Socialism_ you know the essence of Emma Goldman’s Anarchism. What is
there about it to cause an epidemic of terror? It is merely the highest
ideal of human conduct that has ever been evolved. Well, it is possible
to get even the prejudiced to admit this much. Nearly everyone can see
that government in its essence is tyranny; that one human being’s
authority over another is a degrading thing; that no man should have the
power to force his neighbor into a dungeon on the flimsy pretext that
punishment is a prevention and a protection; that no man should dare to
take the life of another man, on any basis whatever; that crime is
really misdirected energy and “criminal types” usually sick people who
should be treated as such; that “abnormal” people are those who have not
found their work; that people who work should have some share of their
production; that the holding of property is a source of many evils; that
possessiveness and “bargaining” are mean qualities; that co-operation
and sharing are splendid ones; that there should be an equality between
giving and taking; that nothing worth while was ever born outside of
freedom; and that men _might_ live together on this basis more
effectively than on the present one. Even your “reasonable” man will
grant you this premise; but then he plays his trump card: It may all be
very beautiful—of course it is; _but it can never happen_! Oscar Wilde
answered him in this way: “Is this Utopian? A map of the world that does
not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the
one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands
there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress
is the realization of Utopias.”
Emma Goldman believes this. She does not belong with the rank and file
of Anarchists. Cults and “isms” are too restrictive for her. “But you
are an extreme Individualist,” the Socialists tell her. “No, I am not,”
she answers them. “I hate your rigid Anglo-Saxon individualism. It is
just because I am so deeply social that I put my hope in the
individual.” It is because she hates injustice of any sort so
passionately that she adopted Anarchism as the soundest method of
combating it. If you have laws you must accept the abuses of law. Why
not be more completely simple—why keep on pretending that we need a
machinery which fosters tyrannies instead of giving freedom an
unhandicapped path to begin upon its great responsibilities? This was
the idealism upon which the American founders built—a minimum of
government, at least, when that evil seemed to become a necessity. In
her remarkable book that has just been published, Voltarine de Cleyre
discusses this phase of the matter brilliantly in a chapter called
“Anarchism and American Traditions.” There is no possibility of going
into it minutely here, except to ask those who insist upon regarding
Anarchism as an unconstructive force to read it.
These are the things Emma Goldman is trying to preach. She does not
expect to see a new order spring up in response to her vision; so the
facetious ones who poke their stale jokes at the unspeakable humor of a
communistic society might save their wit for more legitimate
provocations. All she hopes is to quicken the consciousness of those
through whom such changes will come—to improve the individual quality.
It reminds you of Comte’s suggestion, at the time when he fell
deliriously in love, that all the problems of society could be solved on
that divine principle. It is like Tolstoy’s dream prophecy—his
prediction of the time when there will be neither monogamy nor polygamy,
but simply a poetogamy under which people may live freely and
beautifully.
And so Emma Goldman continues her work, talking passionately to crowds
of people, sickened by audiences who listen merely out of curiosity,
disheartened by the vapid applause of those who make their own
incapacities the burden of their rebellion, heartbroken by the masses
who cannot respond to any ideal, cheered by the few who understand,
dedicated to an eternal hope of new values. This is the real Emma
Goldman—a visionist, if you will, but at the same time a woman with a
deep faith in the superiority of reality to imagination. How she has
lived life! How gallantly she makes the big out of the little and
accepts without complaining the perverted role which has been thrust at
her. To have seen her in her home with its hundreds of books and its
charming old pictures of Ibsen and Tolstoy and Nietzsche and Kropotkin;
to have seen her friends, her nephews and nieces offering her their high
adoration; to have watched her gigantic tenderness, her gorgeous
flinging away of self on every possible pretext; to have listened with
her to great music in a kind of cosmic hush that music is made by and
for such spirits; to have heard her, “the crucified,” talk of the ideal
she cherishes and how her expression of it has been so far below her
dream; to have compared her, an artist in life, as incapable of
spiritual vulgarity as a Rodin or a Beethoven, with a sensitiveness
which makes her almost fear beauty, with a sweetness that is
overwhelming—to compare her with the vulgarians who denounce her is to
fall into a mad rage and long to insult them desperately. I said before
that Emma Goldman was the most challenging spirit in America. But she is
so much more than that: she is many wonderful things which this article
merely touches upon, because it is impossible to express them all.
Science is after all but a reassuring and conciliatory expression
of our ignorance.—_Maeterlinck._
Poems
MAXWELL BODENHEIM
Expressions of a Child’s Face
Dawn?—no, the stunted transparency of dawn—
Color taken from the birth of a white throat
And shaken in a still cup till it gradually reaches strength
A sudden scattering of strained light—
The smile has lived and seemed to die.
Thought?—no, the invisible shudder of a perfume
Trying to leave the shadowy pain of a flesh-flower
A whisp of it whips itself away,
And leaves the rest—a cool, colorless struggle.
Sadness?—no, the growth of a pale inclination
Which knows not what it is;
Which tries to form the beginning of a swift question,
But has not yet developed trim lips.
And then what seems a smile
But is the sleeping body of a laugh.
It almost awakes, and throws out
Long breaths, in a green and yellow din.
Emotions
I
His anger was a strained yellow wire.
You leapt into it thinking to snap it,
But it flung you off silently.
II
Her happiness was too apparent—
Pleasant flesh in which you sensed heavy blood-clots.
III
Veering, weary birds were her hatreds.
They rested on you for years,
Then circled away, still weary.
IV
Her sorrows were clumsy, black bandages
Which seemed to hide wide wounds,
But only covered scratches.
To ——
You are a broad, growing sieve.
Men and women come to loosen your supple frame,
And weave another slim square into you—
Or perhaps a blue oblong, a saffron circle.
People fling their powdered souls at you:
You seem to loose them, but retain
The shifting shadow of a stain on your rigid lines.
To Handpainted Chinaware
Distorted ducks, smirking women and potshaped blossoms
Fastened to pale plates, you are dreary symbols of those who painted
you.
O ducks, you were made by women
Who sway in and out of the waters of life,
Content to catch morsels of food from birds flying overhead.
And you smirking women, were painted by men
Who unrolled little souls on plates,
Gave them faces which could not quite hide their ugliness ...
You alone almost baffle me, potshaped blossoms—
Were you fashioned by childless women, who made you the infants
Denied them by life?
Study of a Face
Her forehead is the wind-colored, sun-stilled wall of a country
church.
Trailing cloud-shudders overhead narrow it to a thin band of vague
light:
Two tarnished, exultant cerements of earth—cheeks—meet it,
And the three speak clearly, languidly.
An Old Man Humming a Song
Life was a frayed, pampered lily to him—
A lily which still clung to his gray coat,
Like an unbidden word whitening the death of a smile.
The half-smooth perfume of it touched the slanting, cambric curtain of
his soul,
And stirred it to low song.
The Spiritual Dangers of Writing Vers Libre
EUNICE TIETJENS
The spiritual dangers that beset a struggling poet are almost as
numerous as his creditors, and quite as rampant. And woe unto him who
falls a prey to any one of them! For poetry, being the immediate
reflection of the spiritual life of its author, degenerates more quickly
than almost any other form of human expression when this inner life goes
astray.
There is first of all the danger of sentimentality, an ever-present,
sticky danger that awaits patiently and imperturbably and has to be met
afresh every day. True, if the poet yields to this danger and embraces
it skillfully enough, the creditors aforementioned may sometimes be paid
and much adulation acquired into the bargain—witness Ella Wheeler
Wilcox—but it is at the price of artistic death.
There is the danger of giving the emotions too free rein, of producing,
as Arthur Davison Ficke has said in a former number of THE LITTLE
REVIEW, merely “an inarticulate cry of emotion” which moves us like “the
crying of a child.” Much of our sex poetry is of this type. On the
other hand, there is the equally present danger of becoming
over-intellectualized—of drying up and blowing away before the wind of
human vitality. Edmund Clarence Stedman went that way. Then there is the
danger of determined modernity, of resolutely setting out to be “vital”
at all costs and crystallizing into mere frozen impetuosity, as Louis
Untermeyer has done—and the other danger of dwelling professorially in
the past with John Myers O’Hara. There is too the new danger of
“cosmicality,” of which John Alford amusingly accuses our American poets
of to-day. And there are many, many other pitfalls that the unsuspecting
poet must meet and bridge before he can hope to win to the heights of
immortality.
But there seems to be a whole new set of dangers, especially virulent,
that attend the writing of _vers libre_, free verse, polyrhythmics, or
whatever else one may choose to call the free form so prevalent to-day.
These dangers are inherent in the form itself and are directly traceable
to it. For contrary to the general notion on the subject, it takes a
better balanced intellect to write good _vers libre_ than to write in
the old verse forms. It is essentially an art for the sophisticated, and
the tyro will do well to avoid it.
The first of these dangers, and the one in which all the others take
root, is a very insidious peril, and few there be who escape it. It is
the danger of being obvious.
In writing rhymed or even rhymeless poetry of a conventional rhythmical
pattern the mind is constantly obliged to sift and sort the various
images which present themselves—to test them, and turn them this way and
that, as one does pieces in a mosaic, till they at last fit more or less
perfectly into the pattern. This process, although it sometimes, owing
to the physical formation of the language, distorts the poet’s meaning a
little, has the great artistic advantage of eliminating many casual
first associations, which on careful thought are found not worth saying.
It is precisely this winnowing, weighing process which the form of free
verse lacks. Anything that comes to mind can be said at once, and with a
little instinct for rhythm, is said. The result of this mental laziness
is that the ideas expressed are often obvious.
But here a curious phenomenon of the human mind comes into play. Just as
a physically lazy man will often perform great mental exertions to avoid
moving, so the mind will frequently go to quite as great lengths to find
unusual methods of expression to conceal, even from itself, this
laziness of first thinking. The result is the attempt to cover with
words the fundamental paucity of the ideas.
There are several principal effects which may result from this. One is
brutality. A conception which, if spoken simply, is at once recognized
as trite, may if said brutally enough pass muster as surprising and
“strong.” A crude illustration of this is to be found in the recent war
poetry of “mangled forms” and “gushing entrails.” Ezra Pound furnishes
the most perfect example. Another effect is the tendency to the
grotesque. This device is more successful in deceiving the poet himself
than the other, though it has less general appeal. For it is possible,
by making a thing grotesque enough, to cover almost completely the
underlying conception. Skipwith Cannéll runs this danger, along with
lesser men. A third peril is that which besets some of the Imagistes—the
danger of reducing the idea to a minimum and relying entirely on the
sound and color of the words to carry the poem.
Still another result of the complete loosening of the reins possible in
_vers libre_ is the immediate enlargement of the ego. It is not so easy
to see why this should result, but it almost invariably does, and has
since the days of Whitman. It usually goes to-day with the effect of
brutality. The universe divides itself at once into two portions, of
which the poet is by far the greater half. “I”—“I”—“I” they say, and
again “I”—“I”—“I.” And having said it they appear to be vastly relieved.
The next step is to lay about them gallantly at every person or tendency
that has ever annoyed them. “I have been abused” they say, “I have been
neglected! You intolerable Philistines, I will get back at you!” It is
odd that it never seems to occur to these young men that they can only
hit those persons who read them, and that every person who reads them is
at least a prospective friend. Those who neglect them they can never
reach—and slapping one’s friends is an unprofitable amusement.
Examples of these unfortunate spiritual results of abandoning oneself
too recklessly to the free verse form are numerous. James Oppenheim’s
latest volume, _Songs for the New Age_—although it is in many ways an
excellent work and deserves endorsement by all who really belong to the
new age and are not merely accidentally alive to-day—nevertheless shows
in places the tendency to obviousness and slack work.
More flagrant examples are to be found elsewhere. Take for instance
Orrick Johns. Here are some stanzas from his long poem, _Second Avenue_,
which took the prize in Mitchell Kennerley’s _Lyric Year_:
“How often does the wild-bloom smell
Over the mountained city reach
To hold the tawny boys in spell
Or wake the aching girls to speech?
The clouds that drift across the sea
And drift across the jagged line
Of mist-enshrouded masonry—
Hast thou forgotten these are thine?
That drift across the jagged line
Which you, my people, reared and built
To be a temple and a shrine
For gods of iron and of gilt—
Aye, these are thine to heal thy heart,
To give thee back the thrill of Youth,
To seek therein the gold of Art,
And seek the broken shapes of Truth.”
The same Orrick Johns wrote this blatant bit of free verse in _Poetry_ a
few months later. Both the paucity of ideas and the enlarged ego are
very well shown here:
No man shall ever read me,
For I bring about in a gesture what they cannot fathom in a life;
Yet I tell Bob and Harry and Bill—
It costs me nothing to be kind;
If I am a generous adversary, be not deceived, neither be devoted—
It is because I despise you.
Yet if any man claim to be my peer I shall meet him,
For that man has an insolence that I like;
I am beholden to him.
I know the lightning when I see it,
And the toad when I see it ...
I warn all pretenders.
But to see the tendencies of which we have spoken in their most
exaggerated form it is necessary to go to Ezra Pound, the young
self-expatriated American who wails because “that ass, my country, has
not employed me.” His earlier work was clean-cut, sensitive poetry, some
of it very beautiful. This for example:
PICCADILLY
Beautiful, tragical faces,
Ye that were whole, and are so sunken;
And, O ye vile, ye that might have been loved,
That are so sodden and drunken,
Who hath forgotten you?
O wistful, fragile faces, few out of many!
The gross, the coarse, the brazen,
God knows I cannot pity them, perhaps, as I should do,
But, oh, ye delicate, wistful faces,
Who hath forgotten you?
This, from _Blast_, the new English quarterly, is the latest from the
same hand. The capitals are his own. The contrast needs no comment:
SALUTATION THE THIRD
Let us deride the smugness of “The Times”:
GUFFAW!
So much the gagged reviewers,
It will pay them when the worms are wriggling in their vitals;
These were they who objected to newness,
HERE are their TOMB-STONES.
They supported the gag and the ring:
A little black BOX contains them.
SO shall you be also,
You slut-bellied obstructionist,
You sworn foe to free speech and good letters,
You fungus, you continuous gangrene.
* * * * *
I have seen many who go about with supplications,
Afraid to say how they hate you
HERE is the taste of my BOOT,
CARESS it, lick off the BLACKING.
To attempt to lay the entire onus of so flagrant a spiritual and
cerebral degeneration to the writing of _vers libre_ alone is of course
impossible. But the tendency is clear. Fortunately, however, we are not
all Ezra Pounds and there are still poets balanced enough to appreciate
these dangers and to make of free verse the wonderful vehicle it can be
in the hands of a genius.
Union
RABINDRANATH TAGORE
(_Translated from the original Bengali by Basanta Koomar Roy, author
of “Rabindranath Tagore: The Poet and His Personality.”_)
Beloved, every part of my being craves for the corresponding part of
yours. My heart is heavy with its own restlessness, and it yearns to
fall senseless on yours.
My eyes linger on your eyes, and my lips long to attain salvation by
losing their existence on your lips.
* * * * *
My thirsty heart is crying bitterly for the unveilment of your celestial
form.
* * * * *
The heart is deep in the ocean of being, and I sit by the forbidding
shore and moan for ever.
But to-night, beloved, I shall enter the mysteries of existence with a
bosom heaving with love supreme, and my entire being shall find its
eternal union in thine.
War, the Only Hygiene of the World
F. T. MARINETTI
(_Translated from the French by Anne Simon_)
I want to explain to you the difference between Futurism and Anarchism.
Anarchism, denying the infinite principle of human evolution, suspends
its impulse at the ideal threshold of universal peace, and before the
stupid paradise of interlocked embraces in the open fields and midst the
waving of palms.
We, the Futurists, on the contrary, affirm as one of our absolute
principles the continuous growth and the unlimited physiological and
intellectual progress of Man.
We aim beyond the hypothesis of the amicable fusion of the different
races, and we admit the only possible hygiene of the World: War.
The distant goal of the anarchistic conception (a kind of sweet
tenderness, sister to baseness) appears to us as an impure gangrene
preluding the agony of the races.
The anarchists are satisfied in attacking the political, judicial, and
economical branches of the social tree. We strive to do much more than
that. We want to uproot and burn its very deepest roots; those that are
planted in the brain of man, and are called:
Mania for order.
The desire for the least effort.
The fanatical adoration of the family.
The undue stress laid on sleep, and the repast at a fixed hour.
Cowardly acquiescence or quietism.
Love for the antique and the old.
The unwise preservation of everything that is wicked and sick.
The horror of the new.
Contempt for youth.
Contempt for rebellious minorities.
The veneration for time, for accumulated years, for the dead, and for
the dying.
The instinctive need of laws, chains, and impediments.
Horror of violence.
Horror of the unknown and the new.
Fear of a total liberty.
Have you never seen an assemblage of young revolutionaries or
anarchists?... _Eh bien_: there is no more discouraging spectacle.
You would observe that the urgent, immediate mania, in these red souls,
is to deprive themselves quickly of their vehement independence, to give
the government of their party to the oldest of their number; that is to
say, to the greatest opportunist, to the most prudent, in a word, to the
one who having already acquired a little force, and a little authority,
will be fatally interested in conserving the present state of things, in
calming violence, in opposing all desire for adventure, for risk, and
heroism.
This new president, while guiding them in the general discussion with
apparent equity, shall lead them like sheep to the fold of his personal
interest.
Do you still believe seriously in the usefulness or desirability of
conventions of revolutionary spirits?
Content yourself then, with choosing a director, or, better still, a
leader of discussion. Choose for that post the youngest amongst you, the
least known, the least important; only his role must never supersede the
simple distribution of the word, with an absolute equality of time that
he shall control, the watch in his hand.
But that which digs the deepest ditch between the futuristic and
anarchistic conception, is the great problem of love, with its great
tyranny of sentiment and lust, from which we want to extricate humanity.
Genius-worship is the infallible sign of an uncreative
age.—_Clive Bell._
The least that the state can do is to protect people who have
something to say that may cause a riot. What will not cause a
riot is probably not worth saying.—_Clive Bell._
Noise
GEORGE BURMAN FOSTER
There is a discovery, by no means pleasing or edifying, that the student
makes as he broadly surveys the history of humanity. All the great
turning-points of that history seem to be inwardly associated with
violent upheavals and fearful revolutions. And of all these revolutions,
it may be doubted whether history records any one on so large a scale as
that which confronts us under the name of Christianity, in the
transition from ancient to mediæval ecclesiastical culture. It was not a
single Crucified One that gave Christianity the sacred symbol of its
religion; unnumbered thousands—mostly slaves—breathed out their poor
lives on martyrs’ crosses. The old culture went down in rivers of
blood—not too figuratively meant—and a new arose, or, better, was
created. Now, what is true of this most important revolution of our
antecedent cultural life is true also, in corresponding measure, of
every new “becoming” in the history of peoples. No state, no church, no
social form, has ever arisen but that the path of the new life has
passed over ruins and graves.
Must this be so? Must it be eternally so? Is it a thing of historical
inevitability, is it even a law of the very order of the world itself?
The answer—first answer, at all events—is, Yes! To affirm itself, to
persist as life,—this belongs as nothing else does to life’s very
nature. What newly arises negates what has already arisen. All that is
living pronounces a sentence of death upon all that has been alive and
that now sets itself against the new life. Accordingly, we are wont to
call life a struggle for existence. Old Greeks coined a phrase, _Polemos
pater panton_: war is the father of all things. The right to life is the
right of the strong.
In view of these things, may we fairly raise the question as to whether
there are exceptions to so universal a rule? Were we to set up a
different right, would it not be the right of the weak? Would it not be
to make the sick and the infirm masters over the well and the strong?
Would it not be to preach a decadent morality as do all the
pusillanimous and the hirelings who beg for the protection of their
weakness because they do not have the strength to drive and force their
way through life?