but another of the multiplying outputs of today which are interesting to
the critic alone, and to him only as a study in the pathology of the
creative instinct. The lay-reader will find himself nodding over the
crucial scenes or will lose his place time and again, if he persist in
reading to the end. If a sense of justice will not permit him to judge
the whole by a part, his persistence is tribute only to the undeniable
sincerity of aim felt throughout the work. A stronger tribute, of
course, is the mere length of this review; the fact, that is, that
whatever of critic be in the reading mind is drawn to reiterate
questions and puzzle over their answer, as to the reason for the falling
short of this novel from the better standards, manifestly striven after.
The reader who does concern himself, then, with _Achievement_ will be
puzzled, perhaps irritated, by the insistent question: “But what is the
matter?” There is a certain mastery of words; there is honesty and
sensitiveness of treatment, to a degree beyond the usual; moreover, side
by side with the theme proper, is carried a sympathetic and reverent
revelation of the mind of a creative artist, in this case, a painter; a
study alone sufficient to redeem the work from the stigma of triteness.
These qualities should carry any novel into favor at least; might be
expected to overshadow the noticeable unevenness of work, astonishing in
an author of E. Temple Thurston’s apprenticeship. But the book fails to
convince. The only lasting impression it leaves is the question, “Why
inadequate?”
Perhaps the answer lies in the inadequacy of the theme itself. This may
be voiced, in both its major and minor keys, through Mr. Thurston’s own
words, “For as it is the tragedy of women when the romance of love is
gone from them, so it is the tragedy of men, when their work is done.”
Had the author juggled the words of that sentence a bit—had it read so:
“The realization that the romance of love has gone out from one’s life
is no more a tragedy than the instant when one knows that his work is
done”; could the author have conceived this theme, the subject of
achievement would have compelled a more worthy treatment. Had he been
able to think of women and men as alike potent, whether creators or
lovers, then his picture of the creator in Richard Furlong fertilized by
the lover in him might have been adequate.
The greatest need of today is a pronoun of the common gender. It is
beginning to be recognized that the generation now growing up to face
the ultimate issues of living is one which will declare that spiritual
experience is basically an unsexed phenomenon. Woman of today has been
heard to declare that whatever charge can be made about man’s
potentialities, even his propensities, can be charged alike to the
woman. This is no meaningless attitude. Neither is it naive nor
amusingly unscientific, when the young girl of the future lifts her
voice and sings out, “Before she is woman or he is a man, man and woman
are alike persons.” In this theorem, difficult to word, lies the fertile
germ of suffrage, feminism, suffragettism, militantism, and all the
other lifted voices of woman.
No one of the women of Mr. Thurston’s portrayal is of value to herself
or to the lives about her, except as a woman, a slave or queen of man,
his toy or his inspiration, life’s parasite. The author would answer
that he is not attempting a study of woman, but of an artist achieving
by means of woman. None the less, if all the women who influence his
artist were drawn in as hunchbacks, we would resent the distorted
picture, the hypothesis that woman is essentially hunchbacked. Thus,
since all the women in _Achievement_ are traditionally paralyzed women,
we resent the generic theme of art under influence of womanhood. In
order to receive serious audience today, any portrayal of woman,
indirectly or directly, must recognize that there are genuine women as
there are men, who live in terms of selfhood rather than in terms of
sex.
The denouement is the usual stock company curtain. However, if so many
pistol shots per volume is a stipulation in the novelist’s contract, it
must be conceded him that his telling of the murder is admirably simple.
A more admirable simplicity is attained in the trenchant description of
the murderer’s psychology after the deed. The author is to be
congratulated for missing that “opportunity” for analysis, of which the
usual fiction writer spins chapter after chapter, morbid, a snare to
catch cheap horror and pity, a spider-web for flies.
That the scene of the last two pages should have been written once is
regrettable. That these pages were not cut out hastily as soon as
written is unforgivable in an author who desires so profoundly to be in
sympathy with the artist who has achieved.
R.
Ethel Sidgwick’s Books
[_Small, Maynard and Company, Boston._]
I cannot let another issue of THE LITTLE REVIEW go to press without some
mention of Ethel Sidgwick. Last year, with a sense of worship, I read
_Succession_, the second volume of a trilogy devoted to the story of a
boy-wonder violinist. To find such subtlety, such radiance, such art—to
find such music!—in a piece of fiction was an unforgettable experience.
Music has never been so richly treated in fiction—except in _Jean
Christophe_, which of course is the master work of the last years. I
felt that I had never comprehended any character so fully as I did
little Antoine, and I still feel that way. This year on Christmas day,
as a sort of special celebration, I read the first volume, _Promise_. It
is just as interesting, though there is not such a brilliant
concentration of art in it. But isn’t there some way to make these books
known? They will never be popular; but it is tragic to think of their
not getting to the people who would value them. Their publishers would
far rather advertise their cheap fiction than to try to force Ethel
Sidgwick on a nation that does not demand good work of novelists.
Oxford and Genius
_Sinister Street, by Compton Mackenzie._ [_D. Appleton and
Company, New York._]
E. Temple Thurston attracted attention here before Compton Mackenzie
did, but the latter is as far ahead of him now as is Gilbert Canaan,
whose _Peter Homunculus_ came out about the time of Thurston’s _City of
Beautiful Nonsense_. These three young Englishmen know how to write
English prose; Mackenzie and Canaan know how to tell big stories.
_Sinister Street_ is much too important a book to be reviewed in less
than three or four pages at least. The first part of it tells of the
modern man at Oxford—“a more complete account of the mind of a young man
of our day than has been written previously in English, an account which
presents some of the things that Thackeray meant when he complained that
his public would not permit him to tell all he wished about Pendennis,
and a good many more besides,” as Lucien Cary has said. It is so
extremely well done that the second part of the volume—the hero’s
reactions to life after Oxford—comes with a sense of forced writing.
Perhaps the war had something to do with it. We shall try to review this
book more at length later.
“Without Machiavellian Subtlety”
_The War and Culture, by John Cowper Powys._ [_G. Arnold Shaw,
New York._]
Among all the patriotic rubbish that has been heaped upon the book
market since the outbreak of the European war, Mr. Powys’s pamphlet
presents at least not dull reading. The brilliant lecturer unmasques the
underlying motives of German statesmen who have accepted Machiavellian
principles, “without acquiring Machiavellian subtlety.” He successfully
attacks Münsterberg and other apologists for the Fatherland, who
endeavor to present their country in the image of an innocent lamb
dragged into the bloody struggle by greedy barbarians. Mr. Powys’
mission is a negative one, and there it ends. He falls flat as soon as
he attempts to idealize and to glorify the Allies. His speculation that
the present war is a struggle of ideas, of individualism versus state,
of soul versus machine, is far fetched.
The Reader Critic
Mr. Powys on Dostoevsky
(_A reader sends us these jottings from one of Mr. Powys’s
lectures._)
Shudders of life....
I have only one thing to do—to bring you into a strange mass of palpable
darkness with something moving in it. Dostoevsky is really a great mass,
a volume, not a cloud nor a pillar of fire nor a puff of smoke, but a
vast, formless, shapeless mass of darkness, palpable and drawing you
towards itself.
Reading him is dangerous because of the inherent sense of fear likely to
be accentuated in those who are a little mad and whose madness takes on
the form of fear. We go on a visit to a mad house, to hospitals with
Dostoevsky. But with him this whole world suddenly changes into a mad
house. It is all haunting mad houses and hospitals filled with us
maniacs of the particular fear we are subject to.
(Life is all a running away—a distraction. We are running away when we
are talking, when we are making love—then more than ever, perhaps.)
In Dostoevsky we suddenly realize that these Russians are ourselves. If
the religion, mysticism, liberalism, despotism they possess were only
Russian there are excellent books written by travellers in Russia for us
to read. But Dostoevsky is different. If I could but mesmerize you....
It is like reading the gospels in childhood, being overrun and
overthrown by fate and then after one has lived meeting the words of the
childhood situations and making associations.
I do not think of him as an artist, though he is a great one. You do not
_think_ of him.... In ordinary life we suppress half the things and more
we might say. Vanity and fear are the ultimate things. In Dostoevsky the
people tug and scrape at one anothers’ vain nerves with adder’s poison.
He gives one the sensation of discovering one’s self and betraying one’s
self. He reveals as friends talking and discussing in the small hours of
the morning reveal themselves to one another. The talk may be a
describing of the animal functions of the human body. But in reality it
is the psychic tingling, electric vibrations which the physiological
structure exerts upon mind! Mind! Mind! Dostoevsky is interested in what
people actually feel. He is more with people who have written diaries
than with so-called realistic novelists. One gets from him a sense of
perversion of human imagination.... He is the most important of
novelists; full of ripples and vibrations of imagination. Everybody has
imagination. The things we do are nothing. Imagination is the only thing
over which Will has no power.
Nietzsche says that he got all his contemporary philosophy from
Dostoevsky. He got from him even his idea of the inner circle of
aristocratic souls who really rule the world, are themselves unhappy,
and take with others to places which they (these others) cannot enter.
Dostoevsky thinks that the secret of the world is in abandonment,
perversion; Nietzsche in harness, stiffness, the gay, the strong, the
beautiful, aristocratic, dominant.... Nietzsche with all his reality
does not describe life as it is. Zarathustra is a dream—impossible
perhaps. But Dostoevsky does describe life. Nietzsche’s man is
absolutely alone—has his own hell. Dostoevsky’s has that too, but in a
different way. He gives the feeling of a third person where two are
alone. Do not think that Dostoevsky is a mystic. The essential thing is
that you have this sense of a third person to which genius appeals.
Dostoevsky is a stronger as well as a truer one than even Nietzsche
himself.
Nietzsche is as a skater upon the ice, a dancer upon a tight rope who
remains a white, balanced figure on the surface. Dostoevsky plunges—into
a darkness full of voices. You must get there by a form of perversion.
Every one of his characters is incurably hurt. Nietzscheans harden their
hearts and live on the surface. All Dostoevsky people are weak. He
thinks that only out of weakness will redemption come; abandonment to
every emotion. In that he is Dionysian.... Dostoevsky I cannot put into
words. Perversion; Disease; God is Disease; God is Pain; Dostoevsky
depicts how Disease gives one illumination. We have an idea that we must
be well. Even Nietzsche says that. The Greeks said it ages ago.
Dostoevsky says “No; I offer you a new value.” He has a lust for
fools—understands the mania that people have of making fools of
themselves. God is Folly; God is Cruelty—perhaps an epicene God.
Dostoevsky is a cerebralist. His specialty is imaginative reactions. All
the lusts that have stretched their wailing arms, all the hopes, all the
goblins.... In sex as in everything else people are not what they are
doing; they are in that vortex of what they imagine themselves.
Dostoevsky understands all that. Those frank-spoken people who think
they know sex are puritans on the other side. They have no imagination.
We can overestimate what Dostoevsky has from Russia and not attribute
what he is to himself. Other Russians are Russians—Turgeniev, Tolstoy,
Andreyev, Chekhov, Gorky—but they are not as big as he is; perhaps they
are more of the broader stamp.
... Constance Garnett’s translations are masterpieces. The French are
too artistic to translate Dostoevsky.... No one can approach Dostoevsky
in creating a saint. Russia as the spiritual bringer-back of the world
to Christianity—this runs through his works. He is _the_ Christian. His
books are full of translations from Scripture. He understands the
underlying psychology of the gospels. Nietzsche said that putting the
gospels with the art of the Old Testament was a crime in the name of
Art. The Old Testament is undoubtedly finer art, but the New is
psychology—masterly.
VERS LIBRE AND COMMON SENSE
_Clinton Masseck, St. Louis_:
_Vers Libre_ has no inconsiderable tradition in English verse, as Mr.
Arthur Ficke has recently pointed out in THE LITTLE REVIEW. Its progress
in French poetry, particularly among modern writers, is familiar to all
students. And if we were inclined to forget or to forgive Whitman
(meaning in politer terms to accept him and his followers), the recent
verse of the Imagiste group and such writers as Miss Amy Lowell and Mr.
Max Bodenheim in our own midst would be likely to force our attention to
this interesting form—if I may employ this word in no paradoxical sense.
But _vers libre_ is of the moment—new, if you will, in its present
appeal. Its modern themes, its unique figures of speech, its wide
practice, both in this country and in England, mark it as a new
movement, or at least a new recrudescence.
Anything new invites attack; anything new in literature perhaps warrants
attack. If it can stand the test, by just such a token, it is worth
consideration. But there are those to whom the new is always a thing to
be attacked—because it is new, because it is inexplicable according to
their own canons of emotion and intellect. Francis Jeffrey, with his
famous caption on Wordsworth, “This will never do,” has his echo, futile
and otherwise, in every generation of critics. And so we have Mr.
Llewellyn Jones, in the January issue of THE LITTLE REVIEW, sending up
his protest against _vers libre_ in general and Mr. Bodenheim in
particular.
Mr. Jones is markedly distressed. If he were not so much in earnest and
so decently—or indecently—polite, so “suedy,” so suave, even scholastic
in his handling, he might be amusing. He is also distinctly pugnacious
and, as most pugnacious people are inclined to be, he is curiously
inconsistent.
In fact, it is a little difficult to determine why Mr. Jones cannot
accept Bodenheim. (He is guilty of reading Meredith, “popularly supposed
to be obscure.”) Because our poet writes of “a world of growing sieves,
slim squares, powdered souls, cool, colorless struggles, the obstetrical
adventures of white throats, and green and yellow dins,” and because Mr.
Jones, in the smallness of his soul or environment, has never been able
to concoct or to conceive of poetry couched in this garb—let us grant
the idea behind it—he straightway announces “This will never do.”
Wordsworth, after being so thoroughly “sieved” by the critics, still
lives; the divine essence of romanticism was not killed by Jeffrey and
his thunder-pellet phrase. Courage, Mr. Bodenheim!
Yet in a really admirable paragraph of summary as to the function of
poetry and the relation of a poet to his audience, Mr. Jones lays down
the dictum that “the poet sees the world as we do not see it.
Consequently, he can put a new complexion on it for us. The world is
pluralistic, and so are we. Intellectually we may be of the twentieth
century, but emotionally we may be born out of our due season. Then let
the poet of that due season mediate to us the emotional life that we
need.... By his aid alone we may get outside of our own skins and into
the very heart of the world.”
The last words of this statement are peculiarly significant in this
connection. “By his aid alone we may get outside of our skins into the
very heart of the world.” What is the heart of the world? I do not know
it all, emotionally or intellectually, although if I were to trust one
of these endowments in order to render judgment upon poetry, I should
choose the first. On the other hand, Mr. Jones does not know the entire
heart of the world; nor does Mr. Bodenheim. But we may each of us know
some little corner of this heart that the other does not or cannot ever
know. For some of us poetry remains but the supreme expression of mere
external beauty, for others the expression in consummate form of a
purely intellectual process; to others poetry is a weapon wherewith to
pierce the veil of externality and to expose the hidden but the real
reality. The late William James once declared that we were standing on
the verge of new discoveries in feeling and knowledge; that just beyond
us lies a world of new adjustments and new experiences. Of course, in
this instance, James had reference to our new appreciation and estimate
of the value of mysticism in the judgment of certain phases of religious
experiences. But the thing holds true even in poetry; the line between
the poet and the mystic has yet to be drawn. I, for one, should not want
to think myself incapable of enlarging either my soul or my
appreciation. If anybody can show me whether in new terms or not a
hitherto unsuspected and unknown aspect of beauty, I shall be content to
accept that person. I would go further; I should be very thankful that I
had obtained a new point of view with which to regulate both my emotions
and my intellect.
I, for one, saw and felt and appreciated the appeal of the
much-discussed “sieve” poem. To be sure, along with Mr. Jones, I had
previously thought of a sieve only in relation to ashes and garden
earth—and even of that “little triangular sieve that fits into kitchen
sinks.” But if some one can come along and convince me that this
hitherto vulgar and despised implement has inherent in it the
possibilities of metaphysical development, and that a certain person can
be likened to a sieve, why, then I have learned a new aspect of beauty.
And hence, it would seem to me that Mr. Bodenheim has fulfilled every
single requirement that Mr. Jones has put upon the poet. And the only
reason Mr. Jones cannot appreciate these little poems is because,
intellectually and emotionally, he is “born out of due season.”
After all, “All art is convention.” The Alaskan Indian, with his
grotesque—to us—totem poles, cannot understand the smooth and plastic
strength of much of classic sculpture. The African Negro, with his
Campbell-soup-can earrings and his Connecticut-made curtain ring
bracelets, cannot appreciate the effect of simple unadornment. Yet in
any case the point of view, the impelling instinct that leads toward
beauty, is the same for any person, any race, any civilization. Let us
be honest and admit this. Let us sincerely seek and discover the
philosophy that guides every new movement, whether in fashion or food or
poetry.
Yet it seems to me that we are too prone to accept poetry and to judge
it from a too utilitarian point of view. We would make it stand the same
test that we apply to religion, to household furnaces, and other things
that have been long tried. We ask ourselves when some new manifestation
of it arises: “Will it do the trick? Will it comfort and warm and
sustain us in the way that we have been accustomed to being comforted,
warmed, and sustained by that which has already been accepted?” Yet if a
new form discovers a new idea, if it tears away the covering with rough
and clumsy hands in order to show the emotions, a fresh significance or
a bold interpretation, we jump back in terror and horror.
So it is with _vers libre_ at the present moment. Because it shows us
new things, and a new and perhaps at times an awkward manner, critics
fed on the diluted sentimentality of Longfellow—or even the classic and
obscure Meredith—revolt. Eventually they will accept it; they must.
Those that are not fools must remember that history repeats itself; that
to cite but a recent instance, Manet and Monet and Sisley, in painting,
are accepted where forty-five years ago they were characterized as fools
and madmen. After time has crystalized the unusual into the
conventional, and the crystals are as common and as pretty as only time
and much practice can make them, the critic, along with the man in the
street, will be content to partake and to appreciate. It will be then
too late; what was once unique and rare will be common and banally
uninteresting; a new awakening will then take place, and once more the
world will witness the same absurd attack of the critics.
In this connection, in our future judgment of _vers libre_, let us
recall the wise and simple words of R. A. M. Stevenson: “The test of a
new thing is not utility, which may appear at any moment like a shoot
with the first favouring breath of spring. The test is the kind and
amount of human feeling and intellect put into the work. Could any fool
do it? Now, in this matter of depicting truth, there are eyesights of
all grades and breadth, of grandeur, of subtlety, and art has more than
the delicacy of a tripos examination in tailing out as in a footrace all
the talents and capabilities of the competitors.”
Go to it, Mr. Bodenheim!
SCRIBNER PLAYS
PLAYS
BY
LEONID
ANDREYEFF
The Life of Man
The Sabine Women
The Black Maskers
Translated from the Russian, with an Introduction, by F.
N. SCOTT and C. L. MEADER
_$1.50 net; postage extra_
Robert Frank
BY SIGURD IBSEN
A drama, which William Archer, the distinguished English critic,
considers convincing proof that he possesses “dramatic faculty in
abundance.” Mr. Archer defines it as “a powerful and interesting
play which claims attention on its own merits, eminently a play
of to-day, or, rather, perhaps of to-morrow.” The truth of this
last comment is sufficiently evinced in the fact that its motive
is the attempt of a young statesman to end, once and for all, the
struggle between capital and labor by dramatically heroic
measures.
_$1.25 net; postage extra_
Plays by Björnstjerne Björnson
Translated from the Norwegian, with Introductions, by
EDWIN BJÖRKMAN. Each with frontispiece
SECOND SERIES
“Love and Geography,” “Beyond Human Might,” “Laboremus.”
FIRST SERIES
“The New System,” “The Gauntlet,” “Beyond Our Power.”
_Each, $1.50 net; postage extra_
Plays by August Strindberg
Translated from the Swedish, with Introductions, by EDWIN
BJÖRKMAN
FIRST SERIES
“The Dream Play,” “The Link,” “The Dance of Death.”
SECOND SERIES
“Creditors,” “Pariah,” “Miss Julia,” “The Stronger,” “There Are
Crimes and Crimes.”
THIRD SERIES
“Advent,” “Simoom,” “Swanwhite,” “Debit and Credit,” “The
Thunderstorm,” “After the Fire.”
_Each, $1.50 net; postage extra_
Half Hours
BY J. M. BARRIE
“Barrie opens the door of fancy, so seldom set ajar. There lies
his peculiar mastery. A tender, strange, exquisitely human fancy,
half child, half spirit, that lends you its own wings, and lifts
you, heavy foot or heavy heart, to rainbow heights. You cannot
resist him, or, if you do, there is nothing but pity to give you,
as some one who has never known youth and, worse, never will know
it. And by this we do not mean youth of time, but its finer,
rarer reality, that quality, indomitable, bright, and free, that
lies at the heart of all high emprise and generous daring, and
without which this old world would have dried up and withered
away ages since.”
—_New York Times._
_$1.25 net; postage extra_
Plays by Anton Tchekoff
Translated from the Russian, with an introduction, by
MARIAN FELL. Frontispiece