THE LITTLE REVIEW
_Literature_ _Drama_ _Music_ _Art_
MARGARET C. ANDERSON
EDITOR
MARCH, 1915
Two Poems Fritz Schnack
For the New Animal in America Will Levington Comfort
Maurice Browne and The Little Theatre John Cowper Powys
Winter’s Pride George Soule
Two Points of View:
Mrs. Ellis’s Gift to Chicago Mary Adams Stearns
Mrs. Ellis’s Failure Margaret C. Anderson
The Acrobat Eloise Briton
A Young American Poet Richard Aldington
Editorials and Announcements
Ten Grotesques Arthur Davison Ficke
A New Standard of Art Criticism Huntley Carter
My Friend, the Incurable Alexander S. Kaun
New York Letter George Soule
“Alice in Wonderland”
Samaroff and Claussen Herman Schuchert
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
MARCH, 1915
No. 1
Copyright, 1915, by Margaret C. Anderson
Two Poems
FRITZ SCHNACK
(_Translated from the German by William Saphier_)
BLOOMING SUNLIGHT
Sharp rips the plow
And roots the day into the opened field,
And kneads the light and splendor of the world
Into the conquered darkness.
In summer, between close rows
Of waving blades, grow flowers
Blooming buried sunlight.
EVENING GIFT
Spread like the palm of a hand
Lies at bottom the evening, gold and red.
Every man may take as much as he likes
Of its beauty, up to the farthest hilltops,
As if it were wine and bread
Handed out to feed hungry souls
And to fill with light the thirsty.
I stroll alone on gentle roads into the splendor
Bathing my face in a thousand rosy waves;
Far away like smoke from a black stack lies my pain.
I know it, yet I wander.
We may, like expectant children, be blessed.
For the New Animal in America
WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT
My enemy has written a book.[1]
This is not man-to-man enmity, but there need be no quibble about it.
For seventeen years I have studied T. R. as representative of that
America which has consistently betrayed the finer aspirations of our
people, shamed the real workman, bewildered the young in millions with
noise and show and shine, and unerringly dimmed for the many the
approaches to the Real. He stands today for armament, against all that
the New Spirit has shown us out of the bleeding heart of the world,
against the plain fact of the war as the quickener of spiritual life,
and against every dream that was ever born in the human breast out of
the loss of the love of self.
You will say, “But why this study of T. R. now? Surely he has received
his _Thumbs-down_ even from the crowd, and with a unanimity seldom
accorded a public man still in the flesh.” ... I am not so sure. I wish
I could be sure that his latest message would be shut from the
receptivity of this land, as a door upon an evil draught.
We have managed to clump along with bunglers through the recent
dropsical years of peace, but there was never such a need as now for a
man of vision and power at the forefront of our affairs. These States
since August have committed atrocities of short-sightedness and triumphs
of selfishness—enough to complicate us for future years. The partisan
and the militarist have already made our neutrality unclean. I would
like to be sure that their strongest influence has already been
encountered.
On our southern borders is war, and our northern border is black with
distrust and the British point of view. From Vancouver to Halifax, the
voice of this hour is, “If Roosevelt were only in the chair at
Washington——” The ensuing part of the “if” covers the present issues
from Mexico to Belgium, and the trouble is that Canada knows from
England what she is wishing us; at least, in part, the venom and
abomination of the saying. To judge from the Press of the States there
are still many who would incite afresh the animal efficiency of our
country, and who range themselves in the background with this master of
the low vibration, calling upon us to answer Europe with a similar
desolation.
... How many times have you heard it said, “This T. R. is in the
comprehension of the crowd.” This is true. The saddest conviction ever
forced into the mind of genius of any age is the opaqueness of the
surface which the crowd presents to light or loveliness of any kind. And
T. R. is in the comprehension of the bleakest generation which this
country has ever known; nor will there ever be another like it, for we
are at the end of the night. That which is about to break is either dawn
or doom.
T. R. is still searching for the crowd through the endless folds of its
obliquity. Who shall say that these folds are not endless; that he may
not turn over still another fateful, if momentary allegiance, from the
bowels of our materialism?
Enough that he is the voice to-day of the Prussian factor in America, a
voice from the throat of the militarists—that curious solution of beef,
iron and wine, from which—as Thou seest the Oise and the Aisne and the
Vistula flow red—oh, Lord, deliver us!
I hold the conviction that if the militarists ever get in full cry after
this country, we shall lose our Peace and our personality. This is an
hour to stand by, and it is only in such an hour that I would venture to
study a party through the character of its loudest voice. For seventeen
years I have watched T. R. stand for the physical and the obvious. There
has been more noise about his name in America than about any other, and
yet he has never risen to a single great moment. And steadily he has
mounted higher in the consciousness of T. R. Many of us thought that the
crisis was reached, when for a day (a little before the last
presidential nominations) the ego broke within him, and those close at
hand saw a deranged creature.... A troop of us camped beside him in
Tampa, and followed the Rough Riders afield above Santiago. Perhaps he
has a certain animal courage—the cheapest utility of the nations—but
there is no moral quality to the courage of a man who would permit
himself to be cast into popular approval on a fake.... There was a
reunion two years afterward of those same Rough Riders in Oklahoma. T.
R. was there, campaigning on the shoulders of McKinley, much as Dr. Cook
did. On the way down through Kansas for two days, we heard him on the
back platform of the private coach, at every station where two or three
would gather together—pouring the most terrific physical energy into
political bickerings and half-truths, the same at each station—until we
drew the press table as far as possible forward, and bore the oppressive
heat with shut windows rather than that repeated clamor of words. He
would come in conqueringly, the black coat damp with sweat.... I
remember the ruffian exhibition with the cattle—steer-torturing, the
brand, the snap of bone, the tightened noose, thud of poor beasts to the
ground—all in a frame for him—the hat with the pinned-back brim, waving
over all....
No other man has been so mighty to keep the pestiferousness of America
alive in the minds of medieval Europe. As our representative citizen, he
has romped our yankeeisms and cutenesses from Queenstown to Port Said
and around. And so it has been for seventeen years since that Tampan
camp, from party to group, from fame to notoriety, from brute-shooting
and affidavits, to cocktails and new African rivers furnished with sworn
statements, from woman’s suffrage back to bayonetism,—always in the
sweat and heft of flesh, unvaryingly the animal man.
They say that if a child is bred and born right, his earlier years
passed in hands that start him straight—such a child will return to the
beauty of his inception, if time and the world are permitted to work
sufficient misery upon him; misery being the great corrective. These
States of America were bred of a fair dream and born of a singular
beauty. The hope of the world today is that as a nation, we restore the
old dream, the old inspiration; not a turning back, for that is against
the law, but turning to a finer dimension of that old passion which made
us a refuge and a brotherhood.
There has been fine living virtue in two recent actions of this
government—two bits of high behavior. Through one of these, it seemed
that a shaft of light poured down from the fatherland of the future—if
day is ahead and not doom. I refer to the return of the Boxer indemnity
to China.... It was like a fine moment in a busy life, and there was
poetry in the answer from old Mother China.... There are men who love
these States well enough to hate her many moments of unworthiness. The
other figment of true national character is the determination of the
part of Washington to keep her promise to Colombia.... I perceived that
T. R. has risen against that, even since his book setting forth the
needs of a new predatory impetus for our national life.... To anyone who
asks a law to go by, for the good of the country and the rectitude of
self, I would say, “Take the side that this man does not, and it will be
impossible for you to lose.”
[1] _America and the World-War, by Theodore Roosevelt._ [_Charles
Scribner’s Sons, New York._]
Maurice Browne and The Little Theatre
JOHN COWPER POWYS
Sick of war and discussion of war; sick of “first and last things” and
discussion of them; deafened by the raucous howling of the preachers,
and dumb before the fathomless stupidity of the mob, one may totter into
the cool quietness of The Little Theatre just as Heine, scarcely a
century ago, escaped from the madness of the crowd, and in that gallery
on the Seine fell at the feet of the armless Goddess! And she smiles at
us too—poor unknown strangers—just as she smiled at that famous
Wanderer; and though “she has no arms to help,” it is enough if for a
little while one can rest at her feet and forget “the voices of hate.”
It was by the incantation she has never been known to resist that she
was drawn here; to rest, after her long pilgrimage: for here she has
found the altar they had lost the secret of building, and the incense
they had forgotten how to burn! O the heavenly quietness of this place,
and the absence, even round about the purlieus of it, of the voices that
grate and jar and harrow and murder!
Favete Linguis! Keep the holy silence, good stranger; till thou knowest
completely on what ground thou standest. “Numen inest!” There is Deity
in this sanctuary. Do the children of Gath howl with laughter, and the
daughters of Askalon shake with spleen, that one should speak of Deity
in the Fine Arts Building, and of Altars on Michigan Avenue? Let them
put out their tongues—let them spit forth their venom—the stone which
they have rejected has already become the head-stone of the temple of
the Future!
Visit other so-called “Little Theatres,” my friends, and you will
understand why the Uranian had to make so long a journey. For there is
none like this. They are either—those others—too gaudy and “artistic”;
or they are too shoddy, ramshackle, littered, patchy and “bohemian.”
This is the place; the place where one can draw large even breaths; the
place where one can cool one’s fever; the place where one can drink, as
Shelley says, “of deep and liquid rest, forgetful of all ill.”
And it matters not what they are “playing,” this gracious company of Our
Lady’s Servants, or whose liturgical “Use” they honor with their
acceptance. Many are such “hours,” such “offices.” It makes no
difference. One Gregorian Harmony brings them into the circle of One
Rhythm. Many and diverse are the offerings they offer up to that great
Goddess. Some are wanton and capricious, some grave and solemn, some
foreign and exotic, some native-born and natural, some from the
market-places of this very city, some from the far-off land of the
Goddess’s own engendering; some light as gossamer-seed, from no land at
all, but from the kingdom of airy nothings, sans habitation, sans name,
sans purpose!
Yes, whatever the words of the “local breviary” we persuade them to
adopt to their music, the effect of it upon the listeners is the same.
“Razed out” at last are those “written troubles”; “cleansed” at last, of
“that perilous stuff,” is the poor “stuff’d bosom”!
Chicago’s Little Theatre is the real “Alsatia”—the authentic
“Arcanum”—the true “Hesperidean Grove”! And do you ask how it rose,
“like an eschalation,” into being—what hands built it—what genius, what
magic, still sustains it? What, do you suppose, questioner at the gate,
worked this miracle? What, do you surmise, wrought this spell? Have you
really no inkling, in this sphere of the raising of Altars, how such
things are done?
Only in one way! There is only one kind of occult adventure—Goethe tells
us that—by means of which these Euphorions of Beauty grow into life!
There must be the creative spirit of Man, giving the thing “Form”; and
the creative spirit of Woman, giving the thing “Color.” Thus we
understand. Thus we unravel the mystery. Thus we learn how the
impossible happens! Look, inquisitive Stranger, at the Inscription over
the entrance to this enchanted retreat. Read the names written upon the
door. Do you catch the trick of it now—do you glimpse the clue? _Two_
names are there—our Faust’s and our Helen’s—and behind those two names
lurk the creative genius that _wills_, and the creative genius that
gives color to what is _willed_. Thus the miracle is accomplished. And
behold—Euphorion! For English “Maurice” and American “Nelly” have that
inestimable bond, between the links of which alone can the true
Parnassian Hyacinths put forth their “hushed, cool-rooted flowers” for
the delight of gods and men;—I mean agreement of “opinion,” with
diversity of “temperament.”
The supremely happy “chance” of the coming together of these two—why not
believe the legend that gives to the very Land of the Muses the spell
that achieved it?—resulted in nothing less than that indescribable
synthesis of Man’s Intellect and Woman’s Instinct which is the desire of
the ages! So ought human beings to be united. So ought their poor mortal
“love,” radiating from Zenith to Nadir, to provoke the return of Saturn,
the unbinding of Prometheus, the Vita Nuova for which we all pine!
It is in fact the presence of our “New Helen” as the guiding, balancing,
mellowing, sweetening influence, in this enterprise, which has enabled
the austere “Formula” of the Founder to take to itself flesh and blood.
For the director of the Little Theatre of Chicago is no Dilettante—no
Petit-Maître of a pompous coterie—no bric-à-brac Virtuoso. Stern and
high and cold is his Ideal; clear and clean-cut the lines that limit it!
To reproduce in the heart of the great mad City—the City of the
“Middle-West”—the City of America—that Rhythm and Harmony which Plato
felt as the secret of the ultimate spheres, is not such a thing worthy
of the gift of a man’s life?
And it is nothing less than a man’s life, and a woman’s too, which is
being given for this. For such temples are not built without the
shedding of blood. Those who have ears to hear let them hear! As the
wise Lady says, who comes from the Isle of the Saints, “The Bridge to
the World’s Future hides within its arches the bodies of the World’s
First-Born!” It is not for any “strayed reveller,” however sensitive to
what he has seen, to give the word of Initiation to these devoted ones’
long-labored Mystery. Maurice Browne’s methods may be seen, and the
passionate irritability of his over-tasked nerves may be teased and rung
upon; but the high invisible walls of the Citadel he is raising—the
“topless towers” of his Ilium—are not for the searching of the profane.
And yet a modest guess may be hazarded as to where, in our horizon,
those towers will grow. They will grow, as all true classical ramparts
have grown, protecting us from the hordes of vulgarity, out of the
ground and soil of inveterate tradition. They will not grow to the tune
of the idealization that spurns “reality,” they will grow to the tune of
the idealization that sifts, selects, winnows, purifies, and heightens
“reality.” They will not be built, they are not being built, according
to the fierce fanaticism of any particular School or Cult or Pass-word.
The sub-soil of their tradition has been watered by no tears but those
of Humanity, and will be sown with no harvest but the harvest of
Humanity. If they are more Greek, or more Hebraic, than anything else,
that is only because to the Greeks and the Jews rather than to the rest
it has been allowed to sweep the unessential absolutely aside and return
with clear-eyed innocence to the main facts. Maurice Browne is not the
slave of Euripides—though, by God! some might think so—nor is he the
slave of the Bible. It is only that he knows too well—too well for his
peace and the peace of his friends!—that only from the depths of that
one tragic fountain—the naked human heart, my friends—spring the little
opal-tinted bubbles that reflect the World!
What has been revealed to our modern Faust in those queer “absences from
the Body,”—what has been revealed to him in those hours, when his nerves
find us so hard to bear—what “the Mothers” have really whispered to
him—who were bold enough even to guess? But this much a poor Satyr of
the Outer Court may without impertinence divine. For Maurice Browne the
whole world resolves itself into an act of worship. The thing worshiped
we know nothing of, save in the eternal rhythm of life; and the “other
worshippers” we know nothing of, save in the music which responds to
that rhythm; but the whole drama—down the long desperate
centuries—resolves itself into nothing less than an attempt to attune to
reciprocity those two cadences—the voice of the Unknown World-Priest,
intoning through the ages, and the voice of the innumerable generations
answering! Have I been able in the remotest degree to indicate why to
the good sneering philistines who mock at all this and ask “what is a
Little Theatre but—a Little Theatre”? there may come some day a somewhat
ghastly awakening, a somewhat damning remorse? In that hour—in that
“Judgment”—happy will those citizens of Chicago be who have prepared the
way, and not laid themselves down in the way, of the builders of the
Abbey of Thelema!
What The Little Theatre is doing is nothing less than a restoration to
the worship of the Eternal Gods of an Institution which has been
bastardized, perverted and profaned! Think what the Drama in our days
has become! Think what “buyers and sellers” have set up their “tables”
in the Lord’s House! The Theatre, in our generation, is no more that
sacred stage where Life is purged and winnowed and heightened; and
where, out of the Tragedy and Comedy of it, clear triumphant music is
made audible. Poetic Drama is extinct. And yet can Life be said to be
even approximately mimicked by anything less than poetry? _Emotions_ we
have enough of and to spare—emotions and sensations! But these are not
poetry. These are but the heavy, raw, crude, chemical protoplasm of
poetry. Thus the only plays of our time which are beautiful and
successful and true to the life-instinct are _Farces_. Farces need not
be poetical. They represent the kicking up of satyr-heels round the
outer circle of the Dionysian grove. They represent the insurgent
rebellion of the humorous mob against all law or rule. And as such they
are admirable. As such they have their place. Indeed they are all that
is left of admirable in our modern Theatre. They are our only
contribution to this world-old act of worship—the contribution of
beautifully kicking up our heels! Putting aside Wagner and Strauss and
half-a-dozen Latin Opera-Makers, what has our stage got which really
answers to the religious exigency of which I am speaking? Nothing but
Farce, nothing but Satyr-heels! Devoted revivals of Gilbert and Sullivan
restore to us our youth once in a long season and _Fanny’s First Play_
and _Pygmalion_ hit our tired heathen fancy. But for the rest—!
Hyperborean morbidities technically adjusted to bourgeois drawing-rooms
with snow-avalanches muttering at the window, are indeed enough to make
unlaid troublesome ghosts of the great psychological names of Ibsen and
Strindberg. But psychology, whether it dissect the old Bourgeois Family
or the New Feminist Lure, is, after all, only a transitory analysis of
ephemeral situations. It does not spring from what, in the relations
between Man and Woman, is eternal and unchangeable. It does not turn
into dramatic poetry the long cry of our common fate. The pathological
“macabrism” of Ibsen and Strindberg dissolves like mephitic scum when
the eternal constellations, under which Job and David and Sophocles
wrote, mount up through the deep hushed air. Mr. Browne has an artist’s
and an Irishman’s passion for Synge—but he knows better than we could
tell him that gaelic Mythology is not classical Mythology and gaelic
poetry is not Universal poetry. And so we return to the one old Path—the
one undying Tradition. We _literally_ return to it. For, after all their
lovely and alluring experiments in a hundred directions, the great work
of The Little Theatre—until Mr. Browne writes his own epoch-making
Poetic Play—is, as we all confess, the revival of Euripides. It is here
and only here that The Little Theatre of Chicago rouses itself, through
every nerve and vein of its corporate body, to grand and undistracted
reciprocity. And here we are in the presence of a true Renaissance: a
Renaissance as authentic and deep as that which the fifteenth century
stumbled upon. The truth of what I am saying will be sealed, for the few
who understand this “open secret,” by the fact of the instinctive
preference displayed, not only by the director but by the whole company,
for _The Trojan Women_, over the less universal, the less classical, the
more modern _Medea_.
No one who has a real insight into what Poetic Drama means—Poetic Drama
the highest of all human Arts—can hesitate for a moment as to where The
Little Theatre rises to a permanent and tradition-making height. It
rises to such a height in its performance of _The Trojan Women_. And it
does so because here and here alone, by reason of the universal nature
of the subject—nothing less in fact than the incarnation of World’s
Sorrow—every member of the company is touched and attuned and compelled
and transfigured to the same ultimate Pity.
It is not only of “Ilion” we think, it is not only for “Ilion” we weep,
in those world-deep choruses; we weep for all the sons and daughters of
men, doomed by the same doom, who “must endure”—with Argive Helen—“their
going hence, even as their coming hither.” The magical Irish “plummet”
of Synge does not, cannot, sound much depth;—and before the bowed
figures of those world-mourners, carved as if by the chisel of Pheidias,
our pathological Hyperborean Phantoms go squeaking, bat-like, to
oblivion.
When, in the future, Poetic Drama once more attains the position to
which the self-preservative instincts of humanity entitle it, it will be
recognized for what it is—the true religious focussing of man’s
permanent protest against Fate—lifted above the dust of all ephemeral
questioning. It will then be seen that in Poetic Drama, rather than in
the noblest sacraments of Religion, the race must find its orchestral
unity, the rhythm of its natural and Tragic breathing. And when this is
seen, and the history of the thing written, The Chicago Little Theatre,
its directors and its company, will receive (too late, as always, for
personal relief) their delayed appreciation.
It would be unjust, in any such tentative anticipation of Time’s verdict
as these pages suggest, to praise Maurice Browne at the expense of those
who so wonderfully work with him. We may have our European blood, our
European Formalism; but, after all, our stage is an American stage, our
company an American company. In estimating the actual contribution of
individual members of the company, to the Idea behind it, it were wise
to be cautious and discreet. Any praise of a particular performer must
needs fall a little discordantly when a certain impersonal rhythmic
orchestration is the note of the whole matter. No such faux-pas is
risked in the mention of three names. This “Chicago Renaissance” in
which Maurice Browne plays the part of the golden-mouthed Mirandola hath
also its young Angelo, “seeking the soul” of light and form and color.
The work that has been done is so much, after all, a matter of technical
inspiration, that to omit the name of Raymond Johnson from its annals
were to write the history of Florence without alluding to Michele.
Chicago may indeed regard itself, for all its chaotic tumult, as the
Tuscan City of America; for nowhere else is so pure a flame, of
single-hearted devotion to Beauty, burning on this side of the Atlantic!
And with the name of Raymond Johnson, the artist of the company, it is
necessary to link that of Edward Moseman, its greater actor. It is
strange that it should have been left to a wandering European—and yet
perhaps not strange!—to make audible the prediction, which all
discerning dramatic critics must inevitably be making in their hearts,
that in not so very many years Mr. Moseman will be recognized, from
shore to shore, as the most interesting and most personally-arresting
player that this country has produced since Booth.
That a genius of his peculiarly _idiosyncratic_ type should have been
magnetized—against his will—into the “formalism” of the One Tradition,
is about as good an evidence as could be found of the power and
conviction of Maurice Browne’s impersonal Ideal!
The third name I may be allowed to mention, without impertinent
intrusion into orchestral harmonies, is the name of Miss Vera White. I
am not now referring to Miss White’s untiring constructive labor upon
what one might call “the architectural scaffolding” of The Little
Theatre’s productions. I am referring to her personal genius as an
actress. Nothing more natural, nothing more _inevitable_, nothing more
winning and seductive, than this gentle actress’s rendering of the
wronged mother in Mrs. Ellis’s Cornish Play could be possibly imagined.
And the same enchanting qualities of direct self-effacing emotion will
no doubt be even more irresistible when, in a classic role, she comes to
play the Nurse in Medea. Of Ellen Van Volkenburg’s own acting in this
classic Renaissance which she is helping her husband to summon from “the
vasty deep,” I cannot speak; for I have only seen her in those charming
“genre” plays where she loves, mischievously enough, to transform
herself, like a witch-fairy, into every mortal kind of dream-person! But
I know enough of her to know at least one aspect of her October-shadowy
moods, which will make us tremble before her Medea!
Well! The Euphorion—the child of this encounter of Past and Present has
yet to grow his full wings. He is still a “Ge-Uranic,” a Child-Angel.
But those who have had the fortune of being present at the scene of his
high engendering will never forget their privilege. “It is a long way”
to the shores of Troas from the shores of our Chicago Lake; but for one
wanderer at least the great goddess of the Gallery of the Louvre has not
worked her spells in vain. Still, with the Elizabethan, we can cry aloud
to her through the mists of many journeyings: “Her lips suck forth my
soul. See where it flies.”
Winter’s Pride
GEORGE SOULE
Intolerant wind, cold, swift over the sand,
An icy-silver sun upon the sea,
Back-spraying plumes of molten white
Wind-lifted from the curling breakers’ tips
That proudly charge the shore with steady roll
And crisping plunge,
The soft advance of foam—
Its million breaking bubbles,
Its elfin rush and tingle;
A thousand gulls awing,
Startled to dipping flight and curving glide,
Their flashing arabesques against the sun
Twisting a thousand beauties never still
Until they rest, fearless, lifted and falling
Upon the surging surf;
And you and I
Striding the flat, resilient sand,
Seeking the distance tirelessly,
Our faces burning,
Our speech of silence made,
In equal freedom joined perfectly,
And our uplifted spirits
Plumed like the waves, exulting with the gulls;
These things are potent
To cleanse us through the years
And to redeem
All dull and sluggard hours;
These things are proof
Of all bright beauty, all swift ecstacy.
Two Points of View
Mrs. Ellis’s Gift to Chicago
MARY ADAMS STEARNS
Love, eugenics, marriage, are not three questions, but merely different
aspects of the one great sex problem, which, according to Mrs. Havelock
Ellis, must be solved within the hearts and souls of men and women and
not by the acts of any legislative body. Those who braved the wind and
the rain to hear this well known writer and thinker talk about “Sex and
Eugenics” were filled with sharp expectancy as she stepped forward to
speak—a short woman about fifty years old, with iron gray hair cut close
to her head, piercing blue eyes, eloquent hands and a low voice,
wonderfully modulated and seemingly as tireless as her poised, vigorous
body; yet expectation seldom fulfills the bright dreams it dangles
before our eyes. We let ourselves be carried away with enthusiasm, and
then are hurt because our visions lack fulfillment. Some expected too
much.
Chicago has welcomed Mrs. Ellis warmly, yet within this cordiality there
have been hidden germs of fear, unreasonable hopes, slavish admiration,
mental indifference and misunderstanding—it is always so. She is without
question in the foremost ranks of women thinkers, and behind her, trying
more or less sincerely to gain an understanding of the great truths that
she teaches and upholds, are hordes of women—curious, broad-minded,
bigoted, desperate, frightened, sane thinkers, and sentimentalists;
women who are economic slaves and others who are financially
independent. What does Mrs. Ellis mean to each one of them? What
message, if any, has she brought? Has she added anything vital and new
to our store of sex and eugenic knowledge which is already burdened with
much mediocre and even valueless information?
Nothing but death could have kept me away from her lecture in Orchestra
Hall February 4th—to which after considerable unnecessary hesitation men
were admitted. Although I knew that I was approaching a burning bush I
felt it was doomed to be hidden in a cloud of misapprehension,
disappointment, and disapproval, and I walked gingerly with my mind open
and unprejudiced and alert. I was fully as eager to catch the atmosphere
of the audience, to fathom the thoughts of the thousand odd brains that
listened, as I was to see and hear Mrs. Ellis herself.
The lecture was an event. The dignity, the lack of sensationalism, the
quiet earnestness of what was said revealed a force at work in the world
as steady and inevitable as the glacier’s erosion of the Swiss hills.
Yet this quality of Mrs. Ellis’s mind is shown in all she writes and is
shared by all who read her pages. _Her great gift to Chicago was her
personality._ It gleamed through every word she spoke and blazed into a
pure white flame, that seemed by its very intensity to create a new
heaven and a new earth where love shall rise Phoenix-like from the ashes
of souls and bodies consumed by a misunderstood and misused passion.
There were well-known and influential women who stayed away from the
lecture because they were afraid—afraid of the truth. Because in their
blindness they could not see behind the cheap sensationalism of certain
newspapers and understand the spiritual purity for which Mrs. Ellis has
always stood. Yet their absence showed them not so much cowards as women
incapable of reaching the great white lights of life.
Then there were women who came to the lecture expecting to be shocked;
and they went away disappointed. There were women who came laughing and
gossiping; and they went away still laughing and wondering what all the
fuss was about anyway. They could not see anything extraordinary; it was
all rather commonplace and not altogether new.
And a few came quietly, knowing that they were to contact a great
earnest and wonderful personality; who above all her broad wisdom stands
for the highest ideals that humanity knows—a little woman with a big
mind. These went away thoughtfully, and were satisfied, for they
understood.
They felt as well as did Mrs. Ellis herself what could and what could
not be said on a public platform to a gathering of more than a thousand
prejudiced and in some cases antagonistic listeners. They had in their
minds, as of course she had also, knowledge of the many scientific
volumes that her husband has written. Those familiar with Havelock Ellis
were better prepared to listen than the others. They were grounded in
the facts and science of sex which has never been disclosed as he has
done it, and those who have read his pages know that in them he is the
complete scientist, weighing, comparing, crediting, and discrediting the
facts that have come to him. In no way are his sex studies
propagandic—they are a tremendous reservoir of static power. It has been
for his wife and co-worker, she of independent mind and high purpose, to
take all this vast collection of scientific information in her small
hands, crush out the sordidness, the misery, the heart-sickening
perversions and distortions of human lives and holding up the bright
ideals, fling them out to her listeners in phrases burning with hope for
both men and women and faith that true love will make everything whole.
She did not pose as a righter of personal grievances or a solver of
private woes. The individual was lost in the group; details were
submerged in generalities; isolated examples made way for guiding
principles. When Mrs. Ellis said “We must improve our knowledge if we
would improve our morals” and that there can be no guide to right living
except that which comes from within, she gave us the key to happiness.
If one might guess, she is a little impatient with laws and quite out of
sympathy with those who, knowing but little themselves, try to bind
others by rules and regulations which often defeat the very ends for
which they were made. “What we want is more eugenics by education, and
less eugenics by legislation” she cried; and what she implied many times
was that when we come to regard sex love as one of the greatest
manifestations of the soul—not one of the offensive expressions of the
body—then and then only shall we have eugenic babies and happy men and
women.
Mrs. Ellis referred to the sex function as a “great spiritual
enterprise” and said that only through the conflict of ideals can
progress be made. With “courage, sanity, and cleanliness” in our hearts
we must “cease to regard sex as mere animalism,” and must “forge passion
into power.” “The sex function is divine fire,” it is “as much an affair
of the soul as of the body” and “it is no more disgraceful to function
on the sex plane than on the hunger plane or on the thirst plane.” She
sees that only in the economic independence of women can sex relations
be righted—love and money must be completely divorced. Any form of
barter, whether lawfully within marriage or unlawfully outside of
marriage, is fatal to the free giving of love. Sex love must exist only
where there is affinity—never where there is question of possession.
Only by being economically free can a woman raise herself above the rank
of a prostitute.
Mrs. Ellis spoke of our changing ideals; that what is normal for the ape
is gross for the average man and woman, and that what has been accepted
as inevitable by ordinary men and women will be utterly intolerable to
the super men and women of the near future. “The woman of the future
will be the high priestess of sense, not the victim of sensuality as she
now is.” “She will learn to love beautifully and live joyfully.” She
referred to the way our bodies have sunk into disrepute ever since Greek
times until to the Puritans everything was impure and emphasized the
fact that “our bodies and our souls are not enemies, but mates.”
Mrs. Ellis could not in a lecture of this sort have touched upon special
sexual situations. She was raising the standards of purity, right
living, and sanity; she was creating ideals, she was destroying
sordidness, she was upholding the sanctity of knowledge and holiness of
a love that is free to give or withhold. She was showing women their
weakness and pointing out where men have been tyrannical; she was
creating a divine dissatisfaction in every soul that heard her. She was
the angel fearing to tread where legislative and police fools rush in
and slash about with the sword of reform.
“Create in us clean hearts and our bodies will take care of themselves,”
seemed to be her prayer. She showed the goals of happiness and right
living; revealed that her own life had proved these things and found
them good. Those who went away disappointed were those who expected her
to lay down rules and say “This shall you do and that, but not the other
thing.” But that is not Mrs. Ellis’s way. She shows us what it is
possible to do, but she distinctly leaves it to every individual to find
his or her own way, unhampered by law, and free to make mistakes if
unavoidable. She points out that some of the world’s greatest geniuses
have been neurotics, as Oscar Wilde, Michael Angelo, Chopin, Rosa
Bonheur, Nietszche. We must make our own paths by looking within, not
trusting to man-made laws and customs.
Those who found the lecture vague and unsatisfactory must increase their
knowledge, not expect a woman to tell in thirty-five minutes all she has
learned in thirty-five years. Was it not enough for her to confess that
we must engage in the sex relation with a “fine passionateness and
spiritual deviltry”? Was it not enough for her to set up the ideal that
the sex function is the “great spiritual enterprise”? Was it not enough
for her to set before men and women the highest ideals that the human
mind had yet conceived? And was it not enough to look at and to listen
to a woman who knows whereof she speaks and who has lived all that she
teaches?
She has found her way through the same clouds of prejudice and prudery
that surround us, and to us of Chicago she has given the great privilege
of sharing with her what she called the proudest moment of her life and
of listening to what, for the first time in her life, she could freely
say. Those looking for cheap sensations will not find them in Mrs.
Ellis. Those trying to limit human action by passing laws will receive
no help from her words. Those hampered by conventions and shackled by
fear of the truth must be born again into the beauty and holiness of
every side of human life before they can even see the heights whereon
Mrs. Ellis stands. Let those who would find happiness for themselves and
a happy issue out of the sufferings of the men and women and children
and unborn babes, look into their own hearts and bravely face what is
there.
Women have always run away from anything sexual as unwomanly. She must
face her own nature; she must learn that to most women “the sex impulse
is the hunger of her soul”; she must study men and find a way to raise
them from the errors into which they have fallen. She must cease to be a
prude, and learn to be brave, patient, wise; she must study, read and
think. Nothing is unwomanly save dishonesty, and until women are honest
enough and fearless enough to face what is within themselves, neither
Mrs. Ellis nor anyone else can help them. Mrs. Ellis is a leader, not a
driver, and because she has found life good she is an inspiration which
no woman can afford to disregard.
Mrs. Ellis’s Failure
MARGARET C. ANDERSON
There was one great fault to be found with Mrs. Ellis’s lecture: it was
not illuminating. It might have failed in any number of other ways and
still have been a real contribution; but it should not have dared to
fall short in that respect, because Mrs. Ellis came forward in the role
of one who has a message and because she chose a subject upon which one
must have a message or not talk at all. What Mrs. Ellis did is the kind
of thing against which our generation has its deepest grudge, and it
constitutes a very special case of what we mean when we talk so heatedly
about Truth. We mean nothing startling by that:—simply that quality
which some one has had the good sense to call “releasing.”
A few days before the lecture Mrs. Ellis said that she might as well
call her talk anything except merely “Sex and Eugenics,” because she
meant to discuss love, spiritually, sex abnormalities, and many other
matters. “I have read all my husband’s manuscripts before they were
published and I know he has never told anything but the truth about
sex,” she said. “I have waited some thirty years to talk about these
things, and I shall tell the truth as I know it, if I am sent to jail or
put out of Chicago for it.” On another occasion she said that she meant
to talk of those people who, through perverted or inverted
sexual tendencies, faced the problem of having to turn their
abnormality—perhaps their gift of genius, if we understood these things
better—into creative channels. Because of all this it was only natural
to expect a message from Mrs. Ellis.
But what actually happened was this: Dr. W. A. Evans opened the meeting
by reading a short paper on Havelock Ellis—a paper full of pompous
phrases and of real interest in its utter lack of thought. He gave some
biographical data which everyone knew, told the dates of Mr. Ellis’s
various publications, repeated the chapter titles of one of his less
important works, and really said nothing at all. Then Mrs. Ellis read a
paper which her husband had written especially for the occasion—the most
uninteresting thing that wonderful man has ever written, I am sure. It
had a lot of abstractions about masculinism and feminism, and really
said nothing at all. (I use the word “nothing” on a basis of Ideas.)
Then Mrs. Ellis read her own paper, which was beautifully written and
charmingly delivered, and which said nothing at all. She said in brief
that there should be no war between body and soul, and that Oscar Wilde
should have been understood rather than sent to jail. These things are
not ideas; they are common sense. They are all quite simply recognized
by thinking people; and most of Mrs. Ellis’s audience was composed of
thinking people who wanted her individual philosophy on these matters.
They were not asking her for art but for thought—not for expression but
for meaning. Her failure was of the sort of which prophets are never
guilty.
Of course, Mrs. Ellis may not wish to be considered a prophet or a
philosopher. Then there should not have been so much talk of offering a
completely new view of sex. She may regard herself as a poet, an
interpreter. Very well; then she should have given a substantial vision
of a future state when love in all its aspects is valued and understood.
Mrs. Ellis cannot be blamed for the sensational stories in the paper.
Her suggestion that men be admitted to the lecture because they need
education in this field as much as women need it, was made simply and
without any thought of sensation. Everybody knows what the press will
make of such material as that. And everybody knows how an organization
managed exclusively by women is likely to be twisted into silly,
sentimental, or malicious issues. But Mrs. Ellis _can_ be blamed for
that attitude which promises more than it has to give, and very
seriously blamed for that spirit which hints that there may be cause for
shame where there is no cause. There has been something altogether too
suggestive of “Did my lecture shock you?” in Mrs. Ellis’s attitude.
These things are not _shocking_; they are beautiful or terrible,
according as they are understood or misrepresented, but so long as the
truth about them is faced squarely they should carry no hint of shock.
The only test of an “emerged personality” is its arrival at a point
where it is not shocked by anything human beings may do or be. You may
be deeply moved or terribly hurt, but you are not merely offended or
embarrassed or startled. All that brings things down to such a little
scale. I don’t know just why, but Mrs. Ellis’s attitude has reminded me
of the man who advised me not to read Havelock Ellis’s volumes on the
psychology of sex, because after such an experience I could never
respect human beings again. If he had been ignorant or puritanical his
remark wouldn’t have mattered; but he was a rather well-known sexologist
and he believed those books to be very valuable! What he meant was that
it is “so disillusioning” to know the truth. If Mrs. Ellis were that
sort of person these things I object to wouldn’t matter in the least. As
it is, they matter hugely. Her failure to assume that knowledge is too
important a thing to concern itself with people’s pruderies is on a par
with the man’s failure to recognize that truth is never disastrous.