all pettiness. She liberated emotions that Wagner alone can touch, when
adequately interpreted. Here is no prima donna, but an artist who sings.
Her voice is a brimming-over of loveliness; her emotional power becomes
inevitable, for she sings in phrases of beauty—a living beauty that
moves to tears. Hers is an art that pervades and satisfies ... something
to be treasured.
Vocalists are generally peacocks—usually moulting. It is a great event
to discover a singing artist, for when the lack is neither a matter of
intelligence nor of intensity, it often happens that the musician uses a
voice that could never perjure itself as beautiful. Julia Claussen gives
a feeling of utter security. No sensibility is wounded or left asleep.
Samaroff is not to be blamed, individually; although what she represents
is not an art, but a menace, for it is always applauded, copied, and
taught to the youth. Sonority and power in tone-masses are never
obtained by blows upon the piano-keys, or by waving the arms over the
head. The piano is capable of infinite shading and many kinds of tone,
from mighty chords and fierce tumult to delicate tonal weavings and
vague states of calm, from crystalline brilliance to low-sung intimate
melodies; and there are certain artists now living who listen closely,
hear these strange secrets, and bring them out for other ears. Olga
Samaroff, apparently, like her Chicago audience, is aware chiefly of the
difference between loud and soft.
HERMAN SCHUCHERT.
Book Discussion
A Peter Pan Lover
_Young Earnest, by Gilbert Cannan._ [_D. Appleton and Company, New
York_]
A man “who is submissive to his emotions is not in power over
himself”—so wrote Spinoza; and such a man is René Fourmy, the Peter Pan
lover of Gilbert Cannan’s latest novel, who never grew up into the fact
that he should not have everything he wanted. After a boyhood and youth
of almost unconscious surrender to environment, he suddenly rebelled
against the pretense that surrounded him and gave himself up as
completely to his emotions as he had hitherto yielded himself to
external circumstances. He had been educated to be a professor and had
married an ambitious girl without having awakened to the meaning of
life, love, or passion. His first great disillusionment came with his
honeymoon, when instead of finding in his bride “the new wonders and
sweet joy” of fulfilled love, they together “attained nothing but heat,
hunger, and distress.”
When he could bear this relationship no longer he fled to London, cast
in his lot with Ann, a girl of the slums, and became a taxi driver. Here
he was happy for a time because of his savage hunger for real things, no
matter if they were degrading. The crude, harsh reality of this life
fascinated him until he discovered that Ann’s love was no more the
fulfillment of his dreams than his wife’s had been; only its honesty had
made it endurable. When he discovers that Ann is to have a child—an
unwanted, unexpected child that will be like a chain binding their two
lives—he is driven to a second rebellion and the ultimate rediscovery of
his first sweetheart. Ann shows her anger in the vulgar, uncontrolled
outbursts natural to such a woman, and finally disappears to Canada,
leaving René free to go to Cathleen. We are given to understand that at
last René has attained to the happiness of his love dream, but nothing
Mr. Cannan has told us warrants the belief that he might not suddenly
discover that Cathleen too falls short of his vision of what real love
should be and start out madly once more in pursuit of he knows not what.
If he and Cathleen do finish their lives together it is safe to gamble
that it will not be because René has learned to adjust himself to life
but because he has met his Waterloo in Cathleen, a clever woman who
wanted him and understood how to keep him.
René was a rebel against the conventions which interfered with his
happiness, a dreamer, and a seeker after the Holy Grail of love. His
attempts to find happiness were utterly selfish, yet honest, so that our
quarrel is not with his morals but with his egotism. He never awoke to
the responsibilities of life, never felt remorse for the sufferings that
he caused others, never grew up to the consciousness that life was
intended for something higher than the fulfillment of his enthusiastic
visions, but blundered into more or less freedom where another man,
perhaps equally rebellious but more scrupulous, would quietly maintain
his outward equanimity and let conventional spiders weave their webs all
about him.
Quarrels there will be and condemnation arising from _Young Earnest_,
but will they be because readers think Mr. Cannan does not understand
whereof he writes or because he is audacious enough to describe a man
who would not accept shams? We may not like the subject any better than
we would a painting of a maimed or ugly person, yet that objection does
not destroy its art, and art it has, in an unusual degree. Only a
skilled writer could depict a man doing sensual things without being a
sensualist, and René was just the opposite of that. All his sins were of
the spirit rather than of the flesh. His ambition in life was to find
happiness at any cost. He desired love as many desire money and with as
little consideration for others, and although hopelessly at odds with
conventional standards and prudish morals it seems to me that the study
of Young Earnest’s efforts to understand life and his own self is rather
a glorious attempt, and that Gilbert Cannan has been decidedly
courageous to try to reduce to printed terms the emotions, aspirations,
cravings, and blunders of a young man too honest to accept deceits, yet
too cowardly (or perhaps too brave) to stand by his blunders. Not a
pretty story, of course, but life is seldom pretty when it is frank, and
his stumbling “from one love to another” is not the expression of
sensuality but rather a spiritual attempt to live out the best that was
in him.
The book has many passages of beauty, many expressions of keen
philosophy which seem to indicate that the author’s soul belongs to the
divine side of life—not to its sordidness. So wonderfully does he
reproduce mediocrity, middle-class respectability, and the vital if less
commendable phases of Mitcham Mews that one is led to believe that all
of life—from visions to slums—is unfolding to him, and that no matter
what his subject, his pen will paint a picture that rings true. One
could hardly find a more subtle task than has been accomplished in
_Young Earnest_—that of painting a man who was not a sensualist doing
sensual things. That Mr. Cannan knew precisely what he was doing is
revealed in the words that he puts into the mouth of one of his
characters who describes René as being a man “simply inappropriate in a
community of creatures who live by cunning.”
M. A. S.
Nietzsche in Fiction
_The Encounter, by Anne Douglas Sedgewick._ [_The Century
Company, New York_]
Nietzsche—jealous, dyspeptic, wonderful—lives in these pages so vividly
that the illusion of biography is attained. His dreams, his faults, his
fears stand forth. Light is focussed upon the great thinker. Ludwig
Wehlitz, as he is called in the novel, loves a young and beautiful girl
from America—Persis Fenamy. He is rivalled in his love by two other
Germans, disciples of his, but very different personally. Persis, who is
a combination of loveliness and good sense, proves to be a difficult,
even impossible, problem for the three philosophers. Their wooing is the
basis of the work.
Such a story achieves originality at one stroke; and it is fair to say
that the author’s development of this dangerous theme is fully equal to
her daring. She catches the high-lights upon the soul of this curious
Titan; she constructs the man as he must actually have been, and places
him in circumstances of her own arrangement. His imperative genius and
his characteristic childishness work out consistently together. Pedants
and long-winded scholars, who know not the poet in their god, will argue
that the real Nietzsche neither could nor would have waxed passionate
over a lovely woman ... the book is not for them. Anne Douglas Sedgewick
sees deep and imagines clearly, and her findings are authentic. Her
lesser people, notably Wehlitz’s untidy Italian friend, Eleanora, and
the inscrutable Mrs. Fenamy, are created with the same splendid skill
and vision. This writer’s realism is not the vaunted “crude and
ruthless” variety; for, although it displays life in a plain and natural
manner, there is in it an intense emotional quality which always evades
the camera or the microscope. _The Encounter_ is altogether worthy.
HERMAN SCHUCHERT.
Joseph Campbell
_Irishry, by Joseph Campbell._ [_Maunsel and Company, London_]
Joseph Campbell holds an enviable position among the present-day Irish
bards. His poems are big, vital themes, readable by every intelligent
person. In his volume of lyrics—for he possesses to a remarkable degree
the enchanted tongue—he takes you into every walk of life in Ireland.
And what goes in regard to life and occupations in England and Ireland
holds good in this country and elsewhere. He does not shun the
pig-killer, the quarry-man, the mid-wife, the unfrocked, or disgraced
priest, the blind man, the osier seller, or even the ragman. The
characters are not put before you as repugnance personified; he makes
you sympathize, admire, and even love them. You could call it a drama of
characters; each one unfolded being a separate act.
How beautiful is _The Shepherd_. You can see the stars, and clearly
comprehend the beauty of the simile in which he compares the shepherd to
the man of Chaldea. The picture of the pasture of eld looms forth like a
marvelous mosaic or mural painting:
THE SHEPHERD
Dark against the stars
He stands: the cloudy bars
Of nebulae, the constellations ring
His forehead like a king.
The ewes are in the fold:
His consciousness is old
As his, who in Chaldea long ago
Penned his flock, and brooded so.
_The Shepherd_ can justly be compared to Sir Richard Lovelace’s _To
Lucretia on Going to War_. They have in common the same metallic
sweetness. A companion piece in both strength of beauty and lyrical
qualities is _The Mother_:
The hearthstone broods in shadow,
And the dark hills are old,
But the child clings to the mother,
And the corn springs in the mould.
And Dana moves on Luachra,
And makes the world anew:
The cuckoo’s cry in the meadow,
The moon, and the earthly dew.
In _The Blind Man at the Fair_ there is a truly masterly imagining of
the blind one’s agony.
O to be blind!
To know the darkness that I know.
The stir I hear is the empty wind,
The people idly come and go.
. . . . . . . . . .
Last night the moon of Lammas shined,
Rising high and setting low;
But light is nothing to the blind—
All, all is darkness where they go.
In _The Laborer_ he reminds one of Whitman in lyrics. Here he speaks of
the open roads, the blue hills, the tranquil skies, and the serene
heavens. A beautiful passage from _The Whelk-Gatherer_ reads:
Where the dim sea-line
Is a wheel unbroken;
Where day dawns on water,
And night falls on wind,
And the fluid elements
Quarrel forever.
What satire, profusely laden with bitter irony is contained in _The
Orangeman_:
His faith, ’Sixteen-Ninety;
His love, none; his hope,
That hell may one day
Get the soul of the Pope.
. . . . . . . . . .
Lives in beauty, with Venus
And Psyche in white,
And the Trojan Laocoön
For his spirit’s delight.
Last, but not least, is _The Old Woman_:
As a white candle
In a holy place,
So is the beauty
Of an aged face.
As the spent radiance
Of the winter sun,
So is the woman
With her travail done.
Her brood gone from her,
And her thought as still
As the waters
Under the ruined mill.
The Reader Critic
_Will Levington Comfort, Kingsville, Ontario_:
I have just had the January number.
I feel as if I had found my companions. You who rejoiced in Caroline
Branson and Margaret Swawite will know what one means by finding his
companions.
And when I came to the line of George Soule’s—“I am the greatest
anarchist of you all—” the fact is I had settled for a nap by the fire,
and here I am by the machine instead.
I am proud of you and glad to be in the world with you all. I am sure
you must feel the same about each other—for you must have been very
lonely in a world that has lost the art of playing—you who play so well.
I have looked long for the new voices; of late I have put every faith in
the conviction that they were just behind. You will have everything in
ten years. No voice from Germany, England, or France—all must come from
you. The only thing that can possibly hurt you is Beauduin and his kind.
They are poison and vision is not with them. I think you must belong to
that generation now of the twenties—that I have felt behind me so long
and so wonderfully. Again and again I have written about this new race
of Americans—there is a touch of it in the _January Craftsman_ which I
wish you would read.
You are singing it. You are of it. You ask nothing—you sing, you play.
There are moments in which I caught you (you of the little book) in that
wondrous naivete which is the loss of the love of self—that cosmic
simplicity of the workmen of to-morrow.
How dreadful is the old—
“And then O night, deliberate, unlovely—”
But the new which you voice, and must always voice—
“In the inspired improvisation of love—”
I have read your January poems to all who come to the study. I have
looked with even more delight at old Walt—who opened the door for (y)our
generation—the dear old pioneer. He helped to make possible, too, our
acceptance of the Zarathustra man—the pillar of fire of our transition,
but Walt is the pillar of cloud by day.
I’m sure you’ll see my zeal for you. I have plugged through fifteen
years in which every ideal of workmanship has sunk visibly in America
until it can sink no lower. The great crowd is forgetting even how to
read. It has lost the cohering line of expression—a series of broken
pictures is enough to hold its eye. But the end is reached with the
war—and the new generation which will witness the tragedy of greater
human waste perhaps than the one before it, also contains the superb
individuals—the few—such individuals as _we_ never dreamed of in our
twenties. I want some time to do for you a bit on this generation of
mine (the bleakest in the world). The age of advertising.... Imagine a
race that can only point to Herrick and London and Atherton and Dreiser
and Watts—weakened solutions of Zola and Thackeray—except London who was
great and open-souled—but lost his way. So I laugh and think of myself
as born out of due time, and though just past midstream, I want to
belong to the twenties again. I believe that you can become the heart of
our new age of letters—if you are true; and I know you will not
encounter the bleakness and the killing terror that we met, for the way
is preparing momentarily. The glory of it all will come from your being
yourselves—as you are so splendidly now. But the prison-house will close
on some, and others will hear the call of the markets and others the
decadence of Europe’s withered loins—and that is why I venture to ask
you to hold fast to the dream—not to listen to anyone—for you have
_emerged_ truly.... Remember there are no others but you in the
world—you alone have touched the new harmony—and it had to come from
America. The New Republic is not doing it, nor _The Masses_, nor _The
Unpopular_. Though they are great—they are of the old. Just to be true
to your vision is all Heaven asks, and believe me one with you. I am
just beginning, too. I want to belong—although I have ten years start.
Great good to you—all.
P. S. We have all loved the little milliner’s hat, and some of us have
wept over it.
ANOTHER NOTE ON PAROXYSM IN POETRY
_Rex Lampman, Portland, Oregon_:
Quoting Mr. Edward J. O’Brien’s instructive article in THE LITTLE REVIEW
for January: “Paroxysm is the poetic expression of that modern spirit
which finds its most notable expression in the sculpture of Meunier, the
polyphonic music of Strauss, the philosophy of Bergson, and the American
skyscraper.... It aims to attain and express, with the quick, keen vigor
and strength of steel, the whirling, audacious, burning life of our
epoch in all the paroxysm of the New Beauty.”
Quoting the dictionary, a paroxysm is “any sudden, violent and
uncontrollable action or emotion; a convulsion or fit.”
The dictionary definition seems more nearly to apply to inspirational
poetic effort, such as Poe had in mind when he advanced his theory that
a long poem is an artistic impossibility; such an effort is as necessary
to any truly poetic performance. Mr. O’Brien’s definition refers to a
particular kind of poetic effort, which, to achieve its aims, also must
be inspirational, and finds its inspiration in “modern industrial and
mechanical effort,” rather than in all creation, free field for the poet
of no prescribed and particular province.
I am totally unacquainted with the sculpture of Meunier, almost as
innocent of knowledge of Strauss’s music, and of Bergson I know but a
little, but I have seen the American skyscraper clutching its black
steel fingers toward the blue, amid the rat-tat-tat-tat-tat of the
pneumatic riveting hammers. Here in Portland the skyscraper is
pre-empting one by one our views of the evergreen hills and the snowy
mountains. Perhaps the other things Mr. O’Brien enumerates as paroxyst
manifestations are shutting off our views of the eternal verities of
life and the silent splendors of the soul—or rather, perhaps they
symbolize the materialistic ideals that are walling us away from the
things of the spirit.
If we accept these paroxyst manifestations as art, and keep our eyes
fixed on them, surely the infinite horizon, with its never-conquered
boundaries always beckoning out and on, is lost to us.
But do we accept them? Beyond the skyscrapers are the quiet hills, and
however we throw ourselves into the vortices of cities, however often we
go down among the red-mouthed, roaring furnaces, however we may
acquiesce in, and even exult in and exalt, the materialistic horrors
that multiply around us like monsters in a steamy primal fen, deep in
ourselves we know that all these things are vain and vanishing, and that
the actual and enduring lie outside and beyond, or within ourselves. The
skyscraper is a monument to the Moloch of Rent. The furnaces are those
of Baal, in which we give our souls as well as those of our children for
sacrifice.
“The evolution of poetry is to be as rapid and terrible henceforth as
material evolution,” says M. Nicholas Beauduin, as quoted by Mr.
O’Brien. No, the gods will not forbid it, for it is their way to let
things run their courses.
Doubtless there were singers, when Babylon was building, who insisted
that a new poetry was necessary to celebrate the city, with its walls
and towers and the efficient wonder of its sewer system, if it had one.
Perhaps these poets, blinking in the glare of the furnaces and confused
by the thunder of the shops whence issued the swords and spears and
war-chariots, said to each other, “These are the supremest things, the
worth-while things, and we must sing of them or be out of date.” And a
paroxyst school was born.
But always the heart of man has yearned toward things other than the
works of his hands. When the walls and towers and spears and chariots
have returned to the earth from which they were fashioned, there still
endured the love for those other things, and the joy in their artistic
expression.
The springtime, banal as it is as a poetic subject, will remain forever
more pleasing to the singer and his audience than can any paroxysm, of
however “scientific technique,” proclaiming in “swift, hurtling, dynamic
rhythms” the clamor and clangor of an armor-plate factory or the din and
danger of a textile-mill. The earth is our mother, and hers are our
deepest yearnings, first and last. “She waits for each and all.”
And if the paroxysts seek for power—for power that overcomes and
subdues, that smites suddenly or conquers slowly, and recreates again
the same—let them look aside from their banging machinery, from all
materialistic illusion—from “the poetry contained in modern cities,
locomotives, aeroplanes, dreadnoughts and submarines; in a stock
exchange, a Wall street or a wheat pit—and behold the power and the
marvel, beyond all “scientific marvels,” of Nature, singing slow or fast
as suits her business, chanting her inevitable rhythms through the ages,
taking back into her patient bosom all the marring excrescence that man
for a little while has reared thereon. What is New York or Pittsburg but
an itching pimple on the face of the earth? There is much outside
incorporate limits, and beyond the sound of mill-whistles and the scream
of trains. The earth is scarce disturbed as yet.
“My love is like a red, red rose”—the same song that sang the enraptured
Solomon, or whoever it was that indited the Canticle—will, I believe,
outlast any paroxysm which records a “cinematographic vision of modern
life.” This is possibly the idea of the paroxysts themselves, they to
sing anew as the occasion demands, and keep their product, like that of
the movies, down-to-now. But though the words of the love-song perish,
some man will sing it again, for joy at sight of his beloved, when
springtime urges on the rose. Sappho sang of love, and men search the
sea-floor for her fragments.
However, if the paroxysts wish to see their notions expressed in proper
relation to all things else, let them read Walt Whitman, who had room
for everything, as he lustily proclaimed, in his sturdy chants.
The New Beauty: is there any such thing? Why the adjective?
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