Chapter II (2)

An expression of peace rested over him—peace and detachment. Of the noise and babble he heard nothing. His eyes were closed to the crowded frantic street.

He sat, his head back, his face bathed in the sun, smileless and dreaming.

“A beggar,” thought Moisse, “asleep, oblivious. Dead. All day he sits in the sun like a saint, immobile. Like one of the old Alexandrian ascetics, like a delicately carved image. He is awake in himself but dead to others. The waves cannot touch him. His thoughts, oh to know his thoughts and his dreams?”

Suddenly the eyes of the young dramatist widened. He was looking at the beggar’s long hair that hung to his neck.

“It’s moving,” he whispered half aloud. He came closer and stood over the old man and gazed intently at the top of his head.

The hair was swaying faintly, each separate fiber moving alone....

It shifted, rose imperceptibly and fell. It quivered and glided....

“Lice,” murmured Moisse.

He watched.

Silent and asleep the old man sat with his thin face to the sun and his hair moved.

Vermin swarmed through it creeping, crawling, tiny and infinitesimal.

Every strand was palpitating, shuddering under their mysterious energy.

At first Moisse could hardly make them out but his eyes gradually grew accustomed to the sight. And as he watched he saw the hair swell like waves riding over the water, saw it drop and flutter, coil and uncoil of its own accord.

Vermin raised it up, pulled it out, streaming up and down tirelessly in vast armies.

They crawled furiously like dust specks blown thick through the white beard.

They streamed and shifted and were never still.

They moved in and out, from no place to no place, but always moving, frantic, and frenzied.

An old woman passed and with a shake of her head dropped two pennies into the upturned hat. Moisse hardly saw her. He saw only the palpitating swarms that were now racing, easily visible, through the grey white hair.

Some ventured down over the white ascetic face, crawling in every direction, traveling around the lips and over the closed eyes, emerging suddenly in thick streams from behind the covered ears and losing themselves under the ever moving beard.

And Moisse, his senses strained, thought he heard a noise—a faint crunching noise.

He listened.

The noise seemed to grow louder. He began to itch but he remained bending over the head. He could hear them, like a faraway murmur, a purring, uncertain sound.

“They’re shouting and groaning, crying out, weeping and laughing,” he mused. “It is life ... life....”

He looked up and down the crowded burning street with its frantic crowd, and smiled.

“Life,” he repeated....

He walked away. Before him floated the hair of the beggar moving as if stirred by a slow wind, and he itched.

“But who was the old man?” he thought.

A young woman, plump and smiling, jostled him. He felt her soft hip pressing against him for a moment.

A child running barefoot through the street brushed against his legs. He felt its sticky fingers seize him for an instant and then the child was gone. On he walked.

Three young men confronted him for a second time. He passed between two of them, squeezed by their shoulders.

A shapeless old woman bumped him with her back as she shuffled past.

Two children dodged in and out screaming and seized his arm to turn on.

The young dramatist stopped and remained standing still, looking about him.

Then he laughed.

“Life,” he murmured again; and

“I am the old man,” he added, “I ... I....”

Depths

Crowds began to come out of the buildings.

They came in streams and broad waves, breaking in a black sweep over the pavements and spreading into a thick long mass that moved forward. The glassy lights cut the twilight drizzel with their yellow fire. The tumult grew until up and down the street an unceasing din sounded, shrieking, roaring, clanging noises.

Moisse, the young dramatist, stood against one of the office buildings as the throngs spilled past him on their ways home. His eyes were fixed on the distant gloom of the sky which hung beyond the drizzel and the fuzzy glare of light like a vast black froth.

“It is so silent,” mused Moisse. “Millions of miles without a sound. Man and his accomplishments are infinitesimal,” went on the young dramatist as the swelling throng brushed and buffeted against him, “but his ego is infinite. Only by thought can he reach the stars.”

He was thoughtless for a moment, holding his position with difficulty as the crowds pressed past. Then he resumed:

“None of them looks at me. None of them imagines I am thinking of the stars. How startled these fat evil-smelling men and women would be if they could see my thought for a moment as they crashed along their tiny ways. But nevertheless I don’t eat tonight,” he murmured suddenly, as if awakening. And the idea plunged him into a series of reflections from which he emerged with a frown and looked about him.

A short thick man with an unshaven face was shuffling past. His skin was broken under his growth of beard with red and purple sores. His mouth hung open, his eyes stared ahead of him and his head was bent forward. Moisse thought of the body concealed by the layers of caked rags which covered the man, and shuddered.

“He never bathes,” mused the young dramatist. “I wonder what a creature like that does.” And he followed him slowly.

At the corner the man stopped and blew his nose violently with his fingers. Another block and he stopped again, bending over in the midst of the crowd and straightening with a cigar butt in his hand. He eyed the thing critically. It was flattened at the end where feet had passed over it. The man thrust it between his lips and shuffled on.

In a vestibule he extracted a blackened match from his pocket and with shaking fingers lighted the butt. When it burned he blew a cloud of smoke, and taking it out of his mouth regarded it with satisfaction.

Several in the throng noticed him, their eyes resting with disapproval and sometimes hate upon the figure. Once a crossing policeman spied him and followed him with his gaze until he was lost to view.

Moisse kept abreast of him and together they turned into an alley that led behind a hotel. The man’s eyes never wavered, but remained fixed in the direction he was moving.

The alley was dark. In the court that ran behind the hotel were several large, battered cans that shone dully against the black wall. Debris littered the ground. Looking furtively at the closed doors the man made his way to one of the cans.

He lifted the cover cautiously and thrust his arm into its depths. For several minutes he remained with his arm lost inside the refuse can.

“He’s found something,” whispered Moisse.

The man straightened. In his hand he held an object on which sparks seemed to race up and down like blue insects.

He raised his find to his face and then thrust it into his pocket and resumed his shuffle down the alley.

“To think,” mused Moisse, “of a man eating out of a garbage can. Either he is inordinately hungry or careless to a point of ... of....”

He searched for a word that refused to appear and he followed slowly after the man. In the dim light of a side street the man paused and took out his booty. It was evidently the back of a fowl.

Standing still the man thrust it into his mouth, gnawing and tearing at its bones. After he had eaten for several minutes he held it up to the light and started picking at shreds of meat with his fingers. These he licked off his hand.

The meal was at length finished. The man threw the gleaned bones away, blew his nose and walked on.

Through the dark tumbled streets Moisse followed. The shuffling figure fascinated him. He noted the gradually increasing degradation of the neighborhood, the hovels that seemed like torn, blackened rags, the broken streets piled with refuse and mud.

In front of a lighted house the man stopped. The curtains which hung over the two front windows of the house were torn. One of them was half destroyed and Moisse saw into the room in which a gas jet flickered and which was empty.

The man walked up the steps and knocked at the door. It was opened.

“A woman,” whispered Moisse.

She vanished, and the man followed her. The two appeared in a moment in the room with the gas light.

The woman was tall and thin, her hair hung down her back in two scimpy braids. Her face was coated with paint and great hollows loomed under her eyes.

The man walked to her, his open mouth widened in a grin.

“They’re talking,” murmured the young dramatist as he watched their haggard faces move strangely. He noted the woman was dressed in a wrapper, colorless and streaked.

“I wonder—” he began, but the scene captured his attention. He watched absorbed. The woman was shaking her head and backing away from the man who finally halted in the center of the room.

He lifted a foot from the floor and removed its shoe. Standing with the shoe in his hand his eyes glistened at the woman who watched him with her neck stretched forward and a sneer on her lips.

The man put his hand in the shoe and brought out a coin.

“A twenty-five cent piece,” muttered Moisse.

The man held it up in his fingers and laughed. His face distorted itself into strange wrinkles when he laughed. Moisse who could not hear the laugh saw only an imbecilic grimace. The woman took the coin, and left the room.

She returned in a moment holding out her arms to the man.

He seized her, crushing her body against him until she was bent backward. He pressed his face over her, his mouth still open, his eyes staring.

The woman stared back and laughed, fastening her lips suddenly to his.

Losing his balance, the man staggered and the woman broke from his grasp. He pounced on her, seizing her hand and jerking her against him.

As she held back he raised his fist and struck her fiercely in the face. She swayed for an instant and then stood quiet.

Her lips began to smile and move in speech. The man shook his head rapturously, rubbing his nose with a finger and panting.

Moisse turned away and walked slowly toward the town.

“Good God,” he murmured, “he’ll take his clothes off and she....”

His emotions began to trouble him. An unrest stirred his body.

“I should have gone in there and taken her away from him,” he mused, and then with a shudder he walked on—smiling.

Gratitude

The avenue bubbled brightly under the grey rain.

The afternoon crowd had melted from the sidewalk, washed into hallways and under awnings by the downpour.

It began to look like evening. A refreshing gloom settled over the street.

The wind leaped out of alley courts and byways and raced over the pavement accompanied by spattering arpeggios of rain.

Moisse, the young dramatist, turned into the avenue. His voluminous black raincoat, reaching from his ears to his shoe tops, flapped in front of him.

By exercising the most diligent effort, however, he managed rather to saunter than walk, and he kept his eyes raptly fixed upon the deserted stretch of shining cement.

As he moved peacefully along he repeated to himself:

“The rain leaps and pirouettes like a chorus of Russian elves. It jumps. It bounces. It hops, skips, and runs. Flocks of little excited silver birds are continually alighting around my feet and chattering in a thousand voices. I should have been a poet.”

Removing his gaze from the ground he looked at the faces which lined the buildings and floated like pale lamps in the darkened vestibules.

“Everyone is watching me,” he thought, “for in my attitude there is the careless courage of an unconscious heroism. I stroll along indifferent to the rain. It splashes down my neck. It takes the crease out of my trousers. It trickles off the brim of my hat.

“And all this stamps me momentarily in these afflicted minds as an unusual human.

“That one with the monogomistic side-whiskers is wondering what a queer fellow I am.

“What can it be that engrosses my attention to the point of making me so oblivious to the rain?

“And that fat woman with the face like a toy balloon is certain I will catch my death of cold.

“The little girl with the wide eyes thinks I am in love.

“There is an infinite source of speculation in my simple conduct.”

The water was making headway down the back of his neck, but Moisse hesitated and then abstained from adjusting his collar more firmly.

“They will notice it,” he thought, “and immediately I will lose the distinctive aloofness which characterizes me now.”

So moving leisurely down the avenue Moisse, the young dramatist, progressed, his eyes apparently unconscious of the scene before him, his soul oblivious to the saturated world, and his mind occupied with distant and mysterious thoughts.

The downpour began to assume the proportions of a torrent. Moisse persisted in his tracks.

Someone touched his elbow.

He turned and found a little old man with faded eyes and threadbare, dripping clothes smiling earnestly at his side.

The little old man was bent in the shoulders. His shirt had no collar. His brown coat was buttoned to his neck.

His face screwed up by a sensitiveness to the cataract of drops beating against it, was round and full of wrinkles.

It had the quizzical, goodnatured look of a fuzzy little dog.

His wet eyes that seemed to be swimming in a red moisture peered at Moisse who was frowning.

“I’m hungry,” began the little old man, “I ain’t had anything to eat—”

“How much do you want?” inquired Moisse.

“Anything,” said the beggar.

The young dramatist felt in his pocket. A single half-dollar encountered his fingers.

“I’ve only got a half-dollar,” he said, “I’ll get it changed. Come on.”

The two of them walked in silence, Moisse still sauntering, the little old man bent over and looking as if he wanted to speak but was afraid of dissipating a dream.

“Wait here,” Moisse said suddenly, “I’ll go in and get change.”

He stepped into the box office of one of the large moving-picture theaters on the avenue and secured change.

The little old man had followed him inside the building, his eyes watching him with an eager curiosity.

Moisse turned with the change to find the beggar at his elbow.

He handed him fifteen cents.

“What’s the matter?” he inquired. “Been drinking?”

“No, no,” said the beggar.

“Why haven’t you?” persisted Moisse frowning; “don’t you know there’s nothing for you but drink. That’s what drink is for. Men like you.”

The faded eyes livened.

“Now you go and get yourself three good shots of booze,” went on Moisse, “and you’ll be a new man for the rest of the day.”

The beggar had become excited.

His lips moved in a nervous delight but he uttered no sound. With the fingers of his right hand he picked at the blackened and roughly-bitten nails of his other. He cleared his throat and then as if suddenly inspired, removed his drenched hat and raised his eyebrows.

Touched by the sincerity of the little old man’s emotions the young dramatist reached into his pocket and brought forth another ten cent piece.

“Here,” he said, “buy two more drinks.”

The little man seemed about to break into a dance. His face became tinged with the pink of an old woman’s cheek.

The red moisture ran out of his eyes in two white tears. Moisse regarded him, frowning.

“Once you were young as I am today,” said Moisse aloud, fastening his eyes upon the top of the little old man’s head which seemed dirty and bald despite the pale hair, and alive.

“Perhaps you had ambitions and then some commonplace occurred and you lost them. And now you float around begging nickles. That’s interesting. A little old man begging nickles in the rain.”

The beggar smiled eagerly and then ventured a slight laugh.

He came closer to Moisse and stood trembling.

“Asking for crumbs,” went on Moisse with a deepening frown, “cursed at night when alone by memories that will not die. Eh?” He looked suddenly into the faded eyes and smiled.

The little old man nodded his head vigorously. He caught his breath and stood looking at Moisse with his mouth open and his cheeks wrinkled as if he were about to cry.

His breath struck the young dramatist and he averted his nose.

“Strange,” resumed he, “now you have a quarter and I have a quarter and still we remain so different. Isn’t it strange, old fellow? Yet it is the inevitable inequality of men that makes us brothers.”

The beggar was about to speak. Moisse paused and looked with interest at the round face, the quivering nostrils and the lips that were twitching into speech.

“No one has talked to me like you,” he said, “no one.”

And he caught his breath and stared with a strange expression at his benefactor.

He bit at a finger nail and lowered his head. He seemed suddenly in the throes of a great mental struggle for his face had become earnest.

It endured for a moment and then he looked at Moisse.

“You—you want me to come along with you,” he said and he scratched at the back of his ear.

“I’ll come along if you want me to,” he repeated.

“Come along? Where?” Moisse asked, his eyes awakening.

“Oh, anyplace,” said the little old man. “I ain’t particular, if you ain’t.”

He was breathing quickly and he reached for the palm of his patron.

A deep light had come into his face. His faded eyes had grown stronger. Their quizzical look was gone and they were burning in their wet depths.

They looked now with a maternal intensity into the eyes of Moisse and their smile staggered the sophistication of the young dramatist.

The little old man continued to breathe hard until he began to quiver.

He suddenly assumed command.

“Come,” he said, seizing Moisse by the palm and squeezing it. “I know a place we can go and get a room cheap and where we won’t be disturbed. It ain’t so nice a place but come.”

He squeezed the palm he held for the second time.

The deep light that had come into his little dog’s face softened and two tears rolled again out of his eyes.

He caught his breath in a sob.

“I—I don’t drink,” he said; “I’m hungry—but I can wait ... until we get through.”

He was beaming coquettishly through his tears and fondling the young dramatist’s hand.

“I can wait,” he repeated, raising his blue lips toward Moisse, his face transfigured and glowing pink.

“I see,” said Moisse, withdrawing his hand with an involuntary shudder. He was about to say something but he turned, again involuntarily, and hurried away, breaking into a run when he found himself in the rain.

The little old man’s face drooped.

He walked slowly staring after him.

He stood bareheaded while the rain bombarded his drenched figure and he looked at the young dramatist running.

While he stood gazing after him his face screwed up was suffused with a strange tenderness and the tears dripped out of his eyes.

Editorials and Announcement

_Emma Goldman at the Fine Arts Theatre_

Beginning Sunday night, November 21, Emma Goldman is to deliver nine new lectures in the most interesting playhouse in town—the Fine Arts Theatre, Chicago home of the Irish Players and Miss Horniman’s company and Miss Barnsdall’s Players’ Producing company, etc. The complete list of lectures will be found on page 44.

The first, on “Preparedness”—well, if you heard the Powys-Browne debate last Sunday night and agree with Margery Currey that Mr. Browne struck the roots of the issue, then I _beg_ you to hear Emma Goldman. Mr. Browne said something about the real issue being whether people would rather kill or be killed. I could scarcely believe my ears.... If you once listen to Emma Goldman talking of fundamentals you can never fall for sentimentalizations again.

_Will Our Readers Help?_

There is a beautiful plan on foot to help THE LITTLE REVIEW live through its third year. It is this:

If our readers will order their books through the Gotham Book Society we will receive a certain percentage on all the sales. This arrangement has been made with the publishers, so that any book you want, whether listed in our pages or not, may be procured at the same price for which it is on sale at your local bookseller’s—and sometimes even less than that. You will find full particulars on page 50 of this issue.

Radical magazines do not become popular, and the problem of meeting the cost of production every month is really a desperate one. If there is a good response to this plan we ought to make the bulk of our publishing cost out of it, and then we can devote our energies to the improvement of the magazine’s quality. Will you please keep this in mind when ordering your books? It will mean such a tremendous thing to us!

_The Russian Literature Class_

In reply to many inquiries about the group for the study of Russian literature, we are glad to announce that the idea is in the process of realization. Early in January the group will meet, and will proceed to attend the regular lectures. The course will be offered by a Russian, who is well known to the readers of THE LITTLE REVIEW. Those willing to join the adventure are asked to send their names and addresses to 834 Fine Arts Building.

John Cowper Powys on War

MARGERY CURREY

It was a quite, quite dreadful jolt that shook the John Cowper Powys cult on the night of the debate between the master and Maurice Browne of the Little Theatre. The great one, appearing robed in black, through his Delphic, released, blinding vapor clouds of infallible utterance, was to devastate the suggestion that war is evil, avoidable, and should not be prepared for by military methods. Maurice Browne was to defend the suggestion.

Scarce half a moon before had the first murmuring of discontent arisen among the worshipers of the temple, when their idol, beautiful, mordant, flaming, strode forth in flapping black garments and proclaimed that in this great war of many nations “the gall and vitriol and wormwood and uncleanness of mankind are burned, purged from the purified flesh of humanity; that then humanity is transformed, until the passion of hate is hardly distinguishable from the passion of love.”

The master himself was the glorious vulture of war. Looming there on the stage of the Little Theatre, black, huge, alone under a vast orange sky heavily streaked with black, a violet light from somewhere touching the crimson of his face—and beside him in that great lonely cosmos an iridescent emerald bowl upon a high ivory pedestal. That little, little iridescent bowl, the ivory, the vast peace of a universe, no coagulating clots hanging from the shreds of bodies torn and entangled in the barbed wire meshes of the trenches, no cries—only one huge black moving thing there.

“War a great evil and an unmitigated wrong? I cannot see it. A pacifist struggle for existence is only a meaner struggle. They are fools who think it advisable or possible to stamp out war; they are knaves if, thinking this possible or advisable, they still go on a pacifist crusade.”

Followed then the picture of a well-managed nation during war, a regime of exalted socialism—the pooling of all moneys, the raising of the income tax, the rich paying for the needs of the poor; she who was once thought a bedraggled hussy of London’s east end now become a savior of her country, in her potential gift of a son to the recruiting office of her country; the high price now set on flesh and blood, even that of the most humble.

Well, all this heroic joy and thin-ice socialism—it was announced at the end of the evening that the week after the subject would be Walt Whitman. Thank heaven! Let his people listen to John Cowper Powys on Walt Whitman. Of these he should speak—of Walt Whitman, of Oscar Wilde, of Huysmans and Richepin and Milton and Ficke and Baudelaire and Goethe and Shakespeare. On these he speaks divinely. Peace and war indeed!

And the debate? There stood Maurice Browne in valiant opposition, really “the idealist and fanatic” as his opponent called him, not adding “the clear thinker,” the rejector of temptations to revel in obvious and facile romanticisms on the sweet decorum of dying for one’s country, with all the talk of defending one’s beloved from the hand of the ravager. There were even those who understood Mr. Browne when his bravery and his prophetic sight let him dare to say such things as “It is better to be killed than to kill. To refrain from a combat of violence when the victims might be your dearest ones is not to put a finger in the cogs of God’s orderly universe. It is a question of looking the God that is within you in the face.” As for the merits of the debate, the matter of war and its avoidableness was not touched on in its practical aspects, except by one who presided over the meeting and in three intelligent moments discussed the economic and the proved sides of war. THE LITTLE REVIEW is no tract, and we may pass that by as understood.

And after it all, out of an audience of two hundred and twenty—when they overflowed the Little Theatre they trooped to the Fine Arts Assembly Room—eighty-four stood up to announce their conviction that war is not evil, not avoidable, and should be prepared for by military methods, and some sixty others stood up to indicate their opposite conviction! The vote was on the merits of the question.

The Theatre

THE WASHINGTON SQUARE PLAYERS

SAXE COMMINS

Were I a self-appointed apologist for the Washington Square Players I might be able to say with gracious fairness that “their works are not worth as much as their endeavors but their endeavors are heroic.” But I am not inclined to pardon these enthusiasts whose enthusiasm has become cautious, whose ideals are inoffensive, whose outlines are blurred by an undiscerning dilettantism, who in the absence of a dominant individual characteristic flounder helplessly through an unbalanced, inartistic program, that is only relieved, fortunately, by Mr. Phil Moeller’s delicious satire _Helena’s Husband_.

“It is not from what you emancipate yourself, it is for what.”—Let us see whether the Washington Square Players have really liberated themselves from the Broadway tradition of “getting it over,” from the sacrifice of the artistic for the opportune, and from the fear of offending the generous critics of the New York Press and incidentally a gullible public. “What have they done that has an element of daring, invigorating thought,” was asked of one of the members of the producing staff. “_My Lady’s Honor_, one of last year’s plays,” was his answer. To those who were unfortunate enough to have seen this pseudo-feminist tract—George Broadhurst supplanting Ibsen in a free theatre—I need not tell what resentment that remark aroused. Nor could those who saw _Moondown_ on the same bill be more antagonized than I was when I heard so fatuous a statement as “If we had more plays like _Moondown_ we would establish the equivalent in America to the Celtic renaissance.” Is this “for what” the Washington Square Players have emancipated themselves? Even if _Moondown_ had any value in itself would they deserve any credit for an aspiration that is only a conditional imitation? I take these casual expressions of members of the organization critically because there is a most noticeable absence of persistent, highly individualized effort, because there is a majority rule, the odorlessness of an insipid mixture prevalent in the atmosphere about the Band Box. They are successful—unfortunately.

Consider the present bill. Has the play-reading committee shown any distinction that differentiates it from those Broadway theatrical agencies that supply syndicated thrills on demand? Have they not arranged their programme without any regard for balance, to the vaudeville formula in this manner: One curtain-raiser on a current topic—of course the war; one play cut and measured for the star, a misfit, to prepare you for the middle piece, in this instance an amazingly clever satire by Phil Moeller; and then the end-up—(Yes, they have outgrown Broadway; they don’t wave a big American flag as a grand finale number)—in this spirit: “wouldn’t a fancifully pagan thing be very nice to show that we have a conception of the beautiful?” Voilà—the whole is the sum of its parts, mathematically accurate, yes; but “who knows whether two and two don’t make five” in the science of Esthetics, if there is such a thing.

Where, I cannot understand, is their proclaimed aspiration of finding plays which fulfill the artistic merit that they would lead us to believe the New York theatre-goer demands? If there is such a public, do they think and choose for them secure in the belief that the patient supporters of these sterile Little Theatre movements will abide such exploitation? Is their complacency so complete that they can disregard every requirement that a “New Theatre” movement imposes and yet get away with it? When I use the term “New Theatre” I mean it in the Strindbergian sense, a new and thoroughly iconoclastic theatre that panders to no opinion, whose merit lies solely in an individual and artistic distinction, a theatre that has something of the “continual slight novelty.”

_Fire and Water_, the opening play of the bill by Hervey White, is a sacrifice of art to the god of timeliness, an inane argument, an undramatic episode, a virtuous plea against War that permits its author to air some abstractions on brotherhood and equality with utter disregard for the tenseness or the dramatic possibilities of the situation. Broadway knows better. They, at least, are both opportune and spectacular and do not pour forth so much of what Nietzsche calls “moralic acid.”

_Night of Snow_, by Roberto Bracco, seems chosen ostensibly to allow Mr. Ralph Roeder to cover as great an area of the stage as is possible in forty-five minutes of monotonous gesture to the melodious obligato of a voice ranting second-rate Hamlet self-lacerations. It tells the story of a person half gentleman, half derelict, who likes to cry about it while his mistress and mother indulge themselves to satiation with sickly sweet sacrifice. “I am his Mo-ho-ther” etcetera. What a relief was Moeller’s play—a play that could not even be contaminated by its environment. I think Anatole France would be glad to have written it. _Helena’s Husband_ is much more than an historical interpretation of a phase of the Trojan wars. It is the truth! Moeller is more than clever. He knows as well as France that “history is a pack of lies.”

_The Antick_, by Percy Mackaye, is a devitalized Pagan attempt which in spite of charming Lupokova was extremely tedious. I heard little of it, so poor was the enunciation of the actors, and for my concentrated attention I was rewarded with an incoherent effort to transplant Pan to barren, colorless New England. I wonder whether Mr. Mackaye ever read Pater’s _Denys L’Auxerrois_?

At least the Washington Square Players presume to desire, even though it be in a misdirected manner. Will they overcome the affable praise that they get so generously from uncritical critics? Will they mature sufficiently to recognize the mistakes of their infancy? There is still hope that they can be saved from success. Where is the strong, perhaps tyrannical, individual who can do it?

“Lithuania”

Whoever hasn’t seen the Little Theatre’s production of Rupert Brooke’s _Lithuania_ has missed an excellent although unimportant dramatic treat. It is the most “effective” thing of its kind I ever have seen executed in Chicago. It is one prolonged and unrelieved shudder from start to finish.

Rupert Brooke is the hero of the occasion. His play is the thing. The theme is that of the guest who stops over in an outlying peasant hut and is murdered in his chamber while he sleeps. Brooke added a flourish in making the guest a returned son of the house who vanished when he was thirteen. Taking this hackneyed idea Brooke moulded it with consummate skill. And the result is a study in horror and pathology, vivid, artistic and for its effect upon the audience to be compared only to the witnessing of a child birth. Three of its actors rose to its demands. Mrs. Browne as the lame daughter contributed practically all the human atmosphere there was. Miriam Kiper abetted her. Allan MacDougall, in the part of a half-witted son of a tavern keeper, added a few excellent moments. The other men were, however, entirely unsuccessful in their efforts. Maurice Browne, as the peasant father, failed with the rest of them to give the impression the play demanded, sullen, grim, virile, despondency. But it was there, despite them.

An Objection

Why is it people have such stupid reactions to the plays put on by the Chicago Little Theatre? I do not know. It is easy to explain why they talk in subdued tones while entering; why they almost walk on tip-toe; why they ask for the programs almost with awe; and why, sometimes, they stop their chatter as the lights are slowly dimmed. The causes of these actions and their explanation are obvious. And yet—after the play! What inane, half-witted remarks about the bill! This “notice” printed above about the opening bill of their fourth season—what is it worth as a piece of criticism, as a review, or even as an account of the proceedings it so tritely and knowingly pretends to explain? “Mrs. Browne as the lame daughter.... Miriam Kiper abetted her. MacDougall ... added a few excellent moments.... Maurice Browne ... failed with the rest of them.” What rot! In watching Brooke’s play you are not aware that you are watching “Mrs. Browne as the lame daughter” or Miriam Kiper as the mother, MacDougall as the son of an inn-keeper, or Mr. Browne as the father. You do not find time to bother about that part of your reaction. Your subjection to play and players is too strong and tense. It is the usual thing to bother after the play, questioning members—who played this role?—who played that role? And then, after hours or days of weighing and shallow balancing, write a “review.” Again I question: Why do people react so stupidly to the plays at this theatre? This is not the adequate or honest way to view a play like Brooke’s or acting like the Little Theatre company’s. In this play even as in _The Trojan Women_ they have closely approached that losing themselves in the “impersonal ideal” or “one tradition” of which Mr. Powys spoke so white-heatedly in a former article in THE LITTLE REVIEW. Except for MacDougall and for Moseman, who are _always_ MacDougall and Moseman, we were watching a play—and forgot to gather the ingredients and essentials of the inevitable review.

Book Discussion

An Inspired Publisher

To paraphrase the biblical adage: Samson is upon ye, Philistines! That quaint giant, Russian literature, is storming the Anglo-Saxon world; and no longer in apothecary doses, in solitary books, but in avalanches. A practical dreamer, Alfred A. Knopf, is determined to deluge this country with the best and nearly best that has been written in Russia, and he is doing it on a big scale, in torrents and showers. Such a dizzying list of publications: Gogol, Goncharov, Lermontov, Gorky, Andreyev, Garshin, Kropotkin; and he is going to give us Sologub, Kuzmin, Ropshin! And he has given us Przybyszewski’s _Homo Sapiens_, the book about which I have been drumming the ears of my American friends for years, the book that has stirred me more than any other work of art,—I mean it literally. Mr. Knopf has introduced another novel feature on the book-market: he selects translators from among those who know three things—Russian, English, and how to write,—so that the reader will be spared the torture of wading through a badly-done translation from the French version of a German translation from the Russian (examples? Recall _Sanine_!).

A literature is like a people; if you want to know it, you must learn not only its Cromwells and Napoleons, but also its Asquiths and Vivianis; not only its Shakespeares and Goethes, but its Wellses and Sudermanns as well. Turgenyev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, do not exhaust Russian literature of the nineteenth century, though they are the greatest novelists of their epoch. There are many interesting sides of Russian life which are not reflected on the canvasses of the great Trio, but have been painted by perhaps minor artists, whom we cannot afford to miss if we intend to gain a clear vista of that peculiar life and its peculiar literature.

Hence Goncharov and his _Precipice_. In Russia he is ranked next to Turgenyev. Without the latter’s delicate lyricism Goncharov presents the objective artist, if this is possible, in depicting the life of the gentry, the class that has been either ignored or caricatured by the writers with a _Tendenz_. In _Precipice_ we face Rayski, Vyera, the grandmother, the passing types of the romantic nobility, whose passions and tragedies are as stirring and as human as those of the more democratic elements of society.

Garshin is another writer heretofore unknown to the English world. His _Signal and other Stories_ are achingly Russian. Garshin is a product of the Eighties, the epoch of “petty deeds,” when the heavy boot of Alexander III. drove into the underground all that was idealistic in his country. The soil-less _Intelligentzia_ had the alternative of turning retrogrades or going insane. Garshin’s lot was with the latter category. His few stories ache with the black melancholy which finally hurled him down a flight of stone steps,—his last flight. His war impressions are gripping with the resigned Russian sadness; they are all-human, universal; but _Attalea Princeps_, the symbolical tale of an exotic plant chafing in a hot-house—who but a compatriot of mad Garshin will fathom its profound tragicness!

The republication of Kropotkin’s _Ideals and Realities in Russian Literature_ will be of service to the critical student of Russian literature. I say critical, for although the book is rich in material the personal views of the author and his valuations of the writers are considerably obsolete and tainted with the liberalistic tendency of “problem”-friends.

Below are more reviews of Mr. Knopf’s publications. The most important one is Przybyszewski’s _Homo Sapiens_. It deserves a special article. See the next issue!

Homo Monstrosus

_Taras Bulba, by Nicolai Gogol. New York: Alfred A. Knopf._

They burned him at the stake, bound to a great tree in iron chains. The flames lapped at his feet, glowing into his old face that was scarred and leathered with battle, brightening the silver of his fierce mustache....

Out of the reddened shadows that fell over him like a mantle his lips could be seen curling in a smile, contemptuous and arrogant, and he turned his eyes toward the Dnyeper where the boats of his brothers were pulling away under a rain of lead.

“Farewell, comrades,” he shouted to them; “remember me, and come hither again next spring to make merry!”

And then he turned to the Lyakhs against whom he had waged war and who knew him as the raven of the steppe.

The fire had risen above the faggots and the great tree was burning. Out of the flames came the voice of the hero....

“A Tzar shall arise from the Russian soil and there shall not be a Power in the world which shall not submit to him.”

Thus died Taras Bulba, kazak.

In this day when a man’s skin is his most greedily guarded possession and the lisping of pale, pretty words his greatest glory, Taras Bulba comes charging into America, a figure in need. On his black horse he comes, his scalp lock flying in the wind, his sword waving in great circles above his head, his body leaning over the shining neck of his steed and his voice ringing with the battle whoop of the kazak.

He is the eternal warrior, the plundering hero, the lusty knight of battle, a devil of a man with boiling blood in his veins and the savage joy of life in his heart.

Taras and his two sons, Andrii and Ostap, go thundering up and down the Russian steppe with the savage avalanche of the Zaporozhe. They fight and carouse and their deeds are mighty—mightier than the deeds of which Homer sang and the performances which Walter Scott sketched. Beside Taras Ivanhoe pales into tin puppet, Ulysses into a lady’s man.

What a book!

If you know Gogol through his _Dead Souls_, the “humorous” classic of Russia, you will read in amazement his _Taras Bulba_. It is Rabelais with a sword. Through its pages ring the shouts of battle and Gargantuan manhood—Homo Monstrosus....

Once or twice the pale face of a woman peeps out of them and Gogol kicks it back into place with his kazak boot.

“Do you want fire, Ostap? Do you want mad blood in your heart? Come ride with me over the steppe to the tents of the Zaporozhe....”

When I closed the book with its red shouts still ringing in my ears—with old Taras still burning against the great tree and the magic steppe stretching before me—I thought of the baby-ribbon bards and the querulous quibblers of American letters—and smiled....

Come on, Bulba, there is still blood in America that has not dried, there are still hearts that have not been transformed into pink doilies.

Welcome! You can’t shout too loud for me, you can’t swagger too much. The soul of you that left your burning body laughed and roared its way into heaven....

Gorky at His Best and Worst

_Chelkash, and Other Stories, by Maxim Gorky. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf_

Maxim Gorky is the poorest and most uneven of the Russian writers. He is—or was—a pioneer. He came wailing from lonely roads where the vagrom man sleeps beneath the stars and wonders what there is to life. And his dull, bitter plaints with ferocity as their leit motif soon sounded over the world. When the majority of Russian genius was struggling to “go to the people” Gorky had the advantage of coming from the people.

Alfred Knopf’s collection of Gorky tales under the title of _Chelkash_ is Gorky at his best and worst. I find in it some of his best tales abominably written, studded with crass “gems” of philosophy, broken up with unnecessary moralizings. For instance, his _Twenty-Six of Us and One Other_. In this Gorky writes of his immortal bakeshop. As a youth Gorky spent his days in a bakeshop. Time and again he has painted it, in other stories better than in this one. But in this instance the bakeshop is only a background; usually it is the main theme. Tanya, a little girl, stops every morning to say “Hello” to the twenty-six bakers. They give her little cakes. She is the only “ray of sweetness” in their lives. They look upon her as a daughter, a shrine. And Tanya it is who alone awakens in them for a few moments each day something approaching fineness. Along comes a terrible dandy, a ladies’ man. He seduces every lady he sets his cap for; it is his boast. The bakers like him: he is a “gentleman” and very democratic. But one day when he is boasting the head baker grows excited and mentions “Tanya.” The dandy boasts he will seduce her. An argument follows. After a month the dandy succeeds. The bakers witness the girl’s “undoing.” When she comes out of the dandy’s room, smiling, happy, they gather around her, spit at her, revile and abuse her. No names they can think of are bad enough. They fall into a frenzy of vituperation. But they do not strike her. Realizing dully that a “god” has died, they go back to work.

_Chelkash_, the first tale in the book, is Gorky on his “home ground”—the vagrom man, the pirate, the road thief. He paints him with a careful brush and a sureness of his subject. In _The Steppe_ he does the same. _A Rolling Stone_, and _Chums_, the last the best story in the volume, are also variations of the vagrom man theme—the underdog. But it is in stories like _One Autumn Night_, _Comrades_, _The Green Kitten_, and _Her Lover_ that Gorky reveals his greatest genius and his greatest weakness. He can feel them, imagine them, see them, but for some reason he cannot write them. _One Autumn Night_ might have been one of the world’s strongest classics.

All the tales in the volume are the work of the “first” Gorky—the bitter one, the melodramatic, outraged Gorky. They are on a whole not as good as the collection of stories written during that same period and translated in a volume called _Orloff and His Wife_. Gorky still lives and he has learned how to write. His later tales, composed in Italy by the “second” Gorky, the consumptive, contemplative, clear-seeing Gorky, are mature, almost mellow. But they are no longer distinctive. Anyone could have written them, anyone with a bit of genius and a great deal of time on his hands. But the _Chelkash_ tales and the tales in _Orloff and His Wife_—these no one but Gorky has written, and although they are inferior in workmanship to the products of Chekhov and Andreyev the American reader will find them perhaps more interesting.

Two Masters and a Petty Monster

_The Little Angel, by Leonid Andreyev. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf._

_Russian Silhouettes, by Anton Chekhov. New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons._

_The Breaking Point, by Michael Artzibashef. New York: B. W.
Huebsch._

“Charming fellows, those Russians,” said my friend. “When it comes to delineating the processes, mental and physical, of rape, suicide, incest, arson, butchery, and disease, they are without peers....” I therefore take this occasion to hurl two newly translated Russian books at my friend, hoping they land on his thick head.

The first book which I hurl at my friend is Andreyev’s _The Little Angel_. It is a collection of short stories. There are fifteen stories in the new volume brought out by Mr. Alfred Knopf, and all of them are little masterpieces. There is one story about a dog, _Snapper_. Only Anatole France has equaled it. There is another story, _The Marseillaise_. It is a perfect story. It is Kipling at his very best plus a flavor, a note, a something serious and deep that the Russians alone know how to command, that Kipling never reached. There is one story, _In the Basement_. I hope my friend chokes on this story. It would serve him right.

But _The Little Angel_ stands out from the fifteen. It is about a little boy, a bitter, lonely-hearted fellow whose mother drinks and beats him, whose father is dying of consumption, and who in turn snarls and bullies his playmates and weeps at night because his heart is so empty and heavy. In this story Andreyev attains a poignant delicacy of touch and a grim beauty which even his one-time contemporary Chekhov never surpassed.

_The Little Angel_ is the most beautiful short story I ever have read.

Chekhov has also been translated again. A collection of fragments, vibrating episodes, moods, and exquisite children stories called _Russian Silhouettes_ has been issued by Scribners’.

A better artist than Andreyev, keener, more reserved, more subtle, Chekhov to my notion nevertheless lacks the vibrancy which the author of _The Seven Who Were Hanged_ flings into his tales. Andreyev wields the pen of Dostoevsky with a little thinner ink. Chekhov is Turgenev fragmentized. He has left behind him a series of little canvases so finely done, so skilfully passionate ... well, I hurl him at my friend without further ado....

... It is that consumptive rogue of an Artzibashef who has caused most of the trouble. The devil take him and his erotic suicides. His latest translated book brought out by Huebsch is a tasteless joke. It is called _The Breaking Point_. In it all the characters but one commit suicide, all the women are “ruined.” Whenever two or more of its genial personae come together they forthwith fall into an argument concerning the futility of life, the idiocy of existence and so on and so on. And the trouble is that Artzibashef can write, beautifully, keenly, and sometimes gloriously. In _Sanine_, for instance, in _The Millionaire_, there are passages better than Andreyev, better than Chekhov, better than any writer has written. But the books are distorted, full of puerile moralizings, breathing a diseased lust and a sentimentalized violence—and _The Breaking Point_ is the worst of them to date. Artzibashef’s work stands in the same relation to the Russian realism that Paul De Kock’s work stands to the French sensual finesse.

AMERICA’S COMING-OF-AGE

_by_ VAN WYCK BROOKS

A study of American ideals and reality: aspirations and
performance.

What is it that prevents the maturity of our literature and life?

In our art, our politics, our letters, the torturous trails of
the “Highbrow” and of the “Lowbrow” may be traced. They stem from
Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin respectively.

_At all
bookstores
$1.00 net._

Whither do they lead?

Read the book: it marks a step forward in American criticism.

_Published by_ B. W. HUEBSCH, _225 Fifth avenue, New York
City_.

AMY LOWELL’S NEW BOOK

SIX FRENCH POETS

Studies in Contemporary Literature

_Emile Verhaeren_
_Albert Samain_
_Remy de Gourmont_
_Henri de Régnier_
_Francis Jammes_
_Paul Fort_

_By the author of “Sword Blades and Poppy Seed,” “A Dome of
Many-Coloured Glass,” etc._

Written by one of the foremost living American poets, this is the
first book in English containing a careful and minute study, with
translations, of the famous writers of one of the greatest epochs
in French poetry.

$2.50

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY, Publishers, New York

EMMA GOLDMAN

AT THE
FINE ARTS THEATRE
410 SOUTH MICHIGAN AVE.

NOVEMBER 21ST TO DECEMBER 5TH, 1915

SUBJECTS:

Sunday, Nov. 21st, _Preparedness, (The Road to War and
Disaster)_
Tuesday, Nov. 23rd, _The Right of the Child Not to Be Born_
Thursday, Nov. 25th, _The Message of Anarchism_
Saturday, Nov. 27th, _Sex, The Great Element of Creative Art_
Sunday, Nov. 28th, _The Philosophy of Atheism_
Tuesday, Nov. 30th, _Victims of Morality_
Thursday, Dec. 2nd, _Nietzsche and the German Kaiser_
Saturday, Dec. 4th, _Birth Control_
Sunday, Dec. 5th, _Beyond Good and Evil_

ALL LECTURES AT 8:15 P. M.

QUESTIONS AND DISCUSSION

TICKETS ON SALE AT THE LITTLE REVIEW, 834 FINE ARTS BUILDING

ADMISSION, 50 AND 25 CENTS

FINE ARTS THEATRE

_410 South Michigan Avenue_

VIOLIN RECITAL BY

David Hochstein

At 3:30 P. M., December 5.

PROGRAMME

1. Concerto in A major _Mozart_
2. Concerto in D minor _Bruch_
3. (a) Romance _Schumann_
(b) Two Waltzes _Brahms_
(c) Air _Nandor Zsolt_
(d) Valse-Caprice _Nandor Zsolt_
4. Bohemian Folk Songs and Dances _Sevcik_
Bretislav
Holka Modrooka

Boxes, $10.00. Tickets, $1.50, $1.00, 75 cents. On sale at
Fine Arts Theatre. Mail orders to FINE ARTS THEATRE, 410
South Michigan Avenue, Chicago.

THE MISCELLANY

THE MISCELLANY combines illustrated articles of interest to
booklovers and lovers of literary essays: _belles-lettres_, art,
and the drama coming within its province as well as occasional
book-reviews.

A partial list of topics appearing during 1915 is as follows:

_The Lost Art of Making Books_
_The Noh Drama of Japan_
_The Fortsas Library_
_The New Loggan Prints, and_
_Ancient Paper-Making_

A department in each number acts as official journal for The
American Bookplate Society.

_In its second year. Specimen on request. Issued quarterly.
Subscription: $1.00 per year._

THE MISCELLANY
17 Board of Trade, Kansas City, Mo., U. S. A.

“An Authentic Original Voice in Literature”—The Atlantic
Monthly.

ROBERT FROST

THE NEW AMERICAN POET

NORTH OF BOSTON

ALICE BROWN:

“Mr. Frost has done truer work about New England than
anybody—except Miss Wilkins.”

CHARLES HANSON TOWNE:

“Nothing has come out of America since Whitman so splendid, so
real, so overwhelmingly great.”

AMY LOWELL in _The New Republic_:

“A book of unusual power and sincerity. A remarkable
achievement.”

NEW YORK EVENING SUN:

“The poet had the insight to trust the people with a book of the
people and the people replied ‘Man, what is your name?’ ... He
forsakes utterly the claptrap of pastoral song, classical or
modern.... His is soil stuff, not mock bucolics.”

BOSTON TRANSCRIPT:

“The first poet for half a century to express New England life
completely with a fresh, original and appealing way of his own.”

BROOKLYN DAILY EAGLE:

“The more you read the more you are held, and when you return a
few days later to look up some passage that has followed you
about, the better you find the meat under the simple
unpretentious form. _The London Times_ caught that quality when
it said: ‘Poetry burns up out of it, as when a faint wind
breathes upon smouldering embers.’ ... That is precisely the
effect....”

REEDY’S MIRROR: