Chapter III: Part 3

Tolstoy was reported to have said, in conversation with a writer for _Le Temps_, "A woman who has never suffered pain is a beast." He could have stretched the allegation to include the other sex, if only by way of illusion to that intense spiritual quality in modern Russian literature--a literature that has never been (notably) an off-shoot of, as much as a protest against, the retrogressive structures of its respective periods.

This spiritual, or psychical, concern with the individual's adjustment to the functioning of life has been revealed to highest degree in Dostoevsky's novels. It is also manifest in the analytical mould assumed by the creative arts of our time.

While Dostoevsky's personality is separably bound up with his work, profitable appreciation of the latter can be considerably amplified with knowledge of the important facts of his life and the conditions with which he struggled. I will record the more essential facts of his life as I have gathered them, and try to explain the causes that have made for the distinction in his work from that of all other writers.

He was born in a charity-hospital in Moscow, in 1821. His father was an army-surgeon, his mother a store-keeper's daughter. I like to think that he derived his expressive powers, or rather the nebulæ out of which they subsequently developed, from his mother, perhaps partly because of my theory that men of acute genius ultimately do transcend the difference of sex in the quality of their personalities as well as in that of their work.

Like most imaginative youths who come into contact with fine art, Dostoevsky was stimulated to literary expression by his study of classical and contemporaneous European literature. He had lived twenty-three years when he graduated from a St. Petersburg school of military engineering. His first novel, _Poor Folk_, was published three years later, and served to focus upon him the attention of the critics.

In 1849 Dostoevsky was arrested, with members of a radical organization, on governmental charges of sedition. The terrible suffering he sustained while awaiting his execution (he was first confined in prison for eight months) have been set forth in striking passages of his novels, _The Idiot_ and _Letters from a Dead House_. The sentence of death was finally, and very unexpectedly, commuted to one of imprisonment in Siberia for four years. At the expiration of this period he served perforce as a private soldier in the Russian army for three more years. When he was permitted to return to St. Petersburg he was accompanied by his first wife, whom he had loved and married while in exile.

Dostoevsky's interminable suffering from epileptic seizures (it has been suggested that these fits originated in a beating administered to him by his father when Fyodor was a boy); his poverty, and the constant accumulation of debt; the terrific haste with which he found it necessary to write his most profound books--all have made it natural to him, in dwelling upon any physiological aspect of his characters, to be as unconvincing as the eremite attempting an analysis of conditions of sex life.

In short, Dostoevsky's nervous disorders pervaded his "sensual sense" of beauty--of beauty in all its manifestations. At the same time it must be remarked that this negation of physical responsiveness surely intensified the acuteness of his mental vision, which was otherwise refined emotionally by the results of his imprisonment and life-long hardships. And this also explains why Dostoevsky's novels are lacking so singularly in the tingle of the physical contact of his characters; why the suffering of his men and women move us so profoundly; why his writings are so uneven, his dialogues of such elemental power, and his purely descriptive passages so ordinary.

The elemental power in his dialogues is due chiefly to the vigor of action accredited his characters. In his work is not to be found the picturesque phrase, the adroitly-turned period, the illuminating metaphor, the sequence of construction, the tone or shading offered by the commingling of his objects. Dostoevsky has no style of form, his outlines are amorphous. It is in his power of transcribing the living voice, of recording in never-failing reflex emotionalism the lives and deeds of his startling figures that he is supreme.

If you have read one of his books you know much of what he has to say. His other works are repetitions, mainly. For Dostoevsky does not attempt to paint character, and rarely does he stop to show the subtly-reacting influence of environment upon his men and women. Always he is concerned with the idea of the individual's personal adjustments to life. Each book of his throbs with the discordant elements that clash over the establishment of this idea; and always its conclusions are recognized. That is why I regard Dostoevsky as an optimist. And his emphasis on humanity's spiritual conception of life, no matter what the cost, grew more and more pronounced in his later works.

His faith in human beings is expressed in one set theme, which can be conveniently resolved into terms of comparison: on one hand the individual's evasion of life's realities by the exercise of material (and therefore fictitious) values; and on the other hand, the frank acceptance of life's realities for the attainment of a proportionate spiritual balance.

In _Crime and Punishment_, Dr. Raskolnikov is in doubt as to the ultimate worth of this attainment, until he expiates his crime in killing the old moneylender (I forget her name) not by confessing,--Dostoevsky is too fine a realist for that,--but by obtaining personal solace from the regenerating qualities of his resignation. And it is characteristic of our writer's method that Raskolnikov is assisted toward this state of resignation by his love, Sonia, the prostitute, whose regard for the murderer is based upon the confirmation evidenced in him of the faith that has been stimulated in herself.

Similar in thesis, though expressed in terms of minor differences, is Dostoevsky's last and unquestionably finest work, _The Brothers Karamazov_. It is incomplete, actually one-third as long as he had intended it to be. He died before he could finish the book. Nevertheless it is compactly-formed material as the work now stands, and superior to his other novels not because his outlines are more constrained, his movement more co-ordinate, and the actual writing of a more intensive quality, but because here he defines his own conception of spiritual beauty in a distinctive fashion not to be found in his other books.

He offers us the history of a family,--and what a family! Each figure in this domestic (?) group embodies conflicting phases of his great idea. Fyodor Karamazov, the father, is a sensualist of the lowest type imaginable. His three sons are Dmitri, Ivan, and Alyosha. There is also another (illegitimate) son, Smerdyakov, an epileptic.

Dmitri Karamazov inherits his father's passion for wine, women, and song, but the son's pursuit of this tame and conventional item is tempered by frequent lapses, by periods of misgiving. The second son is a materialist and a cynic. He changes his mind after a severe illness, and his materialistic beliefs are all but supplanted by intense spiritual curiosity. The third and youngest son is an idealist, lovable and loving. Here again we have Dostoevsky's discordant elements conveyed in terms of human characterizations. The plot of the story is as formless as life itself, for it is with life, not with plots, that Dostoevsky deals.

Dmitri's hatred of his father is intensified by the rivalry that exists between the two in their common pursuit of Grushenka's affections. Grushenka is a woman of the demi-monde. The author, I think, tried to draw her in lines that would reveal a physical zest of life, as evidenced, for example, in Tolstoy's _Anna Karenina_. His failure to make Grushenka a convincing individual, as an individual, is typical, for the reasons I have already advanced.

Development of the story shows how Dmitri's repeatedly avowed determination to kill his father bears fruit. The elder Karamazov is found dead one night, with his skull crushed. Dmitri is imprisoned. And the rest of the book, which is devoted to Dmitri's trial, the moral regeneration of Ivan, and the urge of life in Alyosha, approaches psychological heights (or depths) that have not been surpassed to this day. Small wonder that Nietzsche referred so affectionately to the "giant spirit."

I have made reference to Dostoevsky's "optimism." A better word for it is faith--faith of a new high order. He is the most cheerful, sunlight-giving writer in Russian literature. "The essence of religious feeling," says Prince Myshkin in _The Idiot_, "does not come under any sort of reasoning or atheism, and has nothing to do with any crimes or misdemeanors."

Prince Myshkin is the central figure of the novel; he is the "idiot," and everybody abuses him. He is insulted and beaten, and robbed and deceived and loved. He is the most singular figure in literature--he is Dostoevsky himself.

But he is not an idiot in any sense. He is so profoundly simple and wise, and has such great faith in human beings, that he is mistaken by the men and women of ordinary passions as a fool. While he can be readily toyed with by women--a significant phase of the writer's own attitude toward the sex--Prince Myshkin is regarded by them from a common basis of understanding. For them he holds no quality of sex. "Perhaps you don't know that, owing to my illness," he says (he too is an epileptic), "I know nothing of women."

It is in _The Idiot_ that Dostoevsky's women are at least life-like. The Epanchin sisters, especially the youngest, Aglaia, are not "types" in the usual sense, but preconceived studies. The pages devoted to Aglaia's love affair with Prince Myshkin are of the happiest in the book.

Besides the books I have already mentioned, the more important works are _The Possessed_, in which national politics play a large part; _Poor Folk_, the story of a poor clerk's love for a poor woman who eventually turns from him; and _Letters from a Dead House_. This last is a book of personal experiences, and reveals Dostoevsky's relations with the criminals with whom he was imprisoned in Siberia. The mental temper of men who disregard and break the common and social laws, is set forth with the passionate curiosity that lies behind all his probings of the human soul. I am strongly tempted to offer quotations; to show, in this passage or that, how deeply Dostoevsky looked into the most extreme boundaries of human sensibilities; but on the whole extracts from his writings would do more harm than good. His work is so disconnected, though not in any sense detached, that extracts could not serve here to indicate the amazing clarity of his vision.

His books arouse a feeling of wonder that there can be so many things in our own individual emotions with which we never before came into contact. He moves us so profoundly because he tears his men and women out of their morally-bound lives and makes them confront stupendous questions--the questions of life. He plies detail upon detail of human misery until one feels that the whole world is reeling from him--then grows aware of the sweet white glow of Dostoevsky's faith, and feels that life can hold no terrors--that he is above the petty miseries of human strife! That is why I say Dostoevsky's optimism is of the new high order.

Dostoevsky purges one's mind. He makes you conscious of the beauty of a soul.

BOOK DISCUSSION

AN UNREELING REALIST

_The Titan_, by Theodore Dreiser [John Lane Company, New York]

Theodore Dreiser possesses none of the standard qualifications for the art of fiction writing. He is not imaginative but inventive; he is not clever but clear; he is not excited but calm. Whatever the flaws in his considerable body of work no fair-minded reader may say that it is made to catch popular applause. Its tremendous distinction is sincerity. Another characteristic which his novels exhibit is resolute purpose. Dreiser is aiming at something, and in _The Titan_, the second book in an unfinished trilogy, he takes a long if wobbly step toward it. Previously to the publishing of this volume he had not even hinted at what he intended to work out. One thing was certain: he was not a trifler; he was not trying to write best sellers; literary success was not in his mind. He had set out seriously and indefatigably to write, not so much what he felt and thought, as what he saw. Some day he would try to get at the realities that lay back of their representations. He would probably undertake to reveal the soul of the American nation. He would pass through the growth stages of a nation, and achieve some kind of spiritual national life. In the last two pages of _The Titan_ this guess at his purpose receives appreciable encouragement. Moreover, it is made evident for the first time, in these concluding paragraphs, that Dreiser's prosaic realism springs not only from a vague, deep idealism but a large, hidden spirituality. For at the core of him Dreiser is a profoundly religious person.

Neither his style nor his stuff is far above the dead level of mediocrity; in fact, Dreiser's rhetoric is often inexcusably atrocious--intentionally crude, one is tempted to assert. Obviously he is not interested in style; he is conscious of something bigger than that revealing itself in a huge, ugly, unfinished moving picture--a net result symbolical of a young, raw, riotous, unsynthesized national life. One is therefore tempted to say that Dreiser, more than any other author, is the personification of America. He represents the composite personality of Uncle Sam.

After reading _The Financier_ and running far into the interminable pages of _The Titan_ I felt that in the absence of cameras, kodaks, Baedekers, and historians Dreiser would be worth while. His endless reels of pictorial facts did not impress me as possessing sufficient animation successfully to compete with these odd rivals, but I admired his consistent sincerity and simplicity and felt that something important was promised by the mere unfinishedness of his pictures. I was sure that he did not write as one inspired, and certainly not as one fired. And after finishing _The Titan_ I felt that here was a work having the aspects of a seriously performed duty, exacted by fidelity to some personal theory of industrial change. I could not imagine the author happy as an artist is happy in his creative work; he was too conscious of service to a cause. But in the last paragraph I discovered a big, personal note which introduced an attitude that extends beyond the borders of materialism. It presented another Dreiser--an author who was much more than a cinematograph, snapping superficial impressions of a vast panorama. Two years ago I should not have attributed the following words to Theodore Dreiser:

In a mulch of darkness is bedded the roots of endless
sorrows--and of endless joys. Canst thou fix thine eye on the
morning? Be glad. And if in the ultimate it blind thee, be glad
also! Thou hast lived.

After laboring through arid deserts of description, this memorable passage, fraught with recognition, satisfaction, challenge, hope, and promise, stands out as an oasis.

_The Titan_, by virtue of its bold, graphic strokes, loses its identity as a tree, with sharply defined individual characters, and represents the forest. It is more like a jungle, and the jungle is our national life, into which the morning sun inevitably will shine.

--DeWitt C. Wing.

THE REVOLT OF THE "ONCE BORN"

_Challenge_, by Louis Untermeyer. [The Century Company, New York]

There has recently appeared a volume of verse by Louis Untermeyer which is an excellent example of the determinedly young and eupeptic philosophy so prevalent today--the philosophy of revolt. The book is named _Challenge_ and as challenge it must be considered. To be sure it is rhymed, but the fact seems quite incidental. To rhyme a polemic does not make it poetry, and one feels sure that Mr. Untermeyer is more proud of the spiritual attitude than of the artistry.

The book is a revolt, but a careful perusal of its pages fails to reveal against what it revolts. At first glance one might think it socialistic, but it is not clearly enough visualized for that. Socialism has at least found the enemy. Mr. Untermeyer manfully girds on his armor and sets forth to war, shouting his challenge lustily the while. And why, after all, be particular about having an actual enemy? Life, with a capital L, can do duty for that, or "the scornful and untroubled skies," or the "cold complacency of earth." The revolt is the point, and Mr. Untermeyer drives it home with all the phrases of frozen impetuosity to be discovered in a very useful vocabulary. "Athletic courage," "eager night," "Life's lusty banner," "impetuous winds," "raging mirth," etc., are scattered carefully through the pages. But unfortunately, virility--with all due respect to the reviewer who mentioned these poems in the June number of The Little Review--has a way of oozing out of such phrases, leaving them empty of everything save a painful determination to be manly at all costs.

But though Mr. Untermeyer is not quite clear on some subjects he is very clear on others. Several things seem to have struck him with peculiar force--that city streets are dirty, for instance; that strife is tonic for young blood; and that it is difficult for the human soul to conceive of complete annihilation. These things he proclaims passionately and challenges the world to disprove them. A little couplet from Kipling's _Jungle Book_ suggests itself rather maliciously as the probable attitude of the world towards this outbreak:

"There is none like to me!" says the Cub in the pride of his
earliest kill;
But the Jungle is large and the Cub he is small. Let him think and be
still.

Seriously, however, Mr. Untermeyer's attitude is what William James calls the attitude of the "once born." One feels that he thinks in one dimension, that he does not see around his subject, nor hear the overtones which surround every happening for a man of deep intellect. The revolt is Walt Whitman's magnificent revolt, which is overpowering in a giant, cropping out in a man of very ordinary stature, where it sits a little ridiculously.

As philosophy much of this, printed on a neat little card, would do splendidly to hang in a business office for the encouragement of the employees. As poetry it is negligible. Mr. Untermeyer lacks entirely the one gift which could redeem it--the gift of poignancy. This lack is particularly striking in the middle section, called _Interludes_, in which he pauses for a little from revolt. These are love songs and lyrics, a field in which anything not perfect is no longer acceptable. And Mr. Untermeyer's are not perfect. His sense of rhythm is extremely primitive and his lyrics are full of words. Only now and then, when he forgets for a moment how manly he is, does he say anything simply enough to strike home. These lines, for instance, from _Irony_ stick:

There is no kind of death to kill
the sands that lie so meek and still ...
But man is great and strong and wise--
And so he dies.

But in the main it is unfortunate that Mr. Untermeyer, who writes so much and so readably on the subject of poetry, should put out so pretentious and undeveloped a volume as this is. It is inevitable that it should affect his standing as a critic, and there seems little doubt that his work in that field is really valuable to the cause of poetry in America today.

--Eunice Tietjens.

TWO BIOGRAPHIES: VERLAINE AND TOLSTOY

_Paul Verlaine_, by Wilfred Thorley; _Tolstoy: His Life and
Writings_, by Edward Garnett. [Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.]

When autumn is in your heart--not that of the golden delirium of exotic agony, but bleak weeping autumn of crucifixion and dead leaves--what dirge, what note haunts you in accompaniment to your grief? Maddening darts from Tchaikowsky's _Pathétique_, or _Weltschmerz_-moans from Beethoven's _Marchia Funebre_, or an unuttered accord known only to your soul? Or, if you are a brother of mine, do your lips soundlessly mutter this?

Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l'automne
Blessent mon coeur
D'une langueur
Monotone.

Don't you hear the resonance of the tolling bells in Chopin's _Funeral March_? Your sorrow grows crescendo as you proceed, recalling Massenet's _Elégie_:

Tout suffocant
Et blême, quand
Sonne l'heure,
Je me souviens
Des jours anciens
Et je pleure;

Et je m'en vais
Au vent mauvais
Qui m'emporte
Deçà, delà
Pareil à la
Feuille morte.

When I think of Paul Verlaine I invariably recall Oscar Wilde, despite or because of the abysmal dissimilarity of the two personalities. The sincere, ingenuous, all-loving child Paul, and the thoroughly artificial, paradoxical Oscar; the typical Bohemian with the criminal-face like that of Dostoevsky, and the salon-idol, the refined and gorgeous bearer of the sun-flower. Fate had somewhat reconciled the two contrasts. Both had been "sinners," both were condemned by society and imprisoned, both had "repented"--one in _De Profundis_ where the haughty humility of the self-enamored artist stirs us with its artificial beauty; the other in the primitive-Christian--nay, Catholic--_Sagesse_:

_Mon Dieu m'a dit: Mon fils, il faut m'aimer ...._

Some months ago in reviewing Edmond Lepelletier's voluminous book, (_Paul Verlaine: His Life and Work_) I remarked that the Poet of Absinthe and Violets was still awaiting his Boswell. My view has not changed after reading Wilfrid Thorley's monograph on Verlaine; but my wish for an adequate biography of the signer of _Romances sans Paroles_ has now become counterbalanced by an earnest prayer that the memory of the poet may be saved from such indelicate manipulators as Mr. Thorley. Why this respectable Englishman should have attempted to treat the life of the most wayward French poet since Villon can be explained by no other reason than that it was a case of "made to order." When a Velasquez is pierced by a fanatical suffragette the whole civilized world is roused to indignation; but when an honest philistine unceremoniously puffs his cheap smoke into the face of a dead poet there is not a single protest against that sort of vandalism. Fear of the editor's blue pencil restrains me from putting my attitude more outspokenly.

A conscientious compilator would have found sufficient material for an unpretentious sketch of the life of Verlaine and for an appreciation of his works. Lepelletier gives an amazing mass of facts and personal reminiscences (you may ignore his naive interpretations); Arthur Symons in _The Symbolist Movement in Literature_ has a masterpiece essay on Verlaine, not to mention a number of other French and English writers who have given us glimpses of the imperceptible image of the poet--writers who _knew what they were taking about_. Mr. Thorley has made use of various sources, but in a peculiar way. He fished out the anecdotal scraps, the piquant details, the filthy hints, and patched up a caricature-portrait of a lewd, perverse "undesirable," whose poetry (I quote reluctantly) "was born solely of the genitals," whose "life is but the trite old story of the emotions developed at the expense of domestic peace and civic order; of art for art's sake made to condone the manner of its begetting, and the trend of its appeal; of the hushed acquiescence in emotion as a sacred thing, whatever the quality of the impulse from which it ripens or the level of ideas on which it feeds." Out of the ninety-odd pages of stuff seventy-nine are devoted to "biography" sufficiently spicy to make any toothless old rake chuckle; the rest is given over to "criticism"--a mutilated melange of some of the views of Symons, George Moore, and others, flavored with the compilator's own commonplaces. I quote from the closing lines:

A specious and high-sounding phrase has been invented to excuse
the perversities of imaginative genius by speaking of its
achievement as a "conquest of new realms for the spirit." But the
worth of such acquisitions depends on the nature of the
territory, and if it be, morally, a malarial swamp conducive only
to a human type found subversive in our normal world, it will
always appear to the English mind that we shall do well to forego
the new kingdom and to withhold our homage from its
discoverer.... That "nice is nasty, nasty nice," and the creative
artist the sole arbiter, must be hotly opposed so long as a
social conscience survives.

And this was written in Anno Domini 1914!

A sense of fairness urges me to rehabilitate the "English mind" by recalling a passage from Mr. Thorley's compatriot, Arthur Symons:

The artist, it cannot be too clearly understood, has no more part
in society than a monk in domestic life: he cannot be judged by
its rules, he can be neither praised nor blamed for his
acceptance or rejection of its conventions. Social rules are made
by normal people for normal people, and the man of genius is
fundamentally abnormal.

It is high time that this axiom became a truism and that we cease to measure the artist with the yard-stick of conventional morality. "L'art, mes enfants, c'est d'être absolument soi-même," sang Verlaine, and somewhere else he reveals a bit of that self with his usual sincerity:

I believe, and I sin in thought as in action; I believe, and I
repent in thought, if no more. Or again, I believe, and I am a
good Christian at this moment; I believe, and I am a bad
Christian the instant after. The remembrance, the hope, the
invocation of a sin delights me, with or without remorse,
sometimes under the very form of sin, and hedged with all its
natural consequences.... This delight ... it pleases us to put to
paper and publish more or less well expressed: we consign it, in
short, into literary form, forgetting all religious ideas, or not
letting one of them escape us. Can any one in good faith condemn
us as poets? A hundred times no.

"And, indeed, I should echo, a hundred times no!" exclaims the Englishman, Arthur Symons.

I cannot resist the temptation of quoting the happiest definition of Verlaine's personality written by Charles Morice back in 1888:

The soul of an immortal child, that is the soul of Verlaine, with
all the privileges and all the perils of so being: with the
sudden despair so easily distracted, the vivid gaieties without a
cause, the excessive suspicions and the excessive confidences,
the whims so easily outwearied, the deaf and blind infatuations,
with, especially, the unceasing renewal of impressions in the
incorruptible integrity of personal vision and sensation. Years,
influences, teachings, may pass over a temperament such as this,
may irritate it, may fatigue it; transform it, never--never so
much as to alter that particular unity which consists in a
dualism, in the division of forces between the longing after what
is evil and the adoration of what is good; or rather, in the
antagonism of spirit and flesh....

I have not mentioned the most striking "feature" of Mr. Thorley's ... production--the appendix. Six of Verlaine's poems are translated by him for the benefit of those who do not understand French "intimately." "To offer them to other readers, would, of course, be an impertinence," he modestly admits. Impertinence is not the word for that outrage. I have experienced physical pain at the sight of the Hunnish sacrilege committed by this well-wishing moralist. The poet, for whom "De la musique avant toute chose; De la musique encore et toujours!" who had pleaded, "Car nous voulons la nuance encore, Pas la couleur, rien que la nuance!" has been mercilessly crucified in the form of quasi-Tennysonian, taffy-like verses. One recalls with gratitude the careful albeit pale translations of Gertrude Hall, who at least had the sense of æsthetic propriety in endeavoring to remain true to the master's meter and rhythm.

* * * * *

From Tolstoy's diary in 1855:

... a great, a stupendous idea, to the realization of which I
feel myself capable of devoting all my life. The idea is the
foundation of a new religion corresponding to the development of
mankind--_the religion of Jesus, but purified from dogma and
mysticism; a practical religion, not promising bliss in future,
but giving happiness on earth_.... To work consciously for _the
union on earth_ by religion....

From a letter to the poet Fet in 1898:

I am so different to things of this life that life becomes
uninteresting.... I hope you will love me though I be black.

From the fragment _There are no guilty people_:

There was a time when I tried to change my position which was not
in harmony with my conscience, but the conditions created by the
past, by my family and its claims upon me, were so complicated
that I did not know how to free myself. I had not the strength.
Now that I am over eighty and have become feeble I have given up
trying to free myself. Strange to say, as my feebleness increases
I realize more and more strongly the wrongfulness of my position,
and it grows more and more intolerable to me.

On his death-bed at the railroad station Astapovo, November, 1910:

I am tired of this world of men.

Tolstoy's failure was inevitable, for he had approached life with the uncompromising logic of a child or a god. For fifty years he preached his religion, and during all that time he remained splendidly inconsistent. He opposed private property and proceeded to live on his estate; he had denounced marriage and was a father to thirteen children. Notwithstanding his deadly hatred for the Russian government, he bitterly denounced the liberals and the revolutionists for their "un-Christian" ways of fighting the enemy; but his greatest contradiction, to the joy of the intellectual world, consisted in the victory of the artist over the moralist as manifested in his numerous novels and plays.

The work of Edward Garnett is conscientious and is, to my knowledge, the best short biography of Tolstoy. It was a happy idea to discard the traditional portrait and use a reproduction of Kramskoy's painting, which dates back to the sixties, if I am not mistaken. It is when looking at this portrait, a great piece of art in itself, that we envisage the author of _War and Peace_. A few words from the description of Tolstoy's face by P. A. Terzeyeonvo:

His face was a true peasant's face: simple, rustic, with a broad
nose, a weather-beaten skin, and thick overhanging brows, from
beneath which small, keen, grey eyes peered sharply forth.... One
instantly divines in Tolstoy a man of the highest society--with
polished, unconstrained manners.

... On the one hand an insatiable thirst for power over people,
and on the other an unconquerable ardor for inward purity and the
sweetness of meekness....

In this chain of seething, imperious instincts linked with
delicate spiritual organization lies the profound tragicness of
Tolstoy's personality.

Mr. Garnett succeeds in giving the quintessence of Tolstoy's works and teachings in less than a hundred pages. Like most of the Russian's eulogistic biographers, Mr. Garnett has not escaped the fallacy of exaggerating the moral power that Tolstoy exercised over the government. To say that the Czar and his ministers "dared not touch" the outspoken anarchist and heretic "out of dread of Europe--nay, of Russia," is to reveal one's ignorance of the brazen defiance displayed by Muscovite autocrats in regard to public opinion. As the Germans put it: "Herr Kossack, schämen Sie sich!" Tolstoy, as a matter of fact, had helped to check the revolutionary spirit of his compatriots in a greater degree than the tyrannic persecutions of Von-Plehve. Had he not appealed time and again to embrace his doctrine of Non-Resistance? Had he not denounced the revolutionists as violent prototypes of their hangers? Could the government see any danger in a man who wrote in _The Times_ during the revolution of 1905: "To free oneself from the government it is only necessary to abstain from participating in it and supporting it. Our consciousness of the law of God demands from us only one thing: moral self-perfection, i. e., the liberation of oneself from all those weaknesses and vices which make one the slave of governments and the participation in their crimes"? Another tragic contradiction of the restless soul of the anarchist who, despite himself, renders aid to the despots.

--Alexander S. Kaun.

INTROSPECTION

_Chance_, by Joseph Conrad. [Doubleday, Page & Company, New
York.]

Did you ever take supper in the apartments of a dear bachelor friend, on a night when the wind howled outside the window, and the rain beat against the pane? And after the satisfying meal, whose perfect appointment made you forget all save the luxury of living, did you retire to the spacious living room, and after accepting an aromatic Havana, stretch your feet out to the crackling log fire, and as the smoke from your cigar crawled upward listen to the philosophical analyses of your cultured host on that marvelously simple and profoundly complex servant and master of man, the human mind? Of such an evening is the atmosphere of _Chance_. Not academically deep, but deep from the standpoint of a full life and an active intelligence.

Everyone loves to analyze his fellow creatures. Some do it well, some do it badly, but we all do it. Conrad does it masterfully. There doesn't seem to be a type which holds a mystery for him. The village pillar; the frail, ill-fated maid; the buxsom housewife; the silent captain ashore and afloat; the opinionated, retired old gentleman; the cynical, good-natured man of thirty-five; the flat, tintless fraud. Into the mental realm of all these he makes expeditions long and short. His characters live. They mingle good and bad, and, as strong characters should, weave for themselves a charming story of love, adventure, trial, and victory, never trite, and always surprising. It is a tale built of character studies and garnished with odd conjective philosophy.

Our new acquaintance paused, then added meditatively:

"Queer man. As if it made any difference. Queer man."

"It's certainly unwise to admit any sort of responsibility for
our actions, whose consequences we are never able to foresee,"
remarked Marlow by way of assent.

"The consequence of his action was that I got a ship," said the
other. "That could not do much harm," he added with a laugh which
argued a probably unconscious contempt of general ideas.

But Marlow was not put off. He was patient and reflective. He had
been at sea many years and I verily believe he liked sea-life
because upon the whole it is favourable to reflection. I am
speaking of the now nearly vanished sea-life under sail. To those
who may be surprised at the statement I will point out that this
life secured for the mind of him who embraced it the inestimable
advantages of solitude and silence. Marlow had the habit of
pursuing general ideas in a peculiar manner, between jest and
earnest.

"Oh, I wouldn't suggest," he said, "that your namesake, Mr.
Powell, the Shipping Master, had done you much harm. Such was
hardly his intention. And even if it had been he would not have
had the power. He was but a man, and the incapacity to achieve
anything distinctly good or evil is inherent in our earthly
condition. Mediocrity is our mark. And perhaps it's just as well,
since, for the most part, we cannot be certain of the effect of
our actions."

"I don't know about the effect," the other stood up to Marlow
manfully. "What effect did you expect anyhow? I tell you he did
something uncommonly kind."

"He did what he could," Marlow retorted gently, "and on his own
showing that was not a very great deal. I cannot help thinking
that there was some malice in the way he seized the opportunity
to serve you. He managed to make you uncomfortable. You wanted to
go to sea, but he jumped on the chance of accommodating your
desire with a vengeance. I am inclined to think your cheek
alarmed him. And this was an excellent occasion to suppress you
altogether. For if you accepted he was relieved of you with every
appearance of humanity, and if you made objections (after
requesting his assistance, mind you) it was open to him to drop
you as a sort of impostor. You might have had to decline that
berth for some very valid reason. From sheer necessity, perhaps.
The notice was too uncommonly short. But under the circumstances
you'd have covered yourself with ignominy."

Our new friend knocked the ashes out of his pipe.

There is something about Conrad which gives a warm feeling about the heart. A certain fineness of humor, a certain fullness of sympathy. He never mixes his similes; they always take the same tone and the same color. For instance:

I took a piece of cake and went out to bribe the Fyne dog into
some sort of self-control. His sharp, comical yapping was
unbearable, like stabs through one's brain, and Fyne's deeply
modulated remonstrances abashed the vivacious animal no more than
the deep, patient murmur of the sea abashes a nigger minstrel on
a popular beach. Fyne was beginning to swear at him in low,
sepulchral tones when I appeared. The dog became at once wildly
demonstrative, half-strangling himself in his collar, his eyes
and tongue hanging out in the excess of his uncomprehensible
affection for me. This was before he caught sight of the cake in
my hand. A series of vertical springs high up in the air
followed, and then, when he got the cake, he instantly lost his
interest in everything else.

No, this illustration is not of Conrad's finest, but in a homely way it illustrates a deep sympathy with life, which this strong worker and writer gives in such bountiful measure in all his literature; and, to quote an eminent writer, "Literature and Conrad are interchangeable terms."

--Henry Blackman Sell.

AN AMERICAN NOVEL

_Clark's Field_, by Robert Herrick. [Houghton Mifflin Company,
Boston.]

It was but the other day that Mr. Herrick told us what he thought about the American novel. Those who read the trenchant article found not only a criticism of our machine-like fictionists and their half-baked methods, but also a sturdy conviction that the day was surely approaching when we should demand and receive a truer and more vital presentation of our national life in our literature. And if Mr. Herrick, long since tagged an apostate to our national creed of turgid optimism, believes this, we can safely trust to his cool vision and be glad that the tide has turned. The rich human material lies ready at hand, and the audience is fast growing intelligent and discriminating. As yet, however, "we await the writer or writers keen enough to perceive the opportunity, powerful enough to interest the public in what it has been unwilling to heed, and of course endowed with sufficient insight to comprehend our big new world."

Whatever may be said for our other novelists, surely not one of them can exhibit a mingling of the powers of insight and artistry equal to that of Robert Herrick. His work from the beginning has been an honest and incisive attempt to interpret our life in its peculiar and universal aspects, in spite of the clamor of the public at his tearing away of the veils of sentimentality and prudery. The errors into which he fell were due to the ardor of his spiritual vision, which drove him into an impassioned taking of sides. He has emerged from that stage into what his critics call his "old manner," a more objective treatment of his material. But in the process of change something was lost--the element of flaming intensity which gave the reader a similar capacity to feel. In this latest performance, as well as in _One Woman's Life_, he is always cool, clear-sighted, and admirably efficient in the task he sets himself; but never passionate. On the contrary, despite the pervading atmosphere of earnestness, he often assumes a playful satiric tone, mordant but not bitter,--a method well suited to his matter and purpose.

_Clark's Field_ tells the story of the influence of property upon the human beings who own it and hope to reap gold from its increasing value. All that is left of the great Clark farm is a fifty-acre field in a growing New England town, bequeathed jointly to the two brothers, Edward and Samuel, the former of whom has emigrated to the West and wholly disappeared from the ken of his relatives. So at first the tale is of the baleful influence of expectation delayed again and again: in the case of Samuel who cannot sell the land because of his brother's half-interest, and who in consequence sinks into a sodden inertia; in his son's disintegration into a lazy and drunken "Vet"; in his sister Addie's sordid and pathetic sally into life resulting in the birth of another human being destined to taste of the fruit of their tree and to find it, one day, very bitter.

The greater portion of the novel, then, deals with the influence of the realized wealth upon the unformed, colorless little girl, Adelle, the last of the Clarks. It is a masterly piece of work--the gradual development of the pale rooming-house drudge into the silly and insolent woman of fashion, and slowly but certainly into a human being with a soul. Less promising stuff for a heroine neither fate nor Mr. Herrick could have chosen; the latter delights in ample admissions throughout the book of Adelle's lack of beauty, brains, and charm. Yet he is always sufficiently temperate to escape the danger of caricature. Adelle is a convincing figure. The slow dawning upon her consciousness of the power of money, her "magic lamp" which she need only rub to gratify any desire, is followed by swift and constant use of the new weapon. It brings her a fresh assurance, a few scatter-brained friends, some stylish clothes, and, at length, a callow youth for a husband. It never brings her contact with a real person or friendship with a stimulating individual; nor can it save her from the failure of her marriage, nor compensate her for the death of her little boy.

Adelle's story, then, turns out to be what we least expected it,--a hopeful one. It leaves us with almost a sense of security, for is she not one of those who can "derive good from her mistakes," and therefore "the safest sort of human being to raise in this garden plot of souls"? And although we are still saddled with "that absurd code of inheritance and property rights that the Anglo-Saxon peoples have preserved from their ancient tribal days in the gloomy forests of the lower Rhine," the situation is not without hope, since it has yielded a man of the judge's type, in whom the beauty of a past idealism is coupled with the freshness of a new vision of responsibility.

To hark back to the recent article in _The Yale Review_, we believe that Mr. Herrick himself has given us an American novel--thoroughly American in situation, character, treatment, and even in philosophy. We, as a people, are beginning to suspect our boastful optimism as we become aware of the sordidness beneath the fair exterior of our glorious civilization. And in accordance with the western temperament, the awareness of wrong leads not to bitter cynicism but to sturdy efforts toward amelioration. Such, then, is the spirit of _Clark's Field_--a hopefulness in the power of courage, and labor, and a growing sense of social responsibility to move mounds that seem to have become immovable mountains through a tenacious fostering of tradition.

--Marguerite Swawite.

THE "SAVAGE" PAINTERS

_Cubists and Post Impressionism_, by Arthur Jerome Eddy. [A. C.
McClurg and Company, Chicago.]

An attempt to explain the new schools in art "in plain, every-day terms." An earnest appeal for tolerance in regard to seemingly perversive forms. The book has a wealth of material and numerous quotations from Picasso, Picabia, Cézanne, Matisse, and others, considerably more interesting and instructive than Mr. Eddy's own truisms. Although the author repeatedly resents any accusation in his adherence to Cubism, the reader gets the impression that the Cubistic movement has received a more thorough and fair treatment than the other new schools. Of the sixty-nine reproductions of Post-Impressionistic paintings and sculpture, only five represent the Futurists. Idillon Redon, who gave us the greater delight in last year's International Exhibition, is totally ignored. Among the Self-Portraits that of Matisse is sorely missed--a work that helps greatly in understanding the quaint painter of the Woman in Red Madras. Whether Mr. Eddy will succeed in convincing the prejudiced conservatives is doubtful; but in those who have appreciated the daring attempts of the new schools his book will arouse a renewed longing for the foreign "savages" and an ardent hope for their further invasions in our "sane and healthful" galleries.

THE SAME BOOK FROM ANOTHER STANDPOINT

(With apologies to the author of _Tender Buttons_)

_Oil and Water_

Enough water is plenty and more, more is almost plenty enough. Enthusiastically hurting sad size, such size, same size slighter, same splendor simpler, same sore sounder. Glazed glitter, eddy eddies discover discovered discoveries, discover Mediterranean sea, large print large. Small print small, picked plumes painters and penmen, pretty pieces Picasso, Picabia plus Plato, Hegel, Cézanne, Kandinsky, more plenty more, small print single sign of oil supposing shattering scatter and scattering certainly splendidly. Suppose oil surrounded with watery sauce, suppose spare solely inside, suppose the rest.

--A. S. K.

SENTENCE REVIEWS

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

_The Return of the Prodigal_, by May Sinclair. [The Macmillan Company, New York.] Eight short stories, all subtly done. _The Cosmopolitan_ proves beyond a doubt that women, or at least the thousandth woman, is capable of a disinterested love of life and of nature. It is a big story and a very finished one.

_John Addington Symonds_, by Van Wyck Brooks. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.] A biography of rare charm and distinction in which Mr. Brooks builds a clear picture of Symonds's life as it is related to our day.

_The Sister of the Wind_, and _Other Poems_, by Grace Fallow Norton. [Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.] Some of this will disappoint lovers of _Little Gray Songs From St. Joseph's_--in fact, none of the poems here has such extraordinary poignancy. But there are many that are worth knowing.

_The Continental Drama of Today_, by Barrett H. Clark. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.] Invaluable to the student of continental drama. A half dozen pages of critical analysis devoted to each of thirty modern playwrights.

_Stories and Poems and Other Uncollected Writing_, by Bret Harte, compiled by Charles Meeker Kozlay, with an introductory account of Harte's early contributions to the California press. [Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.] A very beautiful Riverside Press volume with photogravures.

_I Should Say So_, by James Montgomery Flagg. [George H. Doran Company, New York.] Yes, he is silly; but Mr. Flagg is so nicely naughty and so naughtily human that you simply must laugh.

_Broken Music_, by Phyllis Bottome. [Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.] Charming and well done. The story of a young French boy's struggle to create music, and his success after the tradition of a "broken heart" had been fulfilled.

_The Old Game_, by Samuel G. Blythe. [George H. Doran Company, New York.] A temperance tract by a man who knows; minus sanctimoniousness and plus a punch.

_Dramatic Portaits_, by P. P. Howe. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.] One man's opinion of the modern dramatists. A "shelf book" for occasional reference.

_Billy and Hans_, by W. J. Stillman. [Thomas B. Mosher, Portland, Maine.] A charming story of the most temperamental of pets, the squirrel. A Mosher book bound in a cover dark enough to stand wear. A distinct relief from the Alice blue and pale old rose of Mr. Mosher's more delicate periods.

_Billy_, by Maud Thornhill Porter. [Thomas B. Mosher, Portland, Maine.] The true story of a canary bird. One of those little documents written for the enjoyment of a family circle and read on winter evenings. Bright, human, and personal.

_The Social Significance of the Modern Drama_, by Emma Goldman. [Richard G. Badger, Boston.] Miss Goldman discusses Ibsen, Strindberg, Sudermann, Hauptmann, Wedekind, Maeterlinck, Rostand, Brieux, Shaw, Galsworthy, Stanley Houghton, Githa Sowerby, Yeats, Lenox Robinson, T. G. Murray, Tolstoy, Tchekhof, Gorki, and Andreyev, outlining the plays of each and emphasizing their relation to the problem of modern society. She is the interpreter here rather than the propagandist, and her interpretations are not academic discourses. They give you the plays partly by quotation, partly in crisp narrative, and they are not the kind of interpretations that make the authors wish they had never written plays. Whether you like Emma Goldman or not, you will get a more compact and comprehensive working-knowledge of the modern drama from her book than from any other recent compilation we know of.

DEDICATED
TO THAT HISTORIC MOMENT
WHEN
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
THE GREAT AMERICAN CHANTECLIER
SHALL AWAKE
TO FIND
THE SUN HIGH IN HEAVEN
AND THAT
HE
HAD CROWED NOT

A CHANGE OF PRICE

With the August issue, the sixth month of our very flourishing life, we have decided to make one important change in _The Little Review_. We are reducing the subscription price to $1.50 a year, and that of single copies to 15 cents. There will be no change in size or appearance. Those whose subscriptions have already been paid on the former basis will be continued for another half year.

Our reason for doing so is this: We have discovered that a great many of the people whom we wish to reach cannot afford to pay $2.50 a year for a magazine. It happens that we are very emphatic about wanting these people in our audience, and we believe they are as sincerely interested in _The Little Review_ as we are stimulated by having them among our readers. Therefore we are going to become more accessible.

With characteristic lack of modesty we wish also to make another announcement. Our success so far has exceeded even our own hopes--and it may be remembered that they were rather high. As for our practical friends who warned us against starting a literary magazine, even their dark prophecies of debt and a speedy demise have had to dissolve before our statements that we have paid our bills with what _The Little Review_ has earned in its six months of existence, that we are free of debt, that we even have money in the bank, and a subscription list that acts like a live thing!

But we want more! We want everyone who might like _The Little Review_ to hear about it. Therefore:

We want interested readers to be interested to the point of bringing in others. We want intelligent spokesmen in every city in the country to tell people about the magazine and to get their subscriptions. Anyone sending in three yearly subscriptions will be given a year's subscription free. Or he may make a commission of 33 1-3 per cent on every subscription he gets. College girls ought to find the field a very workable one during their summer vacations. Every ten subscriptions will mean $5.00 to the energetic young woman who pursues her friends with accounts of _The Little Review's_ value and charm.

We are trying to make a magazine that is unacademic, enthusiastic, appreciative and critical in the real sense; that seeks and emphasizes the beauty which is truth and insists upon a larger naturalness and a nobler seriousness in art and in life. We know there is room for such a magazine and we ask you to help us in advertising it.

THE COMPLETE WORKS OF
WALT WHITMAN

[AUTHORIZED BY THE EXECUTORS]

COMPLETE LEAVES OF GRASS

This edition contains the text and arrangement preferred by Walt
Whitman. All other editions of "Leaves of Grass" are imperfect in
this respect and incomplete. There are one hundred and six poems
in "Complete Leaves of Grass" not contained in any other edition.

"Complete Leaves of Grass" may be had in the following styles:

INDIA PAPER EDITION

Bound in full limp dark green leather; gilt edges. With
photogravure frontispiece

$2.50 net

LIBRARY EDITION

Bound in cloth; gilt top; uncut edges. With portrait frontispiece

$1.50 net

POPULAR EDITION

Bound in cloth. With portrait frontispiece

$1.00 net

POPULAR EDITION

Bound in paper. With portrait frontispiece

$0.60 net

COMPLETE PROSE

This is the only complete collection of Whitman's prose writings.
It is particularly valuable to students of the poet, as it
contains much biographical and other material not to be found
elsewhere. "Complete Prose" may be had in the following styles:

LIBRARY EDITION

Bound in cloth; gilt top; uncut edges. With three photogravure
illustrations

$1.75 net

POPULAR EDITION

Bound in cloth. With photogravure frontispiece

$1.25 net

WITH WALT WHITMAN IN CAMDEN

BY HORACE TRAUBEL

"The most truthful biography in the language." To be complete in
eight volumes, of which three are now ready.

Large octavo, gilt tops, uncut edges, and fully illustrated

$3.00 net each

WALT WHITMAN: A Critical Study

BY BASIL DE SELINCOURT

The latest book on Whitman (April, 1914). A study of unusual
penetration.

Cloth; gilt top; uncut edges. With photogravure frontispiece

$2.50 net

MITCHELL KENNERLEY, PUBLISHER
32 West 58th Street NEW YORK

Vol. IV · PRICE 15 CENTS · No. IV

Poetry

A Magazine of Verse

Edited by Harriet Monroe

JULY, 1914

Poems to be Chanted Nicholas Vachel Lindsay
The Fireman's Ball--The Santa Fé Trail, A Humoresque--The
Black Hawk War of the Artists.

Poems Richard Butler Glaenzer
From a Club Window--Rodin--Star Magic.