Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

Suppose I were a Bluebeard who had enticed a young girl into my dim chamber of poetic-thought. Suppose I took the little knife of rhyme and coolly sliced off one of her ears, two or three of her fingers, and finished by clawing out a generous handful of her shimmering, myriad-tinted hair, with the hands of meter. I might afterwards display her to the world, saying: “Look! Is she not still beautiful, still almost perfect?” But would that excuse my butchery? The lesson is perhaps fairly clear. Rhymed verse mutilates and cramps poetry. It is impossible for even the greatest poet completely to rise above its limitations. He may succeed in a measure, but that is due to his strength and not to the useless fetters he wears. But, say the defenders of the fetters, rhyme and meter are excellent disciplines. Does Poetry or does the Poet need to be disciplined? Are they cringing slaves who cannot be trusted to walk alone and unbound? These are obvious things, but one must sometimes be obvious when speaking to those who still possess a childish belief. Poetry is not determined by the monotonous form in which it is usually clothed, but by the strength or weakness of its voice. Because men have foolishly placed this voice in the mouth of a child, wearing a dress with so many checks on it, and a hat the blackness of which matches the ebony of its ugly shoes, it does not necessarily follow that the voice becomes miraculously changed when placed in some other mouth, whose owner wears a different garb. Then there is the rhythm difficulty. If the little child, Rhyme and Meter, does not swing his foot in time to what he is saying, adding rhythm, his words, according to some, change from poetry to prose. What delightful superstitions!

Poets can undoubtedly rise to great heights, in spite of the fact that they must replace stronger words with weaker ones, because “passion” does not rhyme with “above,” but “love” does. But how much higher could they rise if they were free? I do not say that to eliminate rhyme, meter, and rhythm is to make the way absolutely clear. The Poet must still be a Poet to climb. Nor do I say that if the Poet finds that rhyme, rhythm, and meter happen almost to fit his poetic thoughts, he must not use them. I only say that the poet who finds that the usual forms of poetry confine and mar his poetic thoughts should be able to discard them without receiving the usual chorus of sneers, and that if he does he is not miraculously changed from a poet to a writer of prose.

Harriet Monroe’s Poetry

EUNICE TIETJENS

_You and I_, by Harriet Monroe. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]

Right here in Chicago, under our very noses, there is dwelling personified a Real Force. It is done up in a neat and compact little package, as most real forces are that are not of the Krupp variety, and it works with so little fuss and fury that it takes some discernment to recognize it for a force at all. Nevertheless it is a power which is felt throughout the length and breadth of the country, in California, in Florida, in Canada, and in England. And wherever it is felt it is a liberating force, a force that ruthlessly shatters the outworn conventions of the art in which it operates, that tears away the tinsel trappings and bids art and beauty spring forth clean and untrammeled, to forge for themselves new forms that shall be fitting for the urge of today.

The name by which this force is known in every day parlance is Miss Harriet Monroe, and its manifestations are twofold—as poet and as editor. As editor she has created and kept alive the courageous little magazine _Poetry: A Magazine of Verse_, which might almost, so far as Chicago is concerned, be called the spiritual older sister of THE LITTLE REVIEW. It, too, in its own field, stands for the revolt of today against the hide-bound spirit of yesterday, and it, too, is a thorn in the side of the Philistines.

The most recent manifestation of Miss Monroe’s influence is, however, in her character as poet. She has collected together a large number of poems, most of which have already appeared in the leading magazines and have been widely copied, and has brought them out under the title _You and I_. Seeing them so collected, one is much better able to get a perspective on the poems themselves, and on the very interesting personality behind them. And they bulk large. Unquestionably this is one of the most important of the recent books of poetry.

_You and I_ is essentially modern in spirit and in treatment. Miss Monroe has the power of looking with the eyes of the imagination at many of our modern institutions. _The Hotel_, _The Turbine_, _The Panama Canal_, _The Ocean Liner_—these are some of the subjects she treats with a real understanding and a sweep of vision that quite transfigures these work-a-day objects. And she is equally at home when writing of the great emotional complexity of _State Street at Night_ or the simpler but more profound poignancy of the _Elegy for a Child_. Indeed, one of the noticeable things about the book is the unusually large range of themes treated.

There is also in this book the primal, but unfortunately rare, gift of wonder. This is one of the essential qualities of true poetry, and it furnishes Miss Monroe with the key-note of the book, an open-eyed, courageous facing of fate, and an unshakable belief in the redeeming power of beauty.

This little lyric may serve as an introduction to the spirit of the book:

THE WONDER OF IT

How wild, how witch-like weird that life should be!
That the insensate rock dared dream of me,
And take to bursting out and burgeoning—
Oh, long ago——yo ho!——
And wearing green! How stark and strange a thing
That life should be!

Oh mystic mad, a rigadoon of glee,
That dust should rise, and leap alive, and flee
Afoot, awing, and shake the deep with cries—
Oh, far away—yo hay!
What moony mask, what arrogant disguise
That life should be!

Scharmel Iris: Italian Poet

MILO WINTER

Scharmel Iris, the first of the Italians in America to write poetry in English is a Florentine who was brought to Chicago when but an infant. Before his tenth year his poems attracted attention and were warmly praised by such men as Ruskin, Swinburne and Gosse. Later Francis Thompson and Richard Le Gallienne expressed appreciation. These poems which originally appeared in leading publications of England and America are gathered together for the first time and printed by the Ralph Fletcher Seymour Company (Fine Arts Building, Chicago; $1.00 net). The volume, entitled _Lyrics of a Lad_, contains his most desirable and characteristic lyrics and is a serious contribution to our poetic literature. These poems came to be respected as art through their freshness and originality—there are no trite, worn-out, meaningless phrases, or words of an abstract, generalized significance. Immortal beauty is a vision in his eyes and a passion in his heart, and he has labored to reveal it to the world. Art is a creation of men’s minds, and because Mr. Iris’s creation is direct and spontaneous it becomes greater art. This volume is not post-Miltonic or post-Swinburnian or post-Kiplonian. This young poet has the good sense to speak naturally and to paint things as he sees them. Because this book is Scharmel Iris it is distinctive. It is without sham and without affectation. The announcement of its publication and his poems in THE LITTLE REVIEW brought the publisher three-hundred orders. The book, slender and well-printed, has more real poetry than any volume of modern verse it has been our good fortune to read.

It is difficult to do an important book justice in a short article. Perhaps a miscellaneous quotation of lines will help:

The thrush spills golden radiance
From boughs of dusk;

The day was a chameleon;

In sweat and pangs the pregnant, Night
Brings forth the wondrous infant, Light;

Within the sunset-press, incarnadine,
The sun, a peasant, tramples out his wine;

You are the body-house of lust;

Where twilight-peacocks lord the place
Spendthrifts of pride and grace;

And lo, at Heaven’s blue-windowed house
God sets the moon for lamp;

The sunbeams sought her hair,
And rested there;

These mute white Christs—the daily crucified;

Lucretia Borgia fair
The poppy is.

The sunbeams dance in dawn’s ballet;

While sunset-panthers past her run
To caverns of the Sun;

When from the husk of dusk I shake the stars;

O dusk, you brown cocoon,
Release your moth, the moon,

Ah, since that night
When to her window, she came forth as light,
Have I been Beauty’s acolyte;

and there are many other striking lines. In _The Visionary_ a poet steals the pennies on a dead man’s eyes to buy himself bread, and, after his death, the money denied him in life is in turn placed on his sightless eyes. It is irony of the bitterest sort. _Late January_ is an excellent landscape—interpretive rather than descriptive. _Scarlet—White_ is struck at the double standard, and is a strong and powerful utterance. _April_, _Canzonette_, _Lady of the Titian Hair_ are exquisite and charming lyrics. Three graceful compositions are _The Heart-Cry of the Celtic Maid_, _Tarantella_ and _Song for a Rose_. _The Ugly Woman_ will cause discussion, but it is good art. The trio of _Spring Songs_ and _Her Room_ are well nigh perfect. _Mary’s Quest_ is very tender, as is also the _Twilight Lullaby_. _The Leopard_, _Fantasy of Dusk and Dawn_, _The Forest of the Sky_ are wonderfully imaginative, and were written in Chicago,—in the grime and barrenness of Halsted Street. There is a poignant thing of five lines, a mother who is going blind over the death of a son. Her despair is hopeless and tragic—she makes a true and awful picture of realism in her grief. _Heroes_ treats of the nameless heroes, daily met and overlooked. The love poems are sincere as all love poems must be. In _Foreboding_ the note of sadness is emphatic—almost dominant; but there is more than mere sadness in it; it is not a minor note. It is tragedy, really, that speaks in such poetry:

Her cold and rigid hands
Will be as iron bands
Around her lover’s heart;

and

O’er thee will winter through the sky’s gray sieve
Sift down his charity of snow.

_The Mad Woman_ (printed in _Poetry_) is as excellent as it is unusual, and few finer things have been done in any literature.

There is a fine flowing harmony about the poetry of Scharmel Iris that denotes a power far beyond that revealed by many of today’s singers. The poems are colorful and certainly musical and they display an adequate technique. Such a gift as his, revealed in a number of very fine achievements, gives promise of genuine greatness. After many years of discouragement and the hardest work, he has at last found a publisher who bears the cost of the edition, purely on the merit of the work. It contains a preface by Dr. Egan, American minister in Copenhagen, an attractive title-page decoration by Michele Greco, and a photogravure portrait of the author. By advancing the work of living poets like Mr. Iris one can repay the debt he owes to the old poets. This poetry (as THE LITTLE REVIEW remarked) is not merely the sort which interests or attracts; it remains in your mind as part of that art treasure-house which is your religion and your life.

The Poetry of T. Sturge Moore

In an early number of THE LITTLE REVIEW a correspondent remarked that an article I had the honor of contributing sounded a rather curious note inasmuch as it was a piece of pure criticism in a magazine deliberately given over to exuberance.

Well, it is now my turn to stand up for exuberance as against a contributor, A. M., who gives the poetry of T. Sturge Moore criticism only, and, in my humble opinion, criticism as unfair as would be a description of Notre Dame rendered altogether in terms of gargoyles and their relative positions.

Would it not be more in the spirit of THE LITTLE REVIEW to point out in the title poem of Mr. Moore’s book, _The Sea is Kind_, such passages as the two following:

_Eucritos_—

Thou knowest, Menalcas,
I built my hut not sheltered but exposed,
Round not right-angled.
A separate window like a mouth to breathe,
No matter whence the breeze might blow,—
A separate window like an eye to watch
From off the headland lawn that prompting wink
Of Ocean musing “Why,” wherever he
May glimpse me at some pitiable task.
Long sea arms reach behind me, and small hills
Have waded half across the bay in front,
Dividing my horizon many times
But leaving every wind an open gate.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

There is a sorcery in well loved words:
But unintelligible music still
Probes to the buried Titan in the heart
Whose strength, the vastness of forgotten life,
Suffers but is not dead;
Tune stirs him as no thought of ours nor aught
Mere comprehension grasps, can him disquiet.

And these are parts of a dramatic poem full of fresh figures, colorful glimpses of the romance of ancient life, and what a school-boy would describe as a “perfectly corking” description of a sea fight with dead men slowly dropping through the green water—

As dead bird leaf-resisted
Shot on tall plane tree’s top,
Down, never truly stopping,
Through green translucence dropping,
They often seemed to stop.

And how, again could any thorough searcher of this book fail to mention that delightful recipe for wine “Sent From Egypt with a Fair Robe of Tissue to a Sicilian Vine-dresser, 276 B. C.” And surely no obscurity nor any uncouthness of figure—such as your critic objects to, as if poets did not have the faults of their virtues—mar those beautiful child poems:

That man who wishes not for wings,
Must be the slave of care;
For birds that have them move so well
And softly through the air:
They venture far into the sky,
If not so far as thoughts or angels fly.

Were William Cory making a prediction rather than “An Invocation” when he ended his poem of that title with the line:

Two minds shall flow together, the English and the Greek.

I would feel like nominating Mr. T. Sturge Moore as its fulfillment.

LLEWELLYN JONES.

Amy Lowell’s Contribution

_Sword Blades and Poppy Seed_, by Amy Lowell. [The Macmillan
Company, New York.]

... And Amy Lowell’s new volume of verse refutes all the critical disparagement of _vers libre_, imagism, or “unrhymed cadence,” as Miss Lowell herself chooses to call her work. For she demonstrates that it is something new—that it is a clear-eyed workmanship which belongs distinctly to this keener age of ours. Miss Lowell’s technical debt to the French—to the so-called Parnassian school—has been paid in a poetical production that will put to shame our hackneyed and slovenly “accepted” poets. Most of the poems in her book are written in _vers libre_, and this is the way Miss Lowell analyzes them: “They are built upon ‘organic rhythm,’ or the rhythm of the speaking voice with its necessity for breathing, rather than upon a strict metrical system. They differ from ordinary prose rhythms by being more curved and containing more stress. The stress, and exceedingly marked curve, of any regular metre is easily perceived. These poems, built upon cadence, are more subtle, but the laws they follow are not less fixed. Merely chopping prose lines into lengths does not produce cadence; it is constructed upon mathematical and absolute laws of balance and time. In the preface to his Poems, Henley speaks of ‘those unrhyming rythms in which I had tried to quintessentialize, as (I believe) one scarce can do in rhyme.’ The desire to ‘quintessentialize,’ to head-up an emotion until it burns white-hot, seems to be an integral part of the modern temper, and certainly ‘unrhymed cadence’ is unique in its power of expressing this.”

Take Miss Lowell’s _White and Green_, for example:

Hey! My daffodil-crowned,
Slim and without sandals!
As the sudden spurt of flame upon darkness
So my eyeballs are startled with you,
Supple-limbed youth among the fruit-trees,
Light runner through tasselled orchards.
You are an almond flower unsheathed
Leaping and flickering between the budded branches.

Or _Absence_:

My cup is empty tonight,
Cold and dry are its sides,
Chilled by the wind from the open window.
Empty and void, it sparkles white in the moonlight.
The room is filled with the strange scent
Of wistaria blossoms.
They sway in the moon’s radiance
And tap against the wall.
But the cup of my heart is still,
And cold, and empty.

When you come, it brims
Red and trembling with blood,
Heart’s blood for your drinking;
To fill your mouth with love
And the bitter-sweet taste of a soul.

—M. C. A.

Star Trouble

HELEN HOYT

A little star
Came into the heaven
At the close of even.
It seemed not very far,
And it was young and soft.
But the gray
Got in its way,
So that I longed to reach my hand aloft
And push the clouds by
From its little eye,
From its little soft ray.

Parasite

CONRAD AIKEN

Nine days he suffered. It was in this wise.—
He, being scion to Homer in our time,
Must needs be telling tales, in prose or rhyme;
He was a pair of large blue hungry eyes.
Money he had, enough to live in ease;—
Drank wine occasionally; would often sit—
Child and critic alternate—in the Pit:
Cheap at a half-crown he thought feasts like these.
Plays held him by the throat—and cinemas too—
They blanched his face and made him grip his seat;
And oh, fine music to his soul was sweet—
He said, “His ears towards that music _grew_!”
And he kept watch with stars night after night,
Spinning tales from the little of life he knew.—
Of modern life he was the parasite.

Subtle his senses were—yea, like a child,
Sudden his spirit was to cry or laugh;
Strange modern blending of the tame and wild;
As sensitive to life as seismograph.
His sympathies were keen and sweet and quick,
He could play music subtly in your mood;
Raw life, to him, was often strange and rude—
Slight accidents could make him white and sick.
Unreasoning, but lovable was he;—
Men liked him, he was brave; and yet withal
When brute truth stunned him, he could cringe and crawl;
When most he loved the world, he least could see.
Now let him speak himself, as he well can,
In his queer modern style of poesy.—
Then judge him, you, as poet and as man.

* * * * *

There was a woman lived by Bloomsbury Square,—
She was not all that womankind can be,—
Yet she was good to me, I thought her fair,—
I loved her, she was all the world to me;
O, I was adoration, she divine,
And star or moon could not so sweetly shine.

I will say little—it was neither’s fault—
Yet to a bitter time my loving came,
A time of doubt, of faltering, of halt,
A time of passionate begging and of shame,
When I threw all life’s purpose at her feet,
And she stood strange to me, and cold and sweet—

Child that I was! for when it came, that hour,
It was in no wise as my heart had thought—
For comic devils had me in their power,
She laughed at me, we wrangled, and I fought,
And there was hot breath gasped in murderous words....
It was at dusk, when sweetly sang the birds....

Then there was silence—oh, how still and cold!
Without good-bye I went; for she had said—
“Young fool!”—that was a rapier-turn that told;
I could have killed her, for she knew I bled—
And smiled a little, as I turned away;
We have not known each other since that day.

I had expected, if my love went wrong,
The world in sympathy; I suffered pain
That evening when I heard the birds in song,
And stars swam out, and there was no hope for rain,
And the air was dense with lilac-sweet.... I walked
In sullen way; fierce with my soul I talked—;

And knew what knave I was; yet I devised,
Being still too angry for sincerer grief,
Some pain,—appropriate for a soul despised,—
In simulated venom crushed a leaf,—
And glared at strangers, thinking I would kill
Any that dared to thwart my casual will.

So, passing through dark streets, with heedless eyes,
I came upon a beggar, who had drawn
Pictures, upon the stones, of ships, and skies;
The moonlight lay upon them, grey and wan—
And they seemed beautiful, alive they seemed;
Beside them, cap in hand, their maker dreamed.

Above him there a long, long while I stood,
Striving to go, like dream-stuff, to his heart;
Striving to pierce his infinite solitude,
To be of him, and of his world, a part;
I stood beside his seas, beneath his skies,
I felt his ships beneath me dip and rise;

I heard his winds go roaring through tall trees,
Thunder his sails, and drive the lifted spray;
I heard the sullen beating of his seas;
In a deep valley, at the end of day,
I walked through darkness green along with him,
And saw the little stars, by moon made dim,

Peer softly through the dusk, the clouds between,
And dance their dance inviolable and bright;
Aloft on barren mountains I have seen
With him the slow recession of the night,
The morning dusk, the broad and swimming sun,
And all the tree-tops burn, and valleys run

With wine of daybreak; he and I had kept
Vigil with stars on bitter frosty nights:
The stars and frost so burned, we never slept,
But cursed the cold, and talked, and watched the lights
Down in the valleys, passing to and fro,
Like large and luminous stars that wandered slow....

Rising at dawn, those times, we had no fire,—
And we were cold,—O bitter times were those,—
And we were rained on, and we walked through mire,
Or found a haystack, there to lie and doze;
Until at evening, with a let of rain,
We shivered awake, and limped, with crying pain,

To farms, and begged a meal.... if they were kind
We warmed ourselves, and maybe were allowed
The barn to sleep in.... I was nearly blind,
Sometimes, with need to sleep—sometimes so cowed
By pain and hunger that for weeks on end
I’d work in the fields,—and maybe lose my friend:

Live steady for a while and flesh my bones,
And reap or plough, or drive the cattle home,
And weed the kitchen patch, and pile up stones;
But always it must end, and I must roam;
One night, as still as stars, I rose, was gone,
They had no trace of me at come of dawn,

And I was out once more in wind and weather,
Brother of larks and leaves and dewy ferns,
Friends of the road I had, we begged together,
And slept together, and tended fire by turns:
O, they were rare times, bitter times were they,
Winding the open road day after day!

And then I came to London.... Sick, half dead,
Crossing a street I shocked with dizzy pain,
With fury of sound, and darkness ... then in bed
I woke; there was a long white counterpane;
I heard, impassively, the doctors talk.
From that day, without crutch, I could not walk.

O, the sick-hearted times that took me then!
The days, like vultures, sat to watch me dying.
It seemed as if they lived to feed on men.
I found no work, it seemed so useless trying.
And I got sick of hearing doorbells ring:
Begging in London was a hopeless thing.

Once I had driven: I tried to get a job
At driving ’busses, but there wasn’t any;
Sometimes, by washing wheels, I earned a bob;
Sometimes held horses for a stingy penny;
And it was hard to choose between the bed
That penny paid for, and a bite of bread.

Often I hid in parks, and slept on benches,
After the criers had wailed and passed me by;
And it was cold, but better than the stenches
Of ten men packed in one room like a sty.
Twice, I was caught and jailed. It wasn’t bad,
Come to think of the cot and bread I had.

But O the weariness, day in, day out,
Watching the people walking on so cold,
So full of purpose, deaf to even a shout,—
It was their utter heedlessness that told;
It made me white at heart and sick with hate.
Some guiltily looked away; some walked so straight

They never knew I lived, but trod my shadow,
Brushed at the laces that I tried to sell....
O God, could I but then have seen a meadow,
Or walked erect in woods, it had been well,
These wretched things I might have then forgiven,
Nor spread my shadow betwixt them and heaven....

I failed at hawking.... somehow, I never sold....
I wasn’t shaped for it by Him that makes.
I tried with matches, toys, sham studs of gold,—
I failed; it needs a fakir to sell fakes.
The bitter pennies that I saved for buying
Were going to hell, and my whole soul was dying.

I tried to steal a sleep, without my penny,
One night at John’s. I hadn’t fed all day.
It was a shrewish winter night, and rainy.
John found me out and swore. I said I’d pay
Next afternoon, or die—he said I’d die....
O, I was longing for a place to lie!...

He pushed me to the door and opened it,
His stinking arm was smothered round my face,
And then I raged and swung my crutch and hit,
He only laughed and knocked me into space.
When I came to, Joe Cluer bathed my head,
And he had paid my penny, so he said.

Joe Cluer was a man—God help him now,
Pneumonia got him down last year and took him.
But he had colored chalks, and taught me how
To draw on stones; sometimes the d.t.’s shook him
So hard he couldn’t draw, himself, but show
The way it’s done.... That’s how I made a go.

And we’d steal out together, he and I,
And draw before the crowds began to come.
At first he helped me. But as time went by
Drink made him worse, and I would help him some:
I drew him six on paper, in the end,
And he would take them out, and just pretend

To draw a little on the dewy stones....
But it was useless, for the stones were wet,
And he just wasted chalk, and chilled his bones,
His hand shook ... O, I can see him yet ...
Cramping his fingers down with hellish pain
To write out “My Own Talent,” large and plain.

Sometimes, to go out early, it was fun,
When it was not too cold, on autumn days
When leaves were rustling downward, and the sun
Came rising red and paley through the haze....
The streets were fairly quiet, the people few,
There was a smell of dead leaves damp with dew....

And I’d draw, singing, places I had seen,
The places that I walked when I was free,
And of my colors best I loved the green,—
O, it would break my heart to draw a tree
Growing in fields, and shaking off the sun,
With cattle standing under, one and one....

And roads I loved to draw,—the white roads winding
Away up, beautifully, through blue hills;
Queer, when I drew them I was always minding
The happy things, forgetting all the ills,
And I’d think I was young again, and strong,
Rising at smell of dawn to walk along....

To walk along in the cool breath of dawn,
Through dusk mysterious with faint song of birds....
Out of the valleys, mist was not yet gone,—
Like sleeping rivers; it were hard for words
To say that quiet wonder, and that sleep,
And I alone, walking along the steep,

To see and love it, like the God who made!...
And I would draw the sea—when I was young
I lived by sea. Its long slow cannonade
Sullen against the cliffs, as the waves swung,
I heard now, and the hollow guttural roar
Of desolate shingle muttering down the shore....

And the long swift waves unfurled in smother of white,
Snow, streaked with green, and sea-gulls shining high,—
And their keen wings,—I minded how, in flight,
They made a whimpering sound; and the clean sky,
Swept blue by winds—O what would I have given
To change this London pall for that sweet heaven!

And I kept thinking of a Devon village
That snuggled in a sea-side deep ravine,
With the tall trees above, and the red tillage,
And little houses smothered soft in green,
And the fishers talking, biding for the tides,
And mackerel boats all beached upon their sides.

And it was pleasure edged with lightning pain
To draw these things again in colored chalk,
And I would sometimes think they lived again,
And I would think “O God, if I could walk,
It’s little while I’d linger in this street
Giving my heart to bitterly wounding feet....”

And shame would gnaw me that I had to do it.
O there were moments when I could have cried
To draw the thing I loved—and yet, I drew it;
But how I longed to say I hadn’t lied,
That I had been and seen it, that I wanted
To go again, that through my dreams it haunted,

That it was lovely here, but lovelier far
Under its own sky, sweet as God had made.
It hurt me keenly that I had to mar
With gritty chalk, and smutchy light and shade,
On grimy pavings, in a public square,
What shone so purely yonder in soft air!

And yet I drew—year after year I drew;
Until the pictures, that I once so loved,
Though better drawn, seemed not of things I knew,
But dreamed perhaps; my heart no longer moved;
And it no longer mattered if the rain
Wiped out what I had drawn with so much pain.

I only care to find the best-paid places,
To get there first and get my pictures done,
And then sit back and hate the pallid faces,
And shut my eyes to warm them, if there’s sun,
And get the pennies saved for harder times,—
Winter in London is no joke, by crimes.

It’s hellish cold. Your hands turn blue at drawing.
You’re cramped; and frost goes cutting to your bones.
O you would pray to God for sun and thawing
If you had sat and dithered on these stones,
And wanted shoes and not known how to get them,
With these few clothes and winter rains to wet them.

You come and try it, you just come and try!
O for one day if you would take my place!
If we could only change once, you and I,
You, with your soft white wrists and delicate face!
One day of it, my man, and like Joe Cluer,
Pneumonia’d get you and you’d die, that’s sure.

O God, if on dark days you yet remember
So small and base a thing as I, who pray,
Though of myself I am but now the ember—
For my great sorrows grant me this, that they
Who look upon me may be shaken deep
By sufferings; O let me curse their sleep,

A devil’s dance, a demon’s wicked laughter,—
To haunt them for a space; so they may know
How sleek and fat their spirits are; and after,
When they have prospered of me, I will go;
Grant me but this, and I am well content.
Then strike me quickly, God, for I am spent.

Yet,—lift me from these streets before I die.
For the old hunger takes me, and I yearn
To go where swelling hills are, and blue sky,
And slowly walk in woods, and sleep in fern;
To wake in fern, and see the larks go winging,
Vanish in sunlight, and still hear them singing!

So die; and leave behind me no more trace
Than stays of chalkings after night of rain;
Even myself, I hardly know their place
When I go back next day to draw again;
Only the withered leaves, which the rain beat,
And the grey gentle stones, with rain still sweet.

* * * * *

So for nine days I suffered this man’s curse,
And lived with him, and lived his life, and ached;
And this vicarious suffering was far worse
Than my own pain had been.... But when I waked,
His pain, my sorrow, were together flown;
My grief had lived and died; and the sun shone.

There was a woman lived by Bloomsbury Square—
She is no more to me; I could not sorrow
To think, I loved this woman, she was fair;
All grief I had was grief that I could borrow—
A beggar’s grief. With him, all these long years,
I lived his life of wretchedness and tears.

Personality

GEORGE BURMAN FOSTER

A powerful appeal to peoples, especially to the German peoples, it was with this that the nineteenth century began. Still in the eighteenth century there were no peoples, only dynasties, courts. All life revolved around these courts. On the crumbs that fell from royal tables, peoples lived. For the sake of these crumbs, peoples crawled and crouched and cringed. Then came the Corsican! He trod under foot all these gracious sovereigns. The greater selfishness of the giant swallowed up the selfishness of the pygmies. Germany was still but an historical memory. Europe seemed to have but one will: the will of Napoleon. In the collapse of dynasties, peoples began to consider themselves. Preachers of repentance arose who interpreted the sufferings of the people in a way that could be understood. The Napoleonic thunder awoke them from the sleep of centuries. There came the prophet Fichte with his ever-memorable _Reden an die deutsche Nation_. A living divine breath blew over the dead bones of the Fatherland until they became alive again. And as the people considered and reflected upon themselves, and showed the astonished world that they were still there, the judgment that was executed against the royal courts was turned against their executor. The German phoenix arose from its ashes, the people revealed their unwithering power, their eternal life. A rebirth of the people’s life, this was the program of the major prophet Fichte. Folk culture, folk education, this was to create a new self within the folk, a free self, dependent upon a life of its own, instead of a self that was unfree, dismembered, unsettled. And all the best, freest, noblest spirits went about the work with a will to renew the folk life in head and heart and hand.

Did this work succeed? Was even an auspicious beginning made? Or, was a false path taken from the very start? Confessedly opinions deviate most widely as to all this. But among those who consider this work as abortive and bungling, no one has aired his displeasure—if not, indeed, his disgust and distemper—so energetically as _Friedrich Nietzsche_. The Germans grew proud of their folk schools, where every one could learn to read and write, if nothing more. But Nietzsche raged: “Everybody can learn to read and write today, which in the long run ruins not only the writing, but the thinking as well!” The Germans founded libraries, built reading halls, and art institutes, that the spiritual treasures of humanity might be as widely available as possible. But Nietzsche scoffed: “Once there was the Spirit of God, now—through its introduction into the masses it has become _Pöbel_, the vulgar plebeian mob!” He even called the whole German culture _pöbelhaft_, vulgar, coarse, plebeian; German manners, unlike French, inelegant and unrefined; ochlocracy or mobocracy, the democratic instinct of modern civilization—to Nietzsche, the grave of all genuine human life.

In the tendency of the times there is undoubtedly the danger of leveling men, of uniformizing their culture, consequently of externalizing their culture. Nietzsche’s aversion to this tendency is understandable, and is well worth laying to heart. For example, religion ecclesiasticized is disspiritualized; morals conventionalized are degraded; so is art; so is even science, as is seen in the “science made easy” cults and courses. Nietzsche made it the special business of his life to dam back this current in the affairs of our modern world. To him, the preaching of the equality of all men was the most dangerous lie of the last century. Therefore, he preached the inequality of all men; required of men that they should not be ironed out to the same smoothness, that they should not all be hand and glove with each other, but on the contrary, that they should be aware of their manifold inequalities, keep their distances, and that thus great and small might be clear as to their real differences. _Not_ liberty, equality, fraternity, but the _Eigenheit_, the peculiarity, the uniqueness, the _own-ness_ of the human personality, the right of man to his _Eigenheit_, the pleasure in its unfolding and formation—this was to be the watchword of the new culture.

This was what Nietzsche required. He based his requirement upon the fact that every man is an unrepeatable miracle. He never was before, he never will be again, except in his own self. This fact is almost self-evident. It must be kept in mind especially when we place a man into relation with his surroundings. A man cannot possibly be explained merely as a result of his environment. No man can be so explained, least of all a superior individual who has awakened to a self-conscious life, of distinctive personality, and who is inwardly aware of the mystery of his own person. Here scientific inquiry, with its descriptions and explanations, halts. At this point science ceases and we must resort to intuition and interpretation of life’s deepest mysteries.

Nietzsche was right in his requirement. Man is an unrepeatable miracle. But may we not go even further than Nietzsche did? All life is peculiar and singular and unique. Behold the billowy field of grain! Countless stalks bend to the breeze. The whole seems to be but a great homogeneous mass. But take any two of these stalks and consider them more minutely, compare them with each other. Each is something special, something with an individual life of its own. Pluck an ear from the stalk. One grain is side by side with another, one looks for all the world just like another. But, in fact, no one is just like another. And from each grain a special stalk grows, so special that the like of it was never in the world before. Or, you wander along the beach. Innumerable are the grains of sand on the shore of the sea. The multitude of grains form indeed a uniform mass, so uniform that its very uniformity wearies and pains the eye, if it is looked at for long. But look sharply, consider any two of these grains of sand. Each is something for itself. In the whole illimitable mass, you find no second grain just like the first. What is true of the little grains of sand is true of every drop in the wide and deep sea; true of every mote in the air, of every least particle in vast shoreless cosmic spaces. Then, too, there are the stars—one star differs from another star in glory, as Paul saw and said long ago.

All this I call the wealth of nature, the wealth, if you will, of God. In this eternal life, nothing is ever repeated or duplicated. This I call infinite creative power. Never and nowhere does the weaving and waxing world deal with copies. Everywhere and everywhen the world creates an original fontal life of its very own.

Then should not man be awakened to such a life—man in whose eyes and soul all this singular and peculiar life is mirrored? Should it be man’s lot alone to be excluded from all this superabounding fulness of original life? Should he be offended at what is a blessing to all other creatures, fear their fulness, find the true task of his life in the renunciation of this fulness? To be sure, the centripetal, solidaric forces of life do indeed awaken in man. With the breadth of his spirit man spans the greatest and the least, compares the likest and the unlikest, combines the nearest and the farthest. But, for all that, he would sin against life, he would commit spiritual suicide, were he to use this systematic power of thought to overpaint gray in gray the variegated world with its colorful magnificence, to make everything in his own world so similar, so uniform and so unicolored, everything that was divinely destined and created for an existence of its own. From everything that was repeated or duplicated in the world would ascend an accusation to God in whose life all human life was rooted. We who would thus be only a repetition of another would have the feeling that we were so much too much, that we were superfluous in the world! For the proof that we are not superfluous in life is to be found in the fact that no one else can be put into our place, can be confounded with us, that there is a gap in life, in the heart, into which no one else can fit, and that if ever another does occupy our place in life, the gap abides, surviving as the only trace of our existence in the human heart, corresponding to our image and our nature. To be superfluous in the world, to fill therein no place of one’s own, to drift and drag about with this feeling—the feeling of all this is alone the real damnation of life, the worst hell that there is in this or in any other world. But the feeling, even with the minimum capital of life, which yet we may call our own—the feeling that one makes a necessary, organic, irreplaceable contribution to the possessions of humanity, this is life indeed; who has this life, and keeps it alive, knows more joy and bliss than any other heaven can guarantee.

A life of one’s own that shall yet serve the life of all—there is the consummation devoutly to be wished! In these days we hear much about decadence and the decadent. What does that mean? At bottom, the decadent seeks to escape the diremption of the modern man between the individual and the social, by affirming the former and negating the latter. The individual, the social cell, detaches itself from the whole organization, from the social body, without considering that he thereby dooms himself to death. The cell can just as little exist without the organism, as the organism without the cell. Decadence is the last word which anti-social individualism has to say to our time. The history of this individualism is the judgment of this individualism. The man who fundamentally detaches himself from society cuts the arteries of life. Still the man must be his own man, and not another, even that he may give a service of his own to society, as a cell must be its own cell and not another if it is to construct and constitute the organism of which it is so small a part. Besides, man is not entirely like a cell. He is in an important sense a supersocial being, as the cell is not super-organic. So we may as well go on with our discussion of the Nietzschean uniqueness and _own-ness_ of personality. Personality is both super-individual and supersocial. We have its truth in value-judgment and not simply in existence-judgment.

Somewhere in the old forgotten gospels there is a grim stirring word: Enter by the narrow gate, for the gate is broad and the road is wide that leads to destruction, and many enter that way. But the road that leads to life is both narrow and close, and there are few who find it.

Yes, indeed! It is a narrow, a very narrow gate through which men enter into life; a small, a very small path that leads to this narrow gate. There is room for only one man at a time—only one! There is one precaution with which man must sharpen all his wits, if he is to have regard for the way, so that he may at no moment lose sight of the way; or if his feet are not to lose their hold and slip, if he is not to grow dizzy and plunge into the abyss. This is not every man’s thing; it costs stress and strain and tension; it needs sharp eyes, cool head, firm and brave heart. It is much easier to stroll along the broad way, where one keeps step with another, where many wander along together; and if there but be one that is the guide of all, then of course all follow that one step by step. On this broad way no one need take upon himself any responsibility for the right way. Should the leader mislead his blind followers, the latter would disbelieve their own eyes rather than their leader, would “confess” that the false broad way was nevertheless the right way, rather than condemn their own blindness and indolence. These are the _Herdenmenschen_, the herd men who cannot understand that there is a strength which only the man feels who stands alone. These are the men who have no stay in themselves and seek their stay, therefore, in dependence upon others; possess no supplies of their own, and ever therefore only consume the capital which others amass.

Friedrich Nietzsche summoned men out and away from this herd. Friedrich Nietzsche warned men of the broad way and guided their minds to the solitary paths which are difficult and perilous indeed, but along which the true life is to be lived. These small paths, these are the paths of the creative: “Where man becomes a new force, and a new law, a wheel rolling of itself, and a first mover!” There every force of his being becomes a living creative force. No thought is repeated, no feeling, no decision, is a copy of something which was before. This is a new faith in man. He does not need to live by borrowing. There is a stratum in his own soul, in whose hidden depths veins of gold are concealed, gold that he needs but to mine in order to have a worth of his own, a wealth of his own. This is a new love to the man who conceals undreamt of riches underneath his poor shell, divine living seedcorn preserved with germinating power underneath all the burden of the dead that overlay him. Here Nietzsche, the godless one, chimes with the godly Gallet who values the error which man of himself finds more highly than the truth he learns by rote. To be sure, man possesses this that is his very own, this power of the creator, in his soul, not in his coat, not in his manners, not in life’s forms of social intercourse. The man is still far from having everything his very own, if he be only different from others, if he only says “no” to what others say “yes.” There are people enough whom one might call reverse _Herdenmenschen_. They esteem themselves original because they act, think, speak differently from what they see everybody else doing, and yet they are only the counterpart of others, they receive the impulse of their life, not from what is living in their ownselves, but from opposition to what they themselves are not. What they call beautiful is not beautiful to them because it grips their souls, fills their hearts with the free joy of vision, but because others cannot endure it, and call it ugly. The good for which they strive is not good because they have themselves thereby become stronger, greater, better, and will always become stronger, greater, better thereby, but a caprice which they follow, making it a law to themselves, because others may not do so. As if anyone could live on negation, or create by digging mole tracks in the fields and meadows of men! Even the small path is path, and every path has a goal, and the goal of every path is a “yes” and not a “no!” Therefore, Friedrich Nietzsche, Contemner of _Pöbel_, of the plebeian mass, would count all as _Pöbel_ who held themselves aloof from the broad way purely because they saw how many there were that trod it. He would also call the most select and sought-after exclusivists _Herdenmenschen_ were they to derive the reason of their action and passion merely from the mania and disease to be different from the herd.

Plain, indeed, then, is Nietzsche’s great requirement. Let every man honor and safeguard his unrepeatable miracle, and be something on his own account. This cultural requirement is supplementation and development of the moral ideal of the great German prophet at the beginning of the nineteenth century, speaking as he did out of the blackest night of a people’s life. Fichte, too, would create a folk, no _Pöbel_. To be folk, all that is _Pöbel_ must be overcome. _Pöbel_, that is all that lives herd-like, and borrows the impulse of its action and passion from others, not from itself; or, more accurately, _Pöbel_, to speak with Nietzsche, is wherever man is not himself, but his neighbor! _Pöbel_ signifies, therefore, not a human class, not a social layer of the population, but a _disposition_. Everywhere there are aristocratic _Pöbel_, wherever men pride themselves on reciprocally surpassing each other in flunkey-like ways of thinking. There is a political, a partisan _Pöbel_ which counts it human duty to help increase the great pride that runs after a leader on the broad way of the herd. There are _Pöbel_ in science and in art, wherever men do not dare to ally themselves with a cause, a principle, a work, until some “authority” has pronounced judgment in the matter. There are pious _Pöbel_ who cock their ears for what their neighbor believes, who, even in questions of conscience and of heart, are impressed by large numbers and determined by vast herds. _Pöbel_ shouts its “hosanna” and its “Crucify him” without knowing what it does, and blasphemes every body who does not shout with it. To what shall I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplace, who call to their playmates, “We piped to you and you would not dance, we lamented and you would not beat your breasts.”

We are all influenced by what the medicinal psychologist is wont to call “suggestion”—influenced, that is, by alien thoughts, alien expressions of will. What we repeatedly hear comes to lose its strangeness; we come to think that we have understood it and appropriated it. Our taste, our moral judgment, our religious faith, these and such as these are probably far more alien than domestic, far more the life of others than our own,—in a word, suggestion. We have not tested the alien, elaborated it, made it our own. We have let these uncritically empty themselves into the vessel of our spirit where they coalesce, motley enough at times, with the rest of the content. There is, therefore, something of _Pöbel_ in all of us, whether we control others or are controlled by others. To form out of _Pöbel_ strong and free personalities of our very own,—as a cell is formed from the precellular stuff of life, as the flowers and fruit of a tree are elaborated from the sap and substance at their disposal,—this is the first and best service we can render society. To form out of _Pöbel_ a folk, not a distinctionless mass that wanders along the broad way to damnation,—a community of men, where each walks the narrow path of life, no herd in which the individual only has his number and answers when it is called,—a body with many members, each member having its own life and its own soul,—_also sprach Jesu-Fichte-Nietzsche_!

The Prophecy of Gwic’hlan

(_Translated by Edward Ramos from the French of Hersart de la
Villemarque_)

I

When the sun sets, when the sea snores, I sing upon the sill of my
door.
When I was young, I used to sing; and I still sing who am grown old.
I sing of the night, of the day, and none the less I am discontent.
If my head is low, if I am discontented, it is not without cause.
It is not that I am afraid; I am not afraid to be killed.
It is not that I am afraid; I have lived long enough.
When one does not look for me, I am found; and when one looks for me, he
finds me not.
Little import that which advenes: that which ought to be will be.
And one must die three times, before he come to repose.

II