The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Little Review, July 1914 (Vol. 1, No. 5), by Margaret C. Anderson This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook. Title: The Little Review, July 1914 (Vol. 1, No. 5) Author: Various Editor: Margaret C. Anderson Release Date: December 22, 2020 [eBook #64083] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 Produced by: Jens Sadowski and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net. This book was produced from images made available by the Modernist Journal Project, Brown and Tulsa Universities. *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LITTLE REVIEW, JULY 1914 (VOL. 1, NO. 5) *** THE LITTLE REVIEW Literature Drama Music Art MARGARET C. ANDERSON EDITOR JULY, 1914 Poems Charles Ashleigh The Renaissance of Parenthood The Editor “Des Imagistes” Charles Ashleigh Of Rupert Brooke and Other Matters Arthur Davison Ficke The New Loyalty George Burman Foster The Milliner (Poem) Sade Iverson “Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt” Margaret C. Anderson Editorials New York Letter George Soule Dostoevsky’s Novels Maurice Lazar Book Discussion: An Unreeling Realist De Witt C. Wing The Revolt of the “Once Born” Eunice Tietjens Verlaine and Tolstoy Alexander S. Kaun Conrad’s Quote Henry B. Sell “Clark’s Field” Marguerite Swawite The “Savage” Painters A. S. K. Sentence Reviews Published Monthly 25 cents a copy MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Publisher CHICAGO Fine Arts Building $2.50 a year THE LITTLE REVIEW Vol. I JULY, 1914 No. 5 POEMS CHARLES ASHLEIGH BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL (A Mystery Rime for Little Children of All Ages) The rain comes down and veils the hills. Ah, tender rain for aching fields! The hills are clothed in a mist of rain. (My heart is clothed in a mist of pain.) Ah, mother rain, that laves the field, If I to you my poor soul yield, Will you not cleanse it, soothe it, tend it, Weep upon it ’til ’tis mended? ’Twas sweet to sow, ’tis hard to reap. Come, mother rain, and lull me to sleep. Lull me to sleep and wash me away, Out of the realm of Night and Day, Back to the bourne from whence I came, Seeming alike yet not the same.... Rain, you are more than rain to me. And Lash of Pain may be a Key. Ope, then, the door and tread within. The double Door of Good and Sin Is vanquished. Lo, with bread and wine, The table’s spread! The feast is Mine! LOVE IN THE ABYSS 1 2 Amidst the buzz of bawdy tales And the laughter of drinking men, I sat and laughed and shouted also. Yet was I not content. My seared and restless eyes, turning here and there,— Like my tired soul,— Seeking new joys and finding them not,— How oft swept you unseeing. Until, suddenly,— And now I know not how I could have missed it,— My eyes saw into yours, And plumbed the deep wells of newly born desire. Ah, dear my heart, what things your eyes did speak! Not God’s own music of creation’s dawn, Revealed to mystic in a holy trance, Could pleasure me more sweetly. So dear were your lips— Your lips so kind and regal red. My memory of your lips I cherish As a great possession ... Ah, flying joy, Caught on the wings of Time ... Tender oasis, Ingemmed in a wilderness of grey! Kisses, kisses,— Kisses upon your red lips in the black night ... When, alone in the long, quiet street, By the door of the tavern, Shielded from sight of those within, The soft rain falling on our heads like a mother’s blessing,— We bartered the clinging kisses of new desire. And, as I held you to me, The whole universe Became informed of God, And lay within my arms. JEALOUSY You are possessed by another. How I hate him! Hear the rational people say: “Jealousy is a primitive thing. A thing of the emotions; not of reason.” Fools! You do not know scarlet desire, full-flooded! Ah, my dearest, Graal of my heart’s longing, Your stolen kiss is fresh upon my neck. My lips are full of my secret kiss upon your neck. You are with another, whom I hate; whom I like well for himself, but hate because he possesses you ... Your possessor is old and ugly; He can not love you as I can. I can pour out for you the scented treasures of my young love. Dear night of hope, when you gave me the whispered promise to come to me ... Stealthy was I and cunning. Friendly and attentive was I to your old lover (if lover he may be called, who is almost incapable of love). 3 love). And, all the time, I was scheming for you. When the old man was away for an instant— Oh, golden moment,— I poured my whispered passion into your ears. When he looked away, or, for a moment, was distracted, with swift undertones I declared myself to you. How dear was your welcoming glance and your quickly toned assent! You had a face so proud. So quiet and poised among the throng. Yet, for once, you gave me your eyes and, in so doing, gave me your priceless body and warm, comradely soul. Ah, flash of answering love that transformed your face! As a jewel of my memory’s treasure-casket may it be preserved. When the drinking-place was closed, we walked along the dark street. Do you remember? We were four, luckily, and the old man was kept busy in conversation, half drunken as he was. And we, with our secret between us, walked behind. Our hands were tight clasped in the folds of our dress. Tight clasped with the clinging hand caress; you and I trying to put into our hands all the longing that was in us. All the time we were apprehensive of a sudden turning of the old man or the other ... Then, the whispered troth, and the meeting-place appointed. And, then, later, boldly, so openly and audaciously it brought no suspicion, Under seeming of wine-induced jollity, we kissed. And they laughed; it seemed a trivial jest to them. But to us it was a sacrament. But, best of all, my beloved, was the hurried clasping and kissing when we were alone in the dark. Promise of joy to come. Foretaste of the coming ecstasy. And then we had to part. I and my unaware friend. You and the old man. As I walked home that night, How I hated him! How I looked up at the pale-golden moon high-hung in the purple sky, and sang in my heart your praise and cursed in my heart your possessor ... But we will out-wit him. Young I am and young are you and the Law of Life bids us mate. And a whole world standing between us would be melted and destroyed by the fire of our youth’s desire. THE GLORIOUS ADVENTURE OF GLORIOUS ME 4 5 I swim with the tide of life towards the new; I reach out hungered arms to flowing change.— I smash the awesome totems of my kind; My smarting vision bursts its cramping range. A thousand voices yell within my soul; A thousand hymns are chanting in my heart.— I blast the mist of worlds and years apart; I sense the blending glory of the whole. The sap of flowers and trees, it mounts in me. I feel the child within me cry and turn; The crimson thoughts within me writhe and burn.— I stand, with craving arms high-flung, before the rimless sea. And every whirling, passionate star sings melodies to Me; And every bud and every leaf has sought my private ear; And to the quickening soul of Me has told its mystery, As I sit in state in the heart of the world, As I proudly hug the core of the world, As I make me a boat of the whole, wide world ... And then for new worlds steer. T THE RENAISSANCE OF PARENTHOOD MARGARET C. ANDERSON here seems to be a kind of renaissance of motherhood in the air. Ellen Key has just done a book with that title which has come to us too late to be reviewed adequately in this issue; Mrs. Gasquoine Hartley has written The Age of Mother Power which will be brought out in the fall; and in Shaw’s new volume of plays (Misalliance, Fanny’s First Play and The Dark Lady of the Sonnets) there is a preface of over a hundred pages devoted to a discussion of parents and children which says some of the most refreshing and important things about that relationship I have ever read. The home, as such, is rapidly losing its old functions—perhaps it is more accurate to say that it is changing its standards of functioning, and that the present distress merely heralds in a wonderful new conception of family potentiality. But a generalization of this sort can be disputed by any family egotist, so let’s get down to particulars. It’s all right for the enlightened of the older generation to preach violently that the family is a humbug, as Shaw does; that the child should have all the rights of any other human being, and that there is nothing so futile or so stupid as to try to “control” your children. It’s not only all right; it’s glorious! But what I’m more interested in, still being of the age that must classify as “daughter,” is this:—what are “the children” themselves doing about it? Have their rebellions been anything more than complaints; have they made any real stand for liberty; have they proved themselves worthy of the Shavian championship? Well—I got hold recently of a human document which answered these questions quite in the affirmative. It was a rather startling thing because, while it offered nothing new on the theory side of the matter, it showed the theory in thoughtful action—which, for all the talk on the subject, is still rare. It was a letter of some twenty pages written by a girl to her mother at the time of a domestic climax when all the bonds of family affection, family idealism and obligation were tending to smother the human truth of the situation, as the girl put it. She was in her early twenties; she had a sister two or three years younger, and both of them had reached at least a sort of economic independence. She had come to the conclusion, after a good many years of rebellion, that the whole fabric of their family life was wrong; and since it was impossible to talk the thing out sensibly—because, as in all families where the children grow up without being given the necessary revaluations, real talk is no more possible than it is between uncongenial strangers—she had decided to discuss it in a letter. That medium does away with the patronage of the parents’ refusal to listen seriously:—that “Oh, come now, what do you know about these things?” If the child has anything interesting to say, if he puts any of his rebellion into his writing, the chances are that the parent will read the letter through; and the result is that he’ll know more about his child than he has learned in all the years they’ve been trying to talk with each other and not succeeding. I’m enthusiastic about this kind of family correspondence; it’s good training in expression and it clears the air—jolts the “heads” of the family into realizing that the thinking and planning are not all on one side. I once did it myself to my father—put ten pages of closely-written argument on his office desk (so that he’d open it with the same impersonality given to a business communication), in which I explained why I wanted to go away from home and learn to work, and why I thought such a course was an intelligent one. The letter accomplished what no amount of talking would have done, because in our talk we rarely got beyond the “Oh, now, you’re just a little excited, it will look different in the morning” stage. Father said it was rather a shock to him because he didn’t know I had ever figured things out to that extent; but we always understood each other better after that. However—not to get lost in personalities—this is the letter the girl showed me and which she allows me to quote from partially: If we are to continue living together in any sort of happiness and growth the entire basis of our present life will have to be changed. We can do it if we’re brave enough to do what people usually do only in books:—face the fact squarely that our family life is and has been a failure, and set about to remedy it. It will mean an entire change of home conditions, and these are the terms of the new arrangement: When I said to you the other day that things would have to go my way now, you were horrified at the conceit of it. To get to facts, there’s no conceit in it—because my way is simply the practise of not imposing one’s will upon other people. I made the remark merely as a common sense suggestion, and made it out of a seriousness that is desperate. I say “desperate” because I mean that literally: the situation isn’t a question of a mere temporary adjustment—just some sort of superficial arrangement so that we can get on pleasantly for a while before the next outbreak comes. The plans Betty and I have discussed have been made in the interest of our whole future lives:—whether we’re going to submit (either by surrender or compromise or by just drifting along and not doing anything) to an existence of bickering, nagging, hours spent in the discussion of non-essentials, hideous lack of harmony—the whole stupid programme we’ve watched working for years and achieving nothing but unhappiness, folly, and a terrible “human waste.” You ask us to continue in your way; but from at least three points of view that way has been a failure. I ask you to adopt my way—which has not yet failed. That’s why I say it’s not conceit, but common sense. My way is simply this: that we three can live together and work in peace and harmony if this awful bugbear of Authority is dropped out of the scheme. Each of us must go her own way; we’re all different, and there’s no reason why one should impose her authority on the lives of the others. You say that you should because you’re our mother. But that’s the thing I want to discuss. Motherhood isn’t infallibility. If a woman is a wise woman she’s a wise mother; if she’s a foolish woman she’s a foolish mother. Because you’re our mother doesn’t mean that you must always be right; before being a mother you’re a human being, and any human being is likely to be wrong. To get down to brutal facts, we think you are not right about the whole thing. We’ve thought so for years, but now it’s come to the time when our thinking must be put into 6 7 8 action. We’re no longer children; but even as mere infants we thought these things—without having the right to express them. What I’m trying to do now is to express them not as a daughter, but quite impersonally as a human being, as a mere friend, a sister, or anyone who might come to you stating that she believed with all her soul that you were wrong, and also stating, just as impersonally, that she wouldn’t think of modeling her line of conduct after that pattern which appeared to her so wrong. We must face the facts; if you do that squarely it doesn’t seem so bad, and you stop flinching about it. You get to the point where you’re not afraid to face them boldly, and then you begin to construct. And this is the only way to clear up the kind of rottenness and decay that flourishes in our family life. It’s in the interest of this achievement that I say the thing a girl isn’t supposed to say to her mother—namely, that Betty and I will not any longer subscribe to the things you expect us to. The fact to face just as quickly as possible is this: it’s the starting point. When you realize that we feel it’s a question of doing this or laying a foundation for lives that are just half lives—hideous perverted things which miss all the beauty that you can put into the short life given you—I think you’ll see how serious we are. We’re at least two intelligent human beings, if we’re nothing else. And why should you ask or expect that we’ll submit to a system which to us means stupidity, misery, pettiness—all those things which we’ve seen working out for years and which, being at least intelligent, we want to keep away from? That much settled, we can continue to live together in just one way—as three sisters or friends; the motherhood, in so far as it means authority or an attempt to mould us to your way, must be eliminated. A complete new family idealism can be built on such a basis. You will say that it’s an abnormal basis for any mother to accept. Of course it is; but the situation is abnormal, and the orthodox remedies aren’t applicable. The reason I say the situation is abnormal is this: usually when a mother objects to her daughters’ behavior it is on some definite basis of opposing the things they do—like going to too many parties or falling in love with the wrong man. You have very little fault to find with the things we do. Your objections are on a basis of what we are—or, rather, of what we are not: that we are not orthodox, that we are not hypocrites, that we are not the kind of daughters the Victorians approved of. “Hypocrites” will sound paradoxical; but you have confessed that you would rather have us lie to you than to disagree with you; that you would rather have us be sentimental about “the way a girl should treat her mother” than to learn how we ought to treat ourselves. You call that being “respectful” and think that harmony is possible only under such conditions. We call it being “insulting,” and think that it’s the one sure way of destroying any chance of harmony. If we respect you it must be because we think you worthy of the truth: anything else is degrading to both sides. You’ll say you can’t be satisfied to live with us and not give advice and all the other things that are part of a mother’s duty. You may give all the advice you want to; the keynote of the new situation will be that we’ll take the advice if we believe it’s right; if not we’ll ignore it, just as a man ignores his friend’s advice when he feels it to be wrong. Of course the wise person doesn’t give much advice; he simply lives his life the best way he knows how. That’s the only bid he can make for emulation. If we tell you that we don’t approve of the creed you have made you mustn’t be surprised if we try to formulate one of our own. There’s no reason for us to ask you to change just because we’re your daughters. You must do as you believe. But you must grant us the same privilege. We disagree about fundamentals. If our beliefs were merely the vague, unformed ideas of children you might try to change them. But it’s too late now. So we can live together harmoniously only if we give up the foolish attempts at “influencing.” We’re not living three generations ago. We’ve had Shaw since then, and parents and children aren’t doing the insulting things to each other they used to do. Among intelligent people some of the old issues can never raise their heads again. And so, it’s for you to decide:—whether we shall build on the new foundation together or separately. It might be a play; it’s certainly rather good for reality. And what happened? The mother refused to “accept the terms”—which is not surprising, perhaps; and the household broke up into two establishments with results that will disappoint the conservative who thinks those girls should have been soundly beaten. The first wrench of it, the girl said, reminded her of George’s parting with Marion in Tono-Bungay:—that sense of belonging to each other immensely, that “profound persuasion of irreparable error” in the midst of what seemed profoundly right. “Nothing is simple,” Wells wrote in that connection; “every wrong done has a certain justice in it, and every good deed has dregs of evil.” But the girl and her mother have learned to be friends as a result of that break, and the latter will tell you now that it was the right thing to have done. The preface to Misalliance has such a wealth of quotable things in it that the only way to get them appreciated is to quote. Shaw has said much of this before, but it is all so valuable that it ought to be shouted from the housetops: The people against whom children are wholly unprotected are those who devote themselves to the very mischievous and cruel sort of abortion which is called bringing up a child in the way it should go. Now nobody knows the way a child should go. What is a child? An experiment. A fresh attempt to produce the just man made perfect: that is, to make humanity divine. And you will vitiate the experiment if you make the slightest attempt to abort it into some fancy figure of your own: for example, your notion of a good man or a womanly woman. If you treat it as a little wild beast to be tamed, or as a pet to be played with, or even as a means to save you trouble and to make money for you (and these are our commonest ways), it may fight its way through in spite of you and save its soul alive; for all its instincts will resist you, and possibly be strengthened in the resistance; but if you begin with its own holiest aspirations, and suborn them for your own purposes, then there is hardly any limit to the mischief you may do. Francis Place tells us that his father always struck his children when he found one within his reach.... Francis records the habit with bitterness, having reason to thank his stars that his father respected the inside of his head whilst cuffing the outside of it; and this made it easy for Francis to do yeoman’s service to his country as that rare and admirable thing, a Free-thinker: the only sort of thinker, I may remark, whose thoughts, and consequently whose religious convictions, command any respect. Now Mr. Place, senior, would be described by many as a bad father; and I do not contend that he was a conspicuously good one. But as compared with the conventionally good father who deliberately imposes himself on his son as god; who takes advantage of childish credulity and parent worship to persuade his son that what he approves of is right and what he disapproves of is wrong; who imposes a corresponding conduct on the child by a system of prohibitions and penalties, rewards and eulogies, for which he claims divine sanction; compared to this sort of abortionist and monster maker, I say, Place appears almost as a Providence. A gentleman once wrote to me and said, with an obvious conviction that he was being most reasonable and high minded, that the only thing he beat his children for was failure in perfect obedience and perfect truthfulness. On these attributes, he said, he must insist. As one of them is not a virtue at all, and the other is the attribute of a god, one can 9 10 imagine what the lives of this gentleman’s children would have been if it had been possible for him to live down to his monstrous and foolish pretensions. The cruelty (of beating a child) must be whitewashed by a moral excuse, and a pretense of reluctance. It must be for the child’s good. The assailant must say “This hurts me more than it hurts you.” There must be hypocrisy as well as cruelty. The most excusable parents are those who try to correct their own faults in their offspring. The parent who says to his child: “I am one of the successes of the Almighty: therefore imitate me in every particular or I will have the skin off your back” (a quite common attitude) is a much more absurd figure than the man who, with a pipe in his mouth, thrashes his boy for smoking. If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson (which is not at all necessary), hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example. But you had much better let the child’s character alone. If you once allow yourself to regard a child as so much material for you to manufacture into any shape that happens to suit your fancy you are defeating the experiment of the Life Force. You are assuming that the child does not know its own business, and that you do. In this you are sure to be wrong. The child feels the drive of the Life Force (often called the Will of God); and you cannot feel it for him. Most children can be, and many are, hopelessly warped and wasted by parents who are ignorant and silly enough to suppose that they know what a human being ought to be, and who stick at nothing in their determination to force their children into their moulds. Experienced parents, when children’s rights are preached to them, very naturally ask whether children are to be allowed to do what they like. The best reply is to ask whether adults are to be allowed to do what they like. The two cases are the same. The adult who is nasty is not allowed to do what he likes: neither can the child who likes to be nasty. There is no difference in principle between the rights of a child and those of an adult: the difference in their cases is one of circumstance. Most working folk today either send their children to day schools or turn them out of doors. This solves the problem for the parents. It does not solve it for the children, any more than the tethering of a goat in the field or the chasing of an unlicensed dog in the streets solves it for the goat or the dog; but it shows that in no class are people willing to endure the society of their children, and consequently it is an error to believe that the family provides children with edifying adult society, or that the family is a social unit. The family is in that, as in so many other respects, a humbug. Old people and young people cannot walk at the same pace without distress and final loss of health to one of the parties.... And since our system is nevertheless to pack them all into the same house and pretend that they are happy, and that this particular sort of happiness is the foundation of virtue, it is found that in discussing family life we never speak of actual adults or actual children, or of realities of any sort, but always of ideals such as The Home, a Mother’s Influence, a Father’s Care, Filial Piety, Duty, Affection, Family Life, etc., etc., which are no doubt very comforting phrases, but which beg the question of what a home and a mother’s influence and a father’s care and so forth really come to.... Women who cannot bear to be separated from their pet dogs send their children to boarding school cheerfully. They may say and even believe that in allowing their children to leave home they are sacrificing themselves for their children’s good.... But to allege that children are better continually away from home is to give up the whole popular sentimental theory of the family.... If you compel an adult and a child to live in one another’s company either the adult or the child will be miserable. There is nothing whatever unnatural or wrong or shocking in this fact, and there is no harm in it if only it be sensibly faced and provided for. The mischief that it does at present is produced by our efforts to ignore it, or to smother it under a heap of sentimental and false pretenses. The child’s rights, being clearly those of any other human being, are summed up in the right to live.... And the rights of society over it clearly extend to requiring it to qualify itself to live in society without wasting other people’s time.... We must reconcile education with liberty. We must find out some means of making men workers and, if need be, warriors, without making them slaves. In dealing with children what is needed is not logic but sense. A child should begin to assert itself early, and shift for itself more and more not only in washing and dressing itself, but in opinions and conduct.... And what is a tyrant? Quite simply a person who says to another person, young or old, “You shall do as I tell you.” Children are extremely cruel without intending it; and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the reason is that they do not conceive their elders as having any human feeling. Serve the elders right, perhaps, for posing as superhuman! The penalty of the imposter is not that he is found out (he very seldom is) but that he is taken for what he pretends to be and treated as such. The family ideal is a humbug and a nuisance: one might as reasonably talk of the barrack ideal, or the forecastle ideal, or any other substitution of the machinery of social for the end of it, which must always be the fullest and most capable life: in short, the most Godly life. Even apart from its insufferable pretensions, the family needs hearty discrediting; for there is hardly any vulnerable part of it that could not be amputated with advantage. Do not for a moment suppose that uncultivated people are merely indifferent to high and noble qualities. They hate them malignantly.... Whether the risks to which liberty exposes us are moral or physical our right to liberty involves the right to run them. A man who is not free to risk his neck as an aviator or his soul as a heretic is not free at all; and the right to liberty begins, not at the age of 21 years, but of 21 seconds. You may have as much fun at Shaw’s expense as you want on the grounds that he has never had to train a child and therefore doesn’t know the difficulties. But if you want to laugh last don’t read this preface or the play that follows it, because he will make a laughing-stock or a convert of you as surely as he will prove that he is far cleverer than you can ever hope to be. Shaw and Ellen Key preach practically the same doctrine about the home; both are temperamentally incapable of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s programme—education outside the home: Shaw because the school is as big a humbug as the family, and Miss Key because “even if institutions can thus rough-plane the material that is to become a member of society, nevertheless they cannot—if they take in the major part of the child’s education—accomplish that which is needed first of all if we are to lift ourselves to a higher spiritual plane in an economically just society: they cannot deepen the emotional life.” Her insistence is strongly upon the education of the feelings as the most important factor in the soul-life. In her vision of the renaissance of motherhood she begins with Nietzsche’s dictum that “a time will come when 11 12 men will think of nothing except education.” Not that any one can be educated to motherliness; but that our sentimentalization of motherhood as the ever holy, ever infallible power, must be abandoned, and a quality of intelligent mother-power cultivated by definite courses of training which she lays out in detail. In view of the number of homes I know of that come legitimately under the Shaw denunciation I feel sometimes that any socialization of home life is more hopeful than an attempt to remodel the hopeless conditions inside the home. Regard the parents you know—the great mass of them outside the exceptions that encourage you to believe spasmodically in the beauty and noble need of parenthood. If they are not cruel or stupid or ignorant or smug or righteous or tyrannical or dishonest or unimaginative or weak or quiet ineffectual, they are something else just as bad. It has come to the point where a good parent is as hard to find as an honest man. Very seriously, however, there is hope in the situation—there is renaissance in the air. And it has its foundation in the sensible and healthy (though so far only tacit) admission that it doesn’t matter so much what your child becomes as that he shall become something! You can’t do much with him, anyhow, and you may as well face it. You can give him, during his first few years, the kind of foundation you think will help him; and for the rest of the time you can do only one thing that he will really need from you: you can develop your own personality as richly as you want him to develop his. You can refuse to worry about him—since that does neither of you any good—and thereby save stores of energy that he may draw upon for your mutual benefit. It becomes a sort of game for two, instead of the uninteresting kind in which one player is given all the advantages. Compared with it the old-fashioned game in which the mother sacrificed everything, suffered everything, wore herself out trying to help her child win, looks not only very unfair and very unnecessary, but very wasteful. And have you ever noticed how the man who sentimentalizes about the wonderful mothers we used to have—his own in particular—is the one whose life is lived at the opposite pole of the mother’s wise direction? If you disagree with all this, there is still one other method by which you may produce a child who will be a credit to himself and to society. You may be so utterly stupid and wrong-headed that he will rebel to the point of becoming something different. If you prefer this course no one need worry much about your child, because he’ll probably found a system of child education that will cause him to be famous; and if you have a daughter, she’ll probably become a Montessori. The new home is a recognition that the child is not the only factor in society that needs educating. It assumes that no one’s education is finished just because he’s been made a parent. It means that we can all go on being educated together. It means the elimination of all kinds of domestic follies—for one, the ghastly embarrassment of growing up to discover that you’re different from the rest of your family, and for that reason something of a criminal. It means the kind of understanding that develops a child’s feeling instead of suppressing it, so that he won’t be ashamed, for instance, of having such glorious things as dreams and visions. It means artistic education: and Shaw says that we all grow up stupid or mad to just the extent to which we have not been artistically educated. THE SWAN Under the lily shadow and the gold and the blue and mauve that the whin and the lilac pour down on the water, the fishes quiver. Over the green cold leaves and the rippled silver and the tarnished copper of its neck and beak, toward the deep black water beneath the arches, the swan floats slowly. Into the dark of the arch the swan floats and into the black depth of my sorrow it bears a white rose of flame. F. S. Flint. 13 14 A “DES IMAGISTES” CHARLES ASHLEIGH new and well born recruit has been added to the ranks of the Insurgents. It is true he appeared before we did, but we welcome him before he welcomes us, and thus are things evened. The Little Review, The Masses, Poetry, The International—all bearers of the sacred fire,—and now cometh The Glebe, heralding his approach with the chanting of many-colored strains. And, among the good things which The Glebe has put forth, is a book of portent: Des Imagistes. The Imagistes form one of the latest schools, and it is meet that, before we read their work, we get some idea of their doctrine. Therefore I transcribe here some statements of representative Imagiste poets, which I have culled from Poetry, The Egotist, and other sources. Richard Aldington gives the following rules: I. Direct treatment of subject. We convey an emotion by presenting the object and circumstance of the emotion without comment. For example, we do not say, “O how I admire that exquisite, that beautiful, that—25 more adjectives —woman.” But we present that woman, we make an “Image” of her, we make the scene convey the emotion.... II. As few adjectives as possible. III. A hardness as of cut stone. No slop, no sentimentality. When people say the Imagiste poems are “too hard” ... we know we have done something good. IV. Individuality of rhythm. We make new fashions instead of cutting our clothes on the old models. V. The exact word. We make quite a heavy stress on that. It is most important. All great poetry is exact. All the dreariness of nineteenth century poetry comes from their not quite knowing what they wanted to say and filling up the gaps with portentous adjectives and idiotic similes. Here is a definition by Ezra Pound which helps us: “An Image is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” The book, Des Imagistes, is an anthology, presumably of Imagist (let us, once for all, Anglicize the French word and have done with it) poetry. Yet, one of the foremost imagists, Richard Aldington, in a critique of this book,—comparatively modest, owing to the fact that his own poems formed a sumptuous fraction of the volume,—says that five of those whose poems are there included are not true Imagists. These are Cournos, Hueffer, Upward, Joyce, and Cannell. Mr. Aldington says he doesn’t mean that these poems are not beautiful—on the contrary, he admires them immensely—but they are not, “strictly speaking,” Imagist poems. I agree that the poems of these five men are beautiful, especially the I hear an army of James Joyce and the Nocturnes of Skipwith Cannell; and I also maintain that, all unconsciously, the publishers of The Glebe have dealt a deadly blow to sectarian Imagism by including these non-Imagist poems in their anthology. Because, unless a school can prove that it alone has that unnameable wonder which excites us to deepest emotional turmoil, and which we call poetry, it has but little right to isolate itself or to separate its adepts from the bulk of poets. This may sound sententious, but is, nevertheless, true. Speak you in whatever mode or meter you will, if you arouse me to exultation, or to horror, or to the high pitch of any feeling,—if in me there is that responsive vibration that only true art can produce—then are you a poet. Whitman does it to me. Poe does it to me. Baudelaire and Henley do it. To all of these there is in me a response. I’m awfully sorry, but that’s how it is. I think them all poets. The Imagists believe in the direct presentation of emotion, preferably in terms of objectivity. They abhor an excess of adjectives, and, after a satiety of the pompous Victorian stuff, I am much inclined to sympathize with that tenet of their faith. I wish, however, to make clear my own position, which is the one that most counts when I am writing. I am an anarchist in poetry: I recognize no rules, no exclusions. If the expression of a certain thought, vision, or what not, requires twenty adjectives, then let us have them. If it be better expressed without adjectives, then let us abjure them—temporarily. I am myself a poet (whether performance equals desire is doubtful). My object as a poet is to express the things which are closest to me. This sounds banal, but is better than rhetoric; words exist not with which to define with superclarity the poet’s function, source, and performance. In the true expression of myself I might write Images which would be worshipped for their perfection by the Imagists. A moment after, I might gloat and wallow in the joy of my cosmic oneness (anathema to Imagists!) and, perhaps recall Whitman. The next minute, chronicling some shadowy episode of my variegated past, I may out-decay the decadent Baudelaire. But, this is always poetry if, by the magic of its words and the music of its arrangement, it speaks directly and beautifully to you, giving you that indescribable but unmistakeable sense of liberation and soul-expansion which comes on the contemplation of true art. I think I have made myself clear. There is no quarrel with the Imagists, who have done some beautiful work, as such. But, if they claim monopoly of inspiration or art, as some of them appear to do, then—! Therefore, as a restricted and doctrinaire school, “a bas les Imagistes!” But, as an envigored company of the grand army of poets, “Vivent les Imagistes!” 15 16 17 S OF RUPERT BROOKE AND OTHER MATTERS ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE ince even to poets—and poets are erroneously supposed to sing their hearts out—there remains a certain right of privacy, I am not sure that we do well in writing so much of their personalities and their individual views of life. When we read a poem, we feel a temperament behind it; but the effort to catalogue and label that mind and its “message” is a little impertinent, and very futile. Mr. Rupert Brooke is an excellent illustration. His fondness for this or that—whether in landscape, food, ideas, or morals—is hardly our concern. He deserves to be treated not as a natural-history specimen,—a peculiar group of likes and dislikes and convictions,—but as an artist. Mr. Brooke has the distinction, rare for a young poet, of not having written any bad verse, or of not having printed it. His sole volume, Poems (Sidgwick and Jackson, London, 1913), manifests in even its least notable pieces a creative spirit not allowed to run riot, but chastened and restrained by a keen sense of the obscure laws whose workings turn passion into a decorative pattern, and the emotions of the blood into intelligible designs. Unless one is deeply concerned with such things, one is not likely to recognize the fundamental difference between those poets whose work is merely a more or less interesting emotional cry, and those nobler and more mature poets in whose work the crude elements of emotion are subordinated to the exigencies of an artistic conception. Only the latter have written fine poetry. The former may move us, as a crying child may move us; but they cannot exalt us to a peak that rises above the region of mere sympathetic response. They can never bring us a wind of revelation, or a flame from beyond the world. They are never the poets to whom other poets—and these are the only final judges—turn for inspiration or for fellowship. For after all, there is no magic in any theme or in the emotion behind it; what is magical lies wholly in the design, the mould, in which the poet embodies a feeling that is probably common to all. No thought is so profound, no intimation so subtle, that it alone suffices as the stuff of poetry. But any thought, any intimation, if it be justly correlated and moulded into an organic and expressive shape, will serve to awaken echoes of a forgotten or unknown loveliness, and pierce its way into the very soul of the listener. This sense of design of which I speak is not a hard, formal, conscious thing in the mind of the poet; but rather a carefully trained instinct, like the instinct that guides the hand of a fine draughtsman in the drawing of a curve of unexpected beauty. There is a right place to begin the curve, and a right place to end it; and at every instant of its length it is swayed and governed by a sense of relation to preceding and succeeding moments,—a sense subject to laws that defy mathematical formulation, but are perilously definite nevertheless. This sense of control is a rare thing to find in the work of so young a man as Mr. Brooke. Most young writers seem to approach their work as an unrestrained expression of themselves, —which it should be: but they forget that, for real self-expression, the most scrupulous mastery of the medium of expression is necessary. They regard the writing of verse as something in the nature of a joy- ride with an open throttle,—instead of seeing in it a piece of difficult driving, to be achieved only by the use of every subtlety of modulated speed and controlled steering that the mind is capable of employing. That Mr. Brooke needs no such warning, let the following fine sonnet bear witness: SUCCESS I think if you had loved me when I wanted; If I’d looked up one day, and seen your eyes, And found my wild sick blasphemous prayer granted, And your brown face, that’s full of pity and wise, Flushed suddenly; the white godhead in new fear Intollerably so struggling, and so shamed; Most holy and far, if you’d come all too near, If earth had seen Earth’s lordliest wild limbs tamed, Shaken, and trapped, and shivering, for my touch— Myself should I have slain? or that foul you? But this the strange gods, who had given so much, To have seen and known you, this they might not do. One last shame’s spared me, one black word’s unspoken; And I’m alone; and you have not awoken. It is significant that for his sonnets Mr. Brooke frequently chooses the Shakesperian form,—a form which, strangely, English poets have generally for at least a century discarded in favor of the Petrarchan model. The common feeling appears to be that the Petrarchan (a-b-b-a, a-b-b-a, c-d-e-c-d-e or some variation on that scheme) is musical and emotional; and that the Shakesperian (a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g-g) is harsh, cold, mechanical, and incapable of subtle harmonies. The exact reverse of this is the case. It is perhaps too much to ask the reader to write a sequence of a hundred sonnets in each form, as a test; but I am confident that after such an experience, he would agree with me. The Petrarchan form is capable of only one successful effect; a rising on the crest of a wave, whose summit is the end of the 18 19 eighth line; and a subsidence of the wave, in the course of the last six lines. The Shakesperian form, on the other hand, is capable of a literally infinite variety of effects: no pattern is set arbitrarily in advance, but, as in blank verse, any pattern may be created. The first twelve lines—which are nothing but three quatrains—can be moulded into a contour that fits any shape or size of thought whatsoever; and the couplet at the end—a device despised by the ignorant—may be used either to clinch the purport of the preceding twelve lines, or to blend with them, or startlingly to refute them, or to serve any other end that the genius of the writer is capable of imagining. The mere novice will like this form because of its simple rhyme-scheme and its superficial ease of working; the experienced amateur will prefer the Petrarchan form because, while the more complex rhyme-scheme presents for him no difficulties, the basic inadequacies of his thought-structure are fairly well concealed by the arbitrary sonnet-structure; but the master of imagination and expression is likely to follow Shakespeare and the novice in preferring the true English form, wherein he can with perfect freedom create a subtly modulated movement that will answer to every sway and leap of his thought. Mr. Brooke, whose sense of form is keen, is one of those who can safely and wisely try the more interesting and more dangerous medium. I have thought it worth while to talk a good deal of the sonnet in connection with Mr. Brooke for the reason that several of his very finest pieces are in this form. The following is one that stands a good chance of being in the anthologies a hundred years from now: THE HILL Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill, Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass. You said, “Through glory and ecstasy we pass; Wind, sun, and earth remain, the birds sing still, When we are old, are old ...” “And when we die All’s over that is ours; and life burns on Through other lovers, other lips,” said I, “Heart of my heart, our heaven is now, is won!” “We are Earth’s best, that learnt her lesson here. Life is our cry. We have kept the faith!” we said; “We shall go down with unreluctant tread Rose-crowned into the darkness!” ... Proud we were, And laughed, that had such brave, true things to say. —And then you suddenly cried, and turned away. Perhaps as magical as any of Mr. Brooke’s work is a longer poem called The Fish,—a remarkable and original piece of fantasy that makes the sub-aqueous universe vivid and real to the senses of the reader, and opens to him a new world of imaginative experience. Even the opening lines will serve to indicate something of the curious trance-quality: In a cool curving world he lies And ripples with dark ecstasies. The kind luxurious lapse and steal Shapes all his universe to feel And know and be; the clinging stream Closes his memory, glooms his dream, Who lips the roots o’ the shore, and glides Superb on unreturning tides ... In other of these poems, one is struck by Mr. Brooke’s passion for ugliness. He loves to take the most hideous and base facts of life and give them a place in his work alongside the things of beauty. It would be hard to find anything more humorous and at the same time more repulsive than this: WAGNER 20 21 Creeps in half wanton, half asleep, One with a fat wide hairless face. He likes love music that is cheap; Likes women in a crowded place; And wants to hear the noise they’re making. His heavy eyelids droop half-over, Great pouches swing beneath his eyes. He listens, thinks himself the lover, Heaves from his stomach wheezy sighs; He likes to feel his heart’s a-breaking. The music swells. His gross legs quiver. His little lips are bright with slime. The music swells. The women shiver, And all the while, in perfect time His pendulous stomach hangs a-shaking. Now, a passion for ugliness like this is really a revolt against ugliness,—not the tender-skinned æsthete’s revolt, which consists in denying ugliness and escaping into a remote dream, but the strong man’s, the poet’s,—the revolt that is in effect a seizing of ugliness in all its repulsiveness and giving it a reason for existence by embodying it in a chosen pattern that is beautiful. By this method the poet masters emotion, even unpleasant emotion, making it subservient to a decorative design dictated by his own sense of proportion. It is thus that he is able to endure the world of actualities, and to find it comparable in interest with the world of his own thoughts. And by this process he saves himself from the sharpest bite of evil. For there is a curious consolation in transforming a spontaneous cry into a calculated work of art. By such a process one can give, to elements that before seemed only parts of a torturing chaos, their ordered places in a known scheme. One can impose propitious form upon one’s recollections, and create a little world of design-relations where the poignancy of experience is lost in the discipline of beauty. It is for this reason that the poet must be considered, in spite of everything, the happiest of men. B THE NEW LOYALTY GEORGE BURMAN FOSTER ack to the Old Greek for a starting-point! Two seeds, of the same species, though distant in space and...