Chapter VI

How generously into its soft yielding lap
The bed receives us now,
And its strong arms
Fold us about as a mother folds her children,—
Comforting, and long-accustomed, and secure.

Unquestioning our deserts;
Unfailing; never denying;
Never refusing our weariness;
Taking our weariness from us like a burden.

To petulance, to discomfort,
Answering with soft answers;
Smoothing away with silence our sorrows,
Till in those faithful friendly arms
We are enwrapped with quietness and content;
With old well-being of sleep.

The Ugliest Man

GEORGE BURMAN FOSTER

Good and evil, these are time-old opposites. So are beautiful and ugly. But these two opposites are seldom entirely coincident. No doubt there are good and high-class men who are commonly judged to be fundamentally ugly. And there are blinding beauties who are on a war-footing against all that we call good. The good satisfies our moral judgment; the beautiful, our judgment of taste. The one has to do with the content of human life; the other, with the form. But, at bottom, the moral judgment and the judgment of taste cannot remain entirely and materially dissociated. It was a more nearly correct feeling on the part of the Greeks when they let the beautiful and the good inter-grow. According to the Greek, the good and the beautiful, intimately united, constitute the ideal of virtue, however. We are reconciled after a fashion to the ugliness of a man if we find a great and noble soul in the repellant shell.

But if permanent beauty is to be preserved to human nature, efficient and high endeavor, free self-concentrated formation of character is the only means to this end. When the “outer man” mirrors goodness and beauty of heart, firmness and bravery of will, seriousness and depth of thought, his countenance glows under all circumstances with a radiance of happy beauty, and it would be a barbarian and pitiable eye indeed that could not apprehend such radiance or feel itself smitten with its glory. For the man of fine feeling, therefore, all that is ugly affects him morally at the same time. Indeed, the reproach of having behaved in an ugly manner he feels as keenly, frequently more keenly in fact, than the reproach of having behaved immorally.

In the case of _Friedrich Nietzsche_, the moral criterion of human worth was totally transformed into an aesthetic criterion! This man who had subdued all “morality” and left it behind him, who took his stand “beyond good and evil,” submitted to a new evaluation, was measured according to his greatness. Greatness was nobility, supremacy, beauty. Smallness was vulgarity, baseness, ugliness. Not the wickedest, and not the wretchedest, but the ugliest man—_der hässlichste Mensch_—represents the power which the new culture has to struggle with—to overcome, indeed—if man is to mount to a higher plane of being.

Who is this ugliest man? Of all the Zarathustrian enigmas, this is perhaps the most enigmatic. It must have been a frightful ugliness which haunted and harried the poet-philosopher when he narrates that, amid his wanderings over men’s disappointing earth, he had met the ugliest man. Many and many were the types of human beings that Zarathustra had met in his lonely pilgrimages. Most of them he disposed of with high scorn or honest contempt,—thus did he dispatch the good and reputable, the custodians of the old tables of morals and order; then, the preachers of the doctrine of equality, who swarmed around like flies in market places, shunning all solitudes, able to exist only in masses; next the poisonous tarantulas who, with envious revenge, devised punishments, in cold blood dragged their victims to justice; finally, the wise and upright, the schoolmasters, whose duress converted all depths into shallows, managed to obliterate all men’s peculiarities, till nothing distinctive was left.

But the ugliest man was uglier than any of these! These types did not so infuriate Zarathustra as did the ugliest man. At all these Nietzsche shook his head, but they did not floor him. He had been able to look upon them, to scold them, to laugh at them. “And again did Zarathustra’s feet run through mountains and forests.... When the path curved round a rock, all at once the landscape changed, and Zarathustra entered into a realm of death. Here bristled aloft black and red cliffs, without any grass, tree, or bird’s voice. For it was a valley which all animals avoided, even the beasts of prey, except that a species of ugly, thick, green serpent came here to die when they became old. Therefore the shepherds called this valley ‘Serpent-death.’” Here Zarathustra found the ugliest man something sitting by the wayside shaped like a man, and yet hardly like a man, something nondescript. And all at once there came over Zarathustra a great shame, he blushed up to the roots of his white hair, he would flee this ill-starred place—the worst that there was in the whole world! But the Great Despiser, the Hater of all pity was himself so unstrung and overpowered by pity that he sank down all at once, like a giant oak that had weathered many a storm, or withstood many a stroke of the woodman’s axe.

Who was this ugliest man? What was this ugliest thing which Nietzsche—the great man-spy and life-appraiser—had ever discovered in a human being? Before Nietzsche wrote, _thus spake Zarathustra_, he expresses himself in another work as follows: “Nothing is ugly save the degenerate man.... From the physical standpoint everything ugly weakens and depresses man. It reminds of decay, danger, impotence; he literally loses strength in its presence. The effect of ugliness may be gauged by the dynamometer. Whenever man’s spirits are downcast, it is a sign that he scents the proximity of something ‘ugly.’ His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage and his pride—these things collapse at the sight of what is ugly, and rise at the sight of what is beautiful.... Ugliness is understood to signify a hint or a symptom of degeneration; that which reminds us, however, remotely of degeneracy, impels us to the judgment ‘ugly.’ Every sign of exhaustion, of gravity, of age, of fatigue; every kind of constraint, such as cramp, or paralysis; and above all the smells, colors and forms associated with decomposition and putrefaction, however much they may have been attenuated into symbols,—all these things provoke the same reaction, which is the judgment ‘ugly.’ A certain hatred expresses itself here: who is it that man hates? Without a doubt it is _the decline of his type_. In this regard his hatred springs from the deepest instinct of the race. There is horror, caution, profundity, and far-reaching vision in this hatred,—it is the most profound hatred that exists.”

Nowhere has Nietzsche told us of the zenith, who his superman is. But he here tells us of the nadir, who the ugliest man is—and the superman is the exact and august opposite. Thus we could ourselves construct his superman.

But the ugliest man—we recognize this strange figure of the Zarathustra poesy in the sharp cry of distress which all representatives of degenerate (_de-genera_) humanity groan out where the yearning toward a higher humanity overpowers them. The ugliest man then appears accoutered with a crown with which he has crowned his own head, and with two purple girdles which encircle him. In a later profound observation, Nietzsche informs us that the ugliest man is called _der historische Sinn_, the historical mind, or sense, which needs decoration, accoutrement, like all ugly things that would make themselves tolerable, at least for surface people. The degenerate man,—this is the ugly man, and the saddest degeneration is _the surrender of life to the past_—for the past is the big grave which swallows up all that lives. Whoever makes the past the goal of his longing walks among corpses which make him shiver. He becomes himself a corpse, whose society is freezing for living men. And because this man, assimilated to the past, living in the past, is nothing himself, he needs all kinds of fiddle-faddle to give himself the semblance of being something. He needs pomp which makes a world-stirring phenomenon out of a coronation; he scrambles and scratches after titles and orders—which long ago Frederick the Great, the philosopher-king on the Prussian throne, called the insignia of fools; he has himself accredited by father and grandfather, so that their merit may adorn the shield of son and grandson; in a word, he reverses the counsel of an apostle: “Forgetting the things that are behind,” for he forgets the things that are before and reaches back for the things that are behind. And because there is for this backward-bent man an inconvenient monitor and witness of all life—because there is God, the omnipresent God, who ever sees all, even sees man through and through, this ugliest man became the murderer of God, he took revenge on the living God for being witness of the hiddenest life of man! “I know thee well,” said Zarathustra, with a brazen voice, “_thou art the murderer of God_!... Thou couldst not _endure_ him who beheld thee through and through, thou ugliest man. Thou tookest revenge on this witness!”

We have here, I think, with all that is enigmatic and obscure, a sharply-outlined picture of the ugliest man. Earlier Nietzsche wrote a book on the blessing and the bane of history for life. In that book he accorded right to historical culture and to man’s knowledge of the past _only in so far_ as the life of the man of the present and of the future would be advanced thereby. But the historians in the schools, in chair and pulpit, did not so think. They acknowledged life only when it was dead! A zealous teacher of history was a meandering mummy from out the past, who had no blood more in his veins, no flesh more on his bones. Therefore was he so ugly. Therefore did he create such a frosty temperature round about him. Under the pressure of these historical forces, all life became a _cultus_ of the past. The older a thing was, the better it was. It was the long past, the outlived, that was noble. The more remote that past, the prouder men were of it, and the brighter shone its glory-beaming star to the eyes of men.

From this malady of the ugliest man, from this _de-genera-tion_, we are by no means free. Instead of ascent to a higher _genus_ than present man, to superman, there is descent to a lower _genus_. This antiquarian, hoary spirit pervades our whole social life, this _re-spect_ for what has become old and rotten, for what can show no other merit than that it once—was! It is a sign of our own decay, this living on the dead, this ability only to resuscitate and copy past centuries—past poetry, past art, past philosophy, past morality, past religion!—this knowing in consequence no life of our very own. We build “whitewashed sepulchers” in our lives, because we have no courage of heart to create anything that belongs to life. At all events, that the putridity and the dead bones may be concealed, we use whitewash, much whitewash! We use decorations, brilliant, finely-painted decorations so that men may not observe that life has become a theatrical play, making an impression indeed under clever management, but inspiring no living human heart. All the splendor of this pomp, which we of today employ on the stage of life, cannot conceal the chilly vacuity of this whole business; and the man who peers behind the curtains and sees how people look shorn of their decorations, without powder and paint, without the artificial cunning luminosity of the day’s puffery, has Zarathustra’s feeling in the valley forsaken to the old green thick snake on its way to die,—Zarathustra’s feeling when he met the ugliest man, where much heaviness settled on his mind, because he did not think that anything so ugly and horrible could exist among men.

Yes, there are traces and traits of this ugliest man among us. If we but imagine all that is decoration, flummery, stripped off from us, think how much degenerate life would be disclosed! How much love for the dead _that no longer lives_, how much bitter strife and war over _reliques_, over some sacred cloak, or sacred bone, of which history narrates, telling us that they once belonged to life. How much slavish obedience to thoughts that once were; to institutions that once served the living. To be sure, men call this _piety_, and have thus designed a beautiful robe behind which they hide their moribund lives. For the sake of this piety, they exact consideration for all ancient dust which burden the homes and hearts of men, they arm themselves against him who, with mighty hand, would undertake a huge house-cleaning of life and for life. Piety,—it is this that they call admiration and veneration of every idol which for long has been played out, but still counts us of today among its devotees. Men must even deal God a mortal blow, the _Living_ God of the living, and, with the ferocious hatred of their folly, pursue the God who sees their innermost heart as a living witness of what they would like to hide from themselves and all the world. “But he—_had to_ die: he looked with eyes which beheld _everything_,—he beheld men’s depths and dregs, all his hidden ignominy and ugliness ... he crept into my dirtiest corners. This most prying, over-intrusive, over-pitiful one had to die. He even beheld me: on such a witness I would have revenge—or not live myself. The God who beheld everything, _and also man_: that God had to die! Man cannot _endure_ it that such a witness should live.”

Thus spake the ugliest man. Zarathustra started off, feeling frozen to the very bowels.

The God who told men that altogether they served death, not life, that they worked deterioration, not rejuvenation—had to die! Life is a dying—and yet there shoots through the heart of man such a nameless anxiety in the presence of this dying that he paints up and pencils all death till it looks like life. And indeed many are deceived, many see only men’s rouge and mark not the great lie which it hides. This is the ugliest thing in the world, and it made the prophet of a new culture shudder and freeze—_this_, that we live and walk among corpses which yet look as if they were alive!

To fight and conquer this hindrance to a new culture, this is to fight and conquer death; and since death is death only through man, through his yearning or fear, the triumph of a new culture begins with the triumphal song of life, which knows how to make a festival out of even death. To be sure, Nietzsche did not set his most beautiful man over against his most ugly, but we can yet read between the lines what he conceived the most beautiful man to be. He is the man who has pushed far from him the last vestige and survival of fear and slave-service. He is the man who has learned dying as the great Consummator, victorious, surrounded by men who hope and vow that there shall ever be festival where a man who so dies dedicates himself to the living. Here Zarathustra-Nietzsche intimates a kinship with that other Dying Man Who proclaimed his life’s victorious career in His: “It is finished!” and created on Christianity’s Good Friday a festival of death. Nietzsche speaks of the Hebrew, too early dead, who would have confessed Zarathustra’s doctrine, if he had attained to Zarathustra’s years. It did not occur to Nietzsche that such a confession was not at all needed, because the world had perceived the glad message already which would make a festival out of death and teach men how the most beautiful festival was consecrated. Christian art had opposed to the ugliest man the most beautiful human picture: the head full of wounds and blood, the King in the thorn-crown, who understood dying because he understood living. With this victorious song of death began a new culture, a new heroism of humanity, to which death ceased to be a pale ghost, but which confessed even in death: “as dying, and behold, we live!” Then men ceased to learn dying, and because they made no preaching of life out of dying and no vow to life, death became to them a torturing anxiety and care again; they did not dare name his name; they did not dare frankly look him in the eye. And this cowardice and lie disfigure all their action and passion; they would give to death at least the semblance of life; they would believe in ghostly existence still allotted to all the dead, rather than say to death: “Thou are a messenger of God, a revelation, a witness of life; since thou art good, I will greet thee and bless thee!”

So Zarathustra demanded of his disciples: “Let your dying be no blasphemy of men and earth; my friends, your spirit and your virtue shall still glow in your dying, like the evening red over the earth, or else death has miserably betrayed you.”

Death our will even, our freedom—this is life’s highest meaning! Who but Nietzsche could have thought that? Of course, this is not to throw life away, when it has become hard and heavy to bear. Such a death would be of all the most unfree. It would be a flight, not a deed; it would be a lamentation and a feebleness, not a festival of the soul! But it means that we take up death from the start into the order of our life, as the night which, no less than the day, belongs to man’s full day. It means that we give to life a worth which no death can destroy, which first in death reveals its eternal power. I must die—so laments the slave, who has lived only non-entities even in his life, and has never learned that life is work, creation, consummation. I _will_ die—so speaks the hero, to whom every fight brings the prize of a victory well worth death!—the hero who hazards his life every moment for the highest human good, who knows that he and his life have become a sacrifice from which a better, higher, freer humanity shall gain its life and its strength.

Who is ugly? Who is beautiful? Who is ashamed of his death and falsifies his deadness that it may look like life—who does this, bears death within himself as a power that drags him down, disfigures him in the fullness of that which he would be able to live. But who, in his power to die, proves that he has learned to live, has overcome the ugliest thing in man, cast it out; namely, the fear of death which creates all the lies of life, and all the servility and unfreedom of men—which creates men over whom _das Gewesen_! the dead past, possesses power, so that they can never breathe a joyous breath, can never commit themselves to the living and the growing. But a _beautiful_ culture will also become a _good_ culture because one that is living is at once good and beautiful; the eternal life of God, of whom it is said: There is none good but God alone.

Emasculating Ibsen[2]

Dear Mr. Ibsen: I hope this letter finds you well as it leeves us the same. The reason why I write you is that I seen your play called _Ghosts_ at the Bijou Movie Theater last night and I thought it was so grand that I had to tell you. I thought it was awful the way poor Mr. Alving is always seeing that hand which was pulling his hair out of the past. And it was awful too the way poor Mr. Alving crawled across the floor on his stomich and pulled the poison offn the icebox before he killed himself. The way his poor, dear mother suffered, that was terrible. She was such a strong, brave woman that I cried for her all the time. And The Rev. Manders he was such a real swell minister that my heart was all torn watching him. It ain’t natural for everybody to be so good as ministers because they ain’t got so much time and don’t read the Bible so often. But he was certainly all there when it came to pureness and kindness. But even if the play was awful it was just grand the lesson that it taught. I sent my friend to see it and he thought it was swell. He said the kissing scenes where the terrible Cap. Alving hugs the different ladies was real stuff and that the lesson against the evils of drink was good for the young. This is what I want to write you about, Mr. Ibsen. We’re going to organize a West Side Ibsen Prohibition Club and make you honary president. I wish therefor you will write the club a letter or better if you will write a sequil to the movie play _Ghosts_ we will put it on at the club. I know how hard it is to have movie plays accepted because I have done some myself but if you don’t write the sequil I will write it and send it to the Mutual people who put the first part on. I am certain they will take it because I will make it just so strong and powerful a sermon against the evils of drink as what you did. With best regards and hopes for your future success, I am your friend,

Mobbie Mag.

[2] P.S. For the reader: The wet nurses who minister to the mob
have put our old friend Ibsen into diapers and give him to their
patients to play with. The cherubic little fellow is kicking up
his dimpled heels and thriving well in all the movie houses.

Death

I have always wished to know of death. I have always wondered what became of me when I went back to earth. Today I know.

I have watched a soul die and have heard its pain. Beside it I have stood and listened to its cries. I have watched it sicken and have noted how it struggled.

Life was beautiful to it. There never was so exquisite a soul. It leaped, and burned and danced when it was born. It was so radiant the dark world into which it came grew light.

I have always wished to know of death. Today I know.

It was raining softly and we sat within a room with pictures all about—a woman, fresh and young, and I—and trembled. The beauty and the loveliness of her were dawning in me. And something of myself that had not been took being. I loved. There was nothing as beautiful as her lips. There was nothing as beautiful as her eyes. There was nothing then in all the world as beautiful as she I loved. It was my soul. Restless as a song it reached from day to day to light new moments with its melody. Ever and forever it went singing, “I will live beyond the stars. I will live beyond the mystery of flesh. When the woman who awakened me is turned to dust I will live as now and sing as now.”

I have always wondered what became of me when I went back to earth. Today I know.

It was so precious and so fierce. I loved so. I had but to look on her and taste of immortality.

Beside it I have stood and listened to its cries. I have noted how it struggled. In the night I have repeated its brave words, “Ever and forever.” I have nursed it from her lips. I have given it to feed upon her breast.

It would not live. I loved so, I loved so—and yet I ceased to love.

There is one thing in the world that will not live. There is one thing mortal more than life. It is the beauty of which poets sing. Beauty dies in every moment. It is mortal with the hours. It flashes and it dies. It leaps and dies. It sings and dies.

I loved so and yet I ceased to love.

Her eyes became as nothing. Her lips became as nothing. Her voice became as nothing. Her laughter and her tears, the movement of her body when she walked, the strangeness of her face, the mysteries that made her one apart and glorified her and the radiance that burned in me at her approach—all became as nothing.

Miserable God. False Promiser. I have wished to know of death. I have wondered what became of me when I went back to earth. Today I know.

“The Scavenger.”

Children’s Poems

Alice Oliver Henderson, eight-year-old poet, wrote the following five poems when she was only seven. Her method is to chant them to her mother, Alice Corbin Henderson, who takes them down exactly as they are dictated. Mrs. Henderson thinks their interest lies in the fact that they are the expression of a child’s mind, and so she refuses to change or “improve” them. Besides, it might be difficult to “improve” such lines as “The moon shines against my heart”.... The other poems in the group were written by Percy Mackaye’s children—Arvia’s at the age of ten, and Robin’s at twelve. Mr. Mackaye says that his daughter’s were done while it was still difficult for her to read or write, but that she has always been read aloud to and has learned considerable poetry by heart.

A Mountain of Fire

There was a mountain made of fire,
Far in the sea—
It was very nice to everybody that lived in that world.
Right over in Japan, it was.
Where there are very good fighters and painters,
And very good little children,
And very good minders in that world.

Kathleen

(after seeing _Kathleen ni Houlihan_)

She looked very, very old when she came in.
The mother and the father that were in the house.
Had one brother in the house,
The other one had gone out
And got all the England people away
For Kathleen,
For Kathleen,
And then said, _He shall be remembered forever_.
She was a young woman when she went out,
And she sang when she went out the door.

The moon shines at night
When all are in bed,
And the dear little birdies sing for you
In the morning time to wake you sure.

How lovely the day is—
The moon shines against my heart—
I love the sweetness of the sky.
The beautiful day comes every morning true.

Miss Ungerich’s Japanese Play

Eyes all blackened, lips made beautiful,
Lavender under, then red over for the costume,
Acted wonderfully with her hands fixed all the time,
Bare feet, then on to the floor,
She made a thing that was beautiful.

Next was a man with a sword,
He acted the same way with her face.
Brown—gold costume, then a hat she wore,
Then a sort of stick-sword;
Then she did moving of hands and killing.
She was pretending, but there was only one actor,
Miss Ungerich.

The Snow Flakes

In the winter I saw the loveliest sky that you ever saw.
It was blue and pink and yellow and orange and white and black and grey.
That was the colors of the sky.
It pleased me so that I went and sat down.
You must think of life and the poor that war makes.

_Done by Alice Oliver Henderson, Miss._

Fire Castles

Fast falling rain and every hill in mist
Make even my very saddest thoughts grow sadder,
And every sad thought lengthens my long list,
As, moaning over old things that make me madder,
I sit and sulk over some unkind word
And weep as if I had not wept before,
And think of words about me I have heard,
And with old thoughts grieve over them some more.
But soon, if I get up, or sit and gaze,
Telling myself stories of joyous thought
Before the warm and cheery, singing blaze,
Now all my bad thoughts in a trap are caught;
And if I gaze at castles in the fire,
Then all the while to gladness I grow nigher.

The Unknown Race

O dream, what are you?—
A fairy or a sprite,
A goddess in the air,
Or just a flash of light?

A sudden flash of joy
That brightens up my mind,
Till wonders I see now
Where first I was so blind.

Zephyr

Zephyr—Zephyr—Zephyr! Blow on, blow hard
Over hill and over dale!
O play in the green trees, leave nothing marred:
O blow—O blow—O blow a gale!

Zephyr—Zephyr—Zephyr! Play on, play long!
Play and sing in tops of trees,
And brush the valley’s airy green hair strong;
Dip your head, diving down the leas!

Zephyr—Zephyr—Zephyr,
Like a little heifer,
Frolic and lie
In the field of the sky!

Good-bye, good-bye!
Frolic and turn and lie!

_Arvia Mackaye._

The Swimming Pool

O! crystal-clear, transparent water,
The cool wind is thy joyous daughter.
As I glide through thee, quick and sleek—
Oh thou so quiet and so meek!—
I feel thy ripples lapping free,
And thou dost lie so near to me
I see my figure on thy face,
Entwined in shadows, linked like lace.

Oh! what art thou? what canst thou be,
That dost reflect my visage unto me?
I know not what thou seemest to another,
But thou to me art as a brother.

To a Turtle

O gallant knight in armour black
Blotched with grey and yellow squares,
A horny motto’s on thy breast:
_Bravery_ it bears.

O turtle, paddling through the grass
That skirts the cobwebbed shining lawn!
Come tell me true: where journey you
This dewy dawn?

I smell a pond, and in it are
Young tadpoles, newly hatched and fresh,
And larvas of mosquitoes plump
And sweet of flesh;

And whirligigs, that streak and dart
Like water-lightning underneath
The greenish cat-tail spears, that shade
The frogspit heath.

And there is oozy, deep, soft mud
For me to lie and bask upon,
And dine on lizards fat, and sleek
Chameleon.

And there the bright-green, freckled frog
My only friend will always be.
To him I haste:—To you I bend
My jointless knee.

_Robin Mackaye._

Book Discussion

The Books of Poetry

_Irradiations: Sand and Spray, by John Gould Fletcher. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Company._

There is considerable diversity in Mr. Fletcher’s _Irradiations_, but one soon discovers that he has not encrimsoned himself with the standard passions of poetry. He does not display the usual contortions of love, hate, grief, and fear. Some persons have, therefore, found him aloof, oversubtle, and lacking in emotional force. This intimation that Mr. Fletcher’s art is etiolated is an admission of the reader’s incompleteness. Vitality does not depend on subject; nor is subtlety necessarily weakness. But the notion strangely persists that a poet must clothe his emotions in samite and dance with them around a blood-red fire to the plangent accompaniment of drums and trumpets.

To say that Mr. Fletcher has entwined himself with nature would unfairly give an impression of Wordsworthian insipidity. Yet Mr. Fletcher in many of his poems is a part of the rain, of the sand and wind, of the clouds and sky. But he is never merely descriptive. He has the power of conveying a mood in the terms of nature without intruding himself upon the reader. Let me illustrate with one of the best of his poems which has been much quoted elsewhere:

Flickering of incessant rain
On flashing pavements;
Sudden scurry of umbrellas;
Bending recurved blossoms of the storm.

The winds came clanging and clattering
From long white highroads whipping in ribbons up summits;
They strew upon the city gusty wafts of apple-blossom,
And the rustling of innumerable translucent leaves.

Uneven tinkling, the lazy rain
Dripping from the eaves.

Our tread-mill versifiers will shrink and mumble in the presence of Mr. Fletcher’s clean new poetry. They who have inherited the dead mottled skin of old poetic form with its incrustation of ancient allusions, symbols, and yellowed figures, will not feel the alluring freshness of a poem such as this:

It is evening, and the earth
Wraps her shoulders in an old blue shawl.
Afar there clink the polychrome points of the stars,
Indefatigable after all these years!
Here upon earth there is life, and then death,
Dawn, and later nightfall,
Fire, and the quenching of embers:
But why should I not remember that my night is dawn in another part
of the world,
If the idea fits my fancy?
Dawns of marvellous light, wakeful, sleepy, weary, dancing dawns;
You are rose petals settling through the blue of my evening;
I light my pipe to salute you,
And sit puffing smoke in the air and never say a word.

In his preface Mr. Fletcher says the use of rhyme is in its essence barbarous; yet he himself uses it not infrequently together with such devices as assonance, onomatopoeia, and alliteration. He is not inconsistent, however, for he admits that rhyme used intelligently will add to the richness of effect. It does:

The wind that drives the fine dry sand
Across the strand:
The sad wind spinning arabesques
With a wrinkled hand.

Labyrinths of shifting sand,
The dancing dunes!

I will arise and run with the sand,
And gather it greedily in my hand:
I will wriggle like a long yellow snake over the beaches.
I will lie curled up, sleeping,
And the wind shall chase me
Far inland.

My breath is the music of the mad wind;
Shrill piping, stamping of drunken feet,
The fluttering, tattered broidery flung
Over the dunes’ steep escarpments.

The fine dry sand that whistles
Down the long low beaches.

_Sand and Spray: A Sea-Symphony_ comprises the second part of Mr. Fletcher’s volume. This symphony has much of the movement and variety of music. In manner it resembles many of the “Irradiations,” and it is just as well worth reading.

Certainly there will be many who will not like Mr. Fletcher’s work. Dogs will always bark at a new fragrance.

_Japanese Lyrics, translated by Lafcadio Hearn. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Company._

Readers of Lafcadio Hearn will recall the many translations of Japanese _haikai_ poetry which are scattered through his writings. Those translations have been collected in the present volume. They are delicate whisps of thought, tantalizingly suggestive, most of them confined to a sentence. Here are some of them:

If with my sleeve I hide the faint fair color of the dawning
sun,—
then, perhaps, in the morning, my lord will remain.

Perched upon the temple-bell, the butterfly sleeps:
Even while sleeping, its dream is of play—ah, the butterfly of the
grass!

Many insects there are that call from the dawn to evening,
Crying “I love! I love!”—but the Firefly’s silent passion,
Making its body burn, is deeper than all their longing.
Even such is my love ....

The following poem, says the editor, was written more than eleven hundred years ago on the death of the poet’s little son:

As he is so young, he cannot know the way.
.... To the messenger of the Underworld I will give a bribe,
and entreat him, saying: “Do thou kindly take the little one upon thy
back along the road.”

Some discerning persons have asserted that “Imagism” is derived from _haikai_ or _hokku_ poetry. We shall leave to them the pleasant futility of discussing that theory. They may eventually discover that they are building on the shaky premise that “Imagism” exists other than as a clever word.

_The Winnowing Fan, by Laurance Binyon. Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Company._

My dears, we will tie _vers libre_ in the garden. Then let us go into the parlor where Mr. Laurence Binyon will pour tea; it will have sugar in it. Mr. Binyon will read to you from his latest book _The Winnowing Fan_. He is a gentleman of taste and culture who is vexed at the Germans. He is meticulously metrical and counts his syllables. He will say nothing unexpected.... If _vers libre_ howls in the garden, you may throw rhymes at him.

_Mitchell Dawson._

Have You Read—?

(_In this column will be given each month a list of current
magazine articles which, as an intelligent being, you will not
want to miss._)

Shadows of Revolt, by Inez Haynes Gilmore. _The Masses_, July.

Redemption and Dostoevsky, by Rebecca West. _The New Republic_, July 12.

The State of the War, by Arthur Bullard. _The Masses_, August.

Serbia Between Battles, by John Reed. _The Metropolitan_, August.

Richard Aldington’s lucid account of the Imagists and their history in _Greenwich Village_, July 15.

Almost any of the editorials in _Harper’s Weekly_.

Can You Read—?

(_In this column will be given each month a resume of current
cant which, as an intelligent being, you will go far to avoid._)

The reactions of the two Chestertons in _The New Witness_.

Midsummer fiction issues of _The Century_ or _Scribner’s_ or _Harper’s_.

_The Continent_ on Edgar Lee Masters’ _Spoon River Anthology_: “Each poem is in the nature of a confession, philosophical or satirical, telling secrets of human nature, good or bad—mostly bad. Because of its novelty and originality the book has attracted attention far and wide.... His attitude toward religious believers is a wrong one, and readers may well wonder at the scarcity of sincere, sensible Christians in Spoon River.”

The Reader Critic

_Lee J. Smits, Detroit_:

We are disgusted and impatient with “peo-pul” just to the extent that our realization of superiority fails us. That impatient attitude reminds me of the ordinary attitude of the white toward the black. The white man is not sure of himself; history and biology do not give him sufficient support. So he bullies negroes at every opportunity. Some men even are impelled to contend for their superiority by abusing dogs.

The sense of superiority abides in all living things of necessity, else no form of life would stand out against any other. Wild creatures never need argue, each with himself, as to his place in the world. His right to exist and to express himself is paramount in the animal’s soul. Only man ever doubts.

Really “peo-pul” do not doubt. They with the artist’s mark on them do the doubting. When it is very faint, their doubting asserts itself in strange ways and the crude egoism thereof revolts us. “Peo-pul” crawl along self-satisfied.

And why do you ask so much of artists? Why is it so important that they should use their strength in vain strivings to make butterflies of worms never destined to be butterflies or to amuse other artists who should be able to amuse themselves? If they get joy out of creating and preaching, let them preach and create—let them soar. If they get joy out of being, out of exultant living and watching, let them live, and do not scold.

The most beautiful butterfly I ever saw (some kind of “Emperor”) merely rested on a lump of mud in the forest shade and very languidly moved his wings. That is all he did while I looked at him. He knew that he could fly, I knew that he could fly, and he either knew that I knew or else he didn’t care.

We all know what impatience with “peo-pul” is. In the hush of a great flash of dramatic power from the stage, they giggle, and it would be good to fasten your fingers in the pulpy throat of one. They applaud idiotic vaudeville, and it would be glorious to arise, automatic in hand, and slay and slay.

That is your distrust of yourself—we all have it as much as we deserve it.

“So I belong to this species!” you say.

I do not hate my dog when he seeks out carrion. I wash him with strong soap and try to explain him. I feel quite sure—most of the time—that I have come a little further than he has.

“Peo-pul” are even more interesting than dogs, when taken individually. We even have more in common with them than with other animals.

Some of them are beautiful in their simplicity, like children—unspoiled in their loves and hates, and it is entertainment to behold them; to be with them, yet not of them; to be the arch-snob, of such perfect snobbishness that it is indistinguishable from perfect humility, perfect democracy.

All the mighty ones have been artists in life; like unto children they have walked their ways, so everlastingly sure of themselves that rarely have they been betrayed into petulance by the wobbling of their sense of superiority.

_Susan Quackenbush, Portage, Wisconsin_:

May one who has read your every issue with joy and enthusiasm be permitted to enter protest against that gross libel on the human race labeled _The Artist in Life_, in your June number?

Please—oh please—_be_ an artist-in-life, in human life, as well as in sunsets and Paderewskis and Imagism, and see for one creative moment, in “terms of truth and beauty,” the wonderful, aspiring, suffering, loving, smouldering, flaming beautiful souls of that great living, growing, winged group of creations you have called—may the great human God forgive the phrase—a “mass of caterpillars!” Come and see how its soul, and the souls of its separate creations “spring from the rock” just as truly as the brook’s or your own. If they can not _yet_ spring as far, it is because the weight above them is as yet too heavy.

When all the humans look like caterpillars to any one human, the trouble is with that one’s viewpoint. From an aeroplane, even the Himalayas look like anthills. Come down from your remote altitude and lose yourself in the beautiful, glorious psychic of the crowd—be one of them, and see what you will find!

THE LITTLE REVIEW proclaims itself bent on the adventure of beauty. Is there any beauty like that of the “sad, sweet music of humanity?” What is the glow of the most gorgeous sunset ever splashed against the western skies beside the glow of the divine in the human which hurls itself upon you—and _into_ you if you will let it—in a thousand beseeching, inviting, intoxicating flames from the midst of any crowd?

But only, of course, if you are _in_ the midst.

Is there any adventure like the “adventure of being human”—and _with_ humans? and _of_ them? Go with Whitman into the heart of humanity—struggle _with_ them—not from far above them—to lift from off their backs the crushing weight of wealth and masters and idle snobs and false gods so that they may get _room_ to spread their wings—for they _have_ wings, and then you will know them as they are, and yourself but as one of them.

If some of them still try to clip the wings of those who have struggled free from the crushing pressure, it is because of the maddening agony of their own atrophying wings. If a few seem even to be unaware of the need for wings, it is because the clamor of more insistent needs—the cries of hungry children, of bruised and broken and unsatisfied men and of suffering and degraded women—has silenced for every shame their own soul’s wing-cry.

But I think that you will find that those who perform the wing-clipping are the other butterflies whom money or position or callousness has set above the people—not those who are really of the crowd. They of the crowd _love_ wings, and those who truly use them.

I am not daring to attempt reply to the statement which inflames me most, lest I become profane and entirely incoherent. I mean, of course, the statement that the estimate of four or five thousand living artists would be too optimistic because that would mean four or five thousand who “have nothing in common with caterpillars.” That’s a worse libel on artists than the rest of it is on people. But I’ll try to stop with one remark and one question. The estimate is entirely too pessimistic; I positively refuse to believe there are four thousand persons alive who have or even who think they have “nothing in common” with the great splendid mass of folks; if there are, the gods have pity on them! And—has there ever been one single real and great artist, whether of brush or pen or tone, whose art and whose very greatness was not absolutely dependent upon and because of the fact that he had, and knew he had, _everything_ in common with, and indeed included in his being, the beings of these whom you term “caterpillars”?—these whose life and living are and always have been and through ages will continue to be the most worth while content of all art? Of course you reply: _Nietzsche_; but he was an intellectual and spiritual Rockefeller—not an artist-in-life.

And Individualism? When _all_ have been set free to use their wings, then the few may feel free to strive toward the super-butterfly. And when they arrive, perhaps,—oh, just perhaps—they will find all the other “caterpillars” there too, and with quite wonderful wings. There are wings, and wings, and if they but serve to bear us free of the disaster of meanness and cruelty and snobbishness and injustice, who shall say they are not super-wings?

_Witter Bynner, Windsor, Vermont_:

I wish I could honor the Imagists as you do. Hueffer wrote _On Heaven_ (not imagistic); and Pound wrote well before he affected a school ... Pound has a rhythm he can’t kill. But none of them, except Hueffer, says anything worth mentioning. They build poems around phrases, usually around adjectives. George Meredith has thousands of imagist poems incidental to each of his novels. But he knows their use and their beauty. These people wring tiny beauties dry. I can imagine a good poet using their methods on occasion, but he wouldn’t be so damn conscious about it. On the whole, the Imagists strike me as being purveyors of more or less potent cosmetics, their whole interest being in the cosmetic itself, not even in its application. Poetry gave signs of becoming poetry again and of touching life—when these fellows showed up, to make us all ridiculous.

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have done a great service to the children of light in this
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CAN YOU AFFORD TO DO WITHOUT SO IMPORTANT A MAGAZINE?

POETRY publishes the best verse now being written in English, and
its prose section contains brief articles on subjects connected
with the art, also reviews of the new verse.

POETRY has introduced more new poets of importance than all the
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THE ONLY MAGAZINE DEVOTED EXCLUSIVELY TO THIS ART.

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Have You Read—?

(_In this column will be given each month a list of current
magazine articles which, as an intelligent being, you will
not want to miss._)

The Unbroken Chain, by Romain Rolland. _The New Republic._

Dostoievsky and Tolstoy, by James Huneker. _The Forum_, August.

Nietzsche, by Anna Strunsky Walling. _The New Review_, August 1.

The Uninteresting War, by Max Eastman. _The Masses_, September.

Our Friend, the Enemy, by Alice Corbin Henderson. _Poetry_,
August.

Books and Things, by Walter Lippman. _The New Republic_, August
7.

Morality and the Movies, by Floyd Dell. _The New Review_, August
15.

Nearly everything in _The Egoist_, August 1.

Can You Read—?

(_In this column will be given each month a resumé of
current cant which, as an intelligent being, you will go
far to avoid._)

The Meaning of It, by H. C. _The New Republic_, August 7.

Bryant and “The New Poetry,” by John L. Hervey. _The Dial_, Aug.
15.

The “Free” Poets, by Michael Monahan. _The Phoenix_, September.

Pearls from _The Outlook_ for August 11, in regard to the Becker
trial:

What can we learn from this story of trust betrayed, of dishonor
in high places, and of a three years’ legal battle over a crime
which demanded immediate retribution? Certainly the law did not
come out unscathed from this controversy. It is a familiar story,
but it will bear repetition until it is remedied—we are very much
behind England in our administration of criminal law. The
efficiency of punishment as a deterrent to crime is largely based
upon the swiftness and sureness of justice rather than the
severity of the penalty inflicted. Becker is dead; but who can
deny that whatever social effect may result from his execution
would have been trebled had his death come within a reasonable
interval after the commission of his crime? The case is
significant, not because it is an exception, but because it is
typical of the process of American law.

Statement of Ownership, Management,
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August 24, 1912

of _THE LITTLE REVIEW_ published monthly at
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A page of current French poetry.

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Transcriber’s Notes

Advertisements were collected at the end of the text. Duplicate advertisements were removed.

The table of contents on the title page was adjusted in order to reflect correctly the headings in this issue of THE LITTLE REVIEW.

The original spelling was mostly preserved. A few obvious typographical errors were silently corrected. All other changes are shown here (before/after):

[p. 4]:
... scandal-monging newspapers, out of the malicious after-dinner
gossip of ...
... scandal-mongering newspapers, out of the malicious
after-dinner gossip of ...

[p. 7]:
... For the sun shifts through the shade. ...
... For the sun sifts through the shade. ...

[p. 13]:
... affects his own pocket. And the masses of labor who do feel
themselve and ...
... affects his own pocket. And the masses of labor who do feel
themselves and ...

[p. 20]:
... Sappho, Sappho, long ago the dust of earth mingled with the
dust of they dear limbs, ...
... Sappho, Sappho, long ago the dust of earth mingled with the
dust of thy dear limbs, ...

[p. 29]:
... Unquestioning our desserts; ...
... Unquestioning our deserts; ...

[p. 32]:
... said Zarathustra, with a brazen voice, “thou are the
murderer of God!... ...
... said Zarathustra, with a brazen voice, “thou art the
murderer of God!... ...