The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Little Review, May 1915 (Vol. 2, No. 3), 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, May 1915 (Vol. 2, No. 3) Editor: Margaret C. Anderson Release Date: August 18, 2021 [eBook #66083] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 Produced by: Jens Sadowski and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://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, MAY 1915 (VOL. 2, NO. 3) *** THE LITTLE REVIEW Literature Drama Music Art MARGARET C. ANDERSON EDITOR MAY, 1915 Poems Mitchell Dawson What We Are Fighting For Margaret C. Anderson Echo (from the German of Fritz Schnack). America’s Ignition Will Levington Comfort Solitude George Soule Remy de Gourmont Richard Aldington Who Wants Blue Silk Roses? Sade Iverson “Mother Jones” and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn M. C. A. The Poetry Bookshop Amy Lowell America, 1915 John Gould Fletcher Poems Maxwell Bodenheim Some Imagist Poets George Lane Editorials and Announcements The Sermon in the Depths Ben Hecht “The Spoon River Anthology” Carl Sandburg Poetry and the Panama-Pacific Eunice Tietjens The Mob-God “The Scavenger” The Theatre Music Book Discussion The Reader Critic Published Monthly 15 cents a copy MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Publisher Fine Arts Building CHICAGO $1.50 a year Entered as second-class matter at Postoffice, Chicago THE LITTLE REVIEW Vol. II MAY, 1915 No. 3 Copyright, 1915, by Margaret C. Anderson Poems Mitchell Dawson Cantina You were the flame of a Pompeian lamp, Wavering in the sea-wind, Cosima, And ever to the gale of me you danced, Flickering out of reach.... I will return to Sorrento, To the wine-room under the cliff. Santa Maria del Carmine Here by the church door A shriveled bat Has folded his wings And dreams of dead crepuscular delights, Bat loves, bat orgies, Tarantistic flittings through the dark. O fragrant beggar blinking in the sun, I will drop three soldi in your hat. Harpy O keen of scent, You who have found me in my slough, Not your beak, but your green eyes Have torn to the center of me. Ah, but I shall not slake them with a tremor. Termaggio 1 2 In the asylum at Termaggio Reside a dozen poets— So many colored balloons bobbing against a black ceiling; Will none of them be caught By the arm of a strong wind, Down and outward through the open window? We cannot remove the roof at Termaggio, In the sun our balloons would burst.... Perhaps we had better close the window. Under the Cypresses Under the cypresses No nightingales will sing this spring; For I have strewn the ground With the shards of broken illusions, And I will build of them a citadel of austerity With towers whence I can search the sky For a rainbow that is stronger than painted china. Dear nightingales, There are still the saccharine gardens of Verona, Where the moon-moth waves his fragile wings. I What We Are Fighting For Margaret C. Anderson have been much criticised for an article on Gabrilowitsch in the last issue. I have been told rather violently that I didn’t know what I was talking about; that to say Gabrilowitsch had stood still artistically or that the music critics were deaf because they didn’t like Scriabin’s Prometheus was simply to brand The Little Review again as the kind of magazine which delights in any sort of snap-shot judgment that may sound startling or “new.” But the fact of the matter is this: if The Little Review is ready to stand behind any of its judgments (and it is very ready), I can think of nothing that has appeared which I will so eagerly and convincingly defend as that article on Gabrilowitsch or my remark that Prometheus was extraordinarily beautiful. I can “prove” the first in at least three ways, and I have some one in mind (a Russian) who will write a poem on his reactions to Prometheus that will make you all wish you had imaginations too. But this is not important. It merely leads me to an announcement of a series of articles—a sort of campaign—that we have been planning for the last two months. If we are to prove that we have a real “function” it will be this of depreciating values that have ceased to be important and appreciating new ones that have emerged—or, as I should say, values that are about to become unimportant and those that are about to emerge. In view of such a function I am quite willing to agree with my critics that the Gabrilowitsch article wasn’t worth anything: it merely stated things that are already quite well known, and a magazine that means to announce transvaluations before the approximate ten-year period during which even the uninspired come to accept them has no business to concern itself with mere restatements. Of course the most frequent criticism brought against The Little Review is that it goes to artistic and emotional and intellectual lengths no well-balanced person wants to go. I only wish this were true: I mean, we haven’t gone any real lengths—and that is just what’s the matter with us. We have made statements that seemed fearfully radical and new to a lot of people who don’t know what’s going on in the world; and I’m afraid we have listened to these people and tried to “convert” them. We have wanted to convince everybody—particularly those who seemed to need it most. And there is nothing more fatal: because what everybody thinks doesn’t matter; what a few think matters tremendously. I was brought up with a shock the other day, at an editors’ “meeting,” when Lucien Cary said that though The Little Review had one of the requisites of the ideal magazine,—youth,—it had the wrong kind of youth: the kind that has not yet caught up instead of the kind that has gone ahead. After trying to face that squarely for five awful minutes I was forced to decide that he was right. I mean in this way: I know the quality of our youth is all right, just as I know that people who write true things and live false ones are all wrong; but the wisdom of it is quite another matter. And one of our big mistakes has been a hope that preaching will help. There’s nothing pompous in saying that the thoughts of only a few people matter. This has always been so and always will be. Every new valuation has come about just that way—championed by a group and then endorsed by a majority long after it has ceased to matter much. But for a magazine that means to count—well, I can’t decide whether our predicament of having got into a sort of Billy Sunday slump is humorous or very sad. Hereafter we shall pretend that there are no impossibilists in our audience. But the announcement: In each of the future issues of The Little Review, beginning with June if possible, we shall have a special article attacking current fallacies in the arts or in life—getting down to the foundations. Each one will be written by a person who knows thoroughly what he is talking about, and each will be “true and memorable,” to use Will Comfort’s good phrase. For instance, suppose we begin with the modern theatre. It will be interesting to find why Clayton Hamilton calls a play as false, as distorted, as unwholesome and demoralizing as The Shadow a great drama, and why Percy Hammond, who is looked upon even by some of the discerning as a critic worthy to be trusted in the work of spreading ideas, should have nothing but superlatives for the same outrage. (To do him justice, Mr. Hammond did modify his praise with a single naive sentence: “I could find some flaws in The Shadow”; and then, to put his other foot in, “but the playing glossed them over until they were forgivable”—which is precisely the crime and tragedy of such productions). This type of intellectual blundering is apparent everywhere among the critics of literature, of music, of art, of the drama, and among the strangest of all human creatures—the historians (“men who reserve their judgments for a hundred years”) and the philosophers (men whose judgments are good for everything except to live by). If you happen to be equipped with knowledge of the intricate hypocrisies of the music schools, or the way the newspapers treat a competent art critic, or the methods of a manager in making a good play a bad one, or how dissatisfied the railway employees really are or ought to be—send us an article on the subject. The conditions of acceptance are these: You must know English prose; you must write it as though you are talking instead of writing; you must say quite frankly and in detail the things you would not be allowed to say in the prostituted, subsidized, or uninteresting magazines; and you must be true. This begins our warfare. 3 4 Echo (Translated from the German of Fritz Schnack by William Saphier) Into the forest your voice flew Clear and light as a bird from its nest. From your mouth the sound departed Swinging gaily into the black forest. It flew Through dusky deep solitude Mysterious quiet, pale night, Gravely-bent tree tops, fairy-tale flowers. It danced past Queer animals and strange things, It touched them with quick moves And they were frightened by the gay bird. Green looks stared through the night And angry phosphor glints pierced the foliage Where owls were moving their beaks deceitfully. Here your gay bird was frightened And fearfully returned Beaten by the envy of the black branches. Shuddering it fell into the blue day Tired, lame-winged, dead. 5 America’s Ignition Will Levington Comfort ... The quickened pulse of America did not appear with the outbreak of war. It came with the winter cold, like all revival spirit—a strange and fervent heat, breaking down the old, vitalizing the new everywhere. No one doubts now—no one who can tear his eyes from the ground even for a little— doubts now that the new social order is upon us. America, in opening her breasts to the agony of Europe, in her giving of solids and sympathy, has stumbled upon the ancient and perfect formula for receiving the greater good. In forgetting herself a little, her own human spirit has been ignited. If someone announced that there lived in the Quattor Islands a man who knew the exact way to bring into the world, not only the spirit, but the action of brotherhood and fatherland, there would be some call for maps and steamship passages. If the Quattor Islands were not already on the maps, they would presently appear, but not before the earliest pilgrims had set out. And if someone should add that all expression of the arts so far in the world is wumbled and imperfect compared to that which is about to be, if a certain formula is followed; and that this man in the Quattor group has the formula—many more would start on the quest, or send their most trusted secretaries. And yet the truth and the way is all here, and has been uttered again and again by every voice that has lifted itself above the common din. The wise men carried gifts. You would expect to give something for the secret. You might expect to be called upon to sell all you have and give to the poor. You would not be surprised even if the magnetic Islander said: “It is not your frankincense and myrrh that I want, though I thank you. That which I have is for you. I am more anxious for you to know and live it, than you can be to have and hold it. But the mystery is that it will not come to abide with you, while you are passionate for possession. The passion to give to others must be established within you before you can adequately receive—” You are beginning to see how ancient is the gospel. It is old, older than that. It belongs to the foundations. Personally and nationally, the law works the same way. That which is true, is true in all its parts. There is an adjustment by which that which is good for the whole is good for the part; that which is good for the nation is good for the man; but each, whole and part, nation and man, must have for the first thought not self-good but the general good. One nation, so established in this conviction that its actions are automatically founded upon the welfare of the world, could bring about the true fatherland in a generation; and one human heart so established begins to touch from the first moment the profound significances of life. Personally and nationally, this plain but tremendous concept is beginning to manifest itself here in America. I do not write as a patriot. It is not my country that is of interest, but humankind. America’s political interests, her trade, all her localizations as a separate and bounded people, are inimical to the new enthusiasm. The new social order cannot concern itself as a country apart. American predatory instincts, her self-worship, her attempt at neutrality while supplying explosives for the European slaughter arenas, her deepening confinement in matter during the past fifty years, have prepared her for the outright demoralization of war, just as surely as Europe is meeting today the red harvest from such instincts and activities. For action invariably follows the thought. Yet the hearts of men in America are changing. I do not write as a religionist, but as one very much of the world. For the hearts of men do change, and it is only through such changes that the material stagnation of a people can be relieved without deluges of blood. The high hope is upon us. In being apart from war, America has been enabled to see. One must always remove himself from the ruck to see its movement. In the past six months, within these western shores, the voices of true inspiration have been heard. From a literary standpoint alone, this is the most significant fact since Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau, took pen in hand forgetting themselves a little while each day. There is a peculiar strength upon American production of all kinds, as a result of this very act of getting out from under European influence. England and France and Germany are merely national voices now. The voice of the partisan is but a weak treble against the basic rumble of war. War is a confession, as suicide is a confession, as every act of blood and rage is a confession, of the triumph of the animal in the human mind.... If you have received letters from friends in England or Germany or France since the war; friends whom formerly you admired for their culture and acumen, you have been struck by the dullness and misery of the communications, the uncentered points of view, the incapacity of human vision in the midst of the heaviness and blackness of life there; if, indeed, you have read the recent newspapers and periodicals of these countries, you will require no further proof of the fact—that a nation at war is an obscene nation, its consciousness all driven down into the physical, its voice tonally imperfect from hate and fear, its eyes open to red illusion and not to truth. Even in America the voice of the nationalist is a part of the old and the unclean. The new social order does not recognize the rights and desires of any isolated people. Humankind is basically one in meaning, in aim and in destiny. The difference of one nation from another in relation to the sun’s rays, in character, 6 7 country, environment, race, color and structure of mind—these are primal values, the very values that will sum up into the essential grandeur of the whole. Personally and nationally there are no duplicates in the social scheme. The instruments of this magnificent orchestra are of infinite diversity, but the harmony is one. The spiritual source of all human achievement is already a harmonic whole. That globe is complete. It is our business as men to make a pattern of it in matter—to make the dream come true in flesh, each man and each nation bringing his labor, which can only be bent into a fitting arc, by the loss of the love of self. It requires but a little vision to observe Nature at work upon this concept in a thousand ways. She always seeks to preserve her balances. If a certain plant, or bird, insect, beast, man or nation, rises by intrinsic force and predation to dangerous increase, a destroying parasite is invariably fostered within its shadow. In good time these two growths turn to rend each other, a mutual cleansing. The Prussian war- office is a counter-growth to British imperialism. That which survives will be humbler and wiser. I saw in a doctor’s office in Canada the picture of an English bull-dog standing large against the background of a British flag, and beneath was this line: “What we have, we’ll hold.” I found that the picture had a national acceptance in the British colonies and at Home. Yet a child stopping to think would have seen breakers ahead for a nation so lost in material things, as thus to challenge the Fates.... There is a fairy-tale of a man building a great boat for the air. It looked to win, and in the effrontery of achievement, he set forth to conquer God. Just then a hornet stung him.... All this to suggest that the new dimension of life must come from America, if it comes at all; and from this vantage-point, the reality is mightily appearing—in the new poetry, in the new novels, in music, painting, and the crafts. The generation just coming into its own, contains the builders whose work is to follow the destroyers of war. They are not self-servers. They do not believe in intellect. Their genius is intuitionally driven, not intellectually. Just as steam has reached its final limitation as a force, and is being superseded by electricity, the limitations of which have not been sensed so far even by the most audacious, so the intellect as a producing medium, has had its period—a period of style-worship, vanities of speech and action, of self-service, or parading, of surface show and short-sightedness, without parallel in the world. For the intellect is a product of sunlight, its energy supplied by human blood which dies. The new dimension comes from the fountain-head of energy, and its first realization is the unity of all nature. The intellect is as old as your body is; the giant that is awakening from sleep in the breasts of the rising generation is immortal. The thing that was called genius in the last generation met a destructive force in the material world, almost as deadly and vindictive as that encountered by Copernicus. The voices of the few heralds were scarcely heard, but there is a battle-line of genius in the new generation, timed for the great service years following the chaos of war. They will bring in the liberation of religion from mammon; they will bring in the religion of work, the equality of women, not on a mere suffrage matter alone, but in spirit and truth; they will bring in their children un-accursed. 8 9 Solitude George Soule I was fretted with husks of men; I cried out to be alone, To be free, To run in the wind. Solitude was to me as the dream of a country well to a fevered man. I ran away to be alone. And there were the stars, and the sea, and the sun coming up out of the sea. And I went mad with the wind’s song. Then I chanted my ardor to the air— But it came back clanging about my ears: The stars were too near, I was compressed between horizons; I choked in the wind and the sun! In my wrath I strode back to men And smote the husks asunder. From them came forth The whole of me that I had lacked. For the first time I was alone, Alone with all of myself, In splendid peace. T Remy De Gourmont By Richard Aldington he work of Remy de Gourmont is known and read in all parts of the civilized world. Yet he has not a large circulation and a purely commercial writer would probably be disgusted at his profits, but he has an influence, especially over the younger and more adventuresome spirits, which few writers today possess. One can—or rather one could in the days before the war—hardly pick up any French review without finding some reference to his ideas or some criticism of his work. In Russia he appears to have a more considerable reputation than anywhere else outside France. For, though one sees criticism and translations of him even in languages like Hungarian and Roumanian, it is in Russia alone that a word of praise from Remy de Gourmont seems to make a man’s reputation. The English are far slower in their international appreciations, and the Americans—quick though they are to seize on new men—do not seem to have taken up de Gourmont with much understanding. Mr. Ransome’s translation of Un Nuit au Luxembourg was not received with either appreciation or enthusiasm by English and American critics. And though a savant like Mr. Havelock Ellis quotes from M. de Gourmont’s work, and has, I believe, a great admiration for his personal intellectual qualities; though Mr. Sturge Moore, in his book on Flaubert and Blake, quotes M. de Gourmont among the great critics of France, it must be admitted that few English-speaking critics have yet done him justice. I question if the larger public has heard more of him than a vague rumour of his name. It may be that he is thought too “high-brow.” I suppose every man who gives his life up to the task of expressing his ideas, his character, and his genius in a purely disinterested manner is liable to this criticism. But there is so great a fascination in his work, whether it be criticism or fiction, philosophic dialogue or prose poem, that whenever he gains a reader it is not for an hour but for life. In America especially he should find readers, for America, whatever artistic faults and drawbacks it may have, has not, as England has, a “ring” of reviewers who unanimously “queer” any book whose originality or genius is any menace to their own stick-in-the-mud critical methods. The Symbolist movement in France is now almost ancient history. Unanimists, Futurists, Paroxysts, Fantasists, and all the other “ists” so abundantly produced by this century now face the “ists” of Germany on the battlefield. And while they are there fighting out by bodily force and not by words the intellectual destinies of Europe we may perhaps consider with free minds the Symbolist poets and authors who are now too old to take the field for their country and can only sit at home “waiting for news.” Some of the “children of Mallarmé” are dead; others are forgotten; a few still remain. Maeterlinck, Vielé-Griffin, Jammes, and Remy de Gourmont occur first to one’s mind as the best living representatives of the great Symbolist school, and of these the subtlest, the most fascinating, the most modern is Remy de Gourmont. Along with M. Anatole France, though very different from him, Remy de Gourmont is an example of the tradition of European culture. Less derivative than M. France, or perhaps deriving from less familiar sources, with as great an irony and with a faith that seems more sceptical than scepticism itself, he has extracted from the literature of each country and century that part which helped him to develop and train his own character. He presents in one person the manifold and often conflicting opinions and ideas of modern culture. Reading his books one sees that there is a mystical sort of beauty even in science and under his pen mysticism itself appears almost as exact as a science. I said just now that M. de Gourmont was an example of the tradition of European culture, and since Paris, we are mostly agreed, is the centre of European culture, and since Remy de Gourmont is a Parisian of Parisians, we may count him, I think, as one of the best examples of Latin or West European culture now living. I rather dwell upon this aspect of Remy de Gourmont as the man of supreme culture since that quality has so suddenly and so startlingly come into public discussion. It is extremely difficult to say precisely what culture is; and a definition of culture naturally varies with differences of race and temperaments. John Addington Symonds, in his interesting and illuminating essay on this subject, defines culture as “the raising of previously-educated faculties to their highest potencies by the conscious effort of their possessors.” And it might be added to this excellent definition that the feature of Latin or West European culture which most distinguishes it from the culture of other countries is a wideness of interest, a great general “cultivating” of all the faculties of the mind and character as opposed to the extreme development of one single faculty. Remy de Gourmont is indeed so admirable an example of the type of culture I have briefly indicated that it is difficult to think of any form of intellectual activity which has not at one time or another received his attention. He has been a founder of reviews—among them the famous Mercure de France—and an editor of reviews. He has written prefaces for modern authors and for ancient authors—both poets and prose-writers. As a literary critic it is perhaps not too much to say that in his time and generation he ranks as Sainte-Beuve did in his. Under his name will be found five volumes of Promenades Littéraires, collections of essays dealing with the widest possible range of literary subjects—from Petronius to Guillaume de Machaut, from the Goliardi to the latest “roman passionnel.” His Livres des Masques are one of the most considerable acquisitions to the criticism of French literature during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In these two books will be found amazingly penetrating studies of men so diverse as 10 11 12 the de Goncourt brothers and Maeterlinck, while American readers should be especially interested in his studies of the two Franco-American poets, Stuart Merrill and Francis Vielé-Griffin. As an admirer of Huysmans, M. Remy de Gourmont was naturally interested in the mystic, Christian Latin poets. And the fruit of several years’ study of these authors was that notable and unique book Le Latin Mystique. It is no exaggeration to say that hardly anyone else could have made these writers interesting to anyone but the specialist. One can almost imagine M. de Gourmont being challenged to produce a book which would appeal not only to savants but to the lover of general culture. This mystic Latin poetry had, until Huysmans’ day, been almost entirely neglected by students of beautiful things. But Remy de Gourmont, treating the subject as a poet in love with poetry—not as a pedant or a professor or a book-maker—has produced a work which is at once a criticism and an anthology of the literature produced during those thousand years which we ignorantly call the “Dark Ages.” These investigations into an almost forgotten and strangely attractive literature were not without effect upon his purely creative work. This effect can be best seen in his Litanies, a series of curious and, verbally, extremely beautiful prose-poems, full of assonances, of internal rhymes, of strange symbols, of sonorous rhythms and of fantastic images. Again in his prose, in works like Le Pèlerin du Silence and D’un Pays Lointain; in his poetry—especially in Les Saints du Paradis—this influence is most marked. In books like La Physique de l’Amour, Le Chemin de Velours, the series of Promenades Philosophiques and Epilogues, we have an entirely different kind of intellectual activity—lettered, it is true, but with that incisiveness and clarity of style and thought which mark French prose as the finest in the modern world. In these books problems of philosophy, of morals, of everyday conduct and national and international affairs, problems of music, of painting, of all the arts and sciences, are discussed with a brilliance and an originality not always palatable to the gloomier and duller elements of French society. One must not ask for too clear a definition of M. de Gourmont’s philosophy. He is just sufficient of a mystic to enjoy being misunderstood, and of a nature so ironical that his most innocent-looking statements are traps for the unwary. He is an individualist—true to his type of culture. Perhaps if he were very closely questioned he would smile and say that he belonged to the “tradition des libres esprits.” In addition to these many works, of so diverse a character that they might well be the result of the labours of several men rather than of one, he has written several novels, one or two of which at their appearance were the literary sensation of the hour; he has devoted much time to the study of aesthetic questions and has published two or three volumes on the subject; beyond all this he has produced a modern French rendering of Aucassin and Nicolette, a translation from the Spanish and a couple of original plays! And in his little flat on the rive gauche, not far from St. Sulpice, among his books, he still writes every day words of encouragement for anxious Paris, still finds time to observe and reflect and to let the rest of the world know what is happening in France. 13 Words Out of Waking Helen Hoyt In the warm, fragrant darkness We lay, Side by side, Straight; And your voice That had been silent Came to me through the dark Asking, Do you smell the lilacs? You, half in sleep, Speaking softly,— Indistinctly. Then it seemed to me, A sudden moment, As if we lay in our graves, And you were speaking across From your mound to mine: In the springtime, Speaking of lilacs,— With muffled voice through the grass. Who Wants Blue Silk Roses? Sade Iverson The battlefields are very far away: No friend of mine fights on them—and no foe. I have not sickened at the battle stench, Nor seen the tragic trenches where men die. I am a woman, walking quietly, And fond of peace and place and fireside cheer, Yet here, afar from strife, the grey Uhlans Have battered down my door, let in the rain, And put me out, purse-empty, on the street. Strange, say you? Chance of war! Samaritans, I’m past all succor;—slain in my pocket-book. My little shop for hats—chic hats, oddities— Is shut as tight as Juliet Capulet’s tomb. “Bad times” has stood me up against the wall: “Bad times” in Uhlan gear, takes certain aim. (And firing squads have always stone cold eyes.) All winter long, I’ve peeped out on the street, To watch my little customers go by In conscious rectitude and home-made hats; Home-made to noble ends! Not that they’ve less Than once they had. They’ve more—a bran new creed. Economists approve: the fashion’s set. “How fine and sensible the women are,” You hear the men commenting on the train. “My wife is trimming her own hats.” “And mine.” “I like to see the women suit themselves To present needs.” “And I. It’s fine, I say. Some little good comes out of this sad war.” (Ah, yes, but half a sausage and a roll, Was all the food I’d had in twenty hours!) Now that would seem a feast. The cupboard’s bare. Well, here’s a chance to put my luck to test. Who goes a-roving when the pot is full? Say, comrades, comrades, let’s set out tonight, And brew our mulligan behind the ties. No more I’ll sit alone to play propriety; I sell no more blue roses, hear me swear But when the snows are gone, I’ll scent mayweed Beside the fences, till some purple noon, I find the passion flower, in panoply, Awaiting me, and I shall stoop and pick. But do not think I am without a friend! I have my own familiar Imp for company— The secret, mocking creature of my heart, Which keeps me laughing when I’m set to cry, And fleers the cautions I thought principles. He’s captain now. We’ll see how he’ll provide, For food and drink and thought, and company. Let him advise what lens I’d best look through. Nero, they say, chose green; fools like rose-red. The Imp and I may stand for sun-bright truth, And smoke our glasses if we prove too frail. Come hunger, then, and want, or any shame. If Chatterton dare starve, why should not we? We’ll travel far—though without carfare, dears, 14 15 We’ll travel far—though without carfare, dears, And with shoe-soles that let in pavement slush. But now I shall find out if dry-shod feet Discount the wet ones. Live down the superstitions, So I say. Ducks think wet feet are best. Come, come, my Imp. Let’s start. Our fat landlord Has locked the door on us and taken the key. (When you are passing by the little shop, Remember one who wanted you for friend; A victim of the war, without a faith, But carrying a banner—a white field, And no word written on it. Yes, think of one, Who lacks a watchword, and wears no disguise, And arm in arm with impish laughter, seeks for Life.) M “Mother Jones” and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Margaret C. Anderson other Jones and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn have been talking in Chicago and I went to hear them both, expecting to be captivated by the former and disappointed in the latter. But it turned out just the other way. Mother Jones is all the things you have heard her to be—vigorous, almost sprightly in her eighty-two years, witty, shrewd, kindly, hopeful of great social changes, with snappy little blue eyes and a complexion like a girl of eighteen and a tongue like an automatic revolver. You feel you’d rather have her get after you with fire crackers, as she did to a man in some Western hotel when she wanted to drive him out of town (and succeeded), than to have her side against you in an argument. Right or wrong, she would make you appear to be hopelessly wrong; and certainly on any practical matter you would have a suspicion that she was right anyhow. She is consistent and convincing. But there is one thing none of the magazine articles has said about her: Mother Jones is a completely simple human being, in the least flattering sense of the word. She suffers because men are sent to jail and children are killed in strikes, and she spends every day of her life working toward the prevention of these things. But she lives on no more subtle plane of adjustments to a difficult universe. You can’t associate her with any sort of intense personal struggle. If temperament is the capacity to react, as I heard some one define it the other day, then Mother Jones is as untemperamental a person as I’ve ever seen. She acts; she doesn’t react at all. She has neither a complex nor an interesting mind; she has a well-informed one. She has read a lot— chiefly history and economics. She hasn’t read philosophy or psychology, I think. She hasn’t needed to: her knowledge of psychology is that sweeping and rather crude kind that comes with years of hard experience in which there has been little time for observation. If you asked her to sympathize with a man who had killed himself because he loved too greatly, I can rather hear her say that if men would keep busy they wouldn’t have time for such notions. Life to her is reduced to a matter of two antagonisms: the struggle between Capital and Labor. Other things, such as Art, for instance,—well, she makes you feel it’s a little impertinent to expect her to waste time like that; she is too busy trying to outwit the “damned sewer rats,” as she calls Burns’ detectives or other obstacles to peace and freedom. Mother Jones has a lot of effective phrases of that sort; I think she wants to see if she can make you blanch before she decides really to trust you; and then of course, as she says, “My boys wouldn’t understand me if I talked nice and ladylike all the time.” Underneath all this there is a charming old gentlewoman, full of delicate courtesies that win for her the splendid chivalry of the rough men she spends her life among. The man who took me to see her made an unfortunate remark. He told her that I wanted to write an article about her, and asked if she wouldn’t tell me how she got started in her work. (I tried to stop him in time, but it was no use.) She gave me one scornful look and then flashed at him: “That’s a woman’s question. No man ever asks me such a fool thing, but women always do. How do I know how I got started? I was always a worker—that’s all.” Another of her simplifications is that there are two kinds of people—those who work and those who don’t. She seemed to put me with the latter, and it was my instinct from the first that she didn’t approve of me. She just treated me politely, and it was rather awful. She kept insisting that women know nothing about Labor—which is almost quite true—and of course she didn’t neglect to mention her aversion for the suffragists. But most of the time she told us stories, chuckling heartily whenever she could say anything particularly explosive. She described her recent trip to New York, and I remember her vivid account of a visit she made the Colony Club. She said all the women came tripping in on high heels, bent forward at an ominous angle that made her think of cats ready to spring on a mouse. “I’ve got no time for such idiots,” she finished. “And look at the crazy ones in this town, walking in a mayor’s parade and yelling like wildcats instead of staying at home where they might be reading and learning to educate their children.” That night we went to hear her talk to an organization of painters and found her irresistible. But she did little except entertain them—particularly with stories in which she herself figured as the white-haired heroine, wading across streams in water up to her waist to outwit the police, or forcibly throwing a Burns detective out of her audience. The painters shrieked with joy at that, and it really was good to hear. She had suspected a certain man who had been going to her meetings, so one night she asked him to leave. He refused, but she insisted. He said, “I won’t go and I’d like to see anybody who can make me.” “Well,” she answered, “we’ll see about that”; and she stepped down from the platform, took him by the throat, held him so tightly “that his tongue stuck out,” and marched him out of the hall. He didn’t bother her any more. These things, told in her blunt, snappy way, are overwhelmingly funny—and stirring too. But what you like most about her is her sudden falling into seriousness, and the way she says, “Now, my boys, stick together. Solidarity is the only method by which we can beat the system.” Mother Jones has no patience with anarchism: “Don’t talk to me about philosophies of an ideal society that will happen some time long after I’m in my grave. What I’m after is to do something for my class while I’m still alive. I believe in accomplishing things.” She has none of the anarchist’s hatred of government; she merely wants our present system humanized. And she has a lot of little prejudices about people and things: about Bill Haywood, for instance, who “divides Labor against itself,” as she says— and says untruly. 16 17 18