Sturge Moore (Houghton Mifflin). A letter from the publishers suggests
that “like Noyes and Masefield, T. Sturge Moore may have a message to
American lovers of poetry.” I am an American lover of poetry and an
eager one; therefore, I was hopeful; but I am oppressed by the
obligation of doing justice to the initial poem in the book, viz.: _The
Sea is Kind_, because I cannot tell at all what it is about. Several
people, by name Evarne and Plexaura, females, and Menaleas and Eucritos,
males, seem to be talking high talk by the edge of the sea—about ships
and storms and nymphs and kindred things. Evarne speaks at great length
in rough pentameters, quoting others more obscure, if possible, than
herself.
The handsome scowler smiled.
Then with a royal gesture of content
Addressed our wonder.
* * * * *
“But devastation from mine inroads stretches
“Across Euphrates further than they dare.
“The industrious Ninevite, the huckster grey
“With watching scored tale lengthen down his wall
“Beneath his hatred Median debtor’s name,
“Dread me, and hang near casement, over door,
“To guard each southward-facing aperture,
“Rude effigies smaller than this of me.—
“Charm bootless ’gainst my veering pillared dust
“Which chokes each sluice in vainly watered gardens,
“Dessicates the velvet prudency of roses,
“And leaves green gummy tendrils like to naught
“But ravelled dry and dusty ends of cord”;
and so on for a long, long while. It may be wonderful; I dare say it is.
The last two-thirds of the volume is taken up with short poems arranged
in groups addressed to various persons—Tagore, Yeats, and Moore, among
them. There is more clarity here. One discerns an autobiographic
wistfulness in these stanzas entitled: _A Poet in the Spring Regrets
Having Wed So Late in Life_.
Some things, that we shall never know,
Are eloquent today,
Belittling our experience, though
We loved and were gay:
For those, whose younger hands are free
With a body not their own,
Taste delicacies of intimacy
Which we have not known.
Primrose, narcissus, daffodil,
In sudden April plenty,
Flourish as tender fancies thrill
Spouses at twenty!
There seems something strangely improper about this, considering the
strict propriety of the theme.
One group of two is addressed to Charles Ricketts. _The Serpent_ begins
Hail Pytho; thou lithe length of gleaming plates!
and _The Panther_ thus:
Consider now the Panther, such a beast.
One question addressed to the Panther is:
Dost, cloyed by rich meats spicy as the south,
Expose thy fevered palate to the cool,
Which, like snow melting in an emperor’s mouth,
Helps make excess thy life’s ironic rule?
Consider now Sturge Moore, our bewilderment in trying to ascertain what
you wish us to think about such things as these, and consider too a
transposition of the first line of a well-known poem about a Tiger, to
read, “Consider now the Tiger.”
The group to Yeats has one called _The Phantom of a Rose_. An
explanatory footnote tells us that a girl returning from a ball drops a
rose from her bosom and dreams that a youth, the perfect emanation of
the flower, rises and invites her to dance.
She ached to rise, she yearned to speak,
She strove to smile, but proved too weak;
As one in quicksand neck-deep,
Wild with the will, has no power to leap;
Her limbs like a sunken ferry-boat
Lay logged with sleep, and could not float.
She had danced too often at the ball,
She had fluttered, nodded, and smiled too much.
Tears formed in her heart: they did not fall.
* * * * *
He rose, and danced a visible song;
With rhythmic gesture he contended
Against her trance; and proved so strong
That the grapes of his thought wore the bloom of his mood,
While her soul tasted and understood.
“Her limbs like a sunken ferry-boat.” A happy simile! We recognize the
sensation.
In _Judith_, one of the group to Moore, a vigorous note is sounded. This
is good, and maybe the rest is too; I do not know. It rolls above my
head.
_The Spirit of Life_, a series of nine essays by Mowry Saben (Mitchell
Kennerley), is the kind of book that makes me savagely controversial and
then cross for heeding it at all. Its platitudinous optimism meanders
along through some two hundred and fifty pages under various chapter
headings: Nature, Morals, Sex, Heroes, etc. The first sentence is:
“There are many great Truths that can be expressed only by means of
paradox”; and the last, “If life means nothing, if the universe means
nothing, then reform is only an illusory word, which has come to confuse
us upon the highway of Despair; but if in our highest ideals we may find
the real meaning of our personal lines, because they are the
quintessence of the spiritual universe, whose avatars we should be,
there is nothing too glorious for the heart of man to conceive.” All in
between is just like that.
All persons, and there are many, who are determined willy nilly to
believe the world a nice place; who, confronted with the unlovely, the
stark, gaping and horrid, cast down their eyes exclaiming “It is not
there,” will take solid comfort in _The Spirit of Life_. It is like the
millions of sermons droned out one day in seven all over the land to
patient folk who no longer know why they come nor why they stay to hear.
But this is a review, not a diatribe—so “consider now” the Spirit.
The first essay is called _Nature_. It quotes freely from Peter Bell,
and also reprints something about tongues in trees and sermons in
stones. Turning the leaves we catch the names of Burroughs, Whitman, and
Thoreau. Toward the end is this:
Everything exists for him who is great enough to envisage it. The
life that now is reveals man as the crowning glory of Nature, the
goal of evolution. In the end the earth does but shelter our
bones, not our thoughts and aspirations.
Skipping the rest, we turn quickly to _Sex_, hoping something from the
vitality of the theme, and come to this:
To attack Sex as one of the joys of life would be foolish and
deservedly futile.... I am certain that sex is a sweetener of the
cup of life, but one must not therefore infer that there can
never be too much sweetening, for there can be, even to the point
of danger from spiritual diabetes.
Immortal phrase, “Spiritual diabetes.” Several pages of this essay are
devoted to episodes in the life of insects, all pointing a painful
lesson to man:
... and there are spiders doomed to be eaten by the female as
soon as they have demonstrated their masculinity. Thus are we
taught how little permanence is possessed by an organization
which yields only the instinct of passionate desire for sex.
Here is boldness,—
I cannot indorse the ascetic ideal that holds the love of man for
woman to be but a snare for the spirit. The great poetry of Dante
alone is sufficient to refute so baseless a claim.
Why quote further? There are indubitably certain good things in the
book, but they are by Goethe, Carlyle, Emerson, Dante, Shakespeare,
Whitman, et al.
A. M.
An Unacademic Literary Survey
_Modern English Literature_: From Chaucer to the Present Day, by G.
H. Mair. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]
Good histories of English literature are rare, and Mr. Mair’s book
should accordingly be given a warm welcome, for it combines brevity with
comprehensiveness of treatment in a very unusual manner. Mr. Mair not
only writes well and knows his subject, but he seems instinctively to
know what his readers will want—and he supplies it.
For instance, we do not remember that popular histories of English
literature bother to tell such a detail as how the chronological order
of Shakespeare’s plays is determined, but Mr. Mair’s telling of that
will show the layman just what literary scholarship means, and in
conjunction with his other remarks on our knowledge of Shakespeare it
will rescue the uninformed from the chance of falling into such errors
as the Baconian theory.
The book, however, is not one of higher and textual criticism and
chronology. It is a work of appreciation, and the appreciation is that
of a modern man. It is obvious that Chaucer might be treated in a manner
quite alien to the interests of the man of today who is not a scholar,
but the treatment of his work which ends in joining his hands to those
of Charles Dickens as workers in a kindred quest is one that is well
calculated to persuade even the philistine that Chaucer is a figure of
passable interest to him.
It is the mark of the live man to recognize genius, and the manner in
which Mr. Mair treats the genius of that great poet, John Donne, is in
vivid contrast to the way in which it is usually treated in histories of
English literature. For example:
Very different ... is the closely packed style of Donne, who,
Milton apart, is the greatest English writer of the century,
though his obscurity has kept him out of general reading. No
poetry in English, not even Browning’s, is more difficult to
understand. The obscurity of Donne and Browning proceed from such
similar causes that they are worth examining together. In both,
as in the obscure passages in Shakespeare’s later plays,
obscurity arises not because the poet says too little, but
because he attempts to say too much. He huddles a new thought on
the one before it, before the first has had time to express
itself; he sees things or analyzes emotions so swiftly and subtly
himself that he forgets the slower comprehension of his readers;
he is for analyzing things far deeper than the ordinary mind
commonly can. His wide and curious knowledge finds terms and
likenesses to express his meaning unknown to us; he sees things
from a dozen points of view at once and tumbles a hint of each
separate vision in a heap out on to the page; his restless
intellect finds new and subtler shades of emotion and thought
invisible to other pairs of eyes, and cannot, because speech is
modeled on the average of our intelligences, find words to
express them; he is always trembling on the brink of the
inarticulate. All this applies to both Donne and Browning, and
the comparison could be pushed farther still. Both draw the
knowledge which is the main cause of their obscurity from the
bypaths of mediævalism. Browning’s _Sordello_ is obscure because
he knows too much about mediæval Italian history: Donne’s
_Anniversary_ because he is too deeply read in mediæval
scholasticism and speculation. Both make themselves more
difficult to the reader who is familiar with the poetry of their
contemporaries by the disconcerting freshness of their point of
view. Seventeenth-century love poetry was idyllic and idealist;
Donne’s is passionate and realistic to the point of cynicism. To
read him after reading Browne and Johnson is to have the same
shock as reading Browning after Tennyson. Both poets are salutary
in the strong and biting antidote they bring to sentimentalism in
thought and melodious facility in writing. They are corrective of
lazy thinking and lazy composition.
Another feature in which this book differs from others of its kind is
that the author is not afraid to bring the record down to the work of
his contemporaries, and the struggles of Mr. Shaw with the bourgeois
world, and the era opened by M. J. Synge and the Irish literary
renascence, are here sympathetically dealt with.
L. J.
Overemphasized Purity
_Love’s Legend_, by Fielding Hall. [Henry Holt and Company, New
York.]
With a somewhat overemphasized regard for purity, Fielding Hall
approaches the narration of this honeymoon trip down a Burmese river.
The novel—if such a dissertation on the early marriage state could be
called a novel—is told in rather peculiar fashion, by the man and woman
alternately, at first, and later on with the help of two more people.
The man is prone to burst forth into fairy tales to explain every point
of argument to Lesbia. He tells her of a beautiful princess who was
blindfolded and kept within an enclosed garden that she might never know
the ways of man.
“They told her that the bandage made her see more clearly than if
her eyes were free. For they had painted images upon the inside
of her bandage and told her they were real.”
Silence.
“And she believed it. Then came a Prince. He wooed the Princess
and he won her. So he took her with him out of her garden. They
came into the world and passed into a forest. There they were
quite alone.
“Take off your bandage,” said the Prince. “Look at the world and
me.”
“I am afraid,” she sighed; “the world is evil.”
“It is God’s world,” the Prince replied. “He lives in it.”
“They told me that God lived in Heaven, far off, not here,” she
answered.
“They told you wrong; open and you will see.”
“I will not look,” she said, “I fear the devil.”
“Your beauty is all cold,” he said, “your heart beats not!”
“What is a heart?” she asked.
“That which gives life,” he answered; “my heart beats strongly
and it longs for an answer. You have a heart as strong maybe as
mine. But it is sealed. Will you not let me loose it?”
“I am afraid,” she answered.
“Then I will tell you what he did. He held the Princess in his
arms all despite herself and tore the bandage from her eyes.”
... “Did she let him do it?”
“She heard his voice and all despite herself she let him do his
will.”
Mr. Hall voices these inanities with the appalling conceit of one who
rushes in where even the best of writers tread with circumspection. And
the worst of it is, that his rash feet have carried him nowhere, except,
perhaps, into a limelight that is likely to prove embarrassing.
W. T. HOLLINGSWORTH.
Sentence Reviews
_Russia: The Country of Extremes_, by N. Jarintzoff. [Henry Holt & Co.,
New York.] A mosaic of essays on various aspects of Russian life, some
of them of tremendous interest. Of particular importance are the
chapters on “Studentchestvo” and on “Agents Provocateurs,” which deal
with the political movements of the country. Although the book lacks
unity, the English reader will find in it a wealth of information and a
helpful interpretation of Russian misty reality. Reproductions from
several great Russian paintings are excellent.
_New Songs of Zion_; a Zionist Anthology, edited by S. Roth, New York.
If this anthology was intended to serve as an echo of the Zionist
movement, it will appear as a _testimonia pauperitatis_. The lofty ideal
of forming a cultural center in Palestine for the Wandering Jew is very
pallidly reflected in the naive verses of American boys and girls.
Israel Zangwill is also represented with a few shallow effusions to the
astonishment of those who admire his sense of humor. The translations
from _Byalik_ are tolerable, and I heartily recommend the English reader
to get acquainted through them with one of the greatest living poets who
is known only to readers of Hebrew.
_The Two Great Art Epochs_, by Emma Louise Parry. [A. C. McClurg &
Company, Chicago.] Complete and instructive as a text-book for the
history of art from earliest Egypt down to the decline of Renaissance—if
there is still need for such text-books. The wretchedness of the
reproductions is irritating.
_Changing Russia_, by Stephen Graham. [John Lane Company, New York.]
Sentimental observations of a poetic tramp who bewails the inevitable
transformation of patriarchal, agricultural Russia into a capitalistic
state. Excellent descriptions of the picturesque shore of the Black Sea;
interesting, though often erroneous, notes on the “Intelligentzia.” Mr.
Graham has been religiously tramping the globe for many years, and his
love for nature and primitive life is manifest in every book of his.
_Bellamy_, by Elinor Mordaunt. [John Lane Company, New York.] Cleverly
written, this chronicle of Walter Bellamy, a dynamic English obviosity,
exploiter of silk pajamas, exhibits a man who is sufficiently honest to
devote his life to himself.
_Hebrew and Babylonian Traditions_, by Morris Jastron. [Charles
Scribner’s Sons, New York.] An exhaustive, cool, cautious treatment of
the much-polemised question as to the primacy of one or the other of the
two ancient civilizations. Of great value to the student of comparative
religion.
_The Rise of the Working Class_, by Algernon Sidney Crapsey. [The
Century Company, New York.] An optimistic book by an ex-clergyman. Many
things are cited as working class gains and benefits which that class
would willingly reject. As appendix, there is a long panegyric of that
mountebank, Lloyd George, in which he is hailed as a social and economic
savior of the “People.”
_American Labor Unions_, by a Member. By Helen Marot. [Henry Holt &
Company, New York.] The first book on the American labor movement which
takes tolerant and detailed notice of its later developments. The new
Syndicalist tendency in the American Federation of Labor and the rise
and growth of the Industrial Workers of the World are both discussed, as
are also the much disputed questions of political action, violence, and
sabotage. A book that merits the study of those who believe there is no
other way of remedying economic conditions except through the periodical
dropping of a paper ballot through a slit.
_Life’s Lure_, by John G. Niehardt. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.] A
novel of Western mining life which has the same note of virile realism
as has the very worthy verse of the same author. A healthy contrast to
the usual Western compound of Deadwood Dick and puling sentimentality.
One of the best pieces of red-blooded stuff that has recently been
written. Jack London had better look to his laurels.
_Change_, by J. O. Francis. [Doubleday, Page & Company, New York.] A
play to be read. Life here without affection states itself in its own
terms. The timid and the frivolous may read this and have their eyes
opened. Labor’s struggle for freedom is forcefully depicted. The scene
is laid in a little Welsh mining town, and the characters are drawn with
simple charm and beauty. A play that breaths life and truth.
_Everybody’s Birthright_, by Clara E. Laughlin. [Fleming H. Revell
Company, New York.] Miss Laughlin has both sympathy and understanding
for the ideals of young girls. In this little book she makes clever use
of the Jeanne d’Arc story as a means toward helping another Jean to bear
the loss of a twin sister.
_Myths and Legends of the Mississippi Valley and the Great Lakes_, by
Katharine B. Judson. [A. C. McClurg & Co., Chicago.] Here are some old
friends: Hiawatha, Nokomis, and Minnehaha—also Bre’r Rabbit and the Tar
Baby; and some myths of fire, wild rice, and Mondamin the Corn Woman,
which furnish a fascinating comparison with Prometheus and Demeter over
in the Aegean. A careful arrangement of material overcomes in part the
misfortune of fragmentariness.
_The Twenty-Fourth of June_, by Grace S. Richmond. [Doubleday, Page &
Co., New York.] A study of love at first sight—or just before. Rich
Kendrick came into the house by the back door and saw a rose-colored
scarf on the hatrack; but the poor young millionaire had to wait weeks
before meeting its owner, and then months until _Midsummer’s Day_ for
his answer. Incidentally he discovered the charms of work, home and good
women.
_Tansy_, by Tickner Edwardes. [E. P. Dutton & Co., New York.] A charming
story of the Sussex downs, by a man who lives among them. The background
of village characters, of rural incidents, and of the Sussex countryside
is exquisitely done. Tansy Firle is not a Watteau shepherdess—quite the
contrary; she has a compelling personality and a beauty of the sturdy
upland variety.
_La Vie des Lettres_: Collection anthologique et critique de poèmes et
de proven Neuilly, Paris.
The July issue of this important quarterly is both breezy and
instructive. Two exotic poems by the Roumanian, Alexander Macedonski; a
cycle of poems by Nicolas Beaudrien (who was introduced to English
readers by Richard Aldington in the June _Egotist_); a few
dainty-grotesque _Images de la Capitale_, by Carlos Larronde,—they form
what I called the breezy part. Of great charm also are the “ponderous”
features. Among others there is an article by William Berteval on
_Tolstoi et L’Art pour L’Art_; an attempt of a modernist to justify the
Russian’s point of view on art. In its international review the
Quarterly mentions THE LITTLE REVIEW, with a “memento” for the poems of
Nicolas Vachel Lindsay and Arthur Davison Ficke.
The Reader Critic
_Rev. A. D. R., Chicago_:
I earnestly request you to discontinue sending your impertinent
publication to my daughter who had the folly of undiscriminating youth
to fall in the diabolical snare by joining the ungodly family of your
subscribers. As for you, haughty young woman, may the Lord have mercy
upon your sinful soul! Have you thought of the tremendous evil that your
organ brings into American homes, breaking family ties, killing respect
for authorities, sowing venomous seeds of Antichrist-Nietzsche-Foster,
lauding such inhuman villains as Wilde and Verlaine, crowning with
laurels that bloodthirsty Daughter of Babylon, Emma Goldman, and
committing similar atrocities? God hear my prayer and turn your wicked
heart to repentance.
_A. Faun, Paris_:
In one of your issues I read with delight Wilde’s paradox: “There is
nothing sane about the worship of beauty. It is entirely too splendid to
be sane.” I fear you are getting too sane—you, who some time ago invited
us “to watch, in the early morning, a bird with great white wings fly
from the edge of the sea straight up into the rose-colored sun.” In my
illusion I pictured you enthroned in a tower, high above the street and
the crowd, perceiving reality through dim stained glass walls. Alas,
there is evidently an accommodating lift that connects your tower with
the sidewalk. You have become so sane, so logical, so militant in
attacking the obvious.... Oh, Pan and Apollo!
_A Proletarian_:
Glad to see your magazine getting more and more revolutionary and
courageously attacking the rotten capitalistic order. But why not dot
the i’s? Why shrink from discussing economic problems? Why not give us
the real dope? Go ahead, we are with you!
_David Rudin, New York_:
Permit me to voice a different opinion from that expressed by Charles
Ashleigh in his review of Galsworthy’s _The Mob_. It is my contention
that Mr. Galsworthy has sympathetically and powerfully portrayed the
uncompromising idealist, the champion of an unpopular idea in this
virile disrobing of the spangled strumpet Patriotism.
In these stirring times of destruction to appease insatiable kaisers,
czars, kings and the uncrowned masters of despotism _The Mob_ comes as
an opportune declaration of the minority against war, against invasion,
and against “Love of country.”
Stephen More, the type of man whose conscience and sense of justice
cannot realize that “idealism can be out of place,” makes a brave,
aggressive stand against the allied forces of position, friends, love,
and the blind hatred of the despicable mob, armed only with an
unprejudiced, faithful ideal. Such passion and sincerity of purpose
surely should presage victory. The real victory is won at the moment
when More dies for his idea at the hands of the very mob that many years
later erects a monument to him—and worships. They await the next victim
of the crucifix—and it begins again: inflammatory patriotism,
destruction, and a chaotic, purposeless Hell on earth.
_D. G. King, Chicago_:
Your article _To The Innermost_ in the October number is a manly poke
at the snug, smug, dead-alive ones, the mollycoddles, the
got-in-a-rut-can’t-get-out-without-considerable-effort ones, and others
of the won’t-do-and-dare class that this farcical world of ours is
plentifully sprinkled with! It’s the best thing I’ve seen yet from your
militant pen.
“THE RAFT”
BY CONINGSBY DAWSON
Author of “The Garden Without Walls,” “Florence on a
Certain Night,” etc.