Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

These are some of my own guesses as to why individual impressions of our national life are few and why they are not greatly in vogue in America. Whether they be poor or good guesses they represent one Middle Western reader's observation of some of the actual difficulties that will have to be faced in America by the writer who by temperament desires to follow that golden and beautiful way of Flaubert's, which Mr. Galsworthy has mentioned.

This writer will doubtless get from these difficulties far more fun than he ever could have had without them. They are suggested here in the pages of THE LITTLE REVIEW, not at all with the idea of discouraging a single traveler from setting out on that splendid road, but rather as a step towards the beginning of that true and long comradeship with effort that is worth befriending which our felicitous English well-wisher hopes may be THE LITTLE REVIEW'S abiding purpose.

"Henceforth I ask not Good Fortune: I, myself, am Good Fortune."

Impression

GEORGE SOULE

Her life was late a new-built house--
Empty, with shining window panes,
Where neither sorrow nor carouse
Had left red stains.

A passing vagrant, least of men,
Entered and used; her hearth-fire shone.
She mellowed, he grew restless then--
Left her alone.

Now she is vacant as before,
Desolate through the weary whiles;
Yet play about the darkened door
Shadows of smiles.

Art and Life

GEORGE BURMAN FOSTER

Odium theologicum--it is a deadly thing. But the ridicule and obloquy, formerly characteristic of credal fanaticism, seem to have passed over in recent years into the camp of art connoisseurs. No denying it, it was a Homeric warfare that reverberated up and down the earth from land to land, and from century to century, between what was ever the "old" faith and the "new." In this year of grace, however, it is the disciples of "classic" art--aureoled with the sanctity of some antiquity or idealism--and "modern" art--in whatever nuance or novelty of most disapproved and screaming modernity--who hereticize each other, who even deny each other right of domicile, save, perhaps, in the unvisited solitudes of interstellar spaces. To be sure, those august and frozen solitudes of the everlasting nothing may be conceivably preferable to the theological Inferno, though probably this question has not yet received the attention from critics and philanthropists that its importance would seem to merit.

At the outset it seemed as if the religious warfare had a certain advantage over the esthetic--it agitated more people, and seized men in their idiomatic and innermost interests, while, on the other side, but small and select circles participated in partisan questions and controversies respecting art. But it looks now as if it would soon be the other way around. The people face religious problems with less and less sympathy and understanding. But art, art of some kind and some degree, they are keenly alive as to that, and quick to appraise or to argue. The churches are ever emptier; the theatres, concert halls, museums, "movies," ever fuller. A religious book--short of epoch-making--finds, at best, only a reluctant and panicky publisher; a new play, a new novel, see how many editions it passes through, how hard it is to draw at the libraries, even after the staff and all their friends and sweethearts have courteously had first chance at it!

Now, it is of no use to quarrel with this turn matters have taken. And we miss the mark if we say that it is all bad. Off moments come to the best of us when we grow a bit tired of being "uplifted" and "reformed." Humanity has turned to art and, in doing so, has, on some side of its life, moved forward apace, mounted to higher modes of existence, and, whether the church knows it or not, along the steeps of Parnassus and in the home of the muses has heard some music and caught some glimpses of the not too distant fatherland of the divine and the eternal.

First-rate spirits of light and leading have pointed the way to a new esthetic culture--prophetic spirits who in blackest night when deep sleep had fallen upon most men saw the rosy-fingered dawn of our new day. It was to be a day when beauty should be bidden to lead the dance at the ball of life. There were serious philosophers--there was Kant, who contemplated art as the keystone in the sublime structure which modern knowledge and moral will should be summoned to erect in life. There was Schopenhauer, to whom art was the unveiling of the riddle of the world, the most intimate revelation of the divine mystery of life. There was the hero of Baireuth, who, in his artistic creations, summed up all the spiritual and moral forces of humanity, and made them fruitful for the rebirth and fruition of our modern day.

Among these prophets of a new esthetic culture, Friedrich Nietzsche occupies a quite special place, and influences the course of coming events. As a most enthusiastic apostle of the gospel of a world-redeeming art he first flung his fire-brand into the land, but only to scorn and blaspheme soon thereafter the very gods he had formerly so passionately worshipped; now degrading them to idols. His faith in art, not this art or that, but in all art, in art as such, pathetically wavered. Still the artist in him himself did not die; its eye was undimmed and its bow abode in strength. And though he later confronted every work of art with a malevolent and exasperating interrogation, all this was only his pure and pellucid soul wrestling for better and surer values, for new and nobler revelations, of the artistic genius. Indeed, it was precisely in these interrogations that he was at once our liberator and our leader--our liberator from the frenzy into which the overfoaming enthusiasm as regards art had transported men; our leader to a livelier, loftier beauty summoned to the creation of the humanest, divinest robes for the adornment of humanity as a whole.

The great movement and seething in the artistic life of our age signifies at the same time a turning point in our entire cultural life. This turning point discloses new perspective into vast illimitable distances where new victories are to be achieved by new struggles. The great diremption in our present world, making men sick and weak, calling for relaxation and convalescence, appears at a definite stage as the opposition between life and art. Life is serious, art is gay--so were we taught. Seriousness and gaiety--it was the fatality of our time that these could not be combined. So art and life were torn asunder. Art was no serious matter, no vital matter, satisfying a true and necessary human requirement. Art was a luxury, a sport, and since but few men were in a position to avail themselves of such luxury, art came to be the prerogative of a few rich people. Down at the bottom, in homes of want and misery, life's tragedies were real and fearful; life was real, indeed, life was earnest, indeed; at the top, however, pleasures claimed the senses and thoughts of men; so much so, that even tragedies served but to amuse; tragedies were an illusion of the senses, not realities of life and pain. What God had joined together man had put asunder--and there was art without life, life without art, and both art and life suffering from ailments which neither understood.

There was a time when men worked, too, but it was a beautiful halcyon time, when pleasure and joy throbbed in the very heart of the work itself; when a sunny serenity suffused life's profoundest seriousness. Art pervaded all life, active in all man's activities, present in every nook and corner whither his vagrant feet wandered. Indeed, art was the very life of man, revealing his strength, his freedom, his creativeness, with which he fashioned things after his own image and according to his own likeness. Every craftsman was an artist, every peasant a poet. Man put his soul into all that he said and did, all that he lived; his work was a work of art, his speech a song, his life beauty. No man lived by bread alone; everyone heard and had a word that was the True Bread. His cathedrals--domes of many-colored glass--preached it to him; his actors sang it to him; even his priests were artists. With a sort of divine humor, man thus subjected to himself all the anxiety and need of life.

Then, later, man came to think that he could live by bread alone. Even the True Bread came to be mere bread--public influence; political power. And then man's poor soul hungered. And when he longed for a Living Word that was not mere bread, he was given printer's ink and the "sacred letter" of the Bible. But this--ah, this was no soul's food. So the soul lost its soul. Then, as man had no soul to work with, he had to work with his head, his arms, his feet. Man ceased to be an artist who breathes his living soul into his life, an artist who illumined all the seriousness of life with the sunshine of his living love. Would he art, he could not make it, he had to buy it. Could he not buy it, he had to do without it. Thus, life became as jejune and rational as a Protestant service, where, to be sure, there was no priest more, but also no artist, only scribe and theologian--where religion became dogmatics, faith a sum in arithmetic, Christianity a documentarily deposited judicial process between God and man. To be sure, under certain circumstances, decoration and color, even pomp and magnificence, may be found in this church, but no living connection between the outward appearance of these churches and their inner and peculiar service. Thus, too, our private dwellings have lost living union between their appointments and their inmates. What all are curious to know about these houses is whether the men who dwell in them are rich or poor, not whether they have souls, and what lives in their souls, should they have any.

And because art had no soul of its own more, it became patronizing and mendicant--coquetting for the favors of the rich and powerful, sitting at their tables, perhaps even picking up the crumbs that fall beneath the tables. Art, ah, art sought bread--mere bread--and adopted the sorry principle that to get bread was the sacredest of all duties.

Art without life, life without art! Then came that mighty movement of spirits to bring art and life together again, to reconquer and recreate and reestablish a view of life in which man should learn to see and achieve beauty once yet again. Of that movement, Friedrich Nietzsche was the purest and intensest herald. Bold, fiery spirit, with words that burn, he uttered what had been for a long time a soul-burden of all deeper spirits. This burden of souls was that an art creation should go on in every human life as its highest and holiest calling; that, without the living effectuation of the artistic power of the human soul, all human culture would serve but beastliness and barbarity.

To this end our poet-philosopher returns to the Urgrund, the abyss of nature's life, from whose mysterious deep all tempestuous, wild impulses tumble forth and struggle for form and expression in man. It is life which seeks death in order to renew itself in the painful pleasure of its destruction, perceived but then by man in the thrill of delight which prepares the way for his most original eternal revelation. To breed pleasure from pain; to suck forces of life from the most shocking tragedies; to eavesdrop on the brink of the abysmal so as to fashion sweet phantoms in the divine intoxication of the soul,--this is music, this is art, in this, man struggles beyond and above his whole contradictory nature, transfigures death, creates forms and figures in which he celebrates his self-redemption from seriousness, from the curse of existence. Here, at last, art is no sport, no fiddle-faddle, but at once highest and gayest seriousness. It returns from the service of death which it has performed, to its life, which it receives from "every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." Herein lies the over-powering, the prophetic, in this Nietzschean preaching of art. It tells us that we are very far from comprehending life when we have but measured its length and breadth with yardstick and square; that nature is far different from what scholars have figured it out to be, or from what investigators have seen of it with telescope and microscope. It teaches us to listen to the old eternal murmurs of the spirit, whose sigh we hear indeed, but whence it comes and whither it goes we never know--murmurs and sighs which bring forth the elementary forces, instincts, passions, and friendships in man, which men fashion and shape, regulate and direct indeed, but whose coming and going, whose ebbing and flowing, is not within their power. Inspiration, divine in-breathing--a dead concept as applied by theologians to their Bible--comes into its own again in human nature as a whole, it is the true element in man's life, by virtue of which the soul feels within itself a creative life--its own proof that its dependence is no slave-service, but freedom; that its deepest suffering of pain is itself creative life, creative pleasure.

Is it, now, the tragic fatality of a sick soul, is it the demoniac play of a spirit of negation when precisely the very preacher of this grandiose art-prophecy goes astray in his own preaching, when he finally thrusts it from him, with shrill laughter? The poet-philosopher begins to think concerning his preaching! Art makes the thinker's heart heavy! Art ever speaks a language which thought cannot express. Art strikes chords in the human heart, and there are at once intimations of a Beyond of all thought. And the thinker of today has bidden good-bye to every Beyond of his thought. Nothing unthinkable was to be left for the feelings. So the thinker felt a stab in every art for his thinker's heart, a doubt whether he should hold fast to the incomprehensible or sell himself to the devil of the universally comprehensible. And this doubt becomes an open confession of sin in the Zarathustra poesy: poets--and Zarathustra himself was a poet--lie too much! It is adulterated wine which they set before the thirsty. They muddy all their streams so that they shall appear deep. Into the kingdom of clouds they go, and build their air-castles on all too airy foundations. Thus, Zarathustra, poet, grows weary of their lies; he is a bit tired even of himself. And so, now, this doubt-respecting art slips into the soul of even its most enthusiastic prophets--nor are they the worst artists at whose souls these doubts gnaw! To create a beautiful culture in which man shall receive a higher revelation of life, and mount to a higher stage of his development, to this, art which receives its consecration in dizziness and dream, is not yet called. In fact, these artists do lie too much! They seek life indeed, they hunger for life; but, because life is too living to them, too natural, they create an artificial glow in whose heat they think they first have life. Thus, the second deception becomes worse than the first. The devil of matter-of-fact prose is driven out by the beelzebub of over-stimulated nerves, and men flee from the monotony of every-day life to the refinement of sensibility, which art shall superinduce. Poets do lie too much, not because they tell us fairy tales--fairy tales could be the beautifulest, holiest truths! But because they simulate feelings they do not have--feelings which arise in them not naturally but narcotically! Sculptors, painters, do lie too much, not because they create forms and colors which no man's eyes have ever seen, but because they create their own selves unfaithfully--an alien life which they have somewhere inoculated themselves with and given out as their own. Even architects lie too much, because they compel their works to speak a foreign language, as if stone should be ashamed to speak as stone, wood as wood, iron as iron!

The Nietzschean doubt respecting art--today this has become a demand for truth in art and for truthfulness in the artist! And from these a third--the demand for simplicity! And all this is of a piece with the purpose to live a simple life.

Man does not live by bread alone. It is a living question for the sake of future humanity that our art shall give the True Bread to the heart of man, so that we may form a life in us and around us, a life whereon shall not repose the dead weight of a culture artificially burdened with a thousand anxieties and cares, but a life wherein man shall breathe freer, because he breathes the fresh free air of life itself. Beautiful life, artistic culture; this means the opposite of what many mean by it today--it means, not upholstered chairs, not more cushions and carpets, not motlier pictures on the walls, and not a pleroma of all varieties of ornaments overloading stands and tables, but it means a life full of soul, warm with the sunshine of love, it means that all man does, all that environs him, shall find through eye and ear the mystic pathway to the heart, to bear witness there of a joy and an ardor, of a freedom and a truth, inspiring men to cry: It is good to be here, let us build tabernacles! For such beautiful life, so little is required, yet so much! So little sumptuousness, so much soul! So little money, so much man!

Patriots

ON THE "7:50"

PARKE FARLEY

As you go in and out upon the train,
You're always reading poetry?

... Yes.
At first it slightly did embarrass me
To have the people stare,
Like you, over my shoulder,
Catching, as it were, a sudden flashing thigh,
Or gleam of sunlight on a truth laid bare,
Then sizing me up from the tail of the eye.
I used to shield the books, and myself, too,
But now I have grown bolder--I don't care ...
They say this morning train from Lake Forest to Chicago
Carries more money, more living money
Than any train of its length and size in the world.
There's the Club car, for Bridge, and then the Smoker,
And four or five other coaches.
It makes one feel rich merely to ride upon it ...

No, it's not Keats or Shelley--yes, well enough,
But these are living.
I like them young and strenuous,
And when I find one that has done with lies,
I send a word ...

"Change" at the Fine Arts Theatre

DEWITT C. WING

Your enthusiastic welcome of Change, published in the April number of THE LITTLE REVIEW, compelled me to see the play, and I hasten to report a memorable evening. Have you ever heard the hard, sharp, battering, hammering of an electric riveter used on a steel bridge? Change has a punch like that, and every punch is a puncture. No kind of orthodoxy can resist it.

I have never spent a dozy moment in the Fine Arts Theatre. I shall never forget Candida, Hindle Wakes, Miles Dixon, Prunella, Change, and other dramas and tragedies that I have witnessed there. I shall not even forget Cowards. Chicago some day will reproduce and expand the truth which a dozen plays have driven into the souls of people who have sat in that beautiful little room. Whatever the commercial outcome of an attempt to present beauty and truth as expressions of life, the management has already achieved a noble success. Hundreds of men and women will always remember the Fine Arts Theatre as an inner shrine of authentic art, where the furthermost reaches of the human spirit in the fiction of plays have touched and quickened the heart of reality.

Change represents an ever-new voice rising above the rattle of inevitable dogma and decay. It rings true to life. Even its name is profoundly appropriate as a label for an inexorable law. If a play reveals splendid thinking I am almost indifferent to what in that case becomes largely the incident of acting, for to be engrossed in enforced thought is to lose that narrow vision of the outward eye which merely looks on a performance. One is not then an onlooker but a discoverer. Change was hard, subtle thinking plus admirable interpretative acting. Like the Irish and English players who have appeared in the Fine Arts Theatre, the Welsh company who recently gave us this trenchant criticism of life endowed the word "acting" with a fresh significance. One does not think of them as players; they impress one as re-livers of the life that they portray. That is art of a high order. If we Americans are proud of our wealth and wonders, we must bow in humility when we consider that the biggest plays that we have seen and the best acting that we have witnessed are not of domestic authorship. They are imported, and we have enjoyed them at the Fine Arts Theatre in Chicago.

Change is in four acts, written by J. O. Francis. It was awarded the prize offered by the Incorporated Stage Society of London for the best play of the season. The scene is in a cottage on the Twmp, Aberpandy, in South Wales. The time is the present. A tragic change occurs in a family, whose head was a collier. It is a kind of drama that might inspire the private regret that the tragic martyrdom of Christian fanatics is no longer in vogue, and offers a species of justification of summarily removing human obstacles. Who among real men wouldn't have an impulse to take an active hand in ridding life of a suppressive old barnacle like John Price? He and his conscience and his God stood against the primal law of change, with blind passion and colossal selfishness. If his sons John Henry and Lewis had mangled him I should have admired their passion. Gwen Price, the wife and mother, suffered more than all because she was capable of suffering; I did not wish a change on her account; she was a woman. Her suffering and weakness were her triumph and strength. Besides, she was not at war with life as she saw it in her sons. Her love was great and wise enough to confer tragic beauty and adorn a soul; that kind of love is the supreme religion.

What John Price felt and expressed as religion was a contemptible mental narrowness and spiritual poverty; a counterfeit religion based upon fear and hardened by ceremonial practice. Its one virtue was that it offered the most formidable opposition to the unfolding of manhood in two young men. Youth is ever pushing its entangled feet down against the hard substrata of anterior generations. Too often it is stuck and gradually smothered in the upper mud, which solidifies as insidiously as it forms. A man who can be held by dying or dead impedimenta is himself dead. A man who struggles out and stands triumphant upon it, with the antennae of his being reaching up and out for the widest and finest contacts, fulfills destiny by adding a golden grain of solid value on which a succeeding aspirant for a larger life may stand that much higher on the old foundation. The man who conforms, remains in and a part of the common level, plastically flattens out like dough under a rolling pin, merely fulfills the law of the indestructibility of matter and the conservation of mass. Whereas youth's great dream is symbolized by the over-topping king of the forest, standing stiff-spined and straight upon the old earth, its head in rare aloofness, the ease-lover functions as a lowly parasite.

With wild winged thoughts of which these remarks are vague memories I took Change in my consciousness from the theatre. No thoughtful person could have returned unchanged from the playhouse. The transitoriness of religions, institutions, customs, and all other so-called fixtures which constitute modern civilization is the tremendous fact that makes Change a powerful supplement to social forces. Of course to the modern mind the idea is already old, but to the primitive majority it is a prophecy.

The author tempered his mild radicalism with the hard-headed sagacity of Sam Thatcher, a one-armed pointsman, who, while unintellectually aware of the changelessness of change, "figured it out" that life is cyclic; that as experience broadens the attitudes of men they lose their little individualities in a common resignation, defeat, and decay, which to him meant contentment. "I've been round the world some--round and round. That's how things go--round and round--I know, round and round." Sam thus epitomized an old theory which has so many supporters that it must be wrong. But if we do not go "round and round" in what direction do we go? Nobody knows. If our movement is circular there is the desperate possibility of sufficient momentum to gain new territory by virtue of centrifugal force. We can at least make the circle larger. Races have bloomed, fruited, and passed; planets have shone for an abbreviated eternity and disappeared; baffling facts about life-forms upon the earth have come to light. Our conscious life is young, densely ignorant, and full of pain; our instinctive life is ageless, has perfected its knowledge and can endure, as it has endured, the aeons of change. We shall some day get the idea of change into our consciousness.

Unthinkingly one might regret that Sam was clever enough to sway back toward dogma those wavering minds which might otherwise have yielded to the drama's punches. But his pathetically amusing romance should have made it clear to respectable auditors flirting with new ideas that he was not a competent critic of their particular class-slice of life. What he said was reassuring, assuaging, brilliantly trite, and an untroubled mind would take it and reject the austere, burning truth of the essential message of the play.

"Naught may endure but mutability": Shelley thus expressed what every educated man knows. Change is the unvarying order, and yet we are constitutionally averse to it. Comfortable people dislike it. "All great natures love stability." Why do we make John Prices of ourselves? (I think that H. G. Wells, more than any other literary man, has lived in consonance with the law of change.) An expanding knowledge precludes constancy. All John Prices are obscurantists. Convictions and blind faith based upon glorified ignorance have for thousands of years encysted, cramped, and twisted personal life, but somehow it has burst through the fetters and arrayed itself for successive struggles. Analyzing what we see and know, and confessing what we think we feel, we have the ancient riddle before us. We applaud a play like Change, but seek security and stability in every relationship. Eventually every man must feel what Rousseau wrote: "Everything in this world is a tangled yarn; we taste nothing in its purity, we do not remain two moments in the same state. Our affections, as well as bodies, are in perpetual flux." Maybe Sam Thatcher was wise, but if we knew that our life were cyclic the joy of it to us would cease. The wiser man does not know so much as Sam professed, but his endless endeavor is to try to know more. The law of change, which he sees enforced everywhere, increases his insatiability.

It is ultimate questions to which Change gives rise, and to such questions there are no satisfactory answers. The social value of the play lies in the graphic clearness with which it illustrates the slow but epochal shifts that are always under way in thinking individuals, families, and nations.

There is no Rock of Ages in the land of courageous knowledge. Nothing endures but mutability. The purpose of a play like Change is to open the inner mind to this glorious truth, so that with a fortitude born of understanding we may accept misfortune, calamity, and death as the effects of unalterable law, and not as donated penalties or inscrutable accidents. Poise, power, and personality are the fruits of this attitude toward change, and whoever achieves these has climbed out of the "reddest hell"

Armoured and militant,
New-pithed, new-souled, new-visioned, up the steeps
To those great altitudes whereat the weak
Live not.

Correspondence

The Vision of Wells

I should like to set "M. M.'s" mind at rest about H. G. Wells, but I can't quite understand what her objection to him really is. She seems to be in what the charming little old Victorian lady would have called "a state of mind." Something about Wells annoys her; she hasn't thought it out clearly, but she raps Wells wherever she can get at him, as a sort of personal revenge for her discomfort.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the passage she quotes from the hero really represents Wells's feeling about the relations between the sexes. He believes that "under existing conditions" there is always danger of love between men and women unless the man has one sole woman intimate, and lets "a superficial friendship toward all other women veil impassable abysses of separation." "M. M." wisely admits the truth of that--in fact, it's the most obvious of truisms. Then the hero--or Wells--goes on to say that this, to him, is an intolerable state of affairs. For this "M. M." calls him "wicked," and "Mr. M. M." accuses him of not being busy enough, and of not working for a living.

I wonder if "M. M." stopped to think exactly why the hero considers this an intolerable state of affairs. The statement means nothing more than that the man would like to have intimate friendships with more than one woman. He doesn't say he wants to love more than one woman. Well, it is easily conceivable that a man of active mind and companionability would like to have some degree of intimacy with various women. There doesn't seem to be anything wicked about that, and it's possible that he should feel so even if he was "working for a living." If we confine ourselves to one intimacy, we're likely to lose the full relish of it before many years. The thought of that is certainly intolerable. A man who is close to a good many people is usually better fitted to appreciate his best friend. A woman novelist who has a conspicuously successful marriage put it well the other day. "If you go into a room where there is a bunch of violets," she said, "you are charmed by the odor. If you stay in the room all the time, you forget about the odor--or it bores you. But if you are continually going out and coming in again, it greets you every time, and you learn to appreciate its subtleties." Perhaps "M. M." thinks that reason is begging the question. Well, take the other side. Any human being who is expanding has an insatiable desire for new experience, new knowledge. That is the healthiest instinct in mankind. Such a person would naturally fret at the inability to be intimate with a new acquaintance who interests him. That feeling would not be wicked; it would be right, by any sane standard.

Forgive the blatant obviousness of all this. But I'm bent on carrying through the discussion to the end. Granted, then, that our hero's feeling is not intrinsically wicked--what then? He faces a dilemma. Either he must run the risk of a new love affair, or--and this, I think, escaped "M. M."--present conditions must be changed. If he has a new love affair, he is at the least violating the Victorian lady's conventional morality, which says that every man must love not more than one woman as long as that woman lives. We come then to an extremely vital problem. On the one hand, is conventional morality desirable? On the other, can present conditions be so changed as to eliminate the danger? The solution of that problem is of great importance to anyone interested in human beings. If it can't be solved, it means that the man or woman must quench a right and healthy instinct along whichever line he or she chooses. And that's a bit of pessimism which a warm-hearted man like H. G. Wells doesn't want to accept without further investigation. That's the reason he wrote The Passionate Friends. He is engaged in the noble endeavor to do something at least toward freeing the great spirit of mankind from the network in which it is enmeshed. The history of that struggle is the history of human progress.

Perhaps it isn't necessary further to defend Mr. Wells for the sort of novels he writes. But I'd like to offer an illustration of the difference between Wells and the old-fashioned novelist. The old writer started with the conviction that certain laws and fundamental conditions were forever fixed, and must limit the destinies of his characters. He then works out his little story according to rules, and gets his effect by arousing in us pity for the misfortunes, hatred for the sins, and joy for the virtuous triumphs of his people. The tendency of the whole was to show us once more what the eternal verities were--and the result was highly "moral." Every character was an object lesson. Wells, on the other hand, is not a preacher, but a scientist. He starts with the conviction that, through lack of impartial investigation, we don't really know what the eternal verities are, or what power can be derived from them. His attitude is as far from the old writers' as is Mme. Curie's from the alchemists'. He attempts to free his mind from every prejudice. Then he begins his experiment, puts his characters in their retort under "controlled conditions," and watches what happens. What his characters do corresponds to fact as well as his trained mind can make it. The result may be negative or positive--but at least it is true, and, like all truth, it is really valuable.

"M. M." prejudges the case when she talks about denial, and building up character, and loyalty, and unselfishness. These things may demand her conclusion, and again they may not. At best they are means to an end. She may be right. But Wells is going ahead to find out. He isn't arguing for anything. We may be denying something we ought to have; we may be building the wrong kind of character; we may be loyal to a false principle; we may be unselfish with evil result. But if we cease to becloud the issue, and watch carefully the experiment of Mr. Wells and his followers, we shall know more about it than we do.

And, for a general toning of her mind, I should like to ask "M. M." to read The Death of Eve, by William Vaughn Moody, to pay particular attention to the majestic song of Eve in the garden, and after she has felt the tremendous impulse of that line--

Whoso denyeth aught, let him depart from here

to turn back to her words about denial, and see whether she still thinks denial is always synonymous with strength.

GEORGE SOULE.

Another View of "The Dark Flower"

It is with no desire to be carping that I offer this criticism of The Dark Flower, for I, too, am a devoted disciple who hangs on the master's lips; but being a skeptical modern woman withal, I am not abject. Perhaps we should be satisfied with what Galsworthy has given us--this searching vision into the soul of a rarely sensitive man. The writing of it--what we term style--is beyond doubt Galsworthy's most distinguished performance, far more poetical than any of his verse. Its material is invaluable for its sheer honesty as well as its sheer beauty. Its reality and intimacy are grippingly poignant. And yet how account for the pain of futility which sweeps over you as you close the book, drowning for the time the ecstasy of high joy in all its beauty? It is as if the heavy aroma of autumn's decay had invaded a garden in early spring.

Yes, there is something essentially futile about The Dark Flower. It lies so hidden in the warp and woof of the whole fabric that the casual reader passes it over unseen. I can best explain by referring to the novel itself. Each of the three episodes deals with Mark Lennan's passion for a woman: in his youth for an older woman, in his maturity for a woman his own age, in his approaching autumn for a young girl. And in all three passion--the great primal force--is made an illicit emotion. In the first two episodes the women are married; in the last, Lennan is. It is scarcely by chance that Lennan's loves were unlawful; on the contrary, a symbolic significance seems to be intended, that passion is natural, free, coming and going by tides unbound by man's will or law. But if that was Galsworthy's aim, he has run an unnecessary stretch beyond his goal. By his over-emphasis, passion becomes purposefully illicit, voluntarily seeking out the forbidden object and the secret passage. And instead of being the priceless inheritance from a free God, passion becomes an ailment laid upon us by some designing fate.

And now glance at the dénouement of each episode. In the first it is the woman who closes the little drama; Mark merely watches her go. In the second the woman's husband kills her, and Mark is left dazed. In the last his wife steps in and turns the current of events. Always an extraneous force makes the decision for him. He is never permitted to grapple with the situation created. Galsworthy forever extricates him. Not once is his passion allowed to run its course. Each experience is abortive. If I had been Mark Lennan I should have been tempted to curse the meddling fate that insisted upon rescuing me just before I jumped.

No, a woman would not have had her perfect moment with Mark Lennan, but only the promise of it.

Mark is a futile person; his love life a procession of futile experiences. But in spite of its futility it is an exquisite record for which I whole-heartedly give thanks.

MARGUERITE SWAWITE.

Dr. Foster's Articles on Nietzsche