Spielhagen wrote a sonnet to her, of which I have a careful,
but metrically inadequate, translation:
Thou standst before us, a picture of wondrous charm;
The little violin thou holdst, in tenderess,
Half maidenly, half like a child in dress
Hast soared away from Heaven's angel-farm
Toward where thy large mild eye is dreaming.
And he ended it with these lines:
Thou movest thy bow;
No sounds are these of nicely movéd strings,
No, No! Thy own sweet soul rings out and sings
The melodies that have with you come
From yon high wide-sphered home,
To where thy longing soul swings upward now.
Our apologies to Mr. Spielhagen for that more than atrocious twelfth
line and for the other deficiencies! But the last line is particularly
keen in its photography. It has the spirit of her.
After much touring in Europe she came to this country and played under
the same promising conditions. The critics predicted that if she should
decide to stay here she would probably out-rival our own few noted women
violinists. And then came a period of sorrow, bereavement, hardship, and
illness--and in the meantime the problem of living. That problem becomes
a real one when an artist loves life just a bit more than her art and
refuses to make that spiritual compromise which life tries to wrest from
one in the hard places. One must live, and it takes money to do it
rather than art. The romantic notion that all genius has to do is to
stand up and make itself heard is one of the silliest notions the great
public suffers from. Only the hundredth person recognizes genius when it
proclaims itself; the rest are as blind as this department-store
audience until the sign-posts have been put up, with letters large
enough to be easily read. Also, the amount of machinery and money
involved in the arrangement of concert engagements would surprise the
public as much as the true stories of what it costs the "wealthy patron"
to get his artist started toward recognition.
And so this particular genius will continue for a while to cast her
pearls in a lunch-room, and a few of the discerning will find her out
and thank their stars that they may hear such beauty at the small cost
of a bad club sandwich and a worse cup of coffee.
If you go there you will be haunted by music for days afterward. I say
"haunted" because that is the only word to describe your feeling of
pursuit by melody. And I think I have discovered the reason for it. A
poet once said that the only permanent emotion we human beings are
capable of is--not love, as we like to imagine--but _longing_. And that
is what this music says to you. It is the very essence of longing--the
eternal seeking, the rapturous satisfaction, the disappointment, and the
renewed quest. I have never heard such a quality of _sehnsucht_ in any
music; it is almost more than you can bear. Of course, in these
surroundings, you must listen to the complete gamut of new popular
songs; but at intervals, when the managerial demand for "noise" can be
ignored for a moment, you will be rewarded by the Thais _Meditation_ or
a Schutt waltz or that exquisite Saint-Saens poem called _The Swan_--or
even a Tschaikowsky song. Where does the tone come from, you keep
wondering? Not from a wooden instrument, not from small human fingers,
surely. It is tone of such richness and depth that you sometimes have
the illusion of each note being sung twice. "It transcends music to me
entirely and becomes a matter of life--or of soul," said a critic who
listened with me the other day.
Through it all the artist's earnest face is still and unchanging. That
is part of the fascination--the contrast of that tumultuous singing and
the thoughtful, dreaming face that seems to control it all. "My violin
belongs to me--yes," she says, "but that is such a cold word. It is part
of my body. I feel it is growing on me just like my arms and hands. I
could not live without it." If you watch her closely you will decide
that her playing is the result of an extraordinary sensitiveness to
life. If you know her, as I do, you will expand that judgment to this
one: an extraordinary strength about life; for she is both deep and
strong--qualities that are supposed to be inseparable, but which are so
rarely found together that their combination means--a great spirit.
I am afraid I am too much of a musician not to be a romanticist.
With out music life to me would be a mistake.--_Nietzsche to
Brandes, 1888._
* * * * *
All restlessness, misery, all crime, is the result of the
betrayal of one's inner life.--_Will Lexington Comfort in
"Midstream."_
EDITORIALS
Our New Poet
Charles Ashleigh, who makes his appearance in this issue, was born in
London twenty-five years ago. He was educated in England, Switzerland,
and Germany, and speaks French, German, and Spanish, "as well as two or
three varieties of English and American slang." He has wandered in
Europe, South America and this country, traveling on foot through
Argentine, Chile, and Peru, and in the States as a hobo. He has been
sailor, newspaper man, tramp, actor, farm hand, railroad clerk,
interpreter, and a few other things. He has written verse, short
stories, social studies, literary criticism, and lectured on his travels
as well as on sociological, literary, and dramatic subjects. Quite
unlike those poets who insist that they have no opinions on any
subject--that they simply photograph life--Mr. Ashleigh states his creed
in this way: "I am interested in Labor, literature, and many other
aspects and angles of Life. Men and deeds are to me of primary
importance and books secondary." We look for big things from this young
man.
Two Important Books
Mary Austin has written a study of marriage which she calls _Love and
the Soul Maker_. It appears to be about as big a thing on the subject as
any American woman has done. Will Lexington Comfort has written an
autobiographical novel which he calls _Midstream_. It tells the truth
about a man's life, and is also a big thing. Both will be reviewed in
the August issue.
The Congo
Nicholas Vachel Lindsay's new poem, _The Congo_, is to appear in _The
Metropolitan_ for August. Mr. Lindsay's opinion is that the best effect
will be got by reading it aloud.
The Basis for a New Painting
Truly these Imagists are enchanting! The following examples are selected
from the anthology published by _The Glebe_:
Fan-Piece for Her Imperial Lord
O fan of white silk,
clear as frost on the grass-blade,
You also are laid aside.
Ezra Pound.
In A Garden
Gushing from the mouths of stone men
To spread at ease under the sky
In granite-lipped basins,
Where iris dabble their feet
And rustle to a passing wind,
The water fills the garden with its rushing,
In the midst of the quiet of close-clipped lawns.
Damp smell the ferns in tunnels of stone,
Where trickle and splash the fountains,
Marble fountains, yellowed with much water.
Splashing down moss-tarnished steps
It falls, the water;
And the air is throbbing with it;
With its gurgling and running;
With its leaping, and deep, cool murmur.
And I wished for night and you.
I wanted to see you in the swimming-pool,
White and shining in the silver-flecked water.
While the moon rode over the garden
High in the arch of night,
And the scent of the lilacs was heavy with stillness.
Night and the water, and you in your whiteness, bathing!
Amy Lowell.
Au Vieux Jardin
I have sat here happy in the gardens,
Watching the still pool and the reeds
And the dark clouds
Which the wind of the upper air
Tore like the green leafy bough
Of the divers-hued trees of late summer;
But though I greatly delight
In these and the water lilies,
That which sets me nighest to weeping
Is the rose and white colour of the smooth flag-stones,
And the pale yellow grasses
Among them.
Richard Aldington.
Ts'ai Chi'h
The petals fall in the fountain,
the orange coloured rose-leaves,
Their ochre clings to the stone.
Ezra Pound.
Liu Ch'e
The rustling of the silk is discontinued,
Dust drifts over the courtyard,
There is no sound of footfall, and the leaves
Scurry into heaps and lie still,
And she the rejoicer of the heart is beneath them.
A wet leaf that clings to the threshold.
Ezra Pound.
NEW YORK LETTER
GEORGE SOULE
GEORGE BRANDES--A HASTY IMPRESSION
The man who fought the big battle for Ibsen and Nietzsche should have
filled Madison Square Garden; as it was, the little Comedy Theatre
wasn't large enough to hold the audience, although Scandinavian
patriotism accounted for a good deal of it. He came on the stage with
Brander Matthews, the apotheosis of the academic, and the contrast was
striking. Matthews was tall, dull, professional. Brandes, with his keen
face, alert eyes, and shock of grayish hair, was possibly the most fully
alive person in the room. He radiated interest--human connection with
anything vital.
We were all a little sorry his subject was Shakespeare; we wanted to
hear of something modern. And when the first part of the lecture was
read, couched in scholarly but terse English, we felt cheated. It was
good criticism, and informing, but it wasn't the sort of thing we had
expected from Brandes. Suddenly a spark shot out. (The quotation is from
memory):
We cannot emphasize too strongly the fact that all works of
literature which have a real effect on mankind, all works which
endure hundreds of years, find their inspiration not in books,
but in life.
The words were pronounced with excited intensity. Soon came another:
We used to define the genius as the man who interprets his age;
now we know that the genius is the man who, working against his
age, creates new times.
Dr. Brandes broke into a lively sally at the Baconians. He spoke of
Shakespeare's errors in scholarship. These Bacon would surely have
avoided, but of Shakespeare's great lines Bacon could not possibly have
written one. He ended that section with something like this:
The Baconian theory was founded by the uneducated, it was
developed by the half-educated, and it is now held solely by
idiots.
The audience was immensely pleased at his sharp fire.
Dr. Brandes' epigrams sometimes sound as if he substituted wit for
wisdom. But that is because the epigrams stick and are repeated. His
method is to open with an epigram to catch the attention, to proceed
with a line of sound argument, and at the end to finish superbly with a
sentence that contains his conclusions and impales his opponent at the
same time.
With Frank Harris, Dr. Brandes was no more gentle. By parallel quotation
Harris was made to appear ridiculous. Brandes showed that whatever in
his writings is sound has been said before. This was the end of the
lecture:
Mr. Harris says that it is possible to admire Shakespeare, but
that it is impossible to worship him. Ladies and gentlemen, I do
the impossible.
Afterwards came a supper of the Scandinavian Society, at which the guest
of honor made a speech that looked brilliant and was lively even as a
piece of pantomime--but it was in Danish. Dr. Brandes was beaming and
unaffectedly cordial with everybody. He smilingly interrupted one of the
pompous addresses in his honor to correct a quotation from Goethe. He
proposed a toast to the charming young lady who acted as his American
manager, and said that the success of his tour was due entirely to her.
Later a consul made a highly complimentary, but exceedingly tedious,
speech. Dr. Brandes fidgeted until he could stand it no longer, then he
quickly got up, took his champagne glass, ran over to the orator and
slapped him on the shoulder, saying, "You are a very nice man." The rest
was drowned in the toast.
A NEW LITERATURE
The other day an illustrator saw a hand-mirror in a publisher's office.
He put the mirror against a book cover and held it at arm's length.
"There," he said, "is the ideal jacket for a novel. Every woman likes to
imagine herself the heroine of the book she is reading." But the
publisher was wiser. "You are half right," he answered. "But she wants
to be a Gibson heroine. To see her own face, without flattery, would
startle her into disapproval of the book."
A recent symposium in _The Sun_ bore the impressive title, _The
Sentimentalization of Woman in American Fiction_. All the authors were
agreed that realism doesn't go because of the desire of the reader to be
flattered. If she isn't, the novel is "unpleasant," "depressing." You
may paint your villainess black, but, as your reader will take her for
an enemy, you must see that she is properly punished. But if your
heroine does anything unconventional, it must be of the kind that your
reader enjoys by imagination, though she wouldn't have the courage to do
it. Only you must not make the thrills so strong as to shock the reader
into self-consciousness and self-disapproval. Georg Brandes said that
our novels are written by old maids for old maids. If we would only put
into our literature the same genius and daring that we put into our
skyscrapers!
The thing none of the authors seemed to see is that it is futile to stop
at blaming the readers. Of course the great public is comparatively
stupid. It is everywhere, it always has been and always will be. What is
a leader if he is not someone in advance of the others? And the
essential act for a leader is to lead. He can't get a following until he
does that. Only a coward stays behind and flatters the crowd because he
is afraid they will not come after him. Perhaps they won't follow his
particular route. But if he goes on fearlessly he has done the best that
is in him, anyway. The chances are that if he has a sincere conviction
and marches far enough in one direction they will at least struggle
along after a while. They may even follow in hordes. What we need first
is not a more intelligent public, but courageous writers.
Naturally the matter is not simple. Your artist has to be fed and
clothed. If he is creating a new medium--as did Wagner--he even needs
large resources to produce his art. The solution used to be the wealthy
patron. The petty monarch maintained a musician or a painter to enhance
the glory of his court. The noble supported a writer from personal
pride. The monastery afforded a refuge for the unworldly creator. It
would be difficult to find a great artist before the last century who
did not have some such subsidy, unless he had means of his own.
Since then democracy has permeated the world. Fast presses, advertising,
and royalties have been invented. Now the public is the writer's patron.
Music is often subsidized, to be sure, and painters can still sell their
canvases to the wealthy. But the earnings of the writer are in strict
proportion to the number of copies of his books that can be sold.
There is a distinct advantage in this situation. The virtue of democracy
is not the government of the majority, but the opportunity of the
minority. The minority becomes, not a defensive close corporation, but a
body of fighting visionaries. The emphasis is placed on growth. The
eternal impulse of the minority to turn itself into a majority prevents
a static age. The strongest lead, instead of the highly born.