Chapter D: C. W

Another Masefield Tragedy

_The Tragedy of Pompey the Great_, by John Masefield. [The
Macmillan Company, New York.]

Creative artist that he is, Masefield moves forward into amazing clearness, heightened by flashes of poetic light, the scenes of nearly two thousand years ago in Rome. The fidelity of this tragedy to the facts of history, and the remarkable extent to which it reproduces the overwhelming glory of a great struggle, are new proofs of the author's special affinity with the sanguinary deeds of heroic men. Masefield's plays and narrative poems give the element of tragedy something of its old vividness and nobility in art. Some of his phrases sound like the fall of a guillotine. He is a master of the magic of objectifying tremendous unrealities. He hates feeble passions; wanton courage and oaken physical power in action are the big things that he likes to ennoble with poetic treatment. And his success is incomparable, so far as his contemporaries are concerned.

Masefield's great characters, true to the glossed facts of life, in crises exhibit indwelling cave-men. His frankness and honesty are themselves tragical. Life _is_ full of and inseparable from tragedy. Pompey "saw a madman in Egypt. He was eyeless with staring at the sun. He said that ideas come out of the East, like locusts. They settle on the nations and give them life; and then pass on, dying, to the wilds, to end in some scratch on a bone, by a cave-man's fire." The old warrior lies awake, thinking. "What are we?" he asks Lucceius, and that actor in a great play replies, "Who knows? Dust with a tragic purpose. Then an end." Masefield surveys the recorded history of the past, sees into the heart of the present and exclaims, "Tragedy!" And of course that is in his own life; otherwise he could not see it apart from himself. In sheer desperation he endues dust with a "tragic purpose," but he does not believe so much as he hopes that a "purpose" inheres in that resultant of life, for in the big poem with which he summarizes the record of Pompey he says:

And all their passionate hearts are dust,
And dust the great idea that burned
In various flames of love and lust
Till the world's brain was turned.

God, moving darkly in men's brains,
Using their passions as his tool,
Brings freedom with a tyrant's chains
And wisdom with the fool.

Blindly and bloodily we drift,
Our interests clog our hearts with dreams,
God make my brooding soul a rift
Through which a meaning gleams.

_The Tragedy of Pompey the Great_, unlike any Shaw play or even _The Tragedy of Nan_, is not good reading; its short sentences, tragic with import, are mere outlines. But they drive incarnate reality into one's soul.

What was the tragedy of Pompey? Well, it began hundreds of years before he was born; he was the accidental embodiment of it. He had earned security and peace. He had aided Caesar in conquering Gaul. "Caesar would never have been anybody if Pompey hadn't backed him." But that tyrant's lust for power provoked a civil war, and the end was "a blind, turbulent heaving towards freedom." Pompey's dream of freedom--his conviction that power was in too few hands--cost him his life. To him Rome was inwardly "a great democratic power struggling with obsolete laws." He declared that "Rome must be settled. The crowd must have more power." But Pompey's dream was shallow and human, even if great, for, regarding the "thought of the world" as of transcendent importance, he asks, "For what else are we fighting but to control the thought of the world? What else matters?"

History seems to try to repeat itself. Lentulus, fearing that they were losing Rome, said to Pompey, "You have done nothing." The reply--"Wait"--has a modern sound. Pompey was preparing to fight Caesar, but public opinion, voiced by Metellus, excitedly demanded, "but at once. Give him no time to win recruits by success. Give them no time here. The rabble don't hesitate. They don't understand a man who hesitates."

That too might have been said by a modern American newspaper, affecting to speak for the crowd.

Philip, beloved of the maiden Antistia, is fanatically true to his master, whom he would follow "To the desert. To the night without stars. To the wastes of the seas. To the two-forked flame." To him this blind devotion meant more than Antistia's love. "We shall have to put off our marriage," he said to her, and she, speaking from the deep heart of the mother, unachieved, answered:

Why, thus it is. We put off and put off till youth's gone, and
strength's gone, and beauty's gone. Till we two dry sticks mumble
by the fire together, wondering what there was in life, when the
sap ran.... When you kiss the dry old hag, Philip, you'll
remember these arms that lay wide on the bed, waiting, empty.
Years. You'll remember this beauty. All this beauty. That would
have borne you sons but for your master.

Whatever the fate of Pompey, Antistia's was the supreme tragedy.

DEWITT C. WING.

A Net to Snare the Sun

_The World Set Free_, by H. G. Wells. [E. P. Dutton and Company,
New York.]

Do you remember the little verse of Kipling's in the _Just So Stories_ about the small person who kept so many serving men

"One million Hows, two million Wheres,
And seven million Whys?"

There's something very much like that small person in a decidedly larger person called H. G. Wells. For all the great sweep and astonishing convincingness of his later novels he still keeps the child-like quality of asking startling questions about everything in the universe. He still wants to know: "Why can't I catch the sun, and what would happen if I did?"

In his last half dozen novels he has been asking about various phases of our modern society, politics, and the sex question. But in this latest book, _The World Set Free_, he goes back to a type of question that interested him some years ago, the type half fanciful and half sociological that produced _In the Days of the Comet_, _The Time Machine_, and _When the Sleeper Wakes_. But this book is not entirely like the earlier ones. For one thing the science is for the first time so nearly possible that it is almost probable, and for another this book is the work of an older, quieter soul with less regard for externals and with more faith in the ultimate high hope for mankind.

What Wells has asked himself this time is: "What would happen if man were suddenly given command over an unlimited amount of physical power?" He brings this about by modern chemistry. A scientist discovers a new theory of matter which enables him to break down metals by radio-activity and so generate practically limitless power. The first use the world makes of this power is to go to war. We can hardly quarrel with Wells for the improbability of this because it sweeps the board so clear for his reconstruction period, which is the heart of the story.

A strange story it is; one whose hero is mankind--mankind in the bulk, groping, struggling, trying half blindly to adapt himself to the new conditions, and at last, after a desperate period of reconstruction, coming out into the sunlight, triumphant, clean, and at peace. Now and then an individual is caught up for an instant into the story, transfigured for the moment by circumstances into a mouthpiece for the mass of mankind,--a scientist, a middle-class Englishman who wrote his memoirs, the Slavic Fox, a dying prophet of the later age,--but for the most part it is just mankind who speaks. Wells, by the great sweep and vision of his ideas and the almost super-human handling of the technical difficulties of such an impersonal story, succeeds in raising us for a moment out of our personal selves so that we are completely identified with the race, and view its later successes with a serene and personal pride.

Each of us becomes a link in the great chain of humanity that reaches from the cave man through the "chuckle-headed youth" to the dying professor, the men who dreamed of snaring the sun in a net and taming it to their hand. "Ye auld red thing ..." we say with the chuckle-headed youth, "We'll have you _yet_!" And the dying prophet cries for each of us to the setting orb:

"Old Sun, I gather myself together out of the pools of the
individual that have held me dispersed so long. I gather my
billion thoughts into science and my million wills into a common
purpose. Well may you slink down behind the mountain from me,
well may you cower...."

EUNICE TIETJENS.

A $10,000 Novel

_Diane of the Green Van_, by Leona Dalrymple. [The Reilly and
Britton Company, Chicago.]

About the middle of last December Mr. F. K. Reilly sent a telegram to a Miss Leona Dalrymple of Passaic, New Jersey, in which he asked: "May I call upon you Thursday afternoon?" The telegram was the result of the $10,000 prize contest which the Reilly and Britton Company had planned early in the year; and Miss Dalrymple had just been announced as the winner by the three judges--S. S. McClure, Ida Tarbell, and George N. Madison. She knew nothing of this, however, though she thought Mr. Reilly's telegram must mean an interest in her work; so she replied calmly that she would be pleased to see him on Thursday. Then Mr. Reilly's eyes begin to twinkle, as he tells the story, for it is rather a joke to set out on a journey with a $10,000 check in your pocket for an unsuspecting young woman. Even when he explained to her and presented the check she remained calm--though she is only twenty-eight years old and this was her first taste of real fame. She told Mr. Reilly that she had another novel which she hoped might interest him--but he took the words out of her mouth by saying that he had come prepared to make a contract for it!

So much for the latest of modern fairy tales. _Diane of the Green Van_ is the prize-winning novel, and, despite our first suspicion of it because of that very fact, it proves to be a good one. Miss Dalrymple loves the outdoors, and her present story of an American girl who goes jaunting in a van in the Florida Everglades was suggested by a newspaper clipping about an adventurous young Englishwoman who managed to break away from conventions once a year and roam the country in a gipsy wagon. Not all "best sellers" have as much real charm as this one. Perhaps its freshness and spontaneity are due to the fact that it had to be written in six weeks for the contest.

Miss Dalrymple has stated that her purpose in writing novels is to "entertain wholesomely through optimism and romance." Usually that type of purpose is linked up with a sentimentality which means being sweet at the expense of truth. But this author is not that sort: in expressing her dislike of sex stories, for instance, she attributes their shortcomings to treatment, not to material--"since there is absolutely no subject under the sun which may not be treated with perfect good taste in a novel." She has also stated that in her opinion the modern woman is over-sexed--a popular though altogether wrong-headed view which we mean some time to argue with her in these columns.

Slime and the Breath of Life

_The Russian Novel_, translated from the French of Le Vicomte E. M.
de Vogüe by Colonel H. A. Sawyer. [George H. Doran Company,
New York.]

Although this book was written in 1886, its treatments of Pushkin, Gogol, Turgeneff, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy are now first made accessible to the English reader, and will still be worth his attention. In fact one reads them with a growing regret that the author, who died in 1910, did not continue his interpretation of the Russian spirit as the religious and mystic tone of its nihilism gradually faded and left us the bleaker outlook of such men as Gorky. With Tolstoy, however--"probably the greatest demonstrator of life which has arisen since Goethe"--the book closes.

The author treats his subject from the standpoint of a certain formula which he finds to hold throughout the range of that realism which succeeded the romanticism of Pushkin--a romanticism which disappeared in 1840. Thereafter there grew up the great realistic school which gives Russia the leadership of the world in the field of realistic fiction--a leadership due partly to the temperamental standpoint of the Russian, adapted for just the kind of work which the great realistic novel involves, and partly to the importance of the novel as the vehicle of those ideas which the censor barred from every other channel of expression.

In the bible we are told that God made man out of the slime of the earth and breathed into him the breath of life. In those words is the secret of the Russian realistic novel. For the realism of his own country the author of this work has little praise. Because, he says, it lacked that human sympathy which saw in man not only the slime of the earth but the breath of life, it is barren.

Dickens, on the other hand, and George Eliot gave to English realism a standpoint which was moulded, nay, impregnated through and through, with the religion of that book to which Mary Evans had renounced formal allegiance--the Protestant bible. In fact, De Vogüe goes so far as to say that some of her writing, for instance "the meeting between Dinah and Lisbeth," is biblical in the quality of its appeal, and might have been written by the hand that gave us _Ruth_.

This spirit, but without the Anglo-Saxon hardness, is the spirit of Russian realism. It has all the photographic accuracy, the preocupation with all types of life that distinguishes French realism; but the preoccupation with the divine, the mystical turning away from the things of this world, is also present. The sympathy of Gogol is intensified to painfulness in Dostoevsky and is apotheosized into a new religion of renunciation in Tolstoy.

And because (in contrast to the French) the Russians "disentangled themselves from these excesses, and like the English gave realism a superior beauty moved by the same moral spirit of a compassion cleansed of all impurities and glorified by the spirit of the gospels"--because of this De Vogüe regards Russian realistic literature as the one force that can rejuvenate the literary art of the European nations.

The author writes with the authority of long study and gives us a sufficient basis for what we must now do ourselves--namely, read comtemporary Russian literature and ask ourselves what it tells us; whether or not it tells us that Christian realism is a contradiction in terms.

LLEWELLYN JONES.

A Drama of the Two Generations

_Nowadays: A Contemporaneous Comedy in Three Acts_, by George
Middleton. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]

Some little theatre company ought to send eight of its members on tour through all the smaller cities of the country in _Nowadays_. It would be the most effective way in the world to awaken the people of those slumbering places to the really amazing revolutions in contemporary life--and incidentally in the contemporary theatre. For one thing, it shows how parents and children are gradually bridging the foolish gulf between the generations--the gulf that Shaw has called the degrading objection of youth to age; for another, it reflects the extraordinary renaissance that has come to our theatre since the first visit of the Irish Players.

Mr. Middleton takes a typical small-town family--a father, mother, son, and daughter--and leads them through a domestic crisis that has probably been the sad lot of most modern families. The daughter, like all proper young women, has an ambition: she wants to be a sculptor. The mother understands, having had similar longings before she married a man who made it his business to suppress them. The father refuses to listen to the daughter's idea, and tells her that if she goes to New York it will be without his help. But she goes; and the play opens with her first visit home. The son, a weakling without ability of any sort except to spend money and sow wild oats, has also left home; but he has managed to live very comfortably because of a monthly allowance from his father. The justice of the situation harks back to the antique theory that even a weak boy has more right to the splendors of the world than a girl of any type.

Diana's father refuses to think about woman suffrage. "I don't have to think about something I _feel_. I tell you, if we had woman suffrage, women would all vote like their husbands."

"They say it would double the ignorant vote," answers Diana's friend, Peter, the journalist, who has encouraged her in rebelling.

"He's a good-natured old fossil," Peter says later to Diana. And when the girl insists that she loves her father anyhow, Peter says, "I love radishes, but they don't agree with me. If he had a new idea he'd die of dropsy."

The result of Diana's visit is to produce certain rebellions in her mother, who goes back to New York with her to help make a home of that lonely little flat, and to revive her own early ambitions as a painter. Later the father succumbs to the new order. It is all good "comedy"; also it's tremendously good thinking. If only it could be read by all the people who misunderstand the surging modern spirit that is riding so bravely through traditions and inheritances.

But _Nowadays_ has another value besides that of its story. It is made of the stuff of the new drama; it fulfills our demand that the theatre shall give us the truth about life in a simple way. However, we shall talk more about this in another issue.

Our Mr. Wrenn and Us

_Our Mr. Wrenn_, by Sinclair Lewis. [Harper and Brothers, New
York.]

The poverty of American workaday criticism has rarely shown more threadbare than in the fact that of all the reviews of _Our Mr. Wrenn_, a first novel by Sinclair Lewis, a new author, not one has mentioned the idea under the book.

They have been good reviews, too, as reviews go. Many have praised the book, have talked around it, described its characters, attempted to classify it--under names so various as Locke, Wells, and Dickens. Yet so expected is the novel that means nothing, and so dead is critical vision, that no one has thought to say "Here is a new American writer. What is in his soul?"

Let me prove the point. "Our Mr. Wrenn" is a mouse-like little clerk in the office of a New York novelty company. He is called "Our Mr. Wrenn" in business correspondence by the manager of the firm. He is overshadowed by "the job." He lives uncomfortably in Mrs. Zapp's downtown boarding house. Because the author can see, various figures from the drab stream one meets in the street are made human. Because the author has whimsicality and scorn and sympathy, the book has humor and satire and pathos. All these things have been noted by the critics.

Mr. Wrenn is not always "Our." He becomes his own in the gorgeously illustrated travel leaflets sent out by steamship companies. Eventually he does go to England on a cattle steamer. He is "Bill Wrenn" and licks a tough. He meets adventures--Istra, an over-fine artist girl who likes him because he's real. In the end he pathetically sees her soar above him and sails back to America, where he goes into the office again, falls in love with a sweet little lingerie-counter clerk, marries, and "settles down." All these things the critics have told us.

But Mr. Wrenn is at once glorious and pathetic, not only because he says "Gee!" when he has the emotions of a poet. It isn't only the little things of the book that twist our smiles.

There is an epic conflict between Mr. Wrenn of the job and Bill Wrenn of the sunsets and the sea. Our Mr. Wrenn, oppressed and bullied, scuttling out of the way, not quite daring to think his own thoughts or dream his own dreams, not knowing quite enough to understand the great things of the world--this man is everywhere in New York, in America; he is in our own souls. And when he musters courage to become Bill Wrenn, when he sets out on dangerous quests and loves strange beauty, he becomes a conqueror who rallies with him the great of history, and stands on the high places of our own spirits.

Pitifully inadequate Bill Wrenn is, of course. The lonely tragedy of that conventionally "happy ending" has escaped the critics. The drab, the commonplace, creep over Bill again without his knowing it. That's the frightful part of it. It's very like what appears to happen to everybody. Our Mr. Wrenn he is at the end, sunk in comfort and forgetting his flags in sunsets.

It is a poignant, bitterly human novel. After reading it in sympathy one cannot lean back in satisfaction and write commonplaces. It leads to understandings and resolutions. When we learn to demand such things of American writers, their primary purpose will then cease to be either to entertain or to "teach a lesson."

GILBERT ALDEN.

Lantern Gleams

_Little Essays in Literature and Life_, by Richard Burton. [The
Century Company, New York.]

Readers of _The Bellman_ will welcome in this permanent form many little lantern gleams of thought that have been shed athwart their path by this unacademically-minded incumbent of a Minnesota chair.

Mr. Burton flashes his lamp fitfully over a large area, and shows us loitering spots as well as boggy ground it were well to avoid. Opening his book at random, we find here a hint on reading and here a warning gleam over some political or social morass.

When the morass is a deep one, however, we must not expect to sound its depths with a lantern gleam, and so sometimes Mr. Burton disappoints us. Thus in discussing the individual and society he merely tells us what we all know: that we pay for the advantage of sociality, of mutual comfort, and support by the loss of individuality, by the growth of a fear to do the thing that commends itself to our best judgment. But what must we do? Must we fill in this particular morass by throwing in all the individuals? Or will the individuals be able to jump it? Mr. Burton is discreet on such points.

More satisfactory than that essay and others like it are those on literature. Under "Books and Men" the author deplores the tendency which characterized Chaucer ("Farewell my books and my devotion") of drawing an antithesis between men and books, between literature and life. Literature has its origin in life and its apparent separation from it is an accidental result of the printed book method of spreading what used to be spread by the human voice alone or in chorus.

ILLIAM DHONE.

About Nietzsche

_Nietzsche and Other Exponents of Individualism_, by Paul Carus.
[The Open Court Publishing Company, Chicago.]

Expositions of Nietzsche are usually written by uncritical disciples with little knowledge of formal philosophy. In so far as Nietzsche was a poet, some of these productions may be of value in spots, but in so far as Nietzsche was an intellectual critic of life they are worthless.

Dr. Carus writes from the standpoint of a philosopher in the most formal sense of that word. To him Nietzsche the thundering voice of protest named _Zarathustra_ is of less importance than Nietzsche the extreme nominalist. The chief value of his work therefore is purely informative. He will certainly not send the philosophic debutante further into the matter.

Even from the purely informative side, however, Dr. Carus's work is delimited by his own attitude, which is that of the old time believer in the validity of universals. Recurrence, uniformity, eternal norms of things behind the changing phenomena are the foundations of Dr. Carus's stated or implied world view.

He therefore treats Nietzsche as simply a forerunner of such, to him, mischievous people as William James and Henri Bergson. He takes great pains, indeed, to show that there are many Nietzsches, and among them he classes George Moore, on the strength of extracts from his _Confessions of a Young Man_. Of more value than that is his consideration of the philosophy of Stirner--mainly because Stirner is not so well known as Nietzsche, nor so well as he deserves to be on his merits.

One undoubted merit the book has, and that is the industrious collection of personal recollections of Nietzsche and of Nietzsche portraits which Dr. Carus has brought together in its pages. These will give the book a positive value to the Nietzsche enthusiast, while the sight of Dr. Carus's cool, scholastic temperament trying to drench the burning bush of Nietzsche will at least interest him.

ILLIAM DHONE.

Feminism and New Music

_Anthony the Absolute_, by Samuel Merwin. [The Century Company,
New York.]

It is interesting to watch the struggles of an essentially chivalrous masculine soul caught in the whirlpool of modern feminism. Samuel Merwin, ever since the old days of _A Short Line War_ and _Calumet K._, written in collaboration with Henry Kitchell Webster, has held towards women the attitude of the knight errant. Recently, as shown in _The Citadel_, _The Charmed Life of Miss Austin_, and even more strongly in this latest book, _Anthony the Absolute_, he has become a determined feminist. But the attitude has not changed. Formerly his hero laid at the feet of the lady of his choice as much wealth, fame, and position as he could acquire; this latest hero gives her in the same spirit a career and the chance to develop her own personality. Mr. Merwin says: "The man who deliberately stops a woman's growth--no matter what his traditions; no matter what his fears for her--is doing a monstrous thing, a thing for which he must some day answer to the God of all life." He is still the knight errant. It is still man who permits woman to develop.

None the less it is a very readable tale. The male characters are all clearly and convincingly drawn, not without humor. The lady is a little nebulous, but very charming. Illustrating the absoluteness of Anthony and serving as an introduction to the charming Heloise is an interesting musical theme. The scene is laid in China, where Anthony is studying primitive music, and Heloise is able to sing for him a perfect close-interval scale, in eighth tones instead of the "barbarous" half and whole tones of the piano scale.

Unfortunately Mr. Merwin has permitted himself to be led by the exigencies of a popular magazine, in which the story appeared in serial form, into giving the tale a certain meretricious air of sex allurement which it fundamentally does not possess. On the whole, except in a certain technical facility in handling the situations and sustaining the tension of the plot, _Anthony the Absolute_ is a decided falling below the really splendid standard of excellence which Mr. Merwin set for himself in _The Citadel_.

EUNICE TIETJENS.

Of all our funny little Pantheon the absurd little god who gets
the least of my service is the one labeled "Personal
Dignity."--_Some Letters of William Vaughn Moody._

New York Letter

GEORGE SOULE

Is it true that a Chicago woman's club recently declared any book to be immoral which contains a character whom you wouldn't invite into your home to meet your daughter? If so, the world is to be congratulated, because all novels except the ROLLO BOOKS are labeled immoral, and we needn't worry any more about the word. Provided, of course, that the daughters of this particular woman's club are sheltered as carefully as they should be, having been brought up by such mothers.

I'm afraid only authors and publishers know just how threatening this fear of "immoral" books is getting to be. The most significant American novelist has just written a masterful book which has been declined by two at least of the oldest and best publishing houses because it is "too frank." The men in charge want to publish it; they think the world ought to have a chance at it. But they are afraid. And the author, unlike most authors under similar circumstances, won't modify the book. He says he'll wait twenty-five years, if necessary, but he won't change a word. And yet, if the book were published, some people would accuse him of "pandering to commercialism."

Don't blame the publisher. Mitchell Kennerley came near being fined hundreds of dollars and sent to jail recently for issuing _Hagar Revelly_--a serious though by no means a great novel. Anthony Comstock, who earns his living by attempting to suppress anything which he happens to consider immoral, is likely at any time to pick out a good piece of work for his thunderbolts--and he is a government official in the post office department. You can't tell what he is going to do next. Everybody remembers his ill-advised censorship of Paul Chabas's delicate and inoffensive little _September Morn_; yet in every cheap picture-store window in New York there is now displayed without protest a photograph of a nude woman which makes no pretense to art or beauty.

Not many people know that six men decide what Boston may or may not read. _The Watch and Ward Society_, a group of puritans backed up by the blue laws of the state, have long been active in this pharisaical undertaking and from time to time have arrested booksellers. The booksellers in self-defense have recently formed a committee of three to act with three members of this society. When a new book comes along which anybody "suspects," it is put before the joint committee, and if that decides against it, Boston cannot buy it except by mail. _The Devil's Garden_ only barely escaped, because somebody had read to the end of the book and labeled it "religious." In other words, it teaches a lesson. But the same argument did not save Witter Bynner's _Tiger_.

Magazine editors will tell you similar facts by the hour. The _Metropolitan_ was recently held up by the post office because it contained photographs of nude statuary--from the winter exhibition of the National Academy!

We shall not rid ourselves of this vicious situation by simply getting enraged at the censors. The truth is, they are too well entrenched in public opinion. The people who enforce the law are ignorant postal clerks, clergymen of archaic convictions, and lower court judges of the tobacco-chewing, corner-saloon type to whom any thought of sex is necessarily nasty. But behind them is the man who is always saying that such and such a book or play "oughtn't to be allowed." He is always wanting to protect "the young," or somebody else, although he rarely reads books himself, and probably would resent interference with his own often vicious pleasures. His mind is essentially rotten. He is incapable of understanding the pure beauty of the human body, because he has seen so many "musical comedies." He would be shocked by the statement that passion is a beautiful element of nature toward which we should be reverent. He has a sense of propriety, not so much about what should be done as about what should be said. And then there is the vast Florence Barclay contingent, largely women, who, because they don't know what the world is like, don't want to know, and don't think anybody should be allowed to know.

The trouble with censorship is that we always want it to apply to other people, never to ourselves. It is our national weakness that we try to prescribe conduct by law, instead of seeing that the individual is strong and truth-seeing, and leaving conduct to take care of itself, allowing ideas to fight their own battles. If we must have a censorship, let it be in the hands of the strong and intelligent. Let us forbid all books which are not true. Mental and moral fibre is really vitiated by the Florence Barclay sort of thing. People brought up on that are enemies of light and progress. Their world is an exercise-place for impossible ethics. Their emotion is washed-out sentiment. Courage and vigor are unknown to them. And the worst of it is that their soft and clinging hands are wrapped about the rest of us, as they try to drag us down from the rain-washed skies of the morning to their stuffy hair-cloth religion and pink-candy pleasures.

The fight between the writers and the censors is sure to grow bitter in the next few years; both sides are getting more determined every day. But such crises are welcomed by the adventurous. We shall end not only by riding over our small opponents, but by carrying with us an army awakened to the true issues of art and life.

William Butler Yeats to American Poets

The current number of _Poetry_ prints a speech that William Butler Yeats made during his recent visit to Chicago, in which he took occasion to warn his confreres in America against a number of besetting sins. He said, in part:

Twenty-five years ago a celebrated writer from South Africa said
she lived in the East End of London because only there could she
see the faces of people without a mask. To this Oscar Wilde
replied that he lived in the West End because nothing interested
him but the mask. After a week of lecturing I am too tired to
assume a mask, so I will address my remarks especially to a
fellow craftsman. For since coming to Chicago I have read several
times a poem by Mr. Lindsay, one which will be in the
anthologies, _General Booth Enters Into Heaven_. This poem is
stripped bare of ornament; it has an earnest simplicity, a
strange beauty, and you know Bacon said, "There is no excellent
beauty without strangeness." ...

I have lived a good many years and have read many writers. When I
was younger than Mr. Lindsay, and was beginning to write in
Ireland, there was all around me the rhetorical poetry of the
Irish politicians. We young writers rebelled against that
rhetoric; there was too much of it and to a great extent it was
meaningless. When I went to London I found a group of young lyric
writers who were also against rhetoric. We formed the Rhymers'
Club; we used to meet and read our poems to one another, and we
tried to rid them of rhetoric.

But now, when I open the ordinary American magazine, I find that
all we rebelled against in those early days--the sentimentality,
the rhetoric, the "moral uplift"--still exists here. Not because
you are too far from England, but because you are too far from
Paris.

It is from Paris that nearly all the great influences in art and
literature have come, from the time of Chaucer until now. Today
the metrical experiments of French poets are overwhelming in
their variety and delicacy. The best English writing is dominated
by French criticism; in France is the great critical mind.

The Victorians forgot this; also, they forgot the austerity of
art and began to preach. When I saw Paul Verlaine in Paris, he
told me that he could not translate Tennyson because he was "too
_Anglais_, too noble"--"when he should be broken-hearted he has
too many reminiscences."

We in England, our little group of rhymers, were weary of all
this. We wanted to get rid not only of rhetoric but of poetic
diction. We tried to strip away everything that was artificial,
to get a style like speech, as simple as the simplest prose, like
a cry of the heart....

Real enjoyment of a beautiful thing is not achieved when a poet
tries to teach. It is not the business of a poet to instruct his
age. He should be too humble to instruct his age. His business is
merely to express himself, whatever that self may be. I would
have all American poets keep in mind the example of François
Villon.

So you who are readers should encourage American poets to strive
to become very simple, very humble. Your poet must put the fervor
of his life into his work, giving you his emotions before the
world, the evil with the good, not thinking whether he is a good
man or a bad man, or whether he is teaching you. A poet does not
know whether he is a good man. If he is a good man, he probably
thinks he is a bad man.

Poetry that is naturally simple, that might exist as the simplest
prose, should have instantaneousness of effect, provided it finds
the right audience. You may have to wait years for that audience,
but when it is found that instantaneousness of effect is
produced....

We rebelled against rhetoric, and now there is a group of younger
poets who dare to call us rhetorical. When I returned to London
from Ireland, I had a young man go over all my work with me to
eliminate the abstract. This was an American poet, Ezra Pound.
Much of his work is experimental; his work will come slowly, he
will make many an experiment before he comes into his own. I
should like to read to you two poems of permanent value, _The
Ballad of the Goodly Fere_ and _The Return_. This last is, I
think, the most beautiful poem that has been written in the free
form, one of the few in which I find real organic rhythm. A great
many poets use _vers libre_ because they think it is easier to
write than rhymed verse, but it is much more difficult.

The whole movement of poetry is toward pictures, sensuous images,
away from rhetoric, from the abstract, toward humility. But I
fear I am now becoming rhetorical. I have been driven into Irish
public life--how can I avoid rhetoric?

Letters to The Little Review

What an insouciant little pagan paper you flourish before our bewildered eyes! Please accept the congratulations of a stranger.

But you must not scoff at age, little bright eyes, for some day you, too, will know age; and you should not jeer at robustness of form, slim one, for the time may come when you, too, will find the burdens of flesh upon you. Above all, do not proclaim too loudly the substitution of Nietzsche for Jesus of the Little Town in the niche of your invisible temple, for when you are broken and forgotten there is no comfort in the Overman.

One thing more: Restraint is sometimes better than expression. One who has learned this lesson cannot refrain from saying this apropos of the first paragraphs in the criticism of _The Dark Flower_. Do not give folk a chance to misunderstand you. Being a woman, you have to pay too high a price for moments of high intellectual orgy.

Forgive all this and go on valiantly.

SADE IVERSON.
Chicago.

I am greatly indebted for a copy of THE LITTLE REVIEW. I take this opportunity of stating that the publication is one of the cleverest and best things I have seen. It deserves success, for it contains stuff which will compare very favorably with the best that is being written.

G. FRANK LYDSTON.
Chicago.

Will you allow me to congratulate you on your magnificent effort in bringing out THE LITTLE REVIEW?

I have found it very refreshing after having suffered for so long by reading the so-called book review magazines that have no right to more than passing notice.

You have accomplished wonders, and if your efforts of the future come up to those put into the first number of THE LITTLE REVIEW, your success is assured.

The best wish I can offer is that its path may be covered with roses and bordered with the trees of prosperity.

Again congratulating you, I am, with every good wish, very truly yours,

LEE A. STONE, M. D.
Chicago.

THE LITTLE REVIEW came this morning! And I have read it all! And I love it! Much more than I expected, to be perfectly honest! I feared something too radical--too modern--if that is possible. If it had been like _The Masses_--well, I can never express my contempt for that sheet. But you're perfectly sane, intelligent, readable, and enthusiastic--gloriously so!

Your description of Kreisler is worth much to me. It is precisely what I have always felt about him. Paderewski, too. But I think the Mason and Hamlin reference a little too commercial. I realize you want THE LITTLE REVIEW to be straightforward, honest, intimate, etc., but I fear that kind of thing will be taken as advertisement and not as a personal belief and enthusiasm.

If I should never know anything more of Mr. George Soule than his sonnet and New York letter I should have to like him. The man who could feel and write that last paragraph is a splendid type.

But the whole thing is beautiful, and worth while, whether you agree with it all or not. A thousand congratulations!

AGNES DARROW.
Dayton, Ohio.

[Of course our remarks about the Mason and Hamlin violated all
journalistic traditions. But traditions are so likely to need
violation, and diplomacy and caution are such uninteresting
qualities! What we feel and tried to say about that piano is that
it's as definitely a work of art as good poetry or good music.
Why not say so, quite naturally? We know something of the man who
is responsible for its quality of tone; he's as authentic an
artist as those musicians who create on his foundations. Is there
any reason why such an achievement is not to be mentioned in a
journal that means to devote itself to beauty? Is anything vital
ever gained by a cautious regard for "_on dit_"? Above all, if
one can discover no importance in journalistic tradition of that
type, why defer to it?--THE EDITOR.]

I haven't got over your beautiful magazine yet. Don't let anybody keep you from making it a truthful expression of yourself--but you won't.

First of all, it's beautifully made. You couldn't have done better typographically. It's the most _inviting_ magazine published. I like the color and the paper label.

Second, its spirit blows keen and with a pure fragrance. If you can continue to show such freshness you will have gone far toward achieving the goal Mr. Galsworthy urges--that "sleeping out under the stars" which cleans our hearts of all things artificial.

With sincerest congratulations,

HENRY S.
New York.

I am very much pleased with the first issue of THE LITTLE REVIEW. I am very glad to know that such a thing should be started, and it should be both a cause and an effect of better times in literature. I shall do everything I can to make it better known.

WILLIAM LYON PHELPS.
Yale University.

When I found that the local bookstores had sold out their first orders of THE LITTLE REVIEW I was delighted; for it meant folks were interested in the fledgeling. The first number deserves the praise and congratulations of everybody interested in literature; everything in it is fine, even unto the composition of the "ad" pages. With its fresh, cheerful note THE LITTLE REVIEW very fittingly comes forth on the first day of Spring. Long may it spread sweetness and light.

W. W. G.
Chicago.

There are so many things that I admire in the first issue of THE LITTLE REVIEW that I find it difficult to decide just where to begin. It was like taking up a copy of the Preludes of Debussy for the first time; after playing them over and over again I found it difficult to know whether it was what he said or the way he said it which held the greater charm for me. I congratulate you most sincerely on the distinct personal quality which is so evident in your magazine and you may count upon me to rejoice with you if it meets with anything like the great success which it so distinctly merits.

F. L. R.
Chicago.

Your new publication has just fallen into my hands. The vital thing!

I cannot begin to tell you what its pulsating, teeming import means to me. I know nothing today in magazine form that will mean so much to busy, thinking people.

NANNIE C. LOVE.
Indianapolis.

Please let me offer my sincerest congratulations and my warmest wishes for the continued success of THE LITTLE REVIEW. There are numerous points in the first issue that I should like to discuss with you; I must warn you that you are tempting your readers and must not be surprised if you are overwhelmed with letters, questioning, approving, and criticising.

The foreword strikes such a splendid note! I hope no criticism will influence you to change it.

You agree, evidently, with the point that _The Dark Flower_ suggests a Greek classic; so do I. But, conceding that, how could you have been surprised that countless people care nothing for it? Don't you know that the majority of people in the world do not really "possess" the Greek classics? Without the background of the world's thought, ages ago, and its progress--unless we agree with Alfred Russell Wallace that we have made no progress--can't you see that _The Dark Flower_ could genuinely startle many people? So I beg for less sharpness toward those who do not feel the wonder of it. The tragedy is in their lives.

For just the same reason _Jean Christophe_ belongs to a few, comparatively. If you had never before felt the power of a great epic, could you really grasp this one? Modern as we claim to be--and independent--must there not be some foundation? Oh dear!--I do want to tell you why I think _Vanity Fair_ is greater than _Succession_ and why Ysaye's music is inspired--when I listen, at least. But one can't go on forever.

Since the "Critics' Critic" expressed a doubt about that quotation from Euripides and since you insisted that it sounded like a Gilbert Murray translation, you may be glad to know that it is both. But you quoted it wrong. It is from _Aeolus_, a lost play, and this is the correct version:

This Cyprian,
She is a thousand, thousand changing things;
She brings more pain than any god; she brings
More joy. I cannot judge her. May it be
An hour of mercy when she looks on me.

I do agree that "a million, million changing things" is somehow more perfect; I even agree now, though not at first, with the order of attributes: "She brings more joy than any god, she brings more pain." On a re-reading of _Aeolus_ I am taken with the way you misquoted it. Joy was surely first in the Greek's life. And of course the human beauty of the thing made me think immediately of the way Mrs. Browning "struck off" Euripides:

Our Euripides, the human,
With his droppings of warm tears
And his touches of things common
Till they rose to touch the spheres!

KATHERINE TAPPERT.
Davenport, Iowa.

... I don't know when I've read anything so inspiring as that letter from Galsworthy. Can't all of you who are helping to make the magazine arrange to march up to it mentally and present your "copy" for approval before you decide to print it?

I like the article on Paderewski and the one about _The Dark Flower_. But do be careful of "beauty" and "passion." It's easy to make them commonplace. Also spare your adjectives a bit; you don't need an adjective for everything. I realize that your abbreviations are made in the interest of readableness, but however informal you want to make it you only succeed in sounding hideously colloquial. It doesn't read well, and it makes me feel that you're trying to achieve through the style what ought to be achieved quite simply through the material itself. Not that I approve of anything stilted, but you can easily overdo the other side of it. And wouldn't it be better to leave some of the things unsigned? People who don't know that the various Anderson contributors are unrelated will think it's rather a family monopoly.

The Ficke poems are exquisite; and how I love Nicholas Vachel Lindsay's! Also I like the New York letter very much, but George Soule's _Major Symphony_ could just as well be unwritten. Poetry has to be so much better than that to be real poetry. Another thing: I think your quotations from _Succession_ weren't as efficient as you hoped. It's a book that can't well be quoted except to one who knows it.

You wanted frankness, so here it is. Otherwise, I have nothing but praise for the whole glorious undertaking!

LOIS ALLEN PETERS.
Philadelphia.

[Being a sister of the editor, Mrs. Peters speaks her mind with a
freedom that enchants us. It also helps us--though we want to
shake her for one or two of those remarks. However--may her
letter serve as a model to timid but opinionated readers!--THE
EDITOR.]

If you will allow me to be perfectly frank about your first issue, I should like to tell you that THE LITTLE REVIEW seems rather too esthetic in tone and spirit to avoid being "restrictive"--a wish you expressed in your editorial. There is not enough variety in it, for one thing. For another, some of its critical judgments are too personal--are too largely temperamental judgments--to be of any permanent value. You seem to have set out to exploit personalities; and there's a juvenility in many of the articles that I'm afraid you'll all blush for in ten years.

A WELL-MEANING CRITIC.

The first number of THE LITTLE REVIEW came as a delightful surprise and I have enjoyed reading it. I particularly appreciate the spirit of appreciation running through the pages, which I believe will be of inestimable service to young writers, if you are able to keep it up.

M. K.
New York.

The Little Review looks very interesting. I hope to have the pleasure of reading it through very soon, but at the moment my small sister is devouring it and refuses absolutely to give it up. If you are as successful in pleasing women generally as you have been in pleasing her you need have no fear for the success of the magazine.

J. C. P.
New York.

Professor Foster's essay on _The Prophet of a New Culture_ is magnificent--a soul-searching, heart-breaking bit of writing, fiery and tragic. Nicholas Vachel Lindsay's _How a Little Girl Danced_ is a delightful thing--airy, high-minded, and full of his burning spirit. In fact, THE LITTLE REVIEW is full of things that one reads with a keen zest.

W. L. C.
Denver.

THE LITTLE REVIEW came to hand promptly, but I was unable to read it until last night. That is where I made my first mistake, as I had been denying myself a very pleasant two hours. My second mistake was in having read it at all, as it has now become one of those eight or ten journals which are always welcome and more or less necessary. Ten journals each month (and some weeklies), quietly yet insistently urging me to take them up, are like those good friends who tempt me with an outing in Spring when work is crowding. So with THE LITTLE REVIEW. It has with one reading become a distinctly individual friend.

W. M. L.
Philadelphia.

Your LITTLE REVIEW has just reached me. I took it home for leisurely examination on Sunday. I congratulate you upon launching and hope that you'll meet no adverse trade winds in your voyage. Its atmosphere is certainly anything but editorial, and you've put plenty of your own personality into it. And what a delightfully charming letter is that from Galsworthy!

I should take sharp issue with you on one or two slight points could I face you across a lunch table, but as it is, I tuck my differences away, with a sigh of envy at your enthusiasm, and the sincere wish that you may always keep it.

With best wishes for your good luck.

BEATRICE L. MILLER.
Boston.

I think your first number very interesting indeed, and congratulate you on your fine start. I am always delighted with every new manifestation of the life and enthusiasm in Chicago!

With best wishes for your future.

ALICE C. HENDERSON.
Chicago.

... I've fallen in love with M. H. P., "The Critics' Critic." She's just the sort of person I'd like to go and talk with this afternoon. Please ask her to write a letter properly sitting on Agnes Repplier for her _Atlantic_ essays. A very delicate, cultured, polite little woman sitting behind a tea-table in her aloof apartment, and given over to well-bred sneering at things she doesn't know anything about--that's how I picture Miss Repplier.

A CONTRIBUTOR.

THE LITTLE REVIEW is here, and I have so enjoyed going over it.

It is a great first number and sets a pace that would have made most of us breathless before we started; but anyone can know it isn't so with you, from that last paragraph of your announcement. It was lovely!

I loved the Paderewski, too. Was there anything more wonderful than the glory of the Funeral March as he played it the afternoon of his first recital here this winter? I know you heard it from the way you write of it. An emotion that brings the tears and makes the sobs struggle in the back of your throat is always worth living through, and I wouldn't have missed it for worlds.

With the best of good wishes.

MABEL REBER.
Chicago.

I want to tell you how very good the first issue of THE LITTLE REVIEW is. I don't know what the succeeding numbers will be like, but you have set a pace in this one that will demand some vigorous effort to keep up. After that "gripping" announcement no one will doubt the real purpose of the REVIEW and the fine optimism that is behind it. I don't have to believe everything you are going to print, but if those who write it do, by all means keep them together. And _don't_ let George Soule get away.

It's too early to make suggestions, but I should say that Number One is well balanced and very readable, and I like the trick of throwing the light on from different angles--like the Galsworthy and Nietzsche discussions. The tone is high, and I am quite sure I never read more intelligent reviews anywhere.

Good luck to THE LITTLE REVIEW!

J. D. MARNEY.
Springfield, Ill.

Will you let me thank you for giving me a very pleasant experience in reading the first copy of THE LITTLE REVIEW? There are many things in the first number which arouse one's interest, though I am not sure that I would at all agree in all the critical judgments which are there pronounced. Anyway, you will let me wish you all success, and wave you my hand with the hope that THE LITTLE REVIEW shall be the biggest review in the country.