Vachel Lindsay took a walk from his home in Springfield, Ill.,
over the prairies to New Mexico. He was in Kansas in wheat-harvest
time and he worked as a farmhand, and he tells all about that.
He tells about his walks and the people he met in a little book,
"Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty".
For the conditions of his tramps were that he should keep away
from cities, money, baggage, and pay his way by reciting his own poems.
And he did it. People liked his pieces, and tramp farmhands
with rough necks and rougher hands left off singing smutty limericks
and took to "Atalanta in Calydon" apparently because they preferred it.
Of motor cars, which gave him a lift, he says: "I still maintain
that the auto is a carnal institution, to be shunned by the truly
spiritual, but there are times when I, for one, get tired of being
spiritual." His story of the "Five Little Children Eating Mush" (that
was one night in Colorado, and he recited to them while they ate supper)
has more beauty and tenderness and jolly tears than all the expensive
sob stuff theatrical managers ever dreamed of. Mr. Lindsay doesn't need
to write verse to be a poet. His prose is poetry--poetry straight from
the soil, of America that is, and of a nobler America that is to be.
You cannot afford--both for your entertainment and for the REAL IDEA
that this young man has (of which we have said nothing)--to miss this
book.--Editorial from 'Collier's Weekly'.
The Art of the Moving Picture
Price, $1.25
An effort to apply the Gospel of Beauty to a new art.
The first section has an outline which is proposed as a basis
for photoplay criticism in America; chapters on: "The Photoplay of
Action", "The Intimate Photoplay", "The Picture of Fairy Splendor",
"The Picture of Crowd Splendor", "The Picture of Patriotic Splendor",
"The Picture of Religious Splendor", "Sculpture in Motion",
"Painting in Motion", "Furniture", "Trappings and Inventions in Motion",
"Architecture in Motion", "Thirty Differences between the Photoplays
and the Stage", "Hieroglyphics". The second section is avowedly
more discursive, being more personal speculations and afterthoughts,
not brought forward so dogmatically; chapters on: "The Orchestra
Conversation and the Censorship", "The Substitute for the Saloon",
"California and America", "Progress and Endowment",
"Architects as Crusaders", "On Coming Forth by Day",
"The Prophet Wizard", "The Acceptable Year of the Lord".
For Late Reviews of Mr. Lindsay and his contemporaries read:
'The New Republic': Articles by Randolph S. Bourne, December 5, 1914,
on the "Adventures While Preaching"; and Francis Hackett, December 25,
1915, on "The Art of the Moving Picture".
'The Dial': Unsigned article by Lucien Carey, October 16, 1914,
on "The Congo", etc.
'The Yale Review': Article by H. M. Luquiens, July, 1916,
on "The Art of the Moving Picture".