Carpenter and Weininger and other scientists, and they expected to hear
how far Mrs. Ellis’s personal views coincided or disagreed with these
authorities. But she had no intention of such elucidation, it seems. She
didn’t say what she thought about free love, free divorce, social
motherhood, birth-control, the sex “morality” of the future, or any of
these things. On the other side of the question, in her reference to
intermediate types, she didn’t mention homosexuality; she had nothing to
say about the differences between perversion and inversion, nor did she
even hint at Carpenter’s social efforts in behalf of the homosexualist.
What does Mrs. Ellis think about Weininger’s statement that intermediate
sexual forms are “normal, not pathological phenomena, in all classes of
organisms, and their appearance is no proof of physical decadence?” Does
she agree with him, in his reference to the idea that inversion is an
acquired character and one that has superseded normal sexual impulses,
when he says, “It might equally be sought to prove that the sexual
inclination of a normal man for a normal woman was an unnatural,
acquired habit. In the abstract there is no difference between the
normal and the inverted type. In my view all organisms have both
homosexuality and heterosexuality.... In spite of all present-day clamor
about the existence of different rights for different individualities,
there is only one law that governs mankind just as there is only one
logic and not several logics. It is in opposition to that law as well as
to the theory of punishment according to which the legal offense, not
the moral offense, is punished, that we forbid the homosexualist to
carry on his practices whilst we allow the heterosexualist full play, so
long as both avoid open scandal. Speaking from the standpoint of a purer
state of humanity and of a criminal law untainted by the pedagogic idea
of punishment as a deterrent, the only logical and rational method of
treatment for sexual inverts would be to allow them to seek and obtain
what they require where they can, that is to say, among other inverts.”
It is not enough to repeat that Shakespeare and Michael Angelo and
Alexander The Great and Rosa Bonheur and Sappho were intermediates: how
is this science of the future to meet these issues? They move into the
realm of the world’s sublime tragedies when one reads the manifesto of a
community of such people in Germany:—“The rays of sunshine in the night
of our existence are so rare that we are responsive and deeply grateful
for the least movement, for every single voice that speaks in our favor
in the forum of mankind.” Mrs. Ellis may have thought her audience
entirely too unsophisticated, too untutored in these matters, to admit
of specific treatment. But that is all the greater reason to talk
plainly. When you reflect how difficult it is for the mass to become
educated about sex it becomes rather appalling. It is worth your life to
get Havelock Ellis’s six volumes from a bookstore or a library. You can
only do it with a doctor’s certificate or something of that sort. Even
if you ask for Weininger you are taken behind locked doors, forced to
swear that you want it out of no “morbid curiosity,” that you will keep
it only a week, and above all that you won’t let anyone else read it. Of
course, it is practically impossible to do work of this sort under the
auspices of women’s medical leagues or similar organizations. But Mrs.
Ellis had dared the impossible. I can’t help comparing her with another
woman whose lecture on such a subject would be big, brave, beautiful....
I am criticised for having too much about this other woman in THE LITTLE
REVIEW; so “not to mention any names,” as the story goes, I will merely
say that Emma Goldman could never fail in this way.
It is not a question of what could or could not be said on a public
platform; it is a question of what _should_ be said. If the findings of
science are not to be made accessible, we must all find ourselves in the
position of Rousseau when he said that the renascence of the arts and
sciences had not ennobled morals. Isn’t that almost as true now as then?
A week ago, as I write, a young man named Roswell Smith was hanged in
Chicago for having strangled a four-year-old girl. He had no
recollection of the murder, and his father’s testimony brought out the
fact that the boy had always been epileptic. Since he must die for his
“crime”—oh, the heart-breaking tragedy of his quiet acceptance of that
hellish law!—Smith begged that he be allowed to die under the knife, so
that at least humanity might benefit by an examination of his brain.
But, no—he must be _hanged_: Justice must be done, the public wrath
appeased, the penalty held up to other criminals, prevention enforced
again by methods which don’t prevent! The governor, unwilling to risk
public indignation, salved his conscience by the testimony of one
alienist who pronounced Smith “sane.” And so the boy paid the penalty,
to the accompaniment of Psalms and readings from the Word—the “_Light_
of the world!” ... And sixty people watched the murder and not a voice
was raised in protest. Think of it!—or rather don’t think of it unless
you are willing to lose your mind with horror and shame.
How far have we _advanced_ when things like this can still happen among
us? With us love is just as punishable as murder or robbery. Mrs. Ellis
knows the workings of our courts; she knows of boys and girls, men and
women, tortured or crucified every day _for their love_—because it is
not expressed according to conventional morality. All this was part of
her responsibility on February 4th; and this is why I say she failed.
The Acrobat
ELOISE BRITON
Poised like a panther on a bough
He swings and leaps.
His taut body flashes clear,
And in a long blue arc cuts the hushed air
Tense as a cry.
The keen, sharp wind of Death
Blows after like his shadow, and I feel
A strange beast stir in me.
I almost wish
That which I cannot think,
A scream, a falling body ...
A new thrill!
But he shoots onward, arms outstretched
To clutch at life as it speeds past.
His hands grip vise-like;
With a wrench
That half uproots his fingers, he has caught,
And airily
He twists about the bar
And comes to rest.
Sidewise he sits, and carelessly
High up among the winds,
His taut body
Grown lax and restful.
He smiles—
As a vain child, pleased with himself, he smiles,
While our applause comes up
Like incense.
He breathes a moment deeply.
Then again the supple form grows tense,
All wire, all vibrant,
Poised for one tingling breath
Before another flight.
I watch him
And a quick desire comes over me
Of those slim hips,
Those long! clean! slender limbs
That stand for health, and for the sheer
Keen beauty of the body.
I desire him.
And I desire the spirit of the man,
The bodily fearlessness,
The reckless courage in a swaddled age.
I desire him.
How lithe and firm would be the child
Of such a man....
A Young American Poet
RICHARD ALDINGTON
It is the defect of English, and in a lesser degree of American,
criticism that such criticisms as are not merely commercial are
doctrinaire. The critic, that is to say, comes to judge a work of art
not with an open mind but with a whole horde of prejudices, ignorances,
and eruditions which he terms “critical standards.” “A work of art,” you
can hear him say, “must be this, must be that, must be the other,” when
indeed a work of art may well be no such thing. Just now the cry is all
for “modernity,” for lyrical outbursts in praise of machinery, of
locomotion, and of violence. And the “critics” obediently fill their
minds with these prejudices until at length you discover them solemnly
declaring that a work of art has no value except it treat of machinery,
of locomotion or of kindred subjects! I have yet to find the critic who
approaches his job in the right spirit; who asks himself first, What has
the artist attempted to do?, and then, Has he succeeded? The commercial
critic is of course the more reprehensible; the doctrinaire critic is
nevertheless a serious menace to that liberty of the arts of which one
cannot be too jealous. In England especially the doctrinaire critic
reigns. Yesterday it was all Nietzsche; then Bergson; now there is a
wild fight between a dozen “isms,” combats between traditional imbeciles
and revolutionary imbeciles. So that one spends half one’s time becoming
an “ist” and the rest of the time in getting rid of the title.
The neglect of the poems of the young American poet—H. D.—who is the
subject of this article, is due, I think to the following facts. The
author, who apparently possesses a great degree of self-criticism,
produces a very small bulk of work and most of it is lost in magazines;
such work as attained publicity was judged, before being read, from its
surroundings; the work being original, seemed obscure and wantonly
destructive of classic English models (you must remember that there are
very, very few people in England who have the faintest idea of what is
meant by vers libre); the use of initials rather frightened people; and
the author had no friends among the professional critics.
Now America has this advantage over most European countries that its
inhabitants are mostly willing to accept a fresh view of things. The
lack of a “tradition” has advantages as well as disadvantages. An
American author, then, is less likely to see things in a conventional
way, and is less likely to be deterred from any novel and personal
method of expression. (For in 1911, when H. D. began to write the poems
I am considering, vers libre was practically unheard of outside France.)
If I were asked to define the chief quality of H. D.’s work I should
say: “I can only explain it by a paradox; it is a kind of accurate
mystery.” And I should go on to quote the ballad of Sir Patric Spens in
which from a cloudy, vague, obscure atmosphere, where nothing is
precise, where there is no “story,” no obvious relation between the
ideas, certain objects stand out very sharply and clearly with a very
keen effect, objects like “the bluid-red wine,” “the braid letter,” the
young moon in the old moon’s arms, and the ladies with “their fans intil
their hands.” And then I should go on to say that this “accurate
mystery” came from the author’s brooding over—not locomotives and
machinery—but little corners of gardens, a bit of a stream in some
Pennsylvanian meadow, from memories of afternoons along the New Jersey
coast, or of a bowl of flowers. Curious, mysterious, rather obscure sort
of broodings with startling and very accurate renderings of detail. And
then I should explain the author’s use of Hellenic terms and of the
rough unaccented metres of Attic choruses and Melic lyrics—like those
fragments of Alcaeus and Ibycus and Erinna—by pointing out that it is in
those poems—the choruses in the Bacchae, for example—that this
particular kind of brooding over nature found its best expression.
Let me quote a portion of a poem to illustrate these qualities: the
quality which I have called “accurate mystery,” the quality of brooding
over nature and the quality of spontaneous kinship with certain aspects
of Hellenic poetry. I take it that, if one liked to be specifically
modern the poem could be called “Wind on the New Jersey Coast.” But the
author’s innate sense of mystery, of aloofness, just like that of the
anonymous author of Sir Patric Spens, makes her place the action in some
vague, distant place and time. Though it be contrary to current opinion
I hold that the poem gains by this.
HERMES OF THE WAYS
The hard sand breaks,
And the grains of it are clear as wine.
Far off over the leagues of it,
The wind,
Playing on the wide shore,
Piles little ridges,
And the great waves break over it.
But more than the many-foamed ways
Of the sea,
I know him
Of the triple path-ways,
Hermes,
Who awaiteth.
Dubious,
Facing three ways,
Welcoming wayfarers,
He whom the sea-orchard shelters from the west,
From the east
Weathers sea-wind;
Fronts the great dunes.
Wind rushes
Over the dunes,
And the coarse, salt-crusted grass
Answers.
Heu,
It whips round my ankles!—etc., etc.
I am not willing to have that poem read quickly and cursorarily, as one
reads a column of newspaper print. It must be read with some of the
close, intense attention with which it was written. Each word and phrase
were most carefully considered and arranged. The reader must remember
that the object of such writing is not to convey information but to
create in the reader a mood, an emotion, a sense of atmosphere. Mr.
Yeats is right when he complains that newspapers have spoiled our sense
of poetry; we expect poetry to tell us some piece of news, and indeed
poetry has no news to tell anyone. Its object is simply to arouse an
emotion, and no emotion is ever aroused in a person who skims through a
piece of poetry as he skims through a journal.
When I read that poem I have evoked in me a picture—like a picture of
Courbet or Boudin—of a white sea roaring on to yellow sands under a
bright sky, with the wind sweeping and whistling in the dunes. And I
have a feeling that it is a magic sort of picture, of somewhere a great
way off, where it would not surprise me to find the image of a god at
the cross-roads, with the offerings of simple people about the pedestal.
And at the same time I always remember bathing from some sand-dunes near
Rye, in Sussex, on a very windy afternoon, when the sand blinded me and
the sharp grass cut my ankles as I ran down to the water.
I cannot, of course, tell what sort of an effect such writing has on
other people. It may be that I am especially sensitive to it. But let me
quote another of the author’s poems, conveying a totally different mood.
SITALKAS
Thou art come at length
More beautiful than any cool god
In a chamber under Lycia’s far coast,
Than any high god who touches us not
Here in the seeded grass.
Aye, than Argestes,
Scattering the broken leaves.
If you ask me to say precisely what that “means” I could only explain it
in this way. When I read that poem I experience the emotions I should
expect to receive if I were lying in a sunny meadow on some hot late
September afternoon—somewhere far inland, where there would be a great
silence broken very gently by the rustle of the heavy headed grass and
by the stir of falling beech leaves—somewhere so far inland, somewhere
so hot, that it would come as a shock of delighted surprise to think of
a “cool god in a chamber under Lycia’s far coast.” It does not annoy me
that I have never been to Lycia, that I have no more idea who Sitalkas
and Argestes were than who Sir Patric Spens was; it is all one; I get my
impression just the same, which, I take it, is what the author aimed at.
And indeed the odd unknown names give it a very agreeable sense of
mystery and of aloofness.
Such are some of the qualities of the work of the young American who
hides her identity under the initials H. D. I believe her work is quite
unknown in America, though, before the war, I remember seeing some
comment on it in a French literary paper. It was in another French
review that a critic complained that this author was not interested in
aeroplanes and factory chimneys. Somehow I feel quite coldly about
factory chimneys when I read sudden intense outbursts of poetry like
those I have quoted and like this:
The light of her face falls from its flower
As a hyacinth,
Hidden in a far valley,
Perishes upon burnt grass.
Editorials and Announcements
_On Criticism_
There is something particularly delightful to me in reviewing John
Cowper Powys’s book, _Visions and Revisions_, in THE LITTLE REVIEW. For
Mr. Powys, though quite unconscious of it, was one of the main
inspirations behind the coming-to-be of this magazine. Two years ago we
heard him lecture on Pater and Arnold and came from that rite
determined, if possible, to reflect something of his attitude, his
critical appreciation, in a magazine. I remember the thrill of it very
vividly: “_That is criticism!_” we said. And so I am going to let Mr.
Powys speak for us by quoting almost the entire preface from his new
volume with its critical essays on Rabelais, Dante, Shakespeare, El
Greco, Milton, Lamb, Arnold, Shelley, Keats, Nietzsche, Hardy,
Dostoevsky, Poe, and others. I am sure that, as THE LITTLE REVIEW’S
godfather, he will not mind being quoted so at length:
“Most books of critical essays take upon themselves with unpardonable
effrontery, to weigh and judge from their own petty suburban pedestal,
the great Shadows they review. It is an insolence! How should Professor
This, or Doctor That, whose furthest adventures of ‘dangerous living’
have been squalid philanderings with their neighbors’ wives, bring an
Ethical Synthesis to bear that shall put Shakespeare and Hardy, Milton
and Rabelais, into appropriate niches?
“Every critic has a right to his own Aesthetic Principles, to his own
Ethical Convictions; but when it comes to applying these in tiresome,
pedantic agitation, to Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Lamb, we must beg
leave to cry off! What we want is not the formulating of new Critical
Standards, and the dragging in of the great masters before our last
miserable Theory of Art. What we want is an honest, downright and quite
_personal_ articulation, as to how these great things in literature
really hit us when they find us for the moment natural and off our
guard—when they find us as men and women, and not as ethical
gramophones....
“There is an absurd notion going about, among those half-educated people
who frequent Ethical Platforms, that Literary Criticism must be
‘constructive.’ O that word ‘constructive’! How, in the name of the
mystery of genius, can criticism be anything else than an idolatry, a
worship, a metamorphosis, a love affair! The pathetic mistake these
people make is to fancy that the great artists only lived and wrote in
order to buttress up such poor wretches as they are upon the particular
little, thin, cardboard platform which is at present their moral
security and refuge.
“No one has a right to be a critic whose mind cannot, with Protean
receptivity, take first one form and then another, as the great Spells,
one by one, are thrown and withdrawn.
“Who wants to know what Professor So-and-So’s view of life may be? We
want to use Professor So-and-so as a Mirror, as a Medium, as a
Go-Between, as a Sensitive Plate, so that we may once more get the
thrill of contact with this or that dead Spirit. He must keep his
temperament, our Critic; his peculiar angle of receptivity, his capacity
for personal reaction. But it is the reaction of his own natural nerves
that we require, not the pallid, second-hand reaction of his tedious,
formulated opinions. Why cannot he see that, as a natural man,
physiologically, nervously, temperamentally, pathologically different
from other men, he is an interesting spectacle, as he comes under the
influence first of one great artist and then another, while as a silly,
little, preaching school-master, he is only a blot upon the
world-mirror!...
“It is because so many of us are so limited in our capacity for
‘variable reaction’ that there are so few good critics. But we are all,
I think, more multiple-souled than we care to admit. It is our foolish
pride of consistency, our absurd desire to be ‘constructive’ that makes
us so dull. A critic need not necessarily approach the world from the
‘pluralistic’ angle; but there must be something of such ‘pluralism’ in
his natural temper, or the writers he can respond to will be very few!
“Let it be plainly understood. It is impossible to respond to a great
genius half way. It must be all or nothing. If you lack the courage, or
the variability, to _go all the way_ with very different masters, and to
let your constructive consistency take care of itself, you may become,
perhaps, an admirable moralist; you will never be a Clairvoyant critic.
All this having been admitted, it still remains that one has a right to
draw out from the great writers one loves certain universal aesthetic
tests, with which to discriminate between modern productions.
“But even such tests are personal and relative. They are not to be
foisted on one’s readers as anything ‘ex cathedra’. One such test is the
test of what has been called ‘the grand style’—that grand style against
which, as Arnold says, the peculiar vulgarity of our race beats in vain!
I do not suppose I shall be accused of perverting my devotion to the
‘grand style’ into an academic ‘narrow way,’ through which I would force
every writer I approach. Some most winning and irresistible artists
never come near it.
“And yet—what a thing it is! And with what relief do we return to it,
after the ‘wallowings’ and ‘rhapsodies,’ the agitations and
prostitutions, of those who have it not.
“And what are the elements, the qualities, that go to make up this
‘grand style’?
“Let me first approach the matter negatively. There are certain things
that _cannot_—because of something essentially ephemeral in them—be
dealt with in the grand style.
“Such are, for instance, our modern controversies about the problem of
Sex. We may be Feminists or Anti-Feminists—what you will—and we may be
able to throw interesting light on these complicated relations, but we
cannot write of them, either in prose or poetry, in the grand style,
because the whole discussion is ephemeral; because, with all its
gravity, it is irrelevant to the things that ultimately matter!
“Such, to take another example, are our elaborate arguments about the
interpretation, ethical or otherwise, of Christian Doctrine. We can be
very entertaining, very moral, very eloquent, very subtle, in this
particular sphere; but we cannot deal with it in the ‘great style,’
because the permanent issues that really count lie out of reach of such
discussion and remain unaffected by it.
“Let me make myself quite clear. Hector and Andromache can talk to one
another of their love, of their eternal parting, of their child, and
they can do this in the great style; but if they fell into dispute over
the particular sex conventions that existed in their age, they might be
attractive still, but they would not be uttering words in the ‘great
style’....
“The test is always that of Permanence, and of immemorial human
association. It is, at bottom, nothing but human association that makes
the great style what it is. Things that have, for centuries upon
centuries, been associated with human pleasures, human sorrows, and the
great recurrent dramatic moments of our lives, can be expressed in this
style; and only such things. The great style is a sort of organic,
self-evolving work of art, to which the innumerable units of the great
human family have all put their hands. That is why so large a portion of
what is written in the great style is anonymous—like Homer and much of
the Bible and certain old ballads and songs. It is for this reason that
Walter Pater is right when he says that the important thing in Religion
is the Ceremony, the Litany, the Ritual, the Liturgical Chants, and not
the Creeds or the Commandments, or discussion upon Creed or
Commandment.... Why, of all the religious books in the world, have ‘the
Psalms of David,’ whether in Hebrew or Latin or English, touched men’s
souls and melted and consoled them? They are not philosophical. They are
not logical. They are not argumentative. They are not moral. And yet
they break our hearts with their beauty and appeal!
“It is the same with certain well-known _words_. Is it understood, for
instance, why the word ‘Sword’ is always poetical and in ‘the grand
style,’ while the word ‘Zeppelin’ or ‘Submarine’ or ‘Gatling gun’ or
‘Howitzer’ can only be introduced by Free Versifiers, who let the ‘grand
style’ go to the Devil? The word ‘Sword,’ like the word ‘Plough,’ has
gathered about it the human associations of innumerable centuries, and
it is impossible to utter it without feeling something of their pressure
and their strain. The very existence of the ‘grand style’ is a protest
against any false views of ‘progress’ and ‘evolution.’ Man may alleviate
his lot in a thousand directions; he may build up one Utopia after
another; but the grand style will remain; will remain as the ultimate
expression of those aspects of his life that _cannot change_—while he
remains Man....
“There are a certain number of solitary spirits moving among us who have
a way of troubling us by their aloofness from our controversies, our
disputes, our arguments, our ‘great problems.’ We call them Epicures,
Pagans, Heathen, Egoists, Hedonists, and Virtuosos. And yet not one of
these words exactly fits them. What they are really doing is living in
the atmosphere and the temper of ‘the grand style’—and that is why they
are so irritating and so provocative! To them the most important thing
in the world is to realize to the fullest limit of their consciousness
what it means to be born a Man. The actual drama of our mortal
existence, reduced to the simplest terms, is not enough to occupy their
consciousness and their passion. In this sphere—in the sphere of the
‘inevitable things’ of human life—everything becomes to them a
sacrament. Not a Symbol—be it noted—but a Sacrament! The food they eat;
the wine they drink; their waking and sleeping; the hesitancies and
reluctancies of their devotions; the swift anger of their recoils and
retreats; their long loyalties; their savage reversions; their sudden
‘lashings out’; their hate and their love and their affection; the
simplicities of these everlasting moods are in all of us—become, every
one of them, matters of sacramental efficiency. To regard each day, as
it dawns, as a ‘last day,’ and to make of its sunrise, of its noon, of
its sun-setting, a rhythmic antiphony to the eternal gods—this is to
live in the spirit of the ‘grand style.’ It has nothing to do with
‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ Saints may practise it, and sometimes do. Sinners
often practise it. The whole thing consists in growing vividly conscious
of those moods and events which are permanent and human, as compared
with those other moods and events which are transitory and unimportant.
“When a man or woman experiences desire, lust, hate, jealousy, devotion,
admiration, passion, they are victims of the eternal forces, that can
speak, if they will, in ‘the great style.’ When a man or woman ‘argues’
or ‘explains’ or ‘moralizes’ or ‘preaches,’ they are the victims of
accidental dust-storms, which rise from futility and return to vanity.
That is why Rhetoric, as Rhetoric, can never be in the great style. That
is why certain great revolutionary Anarchists, those who have the genius
to express in words their heroic defiance of ‘the something rotten in
Denmark,’ move us more, and assume a grander outline, than the equally
admirable, and possibly more practical, arguments of the Scientific
Socialists. It is the eternal appeal we want, to what is basic and
primitive and undying in our tempestuous human nature!
“The grand style announces and commands. It weeps and it pleads. It
utters oracles and it wrestles with angels. It never apologizes; it
never rationalizes; and it never explains. That is why the great
ineffable passages in the supreme masters take us by the throat and
strike us dumb. Deep calls unto Deep in them, and our heart listens and
is silent. To ‘do good scientific thinking’ in the cause of humanity has
its well-earned reward; but the gods ‘throw incense’ on a different
temper. The ‘fine issues’ that reach them, in their remoteness and
disdain, are the ‘fine issues’ of an antagonist worthy of their own
swift wrath, their own swift vengeance, and their own swift love....