Chapter III (2)

When the Welshman, John Cowper Powys, comes to the Chicago Little Theatre for his lectures during January and February a great many people ought to fall under the spell of this man whose methods spoil one for almost all other lectures. Mr. Powys’s intellect has that emotional character which is likely to be the quality of the man of genius rather than the man of talent. He might be called the arch-appreciator: he relies upon the inspiration of the moment, and when violently enthusiastic or violently the reverse (he is usually one of the two) he never stops with less than ten superbly-chosen adjectives to express his emotion exactly. His subjects will be Dostoevsky, Wilde, Milton, Lamb, Hardy, Henry James, Dante, Rabelais, Hugo, Verlaine, Goethe, and Heine. The dates may be had at the Little Theatre.

Mrs. Havelock Ellis’s “The Love of Tomorrow”

HERMAN SCHUCHERT

One’s sense of the general or the particular fitness of things is disturbed when an attempt is made to paraphrase or condense the spoken words of Mrs. Ellis. It is seldom that this sense of fitness is at all troubled, because it is a simple matter to extract from the average lecture enough coherent material for second-hand purposes. On the subject given above Mrs. Ellis compels continuous attention. It is not enough to say that she steadily advances her ideas by means of careful phrases, for every phrase seems to be an idea in itself. She is an artist. Her words are like so many focussed lights, not one of which is superfluous. And the illumination which she obtains is a grateful brightness. In listening to her one’s powers of receptivity, while never strained, are not for one moment allowed to rest. As she says, “It’s all solid meat.” Hence, the feeling of futility in an attempt to present justly her observations and schemes of social betterment.

What an absurdity might be suggested to the reader by the statement that Mrs. Ellis advocates a form of “trial marriage” or a “probation for engaged lovers”! And yet her plan of such a pre-ceremonial arrangement is as practical as it is badly needed—practical and entirely reasonable, in that she has apparently overlooked nothing, from the subtleties of human nature to the future laws of the land. And how faddish might she appear if one told of her attacks upon latter-day Puritanism, lust in the guise of love, prostitution within marriage, the evils of both repression and brutish or premature expression, the abomination of smirking elders and cowardly guardians, and so forth. Truly, these things constitute a fad of today, but—Mrs. Havelock Ellis was writing and preaching these ideas longer than twenty-five years ago. In questions of love, marriage, and the possible beauty of human relations, she is a splendid, unhurrying pioneer. It would be impossible to measure the courage, the fine perseverance, it has taken to work on patiently and forcefully in the midst of leering society, infallible misunderstanding, and a great ocean of evil-mindedness. What daring! to speak plainly of the beauty of love-passion. And how hopeless! Here, evolution endlessly proves itself a laggard process.

Until one hears Mrs. Ellis it is easy to overestimate the “building” powers of Emma Goldman, although it is always too easy to consider only Miss Goldman’s sturdy “wrecking” capacity. But the percentage of constructive element in Mrs. Ellis’s work is much more apparent than in Miss Goldman’s. Clearly, each woman is superlative in her own sphere. By virtue of its tested strength, Mrs. Ellis’s constructive machinery may be said to destroy naturally whatever gets in its way. And in addition to this she does some direct, incisive battling as well. Her humor has carbolic in it. Her sarcasm is a spiritual antiseptic.

In the realm of the child, Mrs. Ellis agrees with that grand Swedish woman—Ellen Key. These two coincide upon the supreme importance of full and proper education for the coming generation, including eugenics, hygiene, and kindred topics. It is a joy to know of so much sanity abroad in the world.

But even today, when a number of more or less important writers and speakers are taking up her ideas, when Chicago is having the truths of humanity forced down its tonsilitic throat, it was still possible—on a Sunday night in the Little Theatre—for Mrs. Ellis to have in her audience many whose deep sighs of boredom it was scarcely necessary to observe before tagging them as a lower class of mentality, while no doubt their jewels and furs were quite necessary to indicate their social standing. What curious gropings of psychology brought these people to such a lecture? Or was it fashion? In the faces of these might a dozen Saviours have found ample pity-material. Yawns and dull looks! Something between a Cross and a Bomb was wanting to awaken these unthinking ones, asleep while superb ideas—ideas of admirable vitality and development—were being put before them by the clear and earnest voice of a great woman.

What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and
evil.—_Nietzsche._

London Letter

EDWARD SHANKS

_London, Dec. 1, 1914._

I have to humiliate myself at the beginning of this letter. Nietzsche did not provoke the war; he did not imagine there was ever any specifically “Teutonic” culture, worthy of being spread at any cost; and he seems to have disliked Prussia as much or more than I do. I say this not to inform the readers of THE LITTLE REVIEW, who know it all already from the number in which my error appeared, but to unburden my soul. I sinned like a daily journalist and spoke from hearsay—for I confess I have never been able to read Nietzsche with sufficient attention to gain more than a vague notion of his ideas. Two persons set me right—Mr. Harold Monro, the editor of _Poetry and Drama_, with some heat and indignation, and, more gently, Mr. A. R. Orage, the editor of _The New Age_, who was in old days one of the first to bring Nietzsche to England. It would seem that his efforts were of little use, for my blunder was merely an incident in a carnival of misapprehension which is now engaging our pseudo-intellectual critics. I have sinned in numerous, if evil, company.

I must withdraw another statement—namely, that the war has produced no adequate and agreeable verse. Mr. Maurice Hewlett’s _Sing-songs of the War_ (published by the Poetry Bookshop) is an admirable little volume. Wisely pitching his note neither too high nor too vulgarly, he has struck closer to the mark than he has ever in any attempt. He has achieved an excellent patriotic song, beginning

O, England is an island,
The fairest ever seen:
They say men come to England
To learn that grass is green.

That needs only supporting music to be a fine song of the pleasant boisterousness and exaggeration that it should be. Of the others, _The Drowned Sailor_ and _Soldier, Soldier_, have caught a wonderful and touching note of the folk-song. Mr. Hewlett’s work here is not ambitious, he has profited enormously by not keeping in his mind the necessity of producing a fine piece of literature. He has tried honestly to produce “something that will do” and much good poetry has been written in that way.

Mr. Harold Monro’s new book, _Children of Love_, which he has published himself at the Poetry Bookshop, contains also four gloomy war poems as far removed from Mr. Hewlett’s as from the verse of the newspapers. They are vivid and real impressions of fighting and, as appeals for recruiting, enormously inapt. But poetry does not exist for that. The title poem is a lovely piece, Mr. Monro’s very best, the composition which settled, or should have settled, all our doubts concerning his genius. The others display that sombre misery which is the characteristic note of his writing, which is extremely uncomfortable and, after a little while, extremely impressive.

I may seem to have devoted too much space to the publications of the Poetry Bookshop. But I think that, with luck, as time goes on, it may bulk yet more largely in English letters. Mr. Monro, if he is careful, may have the position that the _Mercure de France_ held in Paris until quite recently: that is, he may publish about ninety per cent of all the good poetry that is published.

The war—again—disturbing our lives as a great tidal wave disturbs sea and shore, has brought to the surface, as waves will, many things of beauty. Among these, one that is not regarded, is Thomas Hardy’s _Dynasts_, which has been abridged and produced by Mr. Granville Barker. It is printed in three volumes and nineteen acts, with innumerable choruses and semi-choruses. Mr. Barker has reduced the play to three acts and the chorus to two persons who sit enthroned, one on each side of the stage. Mr. Henry Ainley sits at a reading-desk lower down in front and declaims the descriptive stage-directions. The setting is a conventional design in grey to which slight additions are made from time to time, but which remains for the most part unchanged. Thus you see the men and women of Wessex in fear of invasion by “Boney,” the victory and death of Nelson, the death and burial of Sir John Moore, Wellington at Salamanca, Napoleon signing his abdication at Fontainebleau, Wellington and Napoleon at Waterloo. The Napoleon was bad: he laughed sardonically in the fashion of melodrama, but the play transcended him. The tragedy was profoundly moving, the comedy not less so. It is an extraordinary work, written in Mr. Hardy’s graceless style, and probably the greatest of his compositions. One thing only was wanting—an audience. That which is essentially impressive must have something to impress—the listeners have a place in a good play—and the grandeur of the occasion was sensibly diminished. When we went, we asked the box-office attendant if we might go in at half-price, on account of our uniforms, and he answered indifferently that “we might if we liked.” When we got in, we understood. There were about two rows in the stalls and two more in the pit. The boxes were empty as far as I could see. I cannot understand the English public. What more do they want now than to see Nelson on the _Victory_ and Wellington at Waterloo? Is it a cause of offence to them that the play is by a great man?

New York Letter

GEORGE SOULE

If I were a Japanese journalist looking for notoriety, I should translate sections from Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, Richmond P. Hobson, _et al._, and publish them under the title “America and the Next War.” There is no question that these gentlemen put together are ten times as influential in the United States as von Bernhardi was in Germany. And there is no question that their utterances are just as inciting to militarism. If to them were added editorials from the Hearst newspapers, with their millions of circulation, and the books of certain prominent army officers, no one could convince the Japanese that the United States is not a conceited, hot-headed, and militarist nation. After the outbreak of a war we should plead in vain that we are peace-loving and fight only in self-defence. “Have you not the second largest navy in the world?” the Japanese would say. “Was any nation threatening you? Did you not capture the Philippines by force and subdue them against their will, practicing against the innocent natives horrible atrocities? Would you not do the same to Japan if you had the chance? Fortunately we are forewarned, and seize a favorable occasion to free the Philippines, since you have broken your promise to give them independence.” And we should feel that the Japanese were monsters hiding their aggressive spirit under humanitarian humbug.

Most of us have forgotten the spasm of “divine mission” that swept over this country at the time of the Spanish-American war. We were appointed by God to conquer or absorb the world, and bestow upon it, willing or unwilling, our American _Kultur_. “Civilization” was, indeed, the precise word we used, although we sometimes varied it with “free institutions.” At the same time the beef trust was furnishing “embalmed beef” to the army, and our economic system was at its very depth of unsavoriness. The Spanish papers cartooned us, quite justly, as “the American hog,” and the cartoons were reproduced broadcast over this country to feed the fires of hate. A Spaniard became to us the very impersonation of demoniacal cruelty. The country ran high with the spy fever, while the Atlantic coast waited in some trepidation for the imagined approach of Cervera’s squadron. We were prey to all the grinning illusions of war.

European opinion was at this time largely against us. To most Europeans we seemed a combination of pious humbug and bumptious conceit. To be actively dangerous we should have needed only a powerful armament. As it was, they regarded us with only distant apprehension. But they were not for a moment deceived by our high-sounding phrases. We were the most dollar-worshipping nation in the world, had often proved ourselves so. They recalled the unpleasant experiences they had had at the hands of Americans—vulgar tourists. The thing was perfectly obvious. We had little fineness of feeling. What we were fighting for was really dollars and cents, not the freedom of subject peoples. At this time they set themselves to watch us very carefully. Canada and the rest of America shared their feelings, with more bitterness.

Since then there has been little visible and striking change. We still live under an inchoate and un-idealistic commercialism. The world can thank us for very few treasures of literature, philosophy, or art. Not a single great nation has any particular occasion to love us. To most of them we are blasphemous and hateful. Hearst has more millions and more newspapers than ever, and we are still subject to strong popular hysteria—such as the recently-shown hatred of Germany. We sit as judges on the world. We calmly assume that we could do no such terrible things as other nations; that our _Kultur_ is the best. At any time we may again be ready to spread it by force of arms.

Now all the powerful nations of the world, except us, are weakening each other in a terrific struggle. The occasion is seized in America by the armament makers and a political party without an issue. To defend ourselves we must arm! they say. Anyone who has taken the trouble to read Bernhardi’s books will know that it is the precise argument he employed. Political parties under commercialism are unscrupulous, and we shall doubtless see the agitation raised to a national issue. Anything to get the Democrats out of office. The probability is that the hysteria will succeed. The only hope to the contrary is that it may be allayed, not by opposition, but by prompt action on the part of the administration which shall mend our present fences without committing us to any definite policy of armament.

Suppose, however, that a President should be elected on the issue of larger armament immediately after the European war. It is an insult to the intelligence to pursue the logic of events further. The “defensive” alliance against us, the “defensive” alliance for us—if, indeed we could induce anybody to enter one—the constantly-increasing tension, the _casus belli_, the repetition of history. But such a disastrous war would not be a tragedy if we had so deserved it. The tragedy would be that we should have no such intrinsic worth as has Germany to offer as a defence. The tragedy would be that we had been so concerned about the mote in our brother’s eye that we had failed to remove the beam in our own.

I Am Woman

MARGUERITE SWAWITE

I am woman:
Old as Lebanon cedars—and far older;
Young as the freshest green shoot
That peeps through the snow in the March time.
My face is turned to the East
Pink with the dawn of my promise;
My hands are clutched from behind
By the fettering fingers of her who was woman alone,
Molded and spurred by desire,
Knowing only the need
Of a kiss for the cup of her throat,
Of a child for the curve of her arm.

To-day I am woman,
Less—yet a little more;
For I am learning to sing
Not his, nor another’s, but mine own song,
That has lain in my heart since the first day.
A great golden song it shall be
Though not always soft with sweet cadence,
For I must travail to sing:
I am learning
To feed upon nothing, yet fill me;
To warm my chill limbs without fire;
To go on my way, without kiss, without child,
Though my lip is red, my arm willing.
Yet I know I shall never cease
Till I have sung it all—
All to the very last note.

Still I shall be woman
In all the long days to come
That beckon to me in the pink dawn;
My song shall grow sweetly familiar,
And he who was frightened shall draw near
Singing his separate song,
Ever his own and yet blending
Its virile strains with mine;
So we shall raise a great harmony
Enfolding the world in our music,
Rejoicing again in our marriage.

One day that shall be ....
But to-day
I am weary—
The East is rosy with promise of dawn.

(_The following is one of the poems in Edgar Lee Master’s
“Spoon River Anthology” which has been running in Reedy’s
St. Louis Mirror and attracting such wide-spread attention.
In our opinion it is in the first ranks of fine poetry._)

Caroline Branson

With our hearts like drifting suns, had we but walked
As often before the April fields till star-light
Silkened over with viewless gauze the darkness
Under the rock, our trysting place in the wood,
Where the brook turns! Had we but passed from wooing
Like notes of music that run together, into winning
In the inspired improvisation of love!
But to put back of us as a canticle ended
The rapt enchantment of the flesh,
In which our souls swooned, down, down,
Where time was not, nor space, nor ourselves—
Annihilated in love!
To leave these behind for a room with lamps;
And to stand with our Secret mocking itself,
And hiding itself amid flowers and mandolins,
Stared at by all between salad and coffee.
And to see him tremble, and feel myself
Prescient, as one who signs a bond—
Not flaming with gifts and pledges heaped
With rosy hands over his brow.
And then, O night! deliberate! unlovely!
With all of our wooing blotted out by the winning
In a chosen room in an hour that was known to all.
Next day he sat so listless, almost cold,
So strangely changed, wondering why I wept,
Till a kind of sick despair and voluptuous madness
Seized us to make the pact of death.

A stalk of the earth sphere,
Frail as star-light,
Waiting to be drawn once again
Into creation’s stream.
But next time to be given birth
Gazed at by Raphael and St. Francis
Sometimes as they pass.
For I am their little brother,
To be known clearly face to face
Through a cycle of birth hereafter run.
You may know the seed and the soil;
You may feel the cold rain fall.
But only the earth-sphere, only heaven
Knows the secret of the seed
In the nuptial chamber under the soil.
Throw me into the stream again,
Give me another trial—
Save me, Shelley!

Music

The Kneisel Quartet and Hofmannized Chopin

ALBERT SPALDING

What more felicitous combination could be desired than this: Albert Spalding playing the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, with the Thomas Orchestra! Twice, four thousand people were warmed to genuine enthusiasm; and at both the Friday and Saturday concerts the orchestra men (whose utterly bored manner is their usual tribute) awakened and showed the strongest appreciation for the young man’s art. Frederick Stock beamed, fatherly, while he clapped his hands.

The displayers of sophisticated conceit and blasé judgment still choose to regard Albert Spalding as a student. Their criticism, superficial as it is, might have been based upon his playing of three or more years back, when, along with the most marked talent, there was an element of the conservatoire in his work. But the pupil has disappeared, and there is now purely the artistic individual. And it follows naturally that, for these same critics, unless one draws from a violin a tone as big as a string bass, it cannot be beautiful.

For his two Chicago appearances he chose a work which is completely suited to him. Spalding can play Mendelssohn. This composer, with his happy delicacy, beauty, and rhythmic finesse, was safe in the hands of the artist. A sturdier or a more sensuous fiddler might have soiled the concerto. For Spalding is a spiritual aristocrat, a musician whose tonal excellencies are not florid, but elegant; not passionate, but of a fine intensity.

Technic?—One speaks of technic only when there is too much or too little. Albert Spalding has, at the age of twenty-six, learned the supreme art of self-expression; and both the self which he expresses and the medium he employs for it are of the first order of fine things.

HERMAN SCHUCHERT.

Book Discussion

Love’s Highway

_Love and the Soul Maker_, by Mary Austin. [D. Appleton and Company,
New York.]

There is a certain generic myth, outcropping whenever the discovery of some mysterious, hidden treasure is in question, which is that the discoverer may possess only so much of it as he can carry away on his own person. Whenever I met this climax in my childish reading my greedy little soul rebelled because the hero might not have all that his eyes could see instead of the negligible bit that he could handle with his own muscles. Experience has taught that under no circumstances can a man own more than he possesses within himself; this is as true of material art forms as it is of culture and education. It is almost tragic in its truth when we look about and see such a wealth of apparent happiness and love and then look into our own impoverished hearts. We may not covet either our neighbor’s automobile or his wife, but frequently we do covet, in spite of good intentions, the happiness that he derives from that automobile and that wife. Particularly weak are we when we look down love’s highway and see what we believe to be limitless and ideal joy. The little orbit in which we move seems sadly askew, and it takes a book like Mary Austin’s _Love and the Soul Maker_ to make us understand that all the topsy-turviness of the present is but the labor-pain of a saner, truer, happier future.

The author combines science and sentiment in a new way. Her facts show that she has read widely; her conclusions show that she has thought deeply; her sentiments show that she has felt—at least potentially—most, if not all, of the joys and sorrows which the practice and malpractice of love produce. And the one shining truth that she has discovered in all this hidden treasure of sex happiness is that “_we’ve a right to as much love as we can work up into the stuff of a superior personality_.” This truth is thrown out as independently of conventions, prejudices, religious beliefs or practices as a searchlight is independent of the hinges that hold it in place. It is the ultimate measure of what is good or what is bad in love; it is the standard by which all sex problems must finally be adjusted. She goes on to say that “taking anything over what we can give back in some form or other to the social sum is my notion of sinning”—and an inspired notion of sinning it is, too. We are all searching for the treasure of love happiness, yet no one may justly take more than he can carry away in inspiration and the impulse of creating something within or without that will add to the sum total of human happiness.

Between facts and sentiment Mrs. Austin leans to sentiment—yet why not? She is not writing for the elect body of sex students, but for ordinary men and women. Those who have read little or nothing of sex psychology would find cold, uncompromising facts too difficult a diet. Offering them such an argument would be like comforting a bumped child with the multiplication table. By means of such a book as _Love and the Soul Maker_ it may be possible for even the ossifying brains of dogmatists to catch a glimmer of light on our present sex problems, while such dazzlingly and ruthlessly true books as Havelock Ellis writes may petrify several additional lobes.

Although not openly propagandic, Mrs. Austin has a decided philosophy of life which she sets forth in a dozen different ways and which, without saying so, she hopes her reader will accept. She insists that “the proper end of loving is not personal but racial; it is the Soul Maker’s most precious commodity,” and that love pirates or love grafters commit their most venal sin by believing that love is its own excuse. As Mrs. Austin expresses it, “Love for love’s sake is the shibboleth by which they blunt the unassailable fact that love was not invented for love’s sake but for life’s.” Here, of course, is a radical point of departure which will turn many readers away from her pages; it may, however, induce an equal number to read further.

The flaws in our modern system of marriage are more closely seen and more cleverly pointed out than are the remedies offered. For example, the author shows that modern society asks of marriage “things it was never meant to pay”; yet her remedy is vague. And again: “The initial mistake about marriage is in regarding it as a condition, a state, when it is primarily a relation” and may exist in spite of very unfavorable conditions and quite apart from them. Delightfully, indeed, does she puncture the time-worn fallacy of platonic friendships: “I doubt that there can be any informing intimacy between men and women unless there exists also the potentiality of passionate experience.” Yet many of her views are completely radical. “There never has been a time since man stood up and knew himself for man,” she writes, “that the major process of love has been reproductive,” and later she points out that “chief among the uses of passion is the raising of the percentage of values in those who entertain it.” She cuts off all the frills of convention, ceremony, tradition; strips away all but the essential naked truth germ and declares: “Marriage is an agreement between any pair to practice mate-love toward one another, with intention.”

Marriage, thus simplified, would not, indeed could not, be the failure which modern society so widely accepts with resignation instead of combating with thoughtful dissatisfaction. We have become so racially hypnotized that we do not distinguish between associated facts (such as food, shelter, religious sanction, obedience, etc.) and the essential truth of mate-love. “The primary obligation of lovers is to love,” she says. This done, all will adjust itself; and yet lest any should draw the over-quick conclusion that Mrs. Austin advocates free love, let me also add that she says: “To love and to keep on loving. This is the one way of making marriage do its work in the world.”

As a remedy she begs women to open their eyes to the fact that marriage is not now the only career for them. That marriage does not fill the lives of those who enter it is evidenced by the divorce courts. Tentatively Mrs. Austin suggests that instead of dissolving so many marriages it would be wiser to unload the excessive strain put upon them. Let economics take hold of the problem of the mother, who for the sake of providing bread for herself and her children crucifies her own personality, ignores her own right to happiness upon the racial conception of marriage. Very frankly she explains what marriage should do for us: “First of all to satisfy the hunger of the body for its natural mate ... and finally it must satisfy the need of companionship on the intimate and personal side of life.” She hints that “it is immensely more important that a mating pair should relish kissing together than that they should both be Presbyterian.”

She is hopeful concerning the final abolishing of prostitution if the present marriage customs are changed. She is emphatic in the need of young people being enlightened in regard to marital experiences and problems, but her suggestions are indefinite and inconclusive. However, much may be overlooked for her emphasis of the fact that sex is an active principal and that the best love-life is that which makes the best use of love’s activities. She admonishes us to “play fair alike in loving and unloving,” which means that love is not a light thing of a day, but must be great enough and strong enough to control itself, even to sacrifice itself for the greatest racial good—and never to sell itself from a motive of personal selfishness, or for the bliss of an hour.

The highway that Mrs. Austin lays out for love is rough and stony in spots, and yet its goal of racial betterment through achievement as well as by means of offspring is not to be despised.

MARY ADAMS STEARNS.

Dutch Bourgeoisie

_Small Souls_, by Louis Couperus. [Dodd, Mead and Company, New
York.]

Rain, rain.... It is always raining in Holland; the skies are ever hidden behind muddy clouds, and in the damp, bleak atmosphere straggle grey figures with stony faces. It is painful to follow Couperus through the four hundred odd pages of his gloomy novel, to meet only “small souls,” petty men and women whose sole interest lies in dinner parties and endless gossip. Empty, tedious, stupid “society,” without even the piquant vice that makes attractive the bourgeoisie of Balzac, Maupassant, or Zola. The least boring figure among the asinine menagerie is that of the heroine, Constance, whose sole virtue consists in the fact that she had committed adultery in her early life. The author has not brought in a single positive type of Holland’s artistic or intellectual circles to counteract the general gloom of the picture; he has evidently determined to hold his readers within the frame of a family-epic, to focus their attention on one particular aspect of life in the Hague, the shallowest, the palest. As this novel presents the translation of the first part of the author’s tetralogy, we must be patient and consider the book as a prelude to the developing drama. Already we see at the end of this volume promising symptoms of a new, real life, to be manifested in the growing boy, Adrian—big, healthy, sturdy, who despises his petty relatives with their noisy intrigues, and whose “boyish lips, with their faint shading of dawn, curve into a scornful smile as he says: ‘It’s all about nothing!’” We shall eagerly look forward to the following volumes, for Couperus is an artist, a deep psychologist, a follower of Zola; his method may be old, arch-realistic, but, as I say, he is an artist, hence thrilling.

K.

James Stephens: Poet and Pagan

_The Demi-Gods_, by James Stephens. [The Macmillan Company, New
York.]

God’s most high messengers and certain Irish loafers nest well together. James Stephens was the first man to discern this and other plain, albeit unique, facts; and in the _Demi-Gods_ he takes the reader into a delightful confidence, telling him the inmost thoughts of three angels, their two companions (also Irish), a philosophic donkey, an ecstatic crow, and the like of them. The angels learn table-manners and similar ethics from the two Celtic vagabonds, whom they chance upon when they touch foot to earth, one dark night. The father-vagabond gets daily food for the party, paying for it when he isn’t temperamentally swept into stealing; the other, who is the dearest kind of an Irish girl, naturally in love with the youngest angel, does the cooking and mothering for them all,—and celestial wisdom is shelved during the acquirement of so much worldly knowledge.

How can the astonishing charms of this book be described? In the first place, there is poetry—neither cadent nor decadent poetry, but the sort of prose that conveys the most finely imagined poetic thought. And there is contrast. Such contrast! From the calm conversation of angels to the braying of an ass is the easiest jump for Stephens. It is a gentle slide from paragraphs of delicate dawn-picturing to a peasant’s narration of brawls and thieving, or a description of the angels attired in Pat McCann’s trousers. And, given the latitude of half a dozen quotations, one might prove that this same Stephens was a deep-gazing mystic. Nor would his extreme paganism be difficult to establish. But to avoid all the inevitable shruggings of literary shoulders, if one really said these things about the man, let it be quickly stated that James Stephens is before all else an artist, a writer with a superlative sense of humor and a pleasantly incomprehensible imagination.

While a deeper probing of his mysticism or paganism (as such) would perhaps bring about a sudden discounting of his humor and his poetic sensibilities, it is necessary to remember that Stephens is Irish, with all the implied values of that temperament. Therefore, it is well to consider the author of _The Demi-Gods_ to be this day’s most unique literary light. The combination stands alone.

HERMAN SCHUCHERT.

Unfulfilled Expectations

_A Lady of Leisure_, by Ethel Sidgwick. [Small, Maynard and
Company, Boston.]

Long, diffuse, sometimes clever, sometimes pointless conversations mark this latest book of an author from whom we had come to expect only the best. Miss Sidgwick could not write anything that did not have passages of keen insight and shrewd handling of our commonplace humanity, but here their value is hidden under an avalanche of words—words—words. The slight plot—which of course is no fault—deals with the whims of the daughter of a great London surgeon. She overcomes parental objection and enters a dressmaking establishment; but we are given no particularly vital picture of this life. There are several young people whose love affairs become mutually mixed, but ultimately untangled—all of which is done by means of conversations, jerky, exclamatory, unrestrained. This method is true to life because such chatter is exactly the way modern people talk, but nevertheless our ears ache with it, and we find ourselves longing for a paragraph of straightaway description or narration, which never comes.

The frivolous and empty atmosphere is all well enough for a relish, but it is unsatisfying as a total, particularly from one who can give too much that is worth while. It is like a continuous afternoon tea, or a lemon meringue pie with nothing but the meringue.