Chapter M: C. a

“The Yellow Ticket”

(_Powers’ Theatre_)

A bleeding chunk of reality is not art, but it is a bleeding chunk of reality; your aesthetic emotions may sleep at the sight of a tortured animal, but your humane emotions will roll up to your throat when you witness the simple tragedy of a Jewish girl in St. Petersburg, presented in Michael Morton’s play, _The Yellow Ticket_. To me such a realistic play in such a realistic presentation has as little to do with dramatic art as a reporter’s story has to do with literature; but I brushed aside my memories of Rheinhardt and Komissarzhevskaya when I went to see a piece of Russian life at Powers’. And I saw it indeed—real, nude, appalling.

Some of my acquaintances have asked me whether the tragedy could be true, whether a Jewish girl has no right to live in St. Petersburg, unless she has bought her protection from the police by selling her reputation—that is by procuring a yellow ticket, the trade-licence of a prostitute. Yes, it is true. A Jew is forbidden to abide outside the Pale of Settlement, with the exception of certain merchants and persons of a university education, and prostitutes. The latter form the most desirable element in the eyes of government officials, since their occupation does not generally presuppose any predilections for revolutionary ideas or free thought. I have known instances where women involved in the Revolution, gentiles as well as Jewesses, obtained yellow tickets which served them the rôle of a _carte blanche_ from the molestations of the police. There are many anecdotic facts in Russian life that seem incredible to the outsider, and Mr. Morton has produced in his play a mass of such facts with photographic verisimilitude. It must be said to the credit of the actors that they have escaped the slippery path of melodramatic overdoing.

K.

“Jael”

(_The Little Theatre_)

“Hosanna!” I felt like shouting, when the curtains slowly concealed the mysterious stage. I am still under the spell of the oriental atmosphere, not yet cooled off for objective criticism. What Florence Kiper Frank has done with the biblical subject may terrify the orthodox student of the Bible, but I greeted her daring heresy and free manipulation of epochs and styles. She has skilfully blended the bloodthirsty, gloating outcries of Deborah’s Song with the idyllic lyrics of Solomon’s Songs, and has presented in _Jael_ a composite type, a mixture of the savage tent-woman, of the passionate yet gentle Shulamite, and of the eternal jealous female. The result, as far as the creation of an atmosphere goes, is a positive success.

A word about the staging. Maurice Browne, on the privilege of a pioneer, may be congratulated on the progress he has made in leaving behind mouldy conventions and approaching the state where he can produce pure aesthetic emotions. The three one-act plays on the present bill, regardless of their merits or demerits, demonstrate the great possibilities of an artistic stage manager, who can do away with elaborate accessories and produce suggestive illusions with the aid of an ultramarine background and calico apple blossoms. Yet, as in all pioneering, there are signs of hesitation and of half-measures. I am sure that the effect of _Jael_ would not in the least diminish (it would rather be intensified), if we were spared the inevitable storm-pyrotechnics. The verses in themselves imply the idea of battle and tempest, and Miss Kiper in the title rôle has the voice and diction to serve the purpose.

K.

Harold Bauer in Chicago

HERMAN SCHUCHERT

There yet remain certain pianists and other opinionated craftsmen in music who will say, when approached on the subject of Harold Bauer’s piano playing: “Oh, yes; but you know Bauer is—well, shall we say?—a monotonist. His playing is all of one style—beautiful tone, to be sure; but, oh, such a sameness! He shades beautifully—yes, surely, but it’s all too colorless.” And it probably never occurs to these critics that a pianist who uses an entirely beautiful tone, who shades delicately, and who is definitely individual in his playing, might not seem monotonous to the admirers of true piano-artistry. And it is quite certain that these carpers failed to attend Bauer’s last Sunday afternoon recital in Orchestra Hall, when and where the above composite quotation was put to shame.

The program was headed by that most unequal set of little pieces—interesting, dull, graceful, and often clumsy:—Brahm’s Waltzes. The Brahms faddists may sacrifice all the credit to their idol, but he deserves only a part of it; for Bauer made these waltzes float as lightly and pleasantly as the material permitted, and invested them with all possible contrast and pulse. There was no lack of what pianists call “point,” either in this opening number or in the remainder of the program; and it is this quality of “point,” which is the season more in evidence in Bauer’s work than ever before, which makes the carpers appear rather uninformed. “Point” is nothing mysterious; it means definite and crisp rhythm, brightness of tone designed to contrast with richness and warmth of tone, sharp shadings artistically brought out, and a deeply satisfying precision in tempi. This man’s work deserves this inclusive term. Whatever lack there might have been in seasons past (there has been a fragile foundation for the criticism mentioned at the beginning of this appreciation, when, as late as three years ago, his tonal ideals apparently did not include great brilliance), this Sunday recital went far to establish the fact that Bauer has a happy variety of tone-colors at his command, which variety includes no little brilliance. Sheer facility and digital expertness have never seemed to occupy the attention of this master-pianist, except insofar as such facility and expertness would give expression to purely musical content; and now if the carpers continue to shrug their shoulders at the praise of Bauer, it will be because they miss the usual bombast and key-swatting of esteemed mediocrity, and certainly not because of any inadequacy of technic for musical purposes, or lack of pianistic lustre. No mediocrity of a technic-worshipper or piano-eater ever gave a performance of Beethoven’s Opus 3 that could compare with that of Bauer on Sunday afternoon; for he then projected a deeply significant art, particularly in the first movement of the sonata, which must be inexplicable in words. Schumann’s _Scenes from Childhood_ were given a highly imaginative treatment—a treatment which penetrated even the academics. And Schumann’s Toccata—that battered veteran of many an ivory struggle—ceased for once to be an endurance stunt, and hummed forth (as the composer hoped and indicated) as a strangely beautiful bit of music. Bauer’s playing of this will remain long in the awakened music-receptacles. So will his interpretation of his own arrangement of César Franck’s Prelude, Choral, and Fugue—which are three movements vieing with each other for supreme religious solidity—and his nonchalant handling of the tricky D-flat Study of Liszt. The Chopin Scherzo in C-sharp minor closed a program which would surely have been sombre and sleepy under the fingers of any less than a pianistic musician. In certain splendid moments Bauer seems like a high priest performing a tonal miracle, or like a potent magician weaving curious and impossible dream-fabrics. And, with all pleasant fancies put aside, he is an exponent of modern pianism at its best.

In music a light blue is like a flute, a darker blue a ’cello, a
still darker a thunderous double bass; and the darkest blue of
all—an organ.—_Kandinsky._

Color is a power which directly influences the soul. Color is the
key-board, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with
many strings. The artist is the hand which plays, touching one
key or another, to cause vibrations of the soul.—_Kandinsky._

A Ferrer School in Chicago

DR. RUDOLF VON LIEBICH

The Havasupai Indian mother says: “I must not beat my boy. If I do, I will break his will.” Unlike her pale-faced friends, she is not obsessed with the mania for governing. We, in our insane subservience to traditions, continue to train our children to obey. Slaves they shall be; that is the slogan. We no longer whip men; we whip children only because they are weaker than we are. So, a child is the slave in successive stages of home, church, school, government, and either boss or “superior officer.” Could Europe be at war unless its men were made molluscous by discipline and their mental paralysis completed through _respectability_?

Children are born materialists, poets, and joy-worshippers. We tame them and they grow up philistines, supernaturalists, and respectable believers in the disinterested love of dullness. Instead of teaching them theories and superstitions, we should tell them that they are parts of the universe; that the carbon, iron, sulphur, phosphorus, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, the zero-gases, and the dozen other elements of which our bodies are made are also the main elements of sun, moon, and stars,—of the whole material universe. The next step might be to show the child, through actual experiments, the known physical and chemical properties of these elements, thus preparing its mind for the greatest of all poetries—the poetry of evolution. These things need but be shown, not laboriously learned by rote; they need only to be told, not to be taught; and if the child’s healthy inquisitiveness has not been ruined by repression, it will delight in feeling the pull of the magnet; in watching the electric spark that unites oxygen and hydrogen into water; in drawing the marvelous beauties of snow flakes and other crystal formations; in watching and aiding the growth of birds, beasts, flowers, or fruits; in the thrill of blended voices or in other forms of voluntary co-operation. All these things, all the realities need but be shown to delight the untainted mind of childhood; while daily free association with other children will soon give to each child a practical working knowledge of ethics (quite impossible to attain under the boss-system of the government schoolmistress) from which, as a basis, the errors of our economic and social systems can be pointed out and discussed. In the minds and hearts of these free children, ideals can then be formulated which will tend toward their development into the free society of the future, whose coming their own efforts will hasten. For it is only through the successive enslavement of each succeeding generation that governments can retain their powers.

Such should be some of the activities of a Ferrer or Modern School, free from the noxious taint of authority, superstition, or respectability. If we cannot do better let us begin, at least, with a Sunday school. However that may be, and whatever the future of such a school, all those interested in establishing it are cordially invited to communicate with the editor of THE LITTLE REVIEW, with William Thurston Brown, 1125 N. Hoyne Ave., with Anthony Udell, 817½ N. Clark St., or with the writer, 1240 Morse Ave.

The Old Spirit and the New Ways in Art

WILLIAM SAPHIER

Full of visions and ideals and eager to express them in their own way, a group of striving young painters and sculptors in this city is working industriously without regard for applause from either the crowd or the few. Just as there are religious and social rebels—people who refuse to accept the old dogmas and habits merely because they were successful at a certain time and fit for a certain period in human history—these young artists refuse to adopt methods and views of the past for the purpose of expressing their views on modern subjects.

In striving to realize the new idea in form and color they are of necessity passing through that period in which the intellect discerns and style is chosen—the period of experiment. And if they do not achieve as great a success as the old masters, they certainly work in the spirit of a Monet or a Rembrandt. We print this month reproductions of work done by four of these artists. They have nothing in common except that they are all trying to express themselves in their own way.

Jerome S. Blum, the oldest and best known of the group, is an extraordinary painter of the usual. He does not rely on a dramatic subject, or on a sensational technic, to arouse interest in his work. It is his unusual way of looking at people and nature, and his vigorous and interesting color schemes, that have made his paintings notable. Mr. Blum is far too imaginative to be natural, far too poetic to be “real.” All his work strikes one as a spontaneous expression of almost childish delight in color.

_The Orator_ is the work of Stanislaw Szukalski, a boy of nineteen, who comes from Russian Poland. He studied at the Krakau Academy, where he received two gold medals and five other prizes. On entering his studio your amazement grows as you wander from one thought or emotion to another in plaster. Each one grips and holds you vigorously. _Impressions of Praying_, _Sleeping_, _Hurling_, and _Bondage_, a few very interesting portraits of Max Krammer and Professor Chiio, and also a full figure of Victor Hugo tell of the spiritual insight of this young sculptor—the unexpected in every one. His works are full of life and imagination. The fact that some of our able nonentities have characterized them as caricatures proves how narrow-minded some of our sculptors are today.

C. Raymond Johnson is only twenty-three years old, and in all the work he has done so far purity, brilliance of color and spaciousness predominate. It is the suggestion in his present work of great possibilities in the near future that makes them interesting. The one in this issue shows the highly decorative effects of his ideas. Besides painting Mr. Johnson finds time to experiment with colored lighting and the making of most original posters for the Chicago Little Theatre.

Christian Abrahamsen, the young and independent portrait painter, has done some very remarkable work. His portraits are the result of penetrating study of his subject and adaptation on the part of the painter to the moods of the sitter. He varies his style with his subject. His portrait of Michael Murphy sparkles with life and vigor and holds your attention as few of the portraits of older painters can. Beside portraits Mr. Abrahamsen paints sunny landscapes in the open air and under clear skies. The large canvas filled with the freshness, strength, and beauty of a clearing in northern Wisconsin, reproduced in this issue of THE LITTLE REVIEW, represents some of the work done last summer.

To name is to destroy. To suggest is to create.—_Stéphane
Mallarmé._

Art is a form of exaggeration, and selection, which is the very
spirit of art, is nothing more than an intensified ode of
over-emphasis.—_Oscar Wilde._

Book Discussion

Vachel Lindsay’s Books

_The Congo and Other Poems_, by Vachel Lindsay. [The Macmillan
Company, New York.]

It is not too much to say that many of us are watching Vachel Lindsay with the undisguised hope in our hearts that he may yet prove to be the “Great American Poet.” He has come so fast and far on the road to art and sanity since the early days when he drew minute, and seemingly pathological, maps of the territories of heaven, and grinning grotesques of the Demon Rum! He has carved his own way with so huge and careless a hand! And his work, in spite of its strangeness, is so deeply rooted in the crude but stirring consciousness that is America to-day! Surely there is ground for hope.

Like every artist who creates a new form, Mr. Lindsay has had to educate his public. And the task is not by any means accomplished yet. We have had to overcome an instinctive feeling that poetry should be dignified, and to look the fact in the face that it must first of all be telling, and that in cases where these two elements conflict, dignity is a secondary consideration. We have been rudely jostled out of our academic position that poetry must be condensed, poignant, and literary, and we have been shown that by going back to the primitive conception—which included as the principal element the half-chant of the bard—true poetry may be diffuse, full of endless iterations and strangely impassioned over crude and even external objects. So much we have learned, and after the first shock of surprise, learned gladly. It has opened to us whole new reaches of enjoyment. We hope sincerely that we are not yet done with Mr. Lindsay’s educative process.

_The Congo_ is the title poem of his new volume. To describe the poem adequately would require almost as much space as the nine pages it occupies. So it must suffice to say that it is perilously near great poetry, broad in sweep, imaginative, full of fire and color, psychological—and very strange. Much in the same vein are _The Firemen’s Ball_ and _The Santa Fe Trail_, which appeared originally in _Poetry_.

Several of the poems in this volume, among them _Darling Daughter of Babylon_ and _I Went Down Into the Desert_, are already familiar to readers of THE LITTLE REVIEW, as they were first published in the June number. The volume contains also a delightful section of poems for children, and a group dealing with the present European war.

Both _The Congo_ and Mr. Lindsay’s earlier volume, _General Booth Enters Heaven_, are extraordinarily interesting books. Every mind which is truly alive to-day should know at least one of them.

_Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty_, by Nicholas
Vachel Lindsay.

[Mitchell Kennerley, New York.]

Almost simultaneously with _The Congo_ has appeared a prose volume by Mr. Lindsay, _Adventures while Preaching the Gospel of Beauty_. It is an account, in the form of a diary, of a walk through Missouri and Kansas, and into Colorado. Its value is almost purely personal. To anyone who is interested in Mr. Lindsay’s striking personality, this book will serve as a spiritual Baedeker. As literature its value is comparatively slight. It contains, however, one of his most striking poems, _The Kallyope Yell_, which appeared originally in _The Forum_. This alone is worth the price of the volume.

EUNICE TIETJENS.

Pumpernickel Philosophy

_The Man of Genius_, by Herman Tuerck. [The Macmillan Company, New
York.]

Professor Tuerck, a very normal German, has been writing critical essays since the end of the eighties, and he has not changed a bit—the same good old idealist of the sissy category. In this book he makes a study of Genius, and comes to the magnificent conclusion that the chief characteristics of a genius must be goodliness, loving kindness, respect, and loyalty to existing institutions, obedience to the law, objectivity, and truth. Naturally, those who do not possess these delicacies are villains. The professor demonstrates two groups of thinkers, one in angelic white, the other in devilish black. Among the first, the real geniuses, we find beside Christ, Buddha, Shakespeare, Goethe, Byron, also Alexander, Cæsar, and Napoleon. But oh, Mr. Wilson, what German atrocities! Mr. Tuerck mercilessly disfigures his victims and pastes upon them with his saliva accurate, uniform labels. In _Hamlet_, in _Faust_, in _Manfred_, in the mentioned law-givers and warriors, the author manages to discover goody-goody traits of exemplary burghers. In the Black Gallery we face the lugubrious sinners—Stirner, Nietzsche, and Ibsen. “Woe to him who follows these modern antisophers!” cries Mr. Tuerck, for they are enemies of humanity, of the state, of society, of reality, of truth, for they are selfish and subjective. “The Devil, the Father of Lies, is great and Friedrich Nietzsche is his prophet.”

A word of reassurance for Mr. Thomas Hardy. This Sauerkraut-gem, _The Man of Genius_, has had _seven_ editions in Germany, and has aroused wide enthusiasm there, as witnessed by the numerous press-notices exaltingly praising the great idealist Tuerck, written by professors, Geheimraths, Hofraths, catholics, protestants, and even by socialists! Now, pray, ought there be any fear for the Nietzscheanization of the Fatherland?

K.

Kilmer’s Confession

_Trees, and Other Poems_, by Joyce Kilmer. [George H. Doran Company,
New York.]

Mr. Kilmer furnishes the following prose account of his convictions: “I am catholic in my tastes and Catholic in religion, am socially a democrat and politically a Democrat. I am a special writer on the staff of the _New York Times Sunday Magazine_, the _Times Review of Books_ and the _Literary Digest_. I am bored by Feminism, Futurism, Free Love.” This is perhaps a more succinct expression of his facility of faith than can be found in his verse. Readers should thank him for it, because it renders unnecessary any further attempt to discover what he believes.

At the opening of the volume, Mr. Kilmer quotes the following stanza from Coventry Patmore:

Mine is no horse with wings, to gain
The region of the Spheral chime
He does but drag a rumbling wain,
Cheered by the coupled bells of rhyme.

This, too, is useful, because it frankly warns us against looking in his verse for anything which is not there.

Within his self-imposed limitations, Mr. Kilmer has done good work. The amusing couplets about _Servant Girl and Grocer’s Boy_ have pleased countless newspaper readers, _The Twelve-Forty-Five_ is a graphic description of the feeling produced by a late suburban train, _To a Young Poet Who Killed Himself_ is an obvious rebuke to the small-hearted versifier, and _Old Poets_ is a comfortable exposition of the philosophy of comfort. The religious poems will probably not be moving to anyone who does not share Mr. Kilmer’s creed.

Mr. Kilmer’s work is glossy with a simplicity more easy-going than profound. Though he is young himself, he obviously does not sympathize with young poets, of whom he writes:

There is no peace to be taken
With poets who are young,
For they worry about the wars to be fought
And the songs that must be sung.

His ideal is that of the “old poet”:—

But the old man knows that he’s in his chair
And that God’s on His throne in the sky.
So he sits by his fire in comfort
And he lets the world spin by.

G. S.

Hilarious Iconoclasm

_Art_, by Clive Bell. [Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York.]

It is an exquisite pleasure to disagree with Clive Bell! Like a fierce Hun he whirls through the art galleries of Europe, and smashes all venerated masterpieces into a heap of rubbish, sparing but the Byzantine Primitives and some of the Post-Impressionists. Between these two epochs he sees a hideous gap; not more than one in a hundred of the works produced between 1450 and 1850 is he willing to accept as a work of art. It naturally hurts to witness the slaughter of your old friends, such as Michelangelo, Velasquez, Whistler; but our Attila performs his massacre so beautifully, with such a charming sense of humor, that you cannot help admiring the paradoxical feats. What but a good-humored smile will provoke in you such a prank, e. g.: “Nietzsche’s preposterous nonsense knocked the bottom out of nonsense more preposterous and far more vile”? The best part of it is the fact that the author does not attempt to convince you in anything, for neither is he convinced in the infallibility of his hypotheses. The book is a relucent gem among the recent dull and heavy works of art.

Comments of an Idler on Three New Books

_Eris: A Dramatic Allegory_, by Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff (Moffatt, Yard), is, we are told on the cover, “full of vigorous enthusiasm, and embodies the philosophy of Henri Bergson,” to whom on a flyleaf the book is duly dedicated. It is in careful rhythmic blank verse; a dialogue, principally, between “Man” and “Thought,” with “Past” and “Future” now and then interrupting. The allegory is prefaced by a portrait of the author by Helleu; we trust an unfair one. A strangely bovine expression greets us from under a plumed black hat and from over shoulders and arms drawn like a Goops. Helleu made lovely things once; why this?

In _Eris_ we find Man hurling defiance at Thought, who taunts him, “You cannot vanquish me while Life endures.” Discussion between them on this point covers some forty pages of melodious argument. Six of these (and they are consecutive) form a fairly comprehensive guide-book to a trip around the world, as Man, distracted, stops off at many well-known points seeking to escape pursuing Thought.

In Venice I spread sail with Capulet
And plied an oar across the green lagoons
The soft air vibrant with the minstrels’ song:
I dreamed in Pisa’s woodland and the gulf
Of Lerici, where once again I heard
The lyrich echo of pure Shelley’s voice.
On Pæstum’s glory and on Dougga’s mount
I studied metope and fluted frieze—

And so on. “Man” finally reaches Mount Parnassus—

The mighty throne of Zeus
Hides like a cloud-veiled mist within the heavens;
I am so near divinity it seems
That I could tread the pathway of the stars;

but “Thought” comes hurrying along, two pages later. Man cries to him desperately:

Envelope me within the cosmic heart
Freed of my separate hideous entity,
Blown with the wingéd dust from whence I came!

They struggle together, and Man plunges over the cliff. Thought, “assuming a sudden intenser magnitude, rises out of the dust of Man” (the stage directions seem a little confused here) and shouts:

At last to conquer after æons of strife—
The reeling stars man’s silent sepulchre.

There are graceful lines and pictures, occasionally a good simile. Technically the lines are too smooth, too neatly finished, each in its little five-iambic jacket. The lyrics lack singing quality. There is a tedious list, two pages, of famous ladies—Helen, Sappho, Salammbo, from Eve to the Virgin Mary—as Man cries to Past, “What woman are you in disguise?” Swinburne did this gorgeously somewhere, making each speak; but these do not—they do not even live.

Totally different is my second volume of verse—_The Sea is Kind_, by T. Sturge Moore (Houghton Mifflin). A letter from the publishers suggests that “like Noyes and Masefield, T. Sturge Moore may have a message to American lovers of poetry.” I am an American lover of poetry and an eager one; therefore, I was hopeful; but I am oppressed by the obligation of doing justice to the initial poem in the book, viz.: _The Sea is Kind_, because I cannot tell at all what it is about. Several people, by name Evarne and Plexaura, females, and Menaleas and Eucritos, males, seem to be talking high talk by the edge of the sea—about ships and storms and nymphs and kindred things. Evarne speaks at great length in rough pentameters, quoting others more obscure, if possible, than herself.

The handsome scowler smiled.
Then with a royal gesture of content
Addressed our wonder.

* * * * *

“But devastation from mine inroads stretches
“Across Euphrates further than they dare.
“The industrious Ninevite, the huckster grey
“With watching scored tale lengthen down his wall
“Beneath his hatred Median debtor’s name,
“Dread me, and hang near casement, over door,
“To guard each southward-facing aperture,
“Rude effigies smaller than this of me.—
“Charm bootless ’gainst my veering pillared dust
“Which chokes each sluice in vainly watered gardens,
“Dessicates the velvet prudency of roses,
“And leaves green gummy tendrils like to naught
“But ravelled dry and dusty ends of cord”;

and so on for a long, long while. It may be wonderful; I dare say it is.

The last two-thirds of the volume is taken up with short poems arranged in groups addressed to various persons—Tagore, Yeats, and Moore, among them. There is more clarity here. One discerns an autobiographic wistfulness in these stanzas entitled: _A Poet in the Spring Regrets Having Wed So Late in Life_.

Some things, that we shall never know,
Are eloquent today,
Belittling our experience, though
We loved and were gay:

For those, whose younger hands are free
With a body not their own,
Taste delicacies of intimacy
Which we have not known.

Primrose, narcissus, daffodil,
In sudden April plenty,
Flourish as tender fancies thrill
Spouses at twenty!

There seems something strangely improper about this, considering the strict propriety of the theme.

One group of two is addressed to Charles Ricketts. _The Serpent_ begins

Hail Pytho; thou lithe length of gleaming plates!

and _The Panther_ thus:

Consider now the Panther, such a beast.

One question addressed to the Panther is:

Dost, cloyed by rich meats spicy as the south,
Expose thy fevered palate to the cool,
Which, like snow melting in an emperor’s mouth,
Helps make excess thy life’s ironic rule?

Consider now Sturge Moore, our bewilderment in trying to ascertain what you wish us to think about such things as these, and consider too a transposition of the first line of a well-known poem about a Tiger, to read, “Consider now the Tiger.”

The group to Yeats has one called _The Phantom of a Rose_. An explanatory footnote tells us that a girl returning from a ball drops a rose from her bosom and dreams that a youth, the perfect emanation of the flower, rises and invites her to dance.

She ached to rise, she yearned to speak,
She strove to smile, but proved too weak;
As one in quicksand neck-deep,
Wild with the will, has no power to leap;
Her limbs like a sunken ferry-boat
Lay logged with sleep, and could not float.
She had danced too often at the ball,
She had fluttered, nodded, and smiled too much.
Tears formed in her heart: they did not fall.

* * * * *

He rose, and danced a visible song;
With rhythmic gesture he contended
Against her trance; and proved so strong
That the grapes of his thought wore the bloom of his mood,
While her soul tasted and understood.

“Her limbs like a sunken ferry-boat.” A happy simile! We recognize the sensation.

In _Judith_, one of the group to Moore, a vigorous note is sounded. This is good, and maybe the rest is too; I do not know. It rolls above my head.

_The Spirit of Life_, a series of nine essays by Mowry Saben (Mitchell Kennerley), is the kind of book that makes me savagely controversial and then cross for heeding it at all. Its platitudinous optimism meanders along through some two hundred and fifty pages under various chapter headings: Nature, Morals, Sex, Heroes, etc. The first sentence is: “There are many great Truths that can be expressed only by means of paradox”; and the last, “If life means nothing, if the universe means nothing, then reform is only an illusory word, which has come to confuse us upon the highway of Despair; but if in our highest ideals we may find the real meaning of our personal lines, because they are the quintessence of the spiritual universe, whose avatars we should be, there is nothing too glorious for the heart of man to conceive.” All in between is just like that.

All persons, and there are many, who are determined willy nilly to believe the world a nice place; who, confronted with the unlovely, the stark, gaping and horrid, cast down their eyes exclaiming “It is not there,” will take solid comfort in _The Spirit of Life_. It is like the millions of sermons droned out one day in seven all over the land to patient folk who no longer know why they come nor why they stay to hear.

But this is a review, not a diatribe—so “consider now” the Spirit.

The first essay is called _Nature_. It quotes freely from Peter Bell, and also reprints something about tongues in trees and sermons in stones. Turning the leaves we catch the names of Burroughs, Whitman, and Thoreau. Toward the end is this:

Everything exists for him who is great enough to envisage it. The
life that now is reveals man as the crowning glory of Nature, the
goal of evolution. In the end the earth does but shelter our
bones, not our thoughts and aspirations.

Skipping the rest, we turn quickly to _Sex_, hoping something from the vitality of the theme, and come to this:

To attack Sex as one of the joys of life would be foolish and
deservedly futile.... I am certain that sex is a sweetener of the
cup of life, but one must not therefore infer that there can
never be too much sweetening, for there can be, even to the point
of danger from spiritual diabetes.

Immortal phrase, “Spiritual diabetes.” Several pages of this essay are devoted to episodes in the life of insects, all pointing a painful lesson to man:

... and there are spiders doomed to be eaten by the female as
soon as they have demonstrated their masculinity. Thus are we
taught how little permanence is possessed by an organization
which yields only the instinct of passionate desire for sex.

Here is boldness,—

I cannot indorse the ascetic ideal that holds the love of man for
woman to be but a snare for the spirit. The great poetry of Dante
alone is sufficient to refute so baseless a claim.

Why quote further? There are indubitably certain good things in the book, but they are by Goethe, Carlyle, Emerson, Dante, Shakespeare, Whitman, et al.

A. M.

An Unacademic Literary Survey

_Modern English Literature_: From Chaucer to the Present Day, by G.
H. Mair. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]

Good histories of English literature are rare, and Mr. Mair’s book should accordingly be given a warm welcome, for it combines brevity with comprehensiveness of treatment in a very unusual manner. Mr. Mair not only writes well and knows his subject, but he seems instinctively to know what his readers will want—and he supplies it.

For instance, we do not remember that popular histories of English literature bother to tell such a detail as how the chronological order of Shakespeare’s plays is determined, but Mr. Mair’s telling of that will show the layman just what literary scholarship means, and in conjunction with his other remarks on our knowledge of Shakespeare it will rescue the uninformed from the chance of falling into such errors as the Baconian theory.

The book, however, is not one of higher and textual criticism and chronology. It is a work of appreciation, and the appreciation is that of a modern man. It is obvious that Chaucer might be treated in a manner quite alien to the interests of the man of today who is not a scholar, but the treatment of his work which ends in joining his hands to those of Charles Dickens as workers in a kindred quest is one that is well calculated to persuade even the philistine that Chaucer is a figure of passable interest to him.

It is the mark of the live man to recognize genius, and the manner in which Mr. Mair treats the genius of that great poet, John Donne, is in vivid contrast to the way in which it is usually treated in histories of English literature. For example:

Very different ... is the closely packed style of Donne, who,
Milton apart, is the greatest English writer of the century,
though his obscurity has kept him out of general reading. No
poetry in English, not even Browning’s, is more difficult to
understand. The obscurity of Donne and Browning proceed from such
similar causes that they are worth examining together. In both,
as in the obscure passages in Shakespeare’s later plays,
obscurity arises not because the poet says too little, but
because he attempts to say too much. He huddles a new thought on
the one before it, before the first has had time to express
itself; he sees things or analyzes emotions so swiftly and subtly
himself that he forgets the slower comprehension of his readers;
he is for analyzing things far deeper than the ordinary mind
commonly can. His wide and curious knowledge finds terms and
likenesses to express his meaning unknown to us; he sees things
from a dozen points of view at once and tumbles a hint of each
separate vision in a heap out on to the page; his restless
intellect finds new and subtler shades of emotion and thought
invisible to other pairs of eyes, and cannot, because speech is
modeled on the average of our intelligences, find words to
express them; he is always trembling on the brink of the
inarticulate. All this applies to both Donne and Browning, and
the comparison could be pushed farther still. Both draw the
knowledge which is the main cause of their obscurity from the
bypaths of mediævalism. Browning’s _Sordello_ is obscure because
he knows too much about mediæval Italian history: Donne’s
_Anniversary_ because he is too deeply read in mediæval
scholasticism and speculation. Both make themselves more
difficult to the reader who is familiar with the poetry of their
contemporaries by the disconcerting freshness of their point of
view. Seventeenth-century love poetry was idyllic and idealist;
Donne’s is passionate and realistic to the point of cynicism. To
read him after reading Browne and Johnson is to have the same
shock as reading Browning after Tennyson. Both poets are salutary
in the strong and biting antidote they bring to sentimentalism in
thought and melodious facility in writing. They are corrective of
lazy thinking and lazy composition.

Another feature in which this book differs from others of its kind is that the author is not afraid to bring the record down to the work of his contemporaries, and the struggles of Mr. Shaw with the bourgeois world, and the era opened by M. J. Synge and the Irish literary renascence, are here sympathetically dealt with.

L. J.

Overemphasized Purity

_Love’s Legend_, by Fielding Hall. [Henry Holt and Company, New
York.]

With a somewhat overemphasized regard for purity, Fielding Hall approaches the narration of this honeymoon trip down a Burmese river. The novel—if such a dissertation on the early marriage state could be called a novel—is told in rather peculiar fashion, by the man and woman alternately, at first, and later on with the help of two more people.

The man is prone to burst forth into fairy tales to explain every point of argument to Lesbia. He tells her of a beautiful princess who was blindfolded and kept within an enclosed garden that she might never know the ways of man.

“They told her that the bandage made her see more clearly than if
her eyes were free. For they had painted images upon the inside
of her bandage and told her they were real.”

Silence.

“And she believed it. Then came a Prince. He wooed the Princess
and he won her. So he took her with him out of her garden. They
came into the world and passed into a forest. There they were
quite alone.

“Take off your bandage,” said the Prince. “Look at the world and
me.”

“I am afraid,” she sighed; “the world is evil.”

“It is God’s world,” the Prince replied. “He lives in it.”

“They told me that God lived in Heaven, far off, not here,” she
answered.

“They told you wrong; open and you will see.”

“I will not look,” she said, “I fear the devil.”

“Your beauty is all cold,” he said, “your heart beats not!”

“What is a heart?” she asked.

“That which gives life,” he answered; “my heart beats strongly
and it longs for an answer. You have a heart as strong maybe as
mine. But it is sealed. Will you not let me loose it?”

“I am afraid,” she answered.

“Then I will tell you what he did. He held the Princess in his
arms all despite herself and tore the bandage from her eyes.”

... “Did she let him do it?”

“She heard his voice and all despite herself she let him do his
will.”

Mr. Hall voices these inanities with the appalling conceit of one who rushes in where even the best of writers tread with circumspection. And the worst of it is, that his rash feet have carried him nowhere, except, perhaps, into a limelight that is likely to prove embarrassing.

W. T. HOLLINGSWORTH.

Sentence Reviews

_Russia: The Country of Extremes_, by N. Jarintzoff. [Henry Holt & Co., New York.] A mosaic of essays on various aspects of Russian life, some of them of tremendous interest. Of particular importance are the chapters on “Studentchestvo” and on “Agents Provocateurs,” which deal with the political movements of the country. Although the book lacks unity, the English reader will find in it a wealth of information and a helpful interpretation of Russian misty reality. Reproductions from several great Russian paintings are excellent.

_New Songs of Zion_; a Zionist Anthology, edited by S. Roth, New York. If this anthology was intended to serve as an echo of the Zionist movement, it will appear as a _testimonia pauperitatis_. The lofty ideal of forming a cultural center in Palestine for the Wandering Jew is very pallidly reflected in the naive verses of American boys and girls. Israel Zangwill is also represented with a few shallow effusions to the astonishment of those who admire his sense of humor. The translations from _Byalik_ are tolerable, and I heartily recommend the English reader to get acquainted through them with one of the greatest living poets who is known only to readers of Hebrew.

_The Two Great Art Epochs_, by Emma Louise Parry. [A. C. McClurg & Company, Chicago.] Complete and instructive as a text-book for the history of art from earliest Egypt down to the decline of Renaissance—if there is still need for such text-books. The wretchedness of the reproductions is irritating.

_Changing Russia_, by Stephen Graham. [John Lane Company, New York.] Sentimental observations of a poetic tramp who bewails the inevitable transformation of patriarchal, agricultural Russia into a capitalistic state. Excellent descriptions of the picturesque shore of the Black Sea; interesting, though often erroneous, notes on the “Intelligentzia.” Mr. Graham has been religiously tramping the globe for many years, and his love for nature and primitive life is manifest in every book of his.

_Bellamy_, by Elinor Mordaunt. [John Lane Company, New York.] Cleverly written, this chronicle of Walter Bellamy, a dynamic English obviosity, exploiter of silk pajamas, exhibits a man who is sufficiently honest to devote his life to himself.

_Hebrew and Babylonian Traditions_, by Morris Jastron. [Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York.] An exhaustive, cool, cautious treatment of the much-polemised question as to the primacy of one or the other of the two ancient civilizations. Of great value to the student of comparative religion.

_The Rise of the Working Class_, by Algernon Sidney Crapsey. [The Century Company, New York.] An optimistic book by an ex-clergyman. Many things are cited as working class gains and benefits which that class would willingly reject. As appendix, there is a long panegyric of that mountebank, Lloyd George, in which he is hailed as a social and economic savior of the “People.”

_American Labor Unions_, by a Member. By Helen Marot. [Henry Holt & Company, New York.] The first book on the American labor movement which takes tolerant and detailed notice of its later developments. The new Syndicalist tendency in the American Federation of Labor and the rise and growth of the Industrial Workers of the World are both discussed, as are also the much disputed questions of political action, violence, and sabotage. A book that merits the study of those who believe there is no other way of remedying economic conditions except through the periodical dropping of a paper ballot through a slit.

_Life’s Lure_, by John G. Niehardt. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.] A novel of Western mining life which has the same note of virile realism as has the very worthy verse of the same author. A healthy contrast to the usual Western compound of Deadwood Dick and puling sentimentality. One of the best pieces of red-blooded stuff that has recently been written. Jack London had better look to his laurels.

_Change_, by J. O. Francis. [Doubleday, Page & Company, New York.] A play to be read. Life here without affection states itself in its own terms. The timid and the frivolous may read this and have their eyes opened. Labor’s struggle for freedom is forcefully depicted. The scene is laid in a little Welsh mining town, and the characters are drawn with simple charm and beauty. A play that breaths life and truth.

_Everybody’s Birthright_, by Clara E. Laughlin. [Fleming H. Revell Company, New York.] Miss Laughlin has both sympathy and understanding for the ideals of young girls. In this little book she makes clever use of the Jeanne d’Arc story as a means toward helping another Jean to bear the loss of a twin sister.

_Myths and Legends of the Mississippi Valley and the Great Lakes_, by Katharine B. Judson. [A. C. McClurg & Co., Chicago.] Here are some old friends: Hiawatha, Nokomis, and Minnehaha—also Bre’r Rabbit and the Tar Baby; and some myths of fire, wild rice, and Mondamin the Corn Woman, which furnish a fascinating comparison with Prometheus and Demeter over in the Aegean. A careful arrangement of material overcomes in part the misfortune of fragmentariness.

_The Twenty-Fourth of June_, by Grace S. Richmond. [Doubleday, Page & Co., New York.] A study of love at first sight—or just before. Rich Kendrick came into the house by the back door and saw a rose-colored scarf on the hatrack; but the poor young millionaire had to wait weeks before meeting its owner, and then months until _Midsummer’s Day_ for his answer. Incidentally he discovered the charms of work, home and good women.

_Tansy_, by Tickner Edwardes. [E. P. Dutton & Co., New York.] A charming story of the Sussex downs, by a man who lives among them. The background of village characters, of rural incidents, and of the Sussex countryside is exquisitely done. Tansy Firle is not a Watteau shepherdess—quite the contrary; she has a compelling personality and a beauty of the sturdy upland variety.

_La Vie des Lettres_: Collection anthologique et critique de poèmes et de proven Neuilly, Paris.

The July issue of this important quarterly is both breezy and instructive. Two exotic poems by the Roumanian, Alexander Macedonski; a cycle of poems by Nicolas Beaudrien (who was introduced to English readers by Richard Aldington in the June _Egotist_); a few dainty-grotesque _Images de la Capitale_, by Carlos Larronde,—they form what I called the breezy part. Of great charm also are the “ponderous” features. Among others there is an article by William Berteval on _Tolstoi et L’Art pour L’Art_; an attempt of a modernist to justify the Russian’s point of view on art. In its international review the Quarterly mentions THE LITTLE REVIEW, with a “memento” for the poems of Nicolas Vachel Lindsay and Arthur Davison Ficke.

The Reader Critic

_Rev. A. D. R., Chicago_:

I earnestly request you to discontinue sending your impertinent publication to my daughter who had the folly of undiscriminating youth to fall in the diabolical snare by joining the ungodly family of your subscribers. As for you, haughty young woman, may the Lord have mercy upon your sinful soul! Have you thought of the tremendous evil that your organ brings into American homes, breaking family ties, killing respect for authorities, sowing venomous seeds of Antichrist-Nietzsche-Foster, lauding such inhuman villains as Wilde and Verlaine, crowning with laurels that bloodthirsty Daughter of Babylon, Emma Goldman, and committing similar atrocities? God hear my prayer and turn your wicked heart to repentance.

_A. Faun, Paris_:

In one of your issues I read with delight Wilde’s paradox: “There is nothing sane about the worship of beauty. It is entirely too splendid to be sane.” I fear you are getting too sane—you, who some time ago invited us “to watch, in the early morning, a bird with great white wings fly from the edge of the sea straight up into the rose-colored sun.” In my illusion I pictured you enthroned in a tower, high above the street and the crowd, perceiving reality through dim stained glass walls. Alas, there is evidently an accommodating lift that connects your tower with the sidewalk. You have become so sane, so logical, so militant in attacking the obvious.... Oh, Pan and Apollo!

_A Proletarian_:

Glad to see your magazine getting more and more revolutionary and courageously attacking the rotten capitalistic order. But why not dot the i’s? Why shrink from discussing economic problems? Why not give us the real dope? Go ahead, we are with you!

_David Rudin, New York_:

Permit me to voice a different opinion from that expressed by Charles Ashleigh in his review of Galsworthy’s _The Mob_. It is my contention that Mr. Galsworthy has sympathetically and powerfully portrayed the uncompromising idealist, the champion of an unpopular idea in this virile disrobing of the spangled strumpet Patriotism.

In these stirring times of destruction to appease insatiable kaisers, czars, kings and the uncrowned masters of despotism _The Mob_ comes as an opportune declaration of the minority against war, against invasion, and against “Love of country.”

Stephen More, the type of man whose conscience and sense of justice cannot realize that “idealism can be out of place,” makes a brave, aggressive stand against the allied forces of position, friends, love, and the blind hatred of the despicable mob, armed only with an unprejudiced, faithful ideal. Such passion and sincerity of purpose surely should presage victory. The real victory is won at the moment when More dies for his idea at the hands of the very mob that many years later erects a monument to him—and worships. They await the next victim of the crucifix—and it begins again: inflammatory patriotism, destruction, and a chaotic, purposeless Hell on earth.

_D. G. King, Chicago_:

Your article _To The Innermost_ in the October number is a manly poke at the snug, smug, dead-alive ones, the mollycoddles, the got-in-a-rut-can’t-get-out-without-considerable-effort ones, and others of the won’t-do-and-dare class that this farcical world of ours is plentifully sprinkled with! It’s the best thing I’ve seen yet from your militant pen.

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softly. The green host halts and calls—in the voice of memory,
poetry, religion, legend or, as the Greeks put it, in the faint
pipes and stampeding feet of Pan.”

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THE EAST I KNOW

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THE FALCONER OF GOD
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his poetry.

The present volume is a collection of virile and impressive poems
enhanced by the fantastic color and charm which Mr. Benét has
already made his own. It contains two poems which should be of
especial interest in the present European crisis, reflecting as
they do the spirit of the Franco-German War of 1870.

_12mo. Board binding. 122 pages. Price $1.00 net postpaid.
Limp leather binding. Price $1.50 postpaid._

_Important New Books_

Love and the Soul-Maker

By Mary Austin, _Author of “The Arrow Maker.”_

In this new book the author makes one of the strongest pleas for
the home that has ever been voiced. Mrs. Austin discusses frankly
the problems of sex differences that are being encountered
everywhere today in our social life, and proves that the balance
of the social relations can be accomplished only by the same
frank handling of the so-called problem of the double standard of
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_$1.50 net_

Hail and Farewell—A Trilogy

“Ave,” “Salve” and “Vale”

By George Moore.

In these three volumes the author brings us into very close touch
with many men and women who have helped to make the history of
art and literature during the last decade. “It is a wonderful
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Rousseau’s Confessions.”—_North American_, Philadelphia.

_$1.75 each vol._

Insurgent Mexico

By John Reed.

This is the true story of the Mexico of today; showing the peon
in war and in peace; intimately portraying the character of this
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the scenes along the march of Villa’s victorious army, and
offering to the reader the only up-to-date and accurate account
of the Mexican situation available.

_$1.50 net_

Americans and the Britons

By Frederick C. De Sumichrast.

A timely book discussing the differences between American and
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interest to all English speaking people. The author is a strong
believer in Democracy, though he sees many faults in it, and
these he discusses frankly, with a hopeful outlook for the
future.

_$1.75 net_

_Notable New Novels_

_By the Author of “Richard Furlong.”_

Achievement

By E. Temple Thurston

The story of an artist whose character develops under the
influence of different women. His trials, temptations, ideals and
triumphs are described, showing that each man as he works is
subject to feminine influence, whether he works for a woman or in
despite of her. A true picture of studio life in London, and
peopled with real men and women worth knowing.

_$1.35 net_

_By the Author of “The Inheritance.”_

To-Day’s Daughter

By Josephine Daskam Bacon

To do something worth while in the world is Lucia Stanchon’s
ambition. In search of a career she is led into many interesting
experiences. Falling in love is one of them, and her conclusions
after this unexpected happening are especially interesting from
the viewpoint of a very modern young woman.

Illustrated, _$1.35 net_

_By the Author of “Broke of Covenden.”_

Anne Feversham

By J. C. Snaith

Piqued by her punishment for sauciness, Anne Feversham elopes
with Heriot, who is falsely accused of a serious crime against
his Queen. Disguised, they join a troup of players, but they are
discovered and brought before the Queen for trial. Exciting
events follow, and things look grave for the culprits. The
climax, however, is both original and charming. The author has
drawn a splendid picture of the Elizabethan period.

_$1.35 net_

_The Romance of An Ambitious Woman._

The Torch Bearer

By Reina Melcher Marquis

The story of Sheila Caldwell, a girl of rare literary gift and
passionate idealism who realizes too late that she has married a
man intellectually and spiritually her inferior. Her husband’s
discovery that his wife continues to cherish literary ambitions
creates discord that grows with each succeeding day. Mrs.
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illuminating.

_$1.30 net_