Chapter I: Front Matter (1)

THE LITTLE REVIEW

_Literature_ _Drama_ _Music_ _Art_

MARGARET C. ANDERSON
EDITOR

MARCH, 1915

Two Poems Fritz Schnack
For the New Animal in America Will Levington Comfort
Maurice Browne and The Little Theatre John Cowper Powys
Winter’s Pride George Soule
Two Points of View:
Mrs. Ellis’s Gift to Chicago Mary Adams Stearns
Mrs. Ellis’s Failure Margaret C. Anderson
The Acrobat Eloise Briton
A Young American Poet Richard Aldington
Editorials and Announcements
Ten Grotesques Arthur Davison Ficke
A New Standard of Art Criticism Huntley Carter
My Friend, the Incurable Alexander S. Kaun
New York Letter George Soule
“Alice in Wonderland”
Samaroff and Claussen Herman Schuchert
Book Discussion
The Reader Critic

Published Monthly

15 cents a copy

MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Publisher
Fine Arts Building
CHICAGO

$1.50 a year

Entered as second-class matter at Postoffice, Chicago

THE LITTLE REVIEW

Vol. II

MARCH, 1915

No. 1

Copyright, 1915, by Margaret C. Anderson

Two Poems

FRITZ SCHNACK

(_Translated from the German by William Saphier_)

BLOOMING SUNLIGHT

Sharp rips the plow
And roots the day into the opened field,
And kneads the light and splendor of the world
Into the conquered darkness.

In summer, between close rows
Of waving blades, grow flowers
Blooming buried sunlight.

EVENING GIFT

Spread like the palm of a hand
Lies at bottom the evening, gold and red.
Every man may take as much as he likes
Of its beauty, up to the farthest hilltops,
As if it were wine and bread
Handed out to feed hungry souls
And to fill with light the thirsty.

I stroll alone on gentle roads into the splendor
Bathing my face in a thousand rosy waves;
Far away like smoke from a black stack lies my pain.
I know it, yet I wander.
We may, like expectant children, be blessed.

For the New Animal in America

WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT

My enemy has written a book.[1]

This is not man-to-man enmity, but there need be no quibble about it. For seventeen years I have studied T. R. as representative of that America which has consistently betrayed the finer aspirations of our people, shamed the real workman, bewildered the young in millions with noise and show and shine, and unerringly dimmed for the many the approaches to the Real. He stands today for armament, against all that the New Spirit has shown us out of the bleeding heart of the world, against the plain fact of the war as the quickener of spiritual life, and against every dream that was ever born in the human breast out of the loss of the love of self.

You will say, “But why this study of T. R. now? Surely he has received his _Thumbs-down_ even from the crowd, and with a unanimity seldom accorded a public man still in the flesh.” ... I am not so sure. I wish I could be sure that his latest message would be shut from the receptivity of this land, as a door upon an evil draught.

We have managed to clump along with bunglers through the recent dropsical years of peace, but there was never such a need as now for a man of vision and power at the forefront of our affairs. These States since August have committed atrocities of short-sightedness and triumphs of selfishness—enough to complicate us for future years. The partisan and the militarist have already made our neutrality unclean. I would like to be sure that their strongest influence has already been encountered.

On our southern borders is war, and our northern border is black with distrust and the British point of view. From Vancouver to Halifax, the voice of this hour is, “If Roosevelt were only in the chair at Washington——” The ensuing part of the “if” covers the present issues from Mexico to Belgium, and the trouble is that Canada knows from England what she is wishing us; at least, in part, the venom and abomination of the saying. To judge from the Press of the States there are still many who would incite afresh the animal efficiency of our country, and who range themselves in the background with this master of the low vibration, calling upon us to answer Europe with a similar desolation.

... How many times have you heard it said, “This T. R. is in the comprehension of the crowd.” This is true. The saddest conviction ever forced into the mind of genius of any age is the opaqueness of the surface which the crowd presents to light or loveliness of any kind. And T. R. is in the comprehension of the bleakest generation which this country has ever known; nor will there ever be another like it, for we are at the end of the night. That which is about to break is either dawn or doom.

T. R. is still searching for the crowd through the endless folds of its obliquity. Who shall say that these folds are not endless; that he may not turn over still another fateful, if momentary allegiance, from the bowels of our materialism?

Enough that he is the voice to-day of the Prussian factor in America, a voice from the throat of the militarists—that curious solution of beef, iron and wine, from which—as Thou seest the Oise and the Aisne and the Vistula flow red—oh, Lord, deliver us!

I hold the conviction that if the militarists ever get in full cry after this country, we shall lose our Peace and our personality. This is an hour to stand by, and it is only in such an hour that I would venture to study a party through the character of its loudest voice. For seventeen years I have watched T. R. stand for the physical and the obvious. There has been more noise about his name in America than about any other, and yet he has never risen to a single great moment. And steadily he has mounted higher in the consciousness of T. R. Many of us thought that the crisis was reached, when for a day (a little before the last presidential nominations) the ego broke within him, and those close at hand saw a deranged creature.... A troop of us camped beside him in Tampa, and followed the Rough Riders afield above Santiago. Perhaps he has a certain animal courage—the cheapest utility of the nations—but there is no moral quality to the courage of a man who would permit himself to be cast into popular approval on a fake.... There was a reunion two years afterward of those same Rough Riders in Oklahoma. T. R. was there, campaigning on the shoulders of McKinley, much as Dr. Cook did. On the way down through Kansas for two days, we heard him on the back platform of the private coach, at every station where two or three would gather together—pouring the most terrific physical energy into political bickerings and half-truths, the same at each station—until we drew the press table as far as possible forward, and bore the oppressive heat with shut windows rather than that repeated clamor of words. He would come in conqueringly, the black coat damp with sweat.... I remember the ruffian exhibition with the cattle—steer-torturing, the brand, the snap of bone, the tightened noose, thud of poor beasts to the ground—all in a frame for him—the hat with the pinned-back brim, waving over all....

No other man has been so mighty to keep the pestiferousness of America alive in the minds of medieval Europe. As our representative citizen, he has romped our yankeeisms and cutenesses from Queenstown to Port Said and around. And so it has been for seventeen years since that Tampan camp, from party to group, from fame to notoriety, from brute-shooting and affidavits, to cocktails and new African rivers furnished with sworn statements, from woman’s suffrage back to bayonetism,—always in the sweat and heft of flesh, unvaryingly the animal man.

They say that if a child is bred and born right, his earlier years passed in hands that start him straight—such a child will return to the beauty of his inception, if time and the world are permitted to work sufficient misery upon him; misery being the great corrective. These States of America were bred of a fair dream and born of a singular beauty. The hope of the world today is that as a nation, we restore the old dream, the old inspiration; not a turning back, for that is against the law, but turning to a finer dimension of that old passion which made us a refuge and a brotherhood.

There has been fine living virtue in two recent actions of this government—two bits of high behavior. Through one of these, it seemed that a shaft of light poured down from the fatherland of the future—if day is ahead and not doom. I refer to the return of the Boxer indemnity to China.... It was like a fine moment in a busy life, and there was poetry in the answer from old Mother China.... There are men who love these States well enough to hate her many moments of unworthiness. The other figment of true national character is the determination of the part of Washington to keep her promise to Colombia.... I perceived that T. R. has risen against that, even since his book setting forth the needs of a new predatory impetus for our national life.... To anyone who asks a law to go by, for the good of the country and the rectitude of self, I would say, “Take the side that this man does not, and it will be impossible for you to lose.”

[1] _America and the World-War, by Theodore Roosevelt._ [_Charles
Scribner’s Sons, New York._]

Maurice Browne and The Little Theatre

JOHN COWPER POWYS

Sick of war and discussion of war; sick of “first and last things” and discussion of them; deafened by the raucous howling of the preachers, and dumb before the fathomless stupidity of the mob, one may totter into the cool quietness of The Little Theatre just as Heine, scarcely a century ago, escaped from the madness of the crowd, and in that gallery on the Seine fell at the feet of the armless Goddess! And she smiles at us too—poor unknown strangers—just as she smiled at that famous Wanderer; and though “she has no arms to help,” it is enough if for a little while one can rest at her feet and forget “the voices of hate.” It was by the incantation she has never been known to resist that she was drawn here; to rest, after her long pilgrimage: for here she has found the altar they had lost the secret of building, and the incense they had forgotten how to burn! O the heavenly quietness of this place, and the absence, even round about the purlieus of it, of the voices that grate and jar and harrow and murder!

Favete Linguis! Keep the holy silence, good stranger; till thou knowest completely on what ground thou standest. “Numen inest!” There is Deity in this sanctuary. Do the children of Gath howl with laughter, and the daughters of Askalon shake with spleen, that one should speak of Deity in the Fine Arts Building, and of Altars on Michigan Avenue? Let them put out their tongues—let them spit forth their venom—the stone which they have rejected has already become the head-stone of the temple of the Future!

Visit other so-called “Little Theatres,” my friends, and you will understand why the Uranian had to make so long a journey. For there is none like this. They are either—those others—too gaudy and “artistic”; or they are too shoddy, ramshackle, littered, patchy and “bohemian.” This is the place; the place where one can draw large even breaths; the place where one can cool one’s fever; the place where one can drink, as Shelley says, “of deep and liquid rest, forgetful of all ill.”

And it matters not what they are “playing,” this gracious company of Our Lady’s Servants, or whose liturgical “Use” they honor with their acceptance. Many are such “hours,” such “offices.” It makes no difference. One Gregorian Harmony brings them into the circle of One Rhythm. Many and diverse are the offerings they offer up to that great Goddess. Some are wanton and capricious, some grave and solemn, some foreign and exotic, some native-born and natural, some from the market-places of this very city, some from the far-off land of the Goddess’s own engendering; some light as gossamer-seed, from no land at all, but from the kingdom of airy nothings, sans habitation, sans name, sans purpose!

Yes, whatever the words of the “local breviary” we persuade them to adopt to their music, the effect of it upon the listeners is the same. “Razed out” at last are those “written troubles”; “cleansed” at last, of “that perilous stuff,” is the poor “stuff’d bosom”!

Chicago’s Little Theatre is the real “Alsatia”—the authentic “Arcanum”—the true “Hesperidean Grove”! And do you ask how it rose, “like an eschalation,” into being—what hands built it—what genius, what magic, still sustains it? What, do you suppose, questioner at the gate, worked this miracle? What, do you surmise, wrought this spell? Have you really no inkling, in this sphere of the raising of Altars, how such things are done?

Only in one way! There is only one kind of occult adventure—Goethe tells us that—by means of which these Euphorions of Beauty grow into life! There must be the creative spirit of Man, giving the thing “Form”; and the creative spirit of Woman, giving the thing “Color.” Thus we understand. Thus we unravel the mystery. Thus we learn how the impossible happens! Look, inquisitive Stranger, at the Inscription over the entrance to this enchanted retreat. Read the names written upon the door. Do you catch the trick of it now—do you glimpse the clue? _Two_ names are there—our Faust’s and our Helen’s—and behind those two names lurk the creative genius that _wills_, and the creative genius that gives color to what is _willed_. Thus the miracle is accomplished. And behold—Euphorion! For English “Maurice” and American “Nelly” have that inestimable bond, between the links of which alone can the true Parnassian Hyacinths put forth their “hushed, cool-rooted flowers” for the delight of gods and men;—I mean agreement of “opinion,” with diversity of “temperament.”

The supremely happy “chance” of the coming together of these two—why not believe the legend that gives to the very Land of the Muses the spell that achieved it?—resulted in nothing less than that indescribable synthesis of Man’s Intellect and Woman’s Instinct which is the desire of the ages! So ought human beings to be united. So ought their poor mortal “love,” radiating from Zenith to Nadir, to provoke the return of Saturn, the unbinding of Prometheus, the Vita Nuova for which we all pine!

It is in fact the presence of our “New Helen” as the guiding, balancing, mellowing, sweetening influence, in this enterprise, which has enabled the austere “Formula” of the Founder to take to itself flesh and blood. For the director of the Little Theatre of Chicago is no Dilettante—no Petit-Maître of a pompous coterie—no bric-à-brac Virtuoso. Stern and high and cold is his Ideal; clear and clean-cut the lines that limit it! To reproduce in the heart of the great mad City—the City of the “Middle-West”—the City of America—that Rhythm and Harmony which Plato felt as the secret of the ultimate spheres, is not such a thing worthy of the gift of a man’s life?

And it is nothing less than a man’s life, and a woman’s too, which is being given for this. For such temples are not built without the shedding of blood. Those who have ears to hear let them hear! As the wise Lady says, who comes from the Isle of the Saints, “The Bridge to the World’s Future hides within its arches the bodies of the World’s First-Born!” It is not for any “strayed reveller,” however sensitive to what he has seen, to give the word of Initiation to these devoted ones’ long-labored Mystery. Maurice Browne’s methods may be seen, and the passionate irritability of his over-tasked nerves may be teased and rung upon; but the high invisible walls of the Citadel he is raising—the “topless towers” of his Ilium—are not for the searching of the profane. And yet a modest guess may be hazarded as to where, in our horizon, those towers will grow. They will grow, as all true classical ramparts have grown, protecting us from the hordes of vulgarity, out of the ground and soil of inveterate tradition. They will not grow to the tune of the idealization that spurns “reality,” they will grow to the tune of the idealization that sifts, selects, winnows, purifies, and heightens “reality.” They will not be built, they are not being built, according to the fierce fanaticism of any particular School or Cult or Pass-word. The sub-soil of their tradition has been watered by no tears but those of Humanity, and will be sown with no harvest but the harvest of Humanity. If they are more Greek, or more Hebraic, than anything else, that is only because to the Greeks and the Jews rather than to the rest it has been allowed to sweep the unessential absolutely aside and return with clear-eyed innocence to the main facts. Maurice Browne is not the slave of Euripides—though, by God! some might think so—nor is he the slave of the Bible. It is only that he knows too well—too well for his peace and the peace of his friends!—that only from the depths of that one tragic fountain—the naked human heart, my friends—spring the little opal-tinted bubbles that reflect the World!

What has been revealed to our modern Faust in those queer “absences from the Body,”—what has been revealed to him in those hours, when his nerves find us so hard to bear—what “the Mothers” have really whispered to him—who were bold enough even to guess? But this much a poor Satyr of the Outer Court may without impertinence divine. For Maurice Browne the whole world resolves itself into an act of worship. The thing worshiped we know nothing of, save in the eternal rhythm of life; and the “other worshippers” we know nothing of, save in the music which responds to that rhythm; but the whole drama—down the long desperate centuries—resolves itself into nothing less than an attempt to attune to reciprocity those two cadences—the voice of the Unknown World-Priest, intoning through the ages, and the voice of the innumerable generations answering! Have I been able in the remotest degree to indicate why to the good sneering philistines who mock at all this and ask “what is a Little Theatre but—a Little Theatre”? there may come some day a somewhat ghastly awakening, a somewhat damning remorse? In that hour—in that “Judgment”—happy will those citizens of Chicago be who have prepared the way, and not laid themselves down in the way, of the builders of the Abbey of Thelema!

What The Little Theatre is doing is nothing less than a restoration to the worship of the Eternal Gods of an Institution which has been bastardized, perverted and profaned! Think what the Drama in our days has become! Think what “buyers and sellers” have set up their “tables” in the Lord’s House! The Theatre, in our generation, is no more that sacred stage where Life is purged and winnowed and heightened; and where, out of the Tragedy and Comedy of it, clear triumphant music is made audible. Poetic Drama is extinct. And yet can Life be said to be even approximately mimicked by anything less than poetry? _Emotions_ we have enough of and to spare—emotions and sensations! But these are not poetry. These are but the heavy, raw, crude, chemical protoplasm of poetry. Thus the only plays of our time which are beautiful and successful and true to the life-instinct are _Farces_. Farces need not be poetical. They represent the kicking up of satyr-heels round the outer circle of the Dionysian grove. They represent the insurgent rebellion of the humorous mob against all law or rule. And as such they are admirable. As such they have their place. Indeed they are all that is left of admirable in our modern Theatre. They are our only contribution to this world-old act of worship—the contribution of beautifully kicking up our heels! Putting aside Wagner and Strauss and half-a-dozen Latin Opera-Makers, what has our stage got which really answers to the religious exigency of which I am speaking? Nothing but Farce, nothing but Satyr-heels! Devoted revivals of Gilbert and Sullivan restore to us our youth once in a long season and _Fanny’s First Play_ and _Pygmalion_ hit our tired heathen fancy. But for the rest—! Hyperborean morbidities technically adjusted to bourgeois drawing-rooms with snow-avalanches muttering at the window, are indeed enough to make unlaid troublesome ghosts of the great psychological names of Ibsen and Strindberg. But psychology, whether it dissect the old Bourgeois Family or the New Feminist Lure, is, after all, only a transitory analysis of ephemeral situations. It does not spring from what, in the relations between Man and Woman, is eternal and unchangeable. It does not turn into dramatic poetry the long cry of our common fate. The pathological “macabrism” of Ibsen and Strindberg dissolves like mephitic scum when the eternal constellations, under which Job and David and Sophocles wrote, mount up through the deep hushed air. Mr. Browne has an artist’s and an Irishman’s passion for Synge—but he knows better than we could tell him that gaelic Mythology is not classical Mythology and gaelic poetry is not Universal poetry. And so we return to the one old Path—the one undying Tradition. We _literally_ return to it. For, after all their lovely and alluring experiments in a hundred directions, the great work of The Little Theatre—until Mr. Browne writes his own epoch-making Poetic Play—is, as we all confess, the revival of Euripides. It is here and only here that The Little Theatre of Chicago rouses itself, through every nerve and vein of its corporate body, to grand and undistracted reciprocity. And here we are in the presence of a true Renaissance: a Renaissance as authentic and deep as that which the fifteenth century stumbled upon. The truth of what I am saying will be sealed, for the few who understand this “open secret,” by the fact of the instinctive preference displayed, not only by the director but by the whole company, for _The Trojan Women_, over the less universal, the less classical, the more modern _Medea_.

No one who has a real insight into what Poetic Drama means—Poetic Drama the highest of all human Arts—can hesitate for a moment as to where The Little Theatre rises to a permanent and tradition-making height. It rises to such a height in its performance of _The Trojan Women_. And it does so because here and here alone, by reason of the universal nature of the subject—nothing less in fact than the incarnation of World’s Sorrow—every member of the company is touched and attuned and compelled and transfigured to the same ultimate Pity.

It is not only of “Ilion” we think, it is not only for “Ilion” we weep, in those world-deep choruses; we weep for all the sons and daughters of men, doomed by the same doom, who “must endure”—with Argive Helen—“their going hence, even as their coming hither.” The magical Irish “plummet” of Synge does not, cannot, sound much depth;—and before the bowed figures of those world-mourners, carved as if by the chisel of Pheidias, our pathological Hyperborean Phantoms go squeaking, bat-like, to oblivion.

When, in the future, Poetic Drama once more attains the position to which the self-preservative instincts of humanity entitle it, it will be recognized for what it is—the true religious focussing of man’s permanent protest against Fate—lifted above the dust of all ephemeral questioning. It will then be seen that in Poetic Drama, rather than in the noblest sacraments of Religion, the race must find its orchestral unity, the rhythm of its natural and Tragic breathing. And when this is seen, and the history of the thing written, The Chicago Little Theatre, its directors and its company, will receive (too late, as always, for personal relief) their delayed appreciation.

It would be unjust, in any such tentative anticipation of Time’s verdict as these pages suggest, to praise Maurice Browne at the expense of those who so wonderfully work with him. We may have our European blood, our European Formalism; but, after all, our stage is an American stage, our company an American company. In estimating the actual contribution of individual members of the company, to the Idea behind it, it were wise to be cautious and discreet. Any praise of a particular performer must needs fall a little discordantly when a certain impersonal rhythmic orchestration is the note of the whole matter. No such faux-pas is risked in the mention of three names. This “Chicago Renaissance” in which Maurice Browne plays the part of the golden-mouthed Mirandola hath also its young Angelo, “seeking the soul” of light and form and color. The work that has been done is so much, after all, a matter of technical inspiration, that to omit the name of Raymond Johnson from its annals were to write the history of Florence without alluding to Michele. Chicago may indeed regard itself, for all its chaotic tumult, as the Tuscan City of America; for nowhere else is so pure a flame, of single-hearted devotion to Beauty, burning on this side of the Atlantic! And with the name of Raymond Johnson, the artist of the company, it is necessary to link that of Edward Moseman, its greater actor. It is strange that it should have been left to a wandering European—and yet perhaps not strange!—to make audible the prediction, which all discerning dramatic critics must inevitably be making in their hearts, that in not so very many years Mr. Moseman will be recognized, from shore to shore, as the most interesting and most personally-arresting player that this country has produced since Booth.

That a genius of his peculiarly _idiosyncratic_ type should have been magnetized—against his will—into the “formalism” of the One Tradition, is about as good an evidence as could be found of the power and conviction of Maurice Browne’s impersonal Ideal!

The third name I may be allowed to mention, without impertinent intrusion into orchestral harmonies, is the name of Miss Vera White. I am not now referring to Miss White’s untiring constructive labor upon what one might call “the architectural scaffolding” of The Little Theatre’s productions. I am referring to her personal genius as an actress. Nothing more natural, nothing more _inevitable_, nothing more winning and seductive, than this gentle actress’s rendering of the wronged mother in Mrs. Ellis’s Cornish Play could be possibly imagined. And the same enchanting qualities of direct self-effacing emotion will no doubt be even more irresistible when, in a classic role, she comes to play the Nurse in Medea. Of Ellen Van Volkenburg’s own acting in this classic Renaissance which she is helping her husband to summon from “the vasty deep,” I cannot speak; for I have only seen her in those charming “genre” plays where she loves, mischievously enough, to transform herself, like a witch-fairy, into every mortal kind of dream-person! But I know enough of her to know at least one aspect of her October-shadowy moods, which will make us tremble before her Medea!

Well! The Euphorion—the child of this encounter of Past and Present has yet to grow his full wings. He is still a “Ge-Uranic,” a Child-Angel. But those who have had the fortune of being present at the scene of his high engendering will never forget their privilege. “It is a long way” to the shores of Troas from the shores of our Chicago Lake; but for one wanderer at least the great goddess of the Gallery of the Louvre has not worked her spells in vain. Still, with the Elizabethan, we can cry aloud to her through the mists of many journeyings: “Her lips suck forth my soul. See where it flies.”

Winter’s Pride

GEORGE SOULE

Intolerant wind, cold, swift over the sand,
An icy-silver sun upon the sea,
Back-spraying plumes of molten white
Wind-lifted from the curling breakers’ tips
That proudly charge the shore with steady roll
And crisping plunge,
The soft advance of foam—
Its million breaking bubbles,
Its elfin rush and tingle;

A thousand gulls awing,
Startled to dipping flight and curving glide,
Their flashing arabesques against the sun
Twisting a thousand beauties never still
Until they rest, fearless, lifted and falling
Upon the surging surf;

And you and I
Striding the flat, resilient sand,
Seeking the distance tirelessly,
Our faces burning,
Our speech of silence made,
In equal freedom joined perfectly,
And our uplifted spirits
Plumed like the waves, exulting with the gulls;

These things are potent
To cleanse us through the years
And to redeem
All dull and sluggard hours;
These things are proof
Of all bright beauty, all swift ecstacy.

Two Points of View

Mrs. Ellis’s Gift to Chicago

MARY ADAMS STEARNS

Love, eugenics, marriage, are not three questions, but merely different aspects of the one great sex problem, which, according to Mrs. Havelock Ellis, must be solved within the hearts and souls of men and women and not by the acts of any legislative body. Those who braved the wind and the rain to hear this well known writer and thinker talk about “Sex and Eugenics” were filled with sharp expectancy as she stepped forward to speak—a short woman about fifty years old, with iron gray hair cut close to her head, piercing blue eyes, eloquent hands and a low voice, wonderfully modulated and seemingly as tireless as her poised, vigorous body; yet expectation seldom fulfills the bright dreams it dangles before our eyes. We let ourselves be carried away with enthusiasm, and then are hurt because our visions lack fulfillment. Some expected too much.

Chicago has welcomed Mrs. Ellis warmly, yet within this cordiality there have been hidden germs of fear, unreasonable hopes, slavish admiration, mental indifference and misunderstanding—it is always so. She is without question in the foremost ranks of women thinkers, and behind her, trying more or less sincerely to gain an understanding of the great truths that she teaches and upholds, are hordes of women—curious, broad-minded, bigoted, desperate, frightened, sane thinkers, and sentimentalists; women who are economic slaves and others who are financially independent. What does Mrs. Ellis mean to each one of them? What message, if any, has she brought? Has she added anything vital and new to our store of sex and eugenic knowledge which is already burdened with much mediocre and even valueless information?

Nothing but death could have kept me away from her lecture in Orchestra Hall February 4th—to which after considerable unnecessary hesitation men were admitted. Although I knew that I was approaching a burning bush I felt it was doomed to be hidden in a cloud of misapprehension, disappointment, and disapproval, and I walked gingerly with my mind open and unprejudiced and alert. I was fully as eager to catch the atmosphere of the audience, to fathom the thoughts of the thousand odd brains that listened, as I was to see and hear Mrs. Ellis herself.

The lecture was an event. The dignity, the lack of sensationalism, the quiet earnestness of what was said revealed a force at work in the world as steady and inevitable as the glacier’s erosion of the Swiss hills. Yet this quality of Mrs. Ellis’s mind is shown in all she writes and is shared by all who read her pages. _Her great gift to Chicago was her personality._ It gleamed through every word she spoke and blazed into a pure white flame, that seemed by its very intensity to create a new heaven and a new earth where love shall rise Phoenix-like from the ashes of souls and bodies consumed by a misunderstood and misused passion.

There were well-known and influential women who stayed away from the lecture because they were afraid—afraid of the truth. Because in their blindness they could not see behind the cheap sensationalism of certain newspapers and understand the spiritual purity for which Mrs. Ellis has always stood. Yet their absence showed them not so much cowards as women incapable of reaching the great white lights of life.

Then there were women who came to the lecture expecting to be shocked; and they went away disappointed. There were women who came laughing and gossiping; and they went away still laughing and wondering what all the fuss was about anyway. They could not see anything extraordinary; it was all rather commonplace and not altogether new.

And a few came quietly, knowing that they were to contact a great earnest and wonderful personality; who above all her broad wisdom stands for the highest ideals that humanity knows—a little woman with a big mind. These went away thoughtfully, and were satisfied, for they understood.

They felt as well as did Mrs. Ellis herself what could and what could not be said on a public platform to a gathering of more than a thousand prejudiced and in some cases antagonistic listeners. They had in their minds, as of course she had also, knowledge of the many scientific volumes that her husband has written. Those familiar with Havelock Ellis were better prepared to listen than the others. They were grounded in the facts and science of sex which has never been disclosed as he has done it, and those who have read his pages know that in them he is the complete scientist, weighing, comparing, crediting, and discrediting the facts that have come to him. In no way are his sex studies propagandic—they are a tremendous reservoir of static power. It has been for his wife and co-worker, she of independent mind and high purpose, to take all this vast collection of scientific information in her small hands, crush out the sordidness, the misery, the heart-sickening perversions and distortions of human lives and holding up the bright ideals, fling them out to her listeners in phrases burning with hope for both men and women and faith that true love will make everything whole.

She did not pose as a righter of personal grievances or a solver of private woes. The individual was lost in the group; details were submerged in generalities; isolated examples made way for guiding principles. When Mrs. Ellis said “We must improve our knowledge if we would improve our morals” and that there can be no guide to right living except that which comes from within, she gave us the key to happiness.

If one might guess, she is a little impatient with laws and quite out of sympathy with those who, knowing but little themselves, try to bind others by rules and regulations which often defeat the very ends for which they were made. “What we want is more eugenics by education, and less eugenics by legislation” she cried; and what she implied many times was that when we come to regard sex love as one of the greatest manifestations of the soul—not one of the offensive expressions of the body—then and then only shall we have eugenic babies and happy men and women.

Mrs. Ellis referred to the sex function as a “great spiritual enterprise” and said that only through the conflict of ideals can progress be made. With “courage, sanity, and cleanliness” in our hearts we must “cease to regard sex as mere animalism,” and must “forge passion into power.” “The sex function is divine fire,” it is “as much an affair of the soul as of the body” and “it is no more disgraceful to function on the sex plane than on the hunger plane or on the thirst plane.” She sees that only in the economic independence of women can sex relations be righted—love and money must be completely divorced. Any form of barter, whether lawfully within marriage or unlawfully outside of marriage, is fatal to the free giving of love. Sex love must exist only where there is affinity—never where there is question of possession. Only by being economically free can a woman raise herself above the rank of a prostitute.

Mrs. Ellis spoke of our changing ideals; that what is normal for the ape is gross for the average man and woman, and that what has been accepted as inevitable by ordinary men and women will be utterly intolerable to the super men and women of the near future. “The woman of the future will be the high priestess of sense, not the victim of sensuality as she now is.” “She will learn to love beautifully and live joyfully.” She referred to the way our bodies have sunk into disrepute ever since Greek times until to the Puritans everything was impure and emphasized the fact that “our bodies and our souls are not enemies, but mates.”

Mrs. Ellis could not in a lecture of this sort have touched upon special sexual situations. She was raising the standards of purity, right living, and sanity; she was creating ideals, she was destroying sordidness, she was upholding the sanctity of knowledge and holiness of a love that is free to give or withhold. She was showing women their weakness and pointing out where men have been tyrannical; she was creating a divine dissatisfaction in every soul that heard her. She was the angel fearing to tread where legislative and police fools rush in and slash about with the sword of reform.

“Create in us clean hearts and our bodies will take care of themselves,” seemed to be her prayer. She showed the goals of happiness and right living; revealed that her own life had proved these things and found them good. Those who went away disappointed were those who expected her to lay down rules and say “This shall you do and that, but not the other thing.” But that is not Mrs. Ellis’s way. She shows us what it is possible to do, but she distinctly leaves it to every individual to find his or her own way, unhampered by law, and free to make mistakes if unavoidable. She points out that some of the world’s greatest geniuses have been neurotics, as Oscar Wilde, Michael Angelo, Chopin, Rosa Bonheur, Nietszche. We must make our own paths by looking within, not trusting to man-made laws and customs.

Those who found the lecture vague and unsatisfactory must increase their knowledge, not expect a woman to tell in thirty-five minutes all she has learned in thirty-five years. Was it not enough for her to confess that we must engage in the sex relation with a “fine passionateness and spiritual deviltry”? Was it not enough for her to set up the ideal that the sex function is the “great spiritual enterprise”? Was it not enough for her to set before men and women the highest ideals that the human mind had yet conceived? And was it not enough to look at and to listen to a woman who knows whereof she speaks and who has lived all that she teaches?

She has found her way through the same clouds of prejudice and prudery that surround us, and to us of Chicago she has given the great privilege of sharing with her what she called the proudest moment of her life and of listening to what, for the first time in her life, she could freely say. Those looking for cheap sensations will not find them in Mrs. Ellis. Those trying to limit human action by passing laws will receive no help from her words. Those hampered by conventions and shackled by fear of the truth must be born again into the beauty and holiness of every side of human life before they can even see the heights whereon Mrs. Ellis stands. Let those who would find happiness for themselves and a happy issue out of the sufferings of the men and women and children and unborn babes, look into their own hearts and bravely face what is there.

Women have always run away from anything sexual as unwomanly. She must face her own nature; she must learn that to most women “the sex impulse is the hunger of her soul”; she must study men and find a way to raise them from the errors into which they have fallen. She must cease to be a prude, and learn to be brave, patient, wise; she must study, read and think. Nothing is unwomanly save dishonesty, and until women are honest enough and fearless enough to face what is within themselves, neither Mrs. Ellis nor anyone else can help them. Mrs. Ellis is a leader, not a driver, and because she has found life good she is an inspiration which no woman can afford to disregard.

Mrs. Ellis’s Failure

MARGARET C. ANDERSON

There was one great fault to be found with Mrs. Ellis’s lecture: it was not illuminating. It might have failed in any number of other ways and still have been a real contribution; but it should not have dared to fall short in that respect, because Mrs. Ellis came forward in the role of one who has a message and because she chose a subject upon which one must have a message or not talk at all. What Mrs. Ellis did is the kind of thing against which our generation has its deepest grudge, and it constitutes a very special case of what we mean when we talk so heatedly about Truth. We mean nothing startling by that:—simply that quality which some one has had the good sense to call “releasing.”

A few days before the lecture Mrs. Ellis said that she might as well call her talk anything except merely “Sex and Eugenics,” because she meant to discuss love, spiritually, sex abnormalities, and many other matters. “I have read all my husband’s manuscripts before they were published and I know he has never told anything but the truth about sex,” she said. “I have waited some thirty years to talk about these things, and I shall tell the truth as I know it, if I am sent to jail or put out of Chicago for it.” On another occasion she said that she meant to talk of those people who, through perverted or inverted sexual tendencies, faced the problem of having to turn their abnormality—perhaps their gift of genius, if we understood these things better—into creative channels. Because of all this it was only natural to expect a message from Mrs. Ellis.

But what actually happened was this: Dr. W. A. Evans opened the meeting by reading a short paper on Havelock Ellis—a paper full of pompous phrases and of real interest in its utter lack of thought. He gave some biographical data which everyone knew, told the dates of Mr. Ellis’s various publications, repeated the chapter titles of one of his less important works, and really said nothing at all. Then Mrs. Ellis read a paper which her husband had written especially for the occasion—the most uninteresting thing that wonderful man has ever written, I am sure. It had a lot of abstractions about masculinism and feminism, and really said nothing at all. (I use the word “nothing” on a basis of Ideas.) Then Mrs. Ellis read her own paper, which was beautifully written and charmingly delivered, and which said nothing at all. She said in brief that there should be no war between body and soul, and that Oscar Wilde should have been understood rather than sent to jail. These things are not ideas; they are common sense. They are all quite simply recognized by thinking people; and most of Mrs. Ellis’s audience was composed of thinking people who wanted her individual philosophy on these matters. They were not asking her for art but for thought—not for expression but for meaning. Her failure was of the sort of which prophets are never guilty.

Of course, Mrs. Ellis may not wish to be considered a prophet or a philosopher. Then there should not have been so much talk of offering a completely new view of sex. She may regard herself as a poet, an interpreter. Very well; then she should have given a substantial vision of a future state when love in all its aspects is valued and understood. Mrs. Ellis cannot be blamed for the sensational stories in the paper. Her suggestion that men be admitted to the lecture because they need education in this field as much as women need it, was made simply and without any thought of sensation. Everybody knows what the press will make of such material as that. And everybody knows how an organization managed exclusively by women is likely to be twisted into silly, sentimental, or malicious issues. But Mrs. Ellis _can_ be blamed for that attitude which promises more than it has to give, and very seriously blamed for that spirit which hints that there may be cause for shame where there is no cause. There has been something altogether too suggestive of “Did my lecture shock you?” in Mrs. Ellis’s attitude. These things are not _shocking_; they are beautiful or terrible, according as they are understood or misrepresented, but so long as the truth about them is faced squarely they should carry no hint of shock. The only test of an “emerged personality” is its arrival at a point where it is not shocked by anything human beings may do or be. You may be deeply moved or terribly hurt, but you are not merely offended or embarrassed or startled. All that brings things down to such a little scale. I don’t know just why, but Mrs. Ellis’s attitude has reminded me of the man who advised me not to read Havelock Ellis’s volumes on the psychology of sex, because after such an experience I could never respect human beings again. If he had been ignorant or puritanical his remark wouldn’t have mattered; but he was a rather well-known sexologist and he believed those books to be very valuable! What he meant was that it is “so disillusioning” to know the truth. If Mrs. Ellis were that sort of person these things I object to wouldn’t matter in the least. As it is, they matter hugely. Her failure to assume that knowledge is too important a thing to concern itself with people’s pruderies is on a par with the man’s failure to recognize that truth is never disastrous.

Nearly all the people in Orchestra Hall that night had read Ellis and Carpenter and Weininger and other scientists, and they expected to hear how far Mrs. Ellis’s personal views coincided or disagreed with these authorities. But she had no intention of such elucidation, it seems. She didn’t say what she thought about free love, free divorce, social motherhood, birth-control, the sex “morality” of the future, or any of these things. On the other side of the question, in her reference to intermediate types, she didn’t mention homosexuality; she had nothing to say about the differences between perversion and inversion, nor did she even hint at Carpenter’s social efforts in behalf of the homosexualist. What does Mrs. Ellis think about Weininger’s statement that intermediate sexual forms are “normal, not pathological phenomena, in all classes of organisms, and their appearance is no proof of physical decadence?” Does she agree with him, in his reference to the idea that inversion is an acquired character and one that has superseded normal sexual impulses, when he says, “It might equally be sought to prove that the sexual inclination of a normal man for a normal woman was an unnatural, acquired habit. In the abstract there is no difference between the normal and the inverted type. In my view all organisms have both homosexuality and heterosexuality.... In spite of all present-day clamor about the existence of different rights for different individualities, there is only one law that governs mankind just as there is only one logic and not several logics. It is in opposition to that law as well as to the theory of punishment according to which the legal offense, not the moral offense, is punished, that we forbid the homosexualist to carry on his practices whilst we allow the heterosexualist full play, so long as both avoid open scandal. Speaking from the standpoint of a purer state of humanity and of a criminal law untainted by the pedagogic idea of punishment as a deterrent, the only logical and rational method of treatment for sexual inverts would be to allow them to seek and obtain what they require where they can, that is to say, among other inverts.” It is not enough to repeat that Shakespeare and Michael Angelo and Alexander The Great and Rosa Bonheur and Sappho were intermediates: how is this science of the future to meet these issues? They move into the realm of the world’s sublime tragedies when one reads the manifesto of a community of such people in Germany:—“The rays of sunshine in the night of our existence are so rare that we are responsive and deeply grateful for the least movement, for every single voice that speaks in our favor in the forum of mankind.” Mrs. Ellis may have thought her audience entirely too unsophisticated, too untutored in these matters, to admit of specific treatment. But that is all the greater reason to talk plainly. When you reflect how difficult it is for the mass to become educated about sex it becomes rather appalling. It is worth your life to get Havelock Ellis’s six volumes from a bookstore or a library. You can only do it with a doctor’s certificate or something of that sort. Even if you ask for Weininger you are taken behind locked doors, forced to swear that you want it out of no “morbid curiosity,” that you will keep it only a week, and above all that you won’t let anyone else read it. Of course, it is practically impossible to do work of this sort under the auspices of women’s medical leagues or similar organizations. But Mrs. Ellis had dared the impossible. I can’t help comparing her with another woman whose lecture on such a subject would be big, brave, beautiful.... I am criticised for having too much about this other woman in THE LITTLE REVIEW; so “not to mention any names,” as the story goes, I will merely say that Emma Goldman could never fail in this way.

It is not a question of what could or could not be said on a public platform; it is a question of what _should_ be said. If the findings of science are not to be made accessible, we must all find ourselves in the position of Rousseau when he said that the renascence of the arts and sciences had not ennobled morals. Isn’t that almost as true now as then? A week ago, as I write, a young man named Roswell Smith was hanged in Chicago for having strangled a four-year-old girl. He had no recollection of the murder, and his father’s testimony brought out the fact that the boy had always been epileptic. Since he must die for his “crime”—oh, the heart-breaking tragedy of his quiet acceptance of that hellish law!—Smith begged that he be allowed to die under the knife, so that at least humanity might benefit by an examination of his brain. But, no—he must be _hanged_: Justice must be done, the public wrath appeased, the penalty held up to other criminals, prevention enforced again by methods which don’t prevent! The governor, unwilling to risk public indignation, salved his conscience by the testimony of one alienist who pronounced Smith “sane.” And so the boy paid the penalty, to the accompaniment of Psalms and readings from the Word—the “_Light_ of the world!” ... And sixty people watched the murder and not a voice was raised in protest. Think of it!—or rather don’t think of it unless you are willing to lose your mind with horror and shame.

How far have we _advanced_ when things like this can still happen among us? With us love is just as punishable as murder or robbery. Mrs. Ellis knows the workings of our courts; she knows of boys and girls, men and women, tortured or crucified every day _for their love_—because it is not expressed according to conventional morality. All this was part of her responsibility on February 4th; and this is why I say she failed.

The Acrobat

ELOISE BRITON

Poised like a panther on a bough
He swings and leaps.
His taut body flashes clear,
And in a long blue arc cuts the hushed air
Tense as a cry.
The keen, sharp wind of Death
Blows after like his shadow, and I feel
A strange beast stir in me.
I almost wish
That which I cannot think,
A scream, a falling body ...
A new thrill!

But he shoots onward, arms outstretched
To clutch at life as it speeds past.
His hands grip vise-like;
With a wrench
That half uproots his fingers, he has caught,
And airily
He twists about the bar
And comes to rest.

Sidewise he sits, and carelessly
High up among the winds,
His taut body
Grown lax and restful.
He smiles—
As a vain child, pleased with himself, he smiles,
While our applause comes up
Like incense.
He breathes a moment deeply.
Then again the supple form grows tense,
All wire, all vibrant,
Poised for one tingling breath
Before another flight.