Chapter VI (2)

A very interesting correspondent sends us the sort of letter we should rather have received than any other sort we can conceive of. It is quoted in full on another page of this issue. In it he asks if THE LITTLE REVIEW will not succeed in creating a _Drang und Sturm_ epoch; if it will not "stir the hearts of college men and women--those who have not yet been completely philistinized by their 'vocational guides'; college men and women who in other countries have always been the torch-bearers, the advance-guard and martyrs in the fights for truth and ideals." It was a definite impulse in this direction which gave birth to THE LITTLE REVIEW; and while, after seven months, we cannot hope to have turned the world inside out the way it should be turned, we are sufficiently sanguine to believe that we have made a beginning. We are so close to the _Drang und Sturm_ ourselves that perhaps we cannot see clearly. But we can hope, with that intensity which makes THE LITTLE REVIEW our religion, that these things will come to pass. Incidentally, we believe in colleges on the same general basis that we believe in many other disciplines: it is impossible ever to learn too much on any subject. But we know there is something seriously wrong with the colleges; and a far graver danger than philistinization seems to us to lie in that hysterical confusion of values which causes our college students to see small things as big ones and to let the big ones slip by.

Witter Bynner on the Imagists

In sending us _Apollo Sings_, Mr. Bynner remarks that it is more fun, for the moment to take a classic theme and mix it, with a little Whitman, into an anagram of rhyme than to imitate the Japanese and try to found a school. He goes on: "In spite of several lovely attempts, Pound's chiefly, the rest seeming to me negligible, they've not approached the poetess Chiyo's lines to her dead child:

I wonder how far you have gone today,
Chasing after dragonflies--

or Buson's

Granted this dewdrop world is but a dewdrop world,
This granted, yet--

I'm ungrateful to look critically toward an attempt to plant in English these little oriental flowers of wonder. If only they would acknowledge the attempt for what it is and not bring it forward with a French name and curious pedantries! Isn't the old name for this sort of poem _Haikai_ or something of that sort? At any rate, there is a name. I ought to know it. And so ought they."

A Rebel Anthology

William D. Haywood, veteran of many labor battles and foremost exponent of the militant unionism in America, is adding to his manifold activities that of compiler and editor. He purposes the formation of an anthology of poems by social rebels, principally of those who have been connected with the activities of the Industrial Workers of the World. In the book will be included poems by Arturo Giovannitti, Covington Hall, Francis Buzzell, George Franklin, Charles Ashleigh, and others. Mr. Haywood wishes to show, by this publication, the spirit of art which is manifesting itself in the working-class movement. He maintains that the heightened consciousness of the workers is beginning to express itself through an adequate and distinctive poetical medium.

New York Letter

GEORGE SOULE.

Eastern publishers have been much amused by the advertising of _The Eyes of the World_ spread over full pages of the recent magazines. The burden of the appeal to the public is, first, that we have been overrun with immoral books; second, that clergymen, editors, and all other forces of decency are powerless to stop the flood; third, that Mr. Harold Bell Wright has sprung to the front as the great leader against the vicious influence of the other writers by the production of his latest novel; and fourth, that the whole battle will be won if the public will step into the nearest bookshop and pay $1.35 net for Mr. Wright's book. From the glowing moral tone of the advertisement one might think it the work of an uplift committee; but in small type at the bottom is a copyright notice bearing the name of the president of Mr. Wright's publishing house. This gentleman is undoubtedly deeply sincere in his admiration of Mr. Wright's work and its influence, but in this case his admiration has led him to a somewhat ingenuous confusion of moral and business motives. It reminds one of the tactics of the billboard advertising men who, when they discovered that billboard advertising was being strongly attacked by those who object to the disfigurement of our countryside, put up a large number of biblical posters to curry favor with simple religious souls--and were afterwards so injudicious as to boast of their cleverness in _Printer's Ink_.

The effectiveness of Mr. Wright's plea is somewhat prejudiced by his own case. His novel sets forth the thesis that in order to make an artistic or literary success it is necessary only to resort to flattery and corruption. But his own novels have for some years been far more popular than those of most competitors. Is it pure perversity that makes his hated rivals reject his obviously successful methods in favor of the despicable ones which he so vehemently attacks?

We wish only that someone with an equal enthusiasm for artistically moral literature would try a similar advertising campaign for a genuine artist. Such advertisements might set forth the facts that the bookshops are being overrun with mediocre novels which make successes by pandering to untruth and public prejudice, that the work of genius is in danger of being choked out by the insincere product of commercial writers, and that the best way to promote the interests of good literature would be to buy in large quantities the novels of John Galsworthy or Romain Rolland! But, alas, such a campaign is impossible in a commercial democracy--it wouldn't pay!

A respectable number of the best publishers have already aroused themselves to the impropriety--or at least to the eventual ineffectiveness--of announcing extreme praises of their own publications even in the critical vein. Surely the book-reading public can't be made to believe that four or five "great novels" are issued every year. Surely they would be grateful for a little genuine information about the books they are asked to buy. And so these publishers have issued for two years a monthly circular entitled _New Books_, which contains descriptions of important new publications without praise of any kind. It would be telling tales out of school to say how carefully the publishers' copy-writers must be watched in order to prevent them from slipping dubious phrases into their notes. Some advertising men seem to have principles against giving any candid information about what they have for sale. But the task has been accomplished so far, and it remains to be seen whether this civilized form of advertising can make much progress against the advertising vandalism which destroys the effectiveness of all publicity by extravagant statements. One begins to suspect that the effort is pitifully Utopian in a state of economic savagery like the present, where every man's attention is more naturally directed to his profits than to the honesty of his work. The chances would be better if the majority of the public knew what intellectual honesty is and really wanted it.

There is hope among the magazines in the form of _The Metropolitan_. That is making a commercial success and is also attempting to publish genuine work--not necessarily "highbrow," but at least genuine. An expert on an important subject recently wished to write a magazine article. The first editor he approached recast the material to suit his own ideas. A second and a third told him that his message was good, but over the heads of the public; they ordered "popular" and ephemeral trivialities. _The Metropolitan_ is the only magazine that wanted him to write, in his own way, what he really had to say. Another writer submitted the outline of an article to a _Metropolitan_ editor. It was on a subject ordinarily considered somewhat "dangerous." The editor said: "That is new, and interesting. It ought to make a good article. You must be careful of only one thing. Be absolutely frank. Don't try to gloss over anything that is a plain matter of fact." Such directness is astounding to one accustomed to the ways of editors.

An editor has recently confessed to me that now for the first time he begins to believe that the popular magazines may have a really good reason for existence, aside from furnishing amusement in hours of train and family boredom. He thinks that the tremendous events in Europe are likely to bring forth literature of worth and quickened emotion which nevertheless cannot wait for book publication, and that so we shall find use for the more ephemeral medium. It certainly is true that the keen public interest in the war is likely to decline even before the war is over. We are bound to experience a reaction in favor of reading matter at the opposite pole of thought.

An incredible rumor that Hearst has bought _The Atlantic Monthly_ is as startling as many of the war headlines which occur when no authentic news is available. In spite of the absurdity of the idea, it has possibilities of momentary amusement. What a retribution to overtake the spinsterly Bostonese journal which tries with such a brown and wren-like conscience to be judiciously radical!

Book Discussion

Two Finds

_Poems_, by George Cronyn. [The Glebe. Albert and Charles Boni, New
York.]

I am very sorry indeed that this book arrived when most of our space was pre-empted. I need room for the sort of appreciation that I feel for these poems.

That extraordinary, delightful, and Quixotic institution, _The Glebe_, which insists on publishing stuff on its merits, apart from considerations of popularity, has had divine luck in finding Cronyn,--whoever he is.

For Cronyn is a poet. Not just a versifier, but a poet. His verse has a facility which does not detract from its beauty. I have encountered sheer beauty more often in his book than in any volume of modern poetry that I have read for some time.

Here is a sample:

Clouds

Whence do you come, oh silken shapes,
Across the silver sky?
We come from where the wind blows
And the young stars die.

Why do you move so fast, so fast
Across the white moon's breast?
The cruel wind is at our heels
And we may not rest.

Are you not weary, fleeing shapes,
That never cease to flee?
The forkéd tree's chained shadows are
Less weary than we.

Whither do you go, O shadow-shapes,
Across the ghastly sky?
We go to where the wind blows
And the old stars die.

This is just a short and rather exuberant message to LITTLE REVIEW readers, because I think they really deserve the pleasure of discovering Cronyn for themselves.

* * * * *

_Songs for the New Age_, by James Oppenheim. [The Century Company,
New York.]

One of the phenomena of the evolution of man is the constant broadening of consciousness. We become accustomed to the sharing of our feelings with larger and larger numbers of people; our identity with the race,--and even with inanimate things,--becomes increasingly plain to us through both the findings of science and heightened emotional receptivity.

And yet this wider consciousness by no means lessens the value or quality of personality. By a splendid paradox, the more we realize our inseparability with all life the more does our selfhood become accentuated. Thus is achieved the marriage of Democracy and Individualism. We find that, in the end, the cultivation of one is the nourishing of the other. I need hardly mention that I am not alluding to that similacrum of equality: political democracy.

This must be known to appreciate the message of James Oppenheim. For it is pre-eminently as a message that these poems should be treated. They are of essential value as one of the most articulate efforts to translate that which in most people is mute.

There is an unmistakable kinship with Whitman in this work; not merely in the form,--which is here termed "polyrhythmic,"--but in the spirit, without hint of plagiarism or of abject imitation. Also we have the same breezy contempt for the petty trappings of civilization.

Here is an extract from the poem, _Tasting the Earth_, which has beauty as well as truth:

O dark great mother-globe so close beneath me....
It was she with her inexhaustible grief,
Ages of blood-drenched jungles, and the smoking of craters, and the
roar of tempests,
And moan of the forsaken seas,
It was she with the hills beginning to walk in the shapes of the
dark-hearted animals,
It was she risen, dashing away tears and praying to dumb skies, in
the pomp-crumbling tragedy of man....
It was she, container of all griefs, and the buried dust of broken
hearts,
Cry of the christs and the lovers and the child-stripped mothers,
And ambition gone down to defeat, and the battle overborne,
And the dreams that have no waking.

My heart became her ancient heart:
On the food of the strong I fed, on dark strange life itself:
Wisdom-giving and somber with the unremitting love of ages....

There was dank soil in my mouth,
And bitter sea on my lips,
In a dark hour, tasting the Earth.

This is enough to make one grateful to Mr. Oppenheim. But not always plays the cosmic symphony; sometimes the spheric strains relax for a few slender lyrics to a moving-picture lady or for the tender song to Annie, the working-girl. We leave the book with the conception of a manly and impressionable personality with a healthy lust for life, a deep insight into the world-soul and his own soul (which, after all, are the same), and great power to communicate his findings to us through a plastic and peculiarly individual medium.

CHARLES ASHLEIGH.

An American Anarchist

_Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre._ [Mother Earth Publishing
Association, New York.]

Into every generation are born certain personalities that have the gift of attracting vast multitudes within their orbit, dominating them, animating them with a single purpose, directing them to a common goal. There are other personalities more richly gifted, of more extended vision, who nevertheless live and die unknown to the greater number of their contemporaries. Aristocrats of the mind, these latter disdain to practice the arts by which popularity is gained and held. They attract, but do not seek to dominate. They persuade, but never command. Their passion is without hysteria; their moral indignation is without personal rancor. They cherish ideals, but harbor no illusions. They will gladly surrender life itself for an idea, but they will not shriek for it. Our popular leaders are not seldom led by those who seem to follow. These others advance alone. If they are followed it is without their solicitation. To say that the individualist writer and lecturer whose collected writings are now before us was such a personality may seem exaggerated praise. If so, I have no apology to offer. I only ask that, until you have read the lectures, poems, stories, and sketches which this book contains you will suspend judgment.

Voltairine de Cleyre belonged to the school of thinkers that has suffered most from the misrepresentations and misunderstanding of the unthinking crowd; the school which numbers among its adherents men like Stirner, Ibsen, and, in some aspects of his teaching, Nietzsche; the school that sees hope of social regeneration only in the sovereignty of the individual and the total abolition of the state. She belonged to it because she was at once logician and poet, with a temperament abnormally rebellious against tyranny and an imagination abnormally responsive to every form of suffering.

It has often been remarked that anarchism takes root most readily in those minds that have endured most oppression. Thus Russia, the home of absolute political despotism, is also the birthplace of Bakunin, Hertzen, Kropotkin, and Tolstoy. In America, where what Mencken calls "the new puritanism" operates more oppressively than political government, it is in behalf of sex freedom that most frequent and vehement protest is heard.

In the case of Voltairine de Cleyre this reaction declared itself neither because of political nor of sexual restraint. It came about in the realm of religion. It began from the moment when, at the age of twelve, the sensitive gifted girl was placed in the hands of a Roman Catholic sisterhood, presumably that her education might be safe. For four years the young Voltairine lived at the convent of Our Lady of Lake Huron at Sarnia, Ontario, heartsick with loneliness, writhing under the padded yoke of conventual discipline, gathering within her soul that flame which was never destined to be quenched save in death. Out of that experience she came with a mind wholly emancipated from the dogmas of religion. Not long afterward she entered upon what promised to be a brilliant career as a secularist lecturer.

That a nature like hers would long confine itself to labor in the barren field of theological controversy was not to have been expected. She was too vital, too human. It is possible that the delicacy of her own health intensified her sense of the world pain. Her sympathies are not alone of the intellect but of the nerves. One feels the nerve torture of an imaginative and poetic invalid in her confession of the reasons which had drawn her to adopt the anarchist propaganda. She pictures herself as standing upon a mighty hill from which she writes:

I saw the roofs of the workshops of the little world. I saw the
machines, the things that men had made to ease their burden, the
wonderful things, the iron genii, I saw them set their iron teeth
in the living flesh of the men who made them; I saw the maimed
and crumpled stumps of men go limping away into the night that
engulfs the poor, perhaps to be thrown up in the flotsam and
jetsam of beggary for a time, perhaps to suicide in some dim
corner where the black surge throws its slime. I saw the rose
fire of the furnace shining on the blanched face of the man who
tended it, and knew surely, as I knew anything in life, that
never would a free man feed his blood to the fire like that.

I saw swart bodies, all mangled and crushed, borne from the
mouths of the mines to be stowed away in a grave hardly less
narrow and dark than that in which the living form had crouched
ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day; and I knew that in order that
I might be warm--I and you, and those others who never do any
dirty work--those men had slaved away in those black graves and
been crushed to death at last. I saw beside city streets great
heaps of horrible colored earth, and down at the bottom of the
trench from which it was thrown, so far down that nothing else
was visible, bright gleaming eyes, like a wild animal hunted into
its hole. And I knew that free men never chose to labor there,
with pick and shovel, in that foul, sewage-soaked earth, in that
narrow trench, in that deadly sewer gas ten, eight, even six
hours a day. Only slaves would do it.

I saw deep down in the hull of the ocean liner the men who
shoveled the coal--burned and seared like paper before the grate;
and I knew that "the record" of the beautiful monster, and the
pleasure of the ladies who laughed on the deck, were paid for
with those withered bodies and souls. I saw the scavenger carts
go up and down, drawn by sad brutes and driven by sadder ones;
for never a man, a man in full possession of his selfhood, would
freely choose to spend all his days in the nauseating stench that
forces him to swill alcohol to neutralize it. And I saw in the
lead works how men were poisoned, and in the sugar refineries how
they went insane; and in the factories how they lost their
decency; and in the stores how they learned to lie; and I knew it
was slavery made them do all this.

And against such slavery this young Amazon of the spirit (for at this time, 1887, she was only twenty-one) declared a life-long warfare. In so doing she separated herself from those who would otherwise have been her natural allies and cut off those opportunities for worldly success which must in the ordinary course of things have come to her.

Finding the cause of economic slavery not in capitalism, as do the socialists, but in the government of man by man through which capitalism is made possible, she was isolated still further from her contemporaries. Hence the obscurity in which her life was passed. Hence the fact that until her death in 1912 she lived quietly, teaching English to the newly-arrived immigrant, scattering about her the treasure of a richly-stored mind as freely as the south wind scatters the perfume it has gathered from the garden in its path. If she had lived nearer to the plane of the generally-accepted culture Voltairine de Cleyre might have gained a recognized place among the foremost women of her time.

As it was she gave us in her lectures, now for the first time offered to the public, the most comprehensive exposition of philosophical anarchism that has appeared since the days of Proudhon and Stirner.

LILIAN HILLER UDELL.

The Growth of Evolutionary Theory

_Evolution Old and New_, by Samuel Butler. [E. P. Dutton and
Company, New York.]

When _The Origin of Species_ was published the world grouped itself into two main camps. By far the larger of these took the attitude that Darwin was an impious propounder of disgusting and dangerous heresy. The smaller group hailed him as the bringer in of a new era.

Samuel Butler allied himself with neither group, but took the attitude of a constructive critic. In these pages he attacks contemporary Darwinism--using the term in the narrow sense--on two grounds. That it is not the novelty it is generally supposed to be, on the one hand, and that the mechanism implied by its theory is not true, on the other hand, are his main points.

In so far as Butler treats the first contention, his book is even today of value. He describes the pre-Darwinian theories of evolution, especially those of Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, and he strives to show that their explanations or provisional explanations were sometimes more near the truth than was Darwin's over-emphasis upon the struggle for existence as the controlling factor in the evolution of species.

Butler's own point of view is that evolution takes place in accordance with a design, and it is this part of his book that will be of least importance at the present day. He quotes Paley, the celebrated English theologian and advocate of the deified architect idea of God, to show that animal organisms do show evidences of what is, strictly speaking, design, and which cannot be referred to the ordinary Darwinian explanations.

Butler differs from Paley, however, in placing the designer not outside the cosmic flux of his working materials, but within the organism. Not God, he says, but the ancestral memory of man is the designer. The individual perishes, but his memory endures in his offspring and alters them in accordance with the lessons of ancestral experience.

We have said that this is the least valuable part of the book, and it is so for the reason that later biologists and philosophers with the biological approach have considerably enlarged the field of speculation in this particular realm. The theory of "entelechies" of Hans Driesch practically does for organisms what Butler does in his idea of unconscious memory. On the other hand, the new "imminent teleology" of Bergson gives us a new angle on the whole question of design in nature.

At the same time, however, the majority of biologists are harking back to a conception of evolution as a kind of mathematical proposition in which all is given to start with, and in which the new is neither a new design nor a spontaneous creation, but is simply a liberation from inhibition of what was always implicit in the old. And the men of this school would never consent to write a book like this of Butler's. "To the seed pan and the incubator" is their cry. The time is not here when synthesis is either advisable or even possible, they tell us. And until we hear further from these modern experimenters the wise man will read Butler for his history and prospective,--and for his humor,--but will not be guided by his theories, which are the work, indeed, of a brilliant intellect, but one working without our new data, and without experimental backing.

Of course, the style of the book is delightful, and all who enjoy controversy and the play of dialectic should read it. Another class to whom it can be recommended is that large class of people who accept their view of evolution in the same spirit that an old lady accepts the Episcopalian creed and are twice as dogmatic over it.

ILLIAM DHONE.

Emma Goldman and the Modern Drama

_The Social Significance of the Modern Drama_, by Emma Goldman.
[Richard G. Badger, Boston.]

[_The points in which we disagree with the reviewer will be
discussed in a coming issue.--The Editor._]

There is an element of the keenest adventure in one's first meeting with a great personality, whether that encounter be in body or through the medium of the written word. In the case of Emma Goldman I should judge the latter to be the severer test, for on the printed page she must stand and fall by the content of her message, unaided by the glamor of personal magnetism and eloquence of the lecture platform. For my own part, I should have preferred to have met her as the fiery orator than as the purveyor of academic wares. And yet in this present performance she comes forward not in the guise of the accustomed critic--on the contrary she is very often quite uncritical--but rather as the social interpreter. In other words, Emma Goldman is here what she has always been: the propagandist, with the modern drama as her latest text.

And she has a mighty text! Because "any mode of creative work, which with true perception portrays social wrongs earnestly and boldly, may be a greater menace to our social fabric and a more powerful inspiration than the wildest harangue of the soapbox orator," she has chosen the drama as the fittest medium "to arouse the intellectuals of this country, to make them realize their relation to the people, to the social unrest permeating the atmosphere." The great iconoclasts of our time who have spoken through the drama--Ibsen, Strindberg, Sudermann, Hauptmann, Wedekind, Brieux, Shaw, Galsworthy, Tolstoi, Tchekhof, Gorki--she has gathered together within one pair of covers to show us that their message is her message:--Change not Compromise.

As she puts it in her foreword:

They know that society has gone beyond the stage of patching up,
and that man must throw off the dead weight of the past, with all
its ghosts and spooks, if he is to go foot free to meet the
future.

Again and again she returns to her theme. In summarizing Ibsen's stand:

Already in _Brand_, Henrick Ibsen demanded all or nothing,--no
weak-kneed moderation, no compromise of any sort in the struggle
for the ideal.

In praise of the author of _Damaged Goods_:

Brieux is among the very few modern dramatists who go to the
bottom of this question by insisting on a complete social and
economic change, which alone can free us from the scourge of
syphilis and other social plagues.

In connection with Yeats's _Where There is Nothing_:

It embodies the spirit of revolt itself, of that most
constructive revolt which begins with the destruction of every
obstacle in the path of the new life that is to grow on the
débris of the old, when the paralyzing yoke of institutionalism
shall have been broken, and man left free to enjoy Life and
Laughter.

Those who are a bit dubious of the "Life and Laughter" that will follow the wholesale destruction of the past will have no difficulty in discovering the shortcomings of Miss Goldman's method. They are the obvious ones which of necessity befall the single-minded propagandist:--the intrusion of dogma and platitude into the discussion, the wearying insistence upon "the moral" of each play, the uncritical attitude of too-ready acquiescence in the veracity of each dramatic picture of life, etc. Such critics might point out that the artist, in spite of Strindberg's dictum, cannot be a mere "lay preacher popularizing the pressing questions of his time"; that insofar as he approaches art, he does not preach; that it is by virtue of this power that Hervieux, for example, is a greater artist than his better-known contemporary, Brieux. (By the way, why did Miss Goldman omit the greatest of the French social dramatists?) These critics might even throw in a word for the institutions of the past which Miss Goldman believes can be as easily shed as an outworn cloak.

But one must not be an orthodox Anarchist to recognize the superficiality of these shortcomings which are the inevitable luggage of the preacher. For Miss Goldman is a preacher. Any interpreter works in accordance with his creed. Having taken to heart the fate of Lot's wife, Miss Goldman has turned her back fiercely upon the past. Grant her this hypothesis and she is always logical and coherent and never irrelevant. And why shouldn't we encourage her to forge boldly ahead, disdainful of the old bondage? We need her courage, her single-mindedness, and the aim to which she has vowed them. She is not alone, for many who know her not chant the same litany. As for the danger to society that lurks in her philosophy, we must not forget that the great conservative mass is leavened slowly. And in the end it is time alone who can give the verdict--whether we shall patch up the old fabric, or destroy and begin our weaving anew.

MARGUERITE SWAWITE.

The Whining of a Rejected One

_Oscar Wilde and Myself_, by Lord Alfred Douglas. [Duffield and
Company, New York.]

Emma Goldman gave this laconic epithet to this latest pearl of scandal-literature. Mylord is very much in earnest, hence his pitiful failure to see the humorous side of his pathetic self-spanking. The modest title of the book obviously suggests the two-fold purpose of the titular harlequin--his own aggrandizement and the dethronement of the Prince of Paradoxes. He excellently succeeds in obtaining the reverse result of his first endeavor; not even his pugilistic father, the Marquis of Queensbury, could have given him a more thorough boxing than the one he so earnestly performs over his own ears. As to his other ambition, that of vying with the laurels of Herostrates in his attempt to belittle the dead lion, we must admit his success in one point, in proving the morbid vanity of Wilde. What but the passion for titular acquaintances could have induced the author of _Salome_ to chum with Bosie Douglas, this burlesque snob, so utterly shallow, petty, so hopelessly stupid and arrogant?

I don't know what to admire more: the "ethics" of the publisher or the sense of humor of the author.

K.

A New Short Story Writer

_Life Is a Dream_, by Richard Curle. [Doubleday, Page and Company,
New York.]

It is to be hoped that Richard Curle will not long remain a name unfamiliar to American readers, for he is a writer of marked and unusual talent. _Life Is a Dream_ is the first of his books to be published in this country, and, consisting as it does of short stories, it can scarcely find as large an audience as it deserves. For there can be no doubt that volumes of short stories have only a modest sale--Kipling and O. Henry to the contrary notwithstanding.

In Curle's case this is a great pity, for the stories in _Life Is a Dream_ are every one of them remarkable and they have not been printed elsewhere. They are not what we are accustomed to; almost any magazine editor would reject them, if only because they have none of that "punch" which so largely characterizes the work of Kipling and O. Henry, not to mention the other and far smaller people. It is difficult for the man who writes stories without "punch" to procure a hearing; the great popular magazines will have none of him; style, craftsmanship, subtle psychology, exquisite color--none of these (and Curle is a master of them all) can quite atone for lack of that predominant American quality. And that is why Richard Curle, working as he has thus far in a genre that appeals, however strongly, still to only a few, may be long in securing the recognition that is already quite his due.

There are nine stories of varying length in the present volume. They take you to the corners of the earth--London, Damascus, Spain, the West Indies, the high seas, Central America--and their spirit is well suggested in the title of the collection--_La Vida Es Sueno_. Truly they are such stuff as dreams are made of. Curle's feeling for the colorful word, the precise phrase is remarkable; in a moment one feels almost bodily transported to a strange and fascinating land. And then the story is unfolded--for these are real stories and never mere impressionistic sketches. They may not be about the sort of people you are likely to number among your friends, but they are about very human folk just the same. They have a subtlety that is never too involved and an engaging frankness which is one of Curle's greatest charms.

_Old Hoskyns_, almost homely in its simplicity, is a very touching tale. _Going Home_ is an exquisite bit of irony. _The Look Out Man_--slight though it is--is profoundly tragic. In _A Remittance Man_, little by little, like a mosaic, a shrewd, penetrating, and very convincing picture is built up of a man who has lost his grip on life. And so they go--Curle knows the people of his tales so well! He is careful never to tell you too much about them--there is ample opportunity after each narrative for pleasant speculation--but one never feels that the real story he set out to tell has not been fully told.

It is equally important that Curle knows intimately the places he chooses as settings for his stories. Most of this knowledge he has gained in his amazingly extensive travels. Aside from North America he has visited almost every corner of the earth. And yet it is none the less very remarkable--this curious ability to paint atmosphere--a talent not too often associated with those who write in English. Conrad has it, and the greater continental writers--and Curle has studied them to advantage. I should have myself to possess this same ability to make you realize the peculiar fascination of such a story as _The Emerald Seeker_. It is a fine and thrilling yarn; no matter that--there are many who can tell a rattling tale. But I doubt if any could approach Curle's masterly sketching of his milieu--a page or two, and in a very real sense you feel yourself in the heart of tropical Central America. Finally and best of all, you know that the color is never there merely for its own sake; there is always a real story to be told and to its telling the background merely adds distinction. It is difficult--trying to show the peculiar charm and interest of Curle's work. But once you read him, it becomes very apparent.

Richard Curle is only thirty years old. If the promise of _Life Is a Dream_ is fulfilled, he should be one of the really significant writers of his day. He has traveled widely and is widely read; he knows not only men and places, but books as well--particularly the works of the great Russian and Frenchmen. Among living writers he admires especially Joseph Conrad, with whose work his own has a certain kinship. Curiously enough he has written the first adequate book on Conrad and it is shortly to be published in America. It will reveal Curle as a critic of sympathy, insight and independence. Meanwhile every lover of good fiction, everyone who cares for skillful craftsmanship in literature, and all those adventurous persons who would see strange lands and people should read _Life Is a Dream_.

ALFRED A. KNOPF.

A New Study of William Morris

_William Morris_, by A. Clutton-Brock. [Henry Holt and Company, New
York.]

I dislike that method which many historians pursue, treating the past as a matter of death instead of life. For a baggage of rags and a jumble of bleached bones I have no concern. Yesterday is a thing I will not consider. History is a proof of one thing only:--that circumstance is a fraud, and that personality is a durability with eternity. The soul writes its autobiography, and those used for the syllables survive the seasons and the years. Rule and custom and people who are no more than these are for the scrap heap. Night comes and swallows the dead. History is nothing except for its exceptions. Nature's royal men we discover despite their uniforms. We note not their habiliments; they have a natural tongue and true approach and are masters of the seconds. They breathe life lustily still. These are the verities. They are descriptive not of antiquity but of the mind which is now. They show us who we are. We love them because of this. Every time we read them we embark on a new voyage, and discover to ourselves a treasure island of which hitherto we had not the slightest knowledge. Trojans of truth, they lift their spears to the central sun, to proclaim the splendor of the individual, the great reality of the Now. Through them we are made aware how rich we are, we begin to realize somewhat of our depths; they provide a new courage, give a new hope, and inspire us for the struggle ahead with the quality of an unwonted self-reliance.

I have probably gone beyond my office in making these remarks, but the temptation provided by the biography of William Morris proved so strong that I could not forego them. Here is a man of whom we cannot know too much. An artist who gave his life for art--what shall we say of him?

Mr. Brock has told a little of the man, sometimes in an interesting way, but he does not make us intimate with him. However, as he tells us in his preface, he had no pretensions. He is lucid and thoughtful, he is excellent in his criticism of Morris's poetry, and on the whole gives us a book well worthy of an hour's quietude. The facts given are good by way of an introduction--sufficient to send one in quest for greater knowledge of the man.

One of Nature's henchmen, fresh, bold, Viking in the marrow, with a spirit of steel, a man for whom the sea would smile, poet, painter, stainer of glass, weaver of carpets, spinning a world with the strains of his song, socialist and revolutionist, Morris comes as a teasing wind through the dank atmosphere of nineteenth-century commercialism, daring conventions and going his way a body all soul, a majesty supreme to the last.

We get a little of the air of the man when we read these lines from the _Sigurd_. I quote from the biography:

There was a dwelling of Kings ere the world was waxen old,
Dukes were the door wards there, and the roofs were thatched with
gold;
Earls were the wrights that wrought it, and silver nailed the doors;
Earls' wives were the weaving women, queens' daughters strewed the
floor.
And the masters of its song craft were the mightiest men that cast
The sails of the storm of battle adown the bickering blast.

One cannot but remark the manhood and courage of this. A Luxury of Life. A freedom here that would fill the winds. It is not to be wondered that such a man should chafe under the tyranny of skin-girt stupidity, and feel a loathing toward the flannel-souled people who in his time were already making machines of men and building a world around them of ugliness,--cities without bearing, without character, without mirth, without life. Cities of the dead, where ghosts might abide.

It is in the realm of art, however, that we must look for Morris would we view him in the light. Art gave the world a child who would lead it by the hand to the Princess Beautiful that the maiden should have a lover to woo. A child--yes; and a warrior too, who would do battle with any of her enemies. I would not say that he knew more of art in its relation to life than did Ruskin, Wilde, and Whistler; he was, however, far more active of the purpose. He saw that art was not a mere thing for the galleries, where Mediocrity can sniff and vaunt its conceits; for him it was serious of all nature, of the whole circle and the endless series of circles.

That which gives ear to the tongues of stones and from marble delivers its soul, he wanted Life to seek. There was a spice in art for Morris which made it dangerous for milk-sops. Art for him was a Reality; the existence around him a fraud, and Life a cowardice. He had Truth on his side; he hated shams and he joined the socialist movement because he saw here a means for their overturning. In a very interesting chapter Mr. Brock tells how Morris, after breakfasting with Burne-Jones, would go out to some street corner and lecture on socialism to a throng of workingmen, some dirty and in rags. He had his courage--this man.

There dwells in each of us a heroism of which the last has not been spoken. Carlyle was drunk with it, Emerson wrote it, Morris lived it. A great artist, but a greater man. Life for him was a cavalier extravagance--thus would he have all men live. To make the world live, we must give of our living. Breathe life into all things that they too will have manners and extend a friendship's greetings.

For practical people Morris is still anathema; for human beings, however, he is yet a comrade in the struggle. Mr. Brock's study of him is therefore welcome, coming as it does with fresh intelligence of his nature. His book most certainly is a thing to be read.

G. F.

Exaggerated Mushrooms

_Minions of the Moon_, by Madison Cawein. [Stewart and Kidd,
Cincinnati.]

At a glance the book seems merely a collection of unusual nursery-rhymes, but after a careful reading one finds little glimmers of poetry, like faded flowers touched with sulphur and pressed between the leaves of a very inane volume. If you have the sublime suggestion of patience necessary to turn the leaves of the book you will rather delight in fingering the flowers. They are moon-light flowers. Mr. Cawein is at his best when he goes into his usual tremulous raptures over moon-light. His moon-light poems actually drip with slim, wistful (to use a much-abused word) color. If he could forget elfs, fairies, and mushrooms for more than a moment, Madison Cawein would reach the plateaus, if not the mountain-tips of poetry. But he can only cast out the trite child which has taken possession of him, now and then. Strange to say, though three or four of the poems in the volume are good, they do not contain a line worth quoting. Their halfbeauty lies in the ensemble. As for the rest of the book, I can best describe it by saying that one feels inclined to turn over the page.

M. B.

Sentence Reviews

(Inclusion in this category does not preclude a more extended
notice.)

_The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd_, by D. H. Lawrence. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.] A three-act drama, by a young English poet, that feels into new recesses of the problem of sex relationships. Clear thinking, acute analysis, and provocative criticisms of life make this a notable addition to _The Modern Drama Series_.

_An Island Outpost_, by Mary E. Waller. [Little, Brown and Company, Boston.] "I respect the clam," says Miss Waller; "it has certain reserves." She also says: "Liberty is the restraint of controlled intelligence," and she tells us that a million ideas unloaded on an unwarned public will cause befogment of its reasoning powers. Miss Waller in her _Island Outpost_ has not shown the reserve of the clam, nor the restraint of controlled intelligence, but has unloaded her "million ideas on a million subjects unannounced and uncatalogued." Socrates, Swedes, and Simians, Hull House and Helsingfors, Praxiteles and Plum Jelly, Clucking Hens and Chemistry, Philanthropic Frenzies, Psychiatry Astigmatic, Outlooks, and Intellectual Miasma overlap each other in "indecent haste"--and to cap all comes an analogy taken from old "turned carpets," suggestive of prehistoric methods of sanitation to a mere "Westerner."

_Gillespie_, by J. MacDougall Hay. [George H. Doran Company, New York.] A big story of heroic Scotch life by a new writer who has tremendous power. It makes that kind of profound personal impressions which a well-bred man refuses to discuss.

_Songs and Poems_, by Martin Schütze. [The Laurentian Publishers, Chicago.] The discriminating reader who is a bit wearied of the "free verse" of "free poets" will find refreshing contrast in this slender volume of Mr. Schütze. Here there is beauty combined with delicate craftsmanship; lines finely wrought, fresh rhythms, uncommon phrasing. The contents reveals a happy versatility: there are a variety of Songs, some Poems, Discourses, and Epigrams.

_When Love Flies Out o' the Window_, by Leonard Merrick. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.] A pretty story of the love affair of a charming chorus girl and a novelist-journalist. It should make good late summer reading, for the route of true love is not over-smooth, and the end is happy. We recommend the earlier portion of the book as done in the inimitable Merrick fashion. It is rather too bad that this author's sustained performances fall so far below his short stories.

_The Man and the Woman_, by Arthur L. Salmon. [Forbes and Company, Chicago.] A comforting little volume for smug Victorian women of both sexes.

_Short Plays_, by Mary Macmillan. [Stewart and Kidd Company, Cincinnati.] Ten short plays deftly done, and sufficiently varied in theme to meet the diverse demands of the woman's club, the girls' school, and the amateur dramatic society.

_English Drama of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century_, by George Henry Nettleton. [The Macmillan Company, New York.] Interesting to academic students of the historical facts of the early periods of the modern English drama.

_Erna Vitek_, by Alfred Kreymborg. [Albert and Charles Boni, New York.] This further enterprise of a new and daring publishing house is an attempt, and a promising one at that, at the naturalistic American novel. But it is only an attempt. Mr. Kreymborg's style is marred by the very frequent use of journalese. He has an excellent plot, but the treatment has somewhat failed to do it justice. Also, it seems to us that the episode narrated in the book would have made a far better short story than a novel. Despite these defects of juvenility, the book gives promise of future work by this author that will surely count. Also one obtains a refreshing insight into the real New York Bohemia.

_A Stepdaughter of the Prairie_, by Margaret Lynn. [The Macmillan Company, New York.] Vivid impressions of pioneer life in the Missouri Valley by a writer who knows the wide prairies of that region.

_Business: A Profession_, by Louis D. Brandeis. [Small, Maynard and Company, Boston.] A book composed of the lectures, essays and discussions which gave rise to the efficiency idea in big business management. It belongs on the shelf with President Wilson's _The New Freedom_.

_London and Paris_, by Prof. John C. Van Dyke. [Charles Scribner's Sons, New York.] Two additions to the _New Guides to Old Masters Series_ that point out to conventional visitors the things that they should see when they look at the pictures in the famous galleries of London and Paris.

_Letters from a Living Dead Man_, dictated to Elsa Barker. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.] Unimportant even if true, which they are alleged to be. Psychical researchers will salt this thing down with their "facts."

_Where Rolls the Oregon_, by Dallas Lore Sharp. [Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.] A group of delightful impressions of "the vast outdoors of Oregon" by an interpretative observer whose zestful phraseology is full of local atmosphere. A number of charming halftones are included.

_The Red Light of Mars_, by George Bronson-Howard. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.] This philosophical comedy in three acts, which adds creditable variety and interest to _The Modern Drama Series_, will be staged this season. Being typically American in spirit, it lacks iron in the body of its thought.

_Bambi_, by Marjorie Benton Cook. [Doubleday, Page and Company, New York.] "_Bambi_" is altogether delightful. After marrying a writer of impossible plays, she endeavors to support him and to teach him to support himself. She becomes an author, and with her delicious vanity, and knowledge of her ability to wind men around her tiny finger, uses her own fame as a lever to place her husband among the successful playwrights. This sprightly midget is one of the most lovable characters we have met in many moons.

The Reader Critic

"_Gaudeamus_":

In these historic days I cannot think of your September issue in other terms than as of a Zeppelin hurling bombs into the enemy's strongholds. From the first to the last page (yes, even the letters!) I read the copy to an imaginary beating of drums, blasting of trumpets, fluttering of banners. When I reached the last line, I relaxed in nervous expectation of the results of the grandiose charge: Will there be no explosion, no earthquake?

I ask this question in dead earnest. THE LITTLE REVIEW has become definite in one point--in its uncompromising warfare against the rotten features of the existing order. In this one issue you have attacked with the fervor of unhesitating youth some of the stanchest fortified dunghills of American life and art. From _Armageddon_, that merciless bomb into the camp of provincial complacency prevailing in this country, through the execution of academical _Grocers_, through the venomous _Democrat_ that reveals the beauty of constructive hatred, down to the palpitating letter of the "Boy-Reader" who deals a tender death-blow to the despotic authoritativness of parenthood,--I scent war powder! And with hope and anxiety I put the question once more:

Will there be no response to the call of the clarion? Will your battle-cry not be echoed by young America, who for the first time hear a free unmercenarized word? Will your courageous gospel not stir the hearts of college men and women, those who have not yet been completely philistinized by their "vocational guides"; college men and women who in other countries have always been the torch-bearers, the advance-guard and martyrs in the fights for truth and ideals? Will THE LITTLE REVIEW not succeed in creating a _Drang und Sturm_ epoch?

A negative answer would spell a death-verdict for the future of this over-dollarized land.

_An Interested Reader, Chicago_:

THE LITTLE REVIEW bubbles over with enthusiasm and love of life. Here is an instance of a losing fight with life--perhaps it may interest you.

A childhood spent in the slums of a large city--not in the camaraderie spirit of the slums but within the close bounds of a little clean apartment presided over by an aristocratic-notioned mother. Absolute barrenness of childhood experience--not a toy, never even a rag doll, not a tree, not a flower, not a picture of any beauty--a household of petty quarreling and incessant scrubbing and cleaning, and strict adherence to duties. As the child, now grown, thinks back, she knows that there was always a subconscious feeling of revolt. She would often go off for many hours knowing that punishment would follow; she destroyed much that caused tears in her efforts to create, she craved and found affection where life was a little richer.

And then came books--avid, unsystematic reading. But life was never touched intimately and directly from any angle but one of barrenness, pettiness. A routined school course enriched living by a deep and lasting friendship. Continually the inner revolt and the outward conforming dragged along together. And then came a time of complete awakening, of burning whys, with realization of a dual existence and a desire for sincerity in living above all things. Life demands some sort of a medium of expression which has its beginning in childhood experience. A maturing mind just beginning on impressions that should have come in childhood is a sorry spectacle. Its desires are so out of proportion to its human possibilities that it flounders and does nothing. It finds in itself capacities dulled for want of stimulation, it looks on things and sees them out of relation to itself. One grows to despise human beings, to hate living--to see that there is beauty and radiance in the world only for the chosen ones who respond to it intimately and not only through day dreams.