Chapter II: Part 2

In the middle of the great greenish room stood the green iron
cage.
All was old, and cold and mournful, ancient with the double antiquity
of heart and brain in the great greenish room,
Old and hoary was the man who sat upon the faldstool, upon the
fireless and godless altar,
Old were the tomes that mouldered behind him on the dusty shelves.
Old was the man upon his left who awoke with his cracked voice the
dead echoes of dead centuries, old the man upon his right
who wielded a wand; and old all those who spoke to him and
listened to him before and around the green iron cage.
Old were the words they spoke, and their faces were drawn and white
and lifeless, without expression or solemnity; like the
ikons of old cathedrals.
For of naught they knew, but of what was written in the old, yellow
books. And all the joys and the pains and the loves and
hatreds and furies and labors and strifes of man, all the
fierce and divine passions that battle and rage in the
heart of man, never entered into the great greenish room
but to sit in the green iron cage.
Senility, dullness and dissolution were all around the green iron
cage, and nothing was new and young and alive in the great
room, except the three men who were in the cage.

And, then, when the prosecutor speaks, we have an insight into the fervor with which Giovannitti greets the overthrow of the old and the budding of the new:

... he said (and dreary as a wind that moans thru the crosses
of an old graveyard was his voice):
"I will prove to you that these three men in the cage are criminals
and murderers and that they ought to be put to death."
Love, it was then that I heard for the first time the creak of the
moth that was eating the old painting and the old books,
and the worm that was gnawing the old bench, and it was
then that I saw that all the old men around the great
greenish room were dead.
They were dead like the old man in the painting, save that they could
still read the old books he could read no more, and still
spoke and heard the old words he could speak and hear no
more, and still passed the judgment of the dead, which he
could no more pass, upon the mighty life of the world
outside that throbbed and thundered and clamored and roared
the wonderful anthem of human labor to the fatherly justice
of the Sun.

To me such stuff as this means a hundred times more than a thousand sonnets to a mistress' eye-lash, or than the weak maudlinities of an absinthe-soaked eroto-dabbler, wailing puling repentance to a pale Christ. It is compact of life--life as it is today, made, not for the tittillation of dilletantes, but for the enjoyment and inspiration of men who can appreciate the meat of life redolent of sweat and blood and tears.

This is Giovannitti's picture of the Republic, after it had been gained with blood and sacrifice:

When night with velvet-sandaled feet
Stole in her chamber's solitude,
Behold! she lay there naked, lewd,
A drunken harlot of the street,

With withered breasts and shaggy hair
Soiled by each wanton, frothy kiss,
Between a sergeant of police
And a decrepit millionaire.

Love poems also figure in the book, but the dominant note is that of conflict. Giovannitti has realized the pregnant fact that in struggle is the greatest joy, that the ecstasy of growth and striving is worth more that the bovine placidity of "happiness." At the end of his love-song, _The Praise of Spring_, he says:

But shall I sing of love now, I who could only sing to the
tune of the clarions of war?
And shall I forget for a woman my black frothing horse that neighs
after the twanging arrows in the wind?
And shall I not lose my strength when her arms shall encircle me
where thou hast girt me with the sword, O Gea, my mother
immortal?

Giovannitti makes no claim for inclusion in Parnassian galleries. He believes that deeds count for more than words, and he essays but to make a handful of war-songs for the pleasure of his comrades.

Still may my song, before the sun's
Reveille, speed the hours that tire,
While they are cleaning up their guns
Around the cheery bivouac fire.

And so, these are the rough-hewn songs of a man; of one who goes his way with his love upholding him and the Vision burning within him and the sound of battle forever in his ears and the whole-hearted hate of his enemy to spur him, and the stalwart comradeship of his fellows to make dear the thorny way.

The Nietzschean Love of Eternity

GEORGE BURMAN FOSTER

After all, there have been great wars before this pan-European cataclysm; and, naturally enough, according to the psychological law of the expansion of the emotions, men have transferred their experiences of time to the content of eternity. Thus, amid the abomination of desolation which the Thirty Years' War brought upon the German Fatherland, one Johannes Rist, a clergyman residing in the neighborhood of Hamburg, sang his symptomatic song:

"O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort!
Du Schwert, das durch die Seele bohrt!
O Anfang sonder Ende!
O Ewigkeit, Zeit ohne Zeit,
Ich weiss vor lauter Traurigkeit,
Nicht, wo ich mich hinwende!"

The thunder and blood of war are in it. The horrors of the war long have passed, but not those of the song. Today you may hear the old hymn sung from new hymn-books in German churches. Today still, school children commit it to memory in their schools--with what profound and terrible impression, who can say? All the pains which little children feel so quiveringly with their defenseless and susceptible natures, all these will continue unbrokenly in eternity. On this bank and shoal of time, children easily and happily forget the tribulations of a bygone hour--in eternity, never, never again! But might there not be also an eternity of childish play and joy? Even so, that could not tip the scale in view of the possibility of a comfortless and cruel eternity; especially since the possibility becomes a probability, and the probability a certainty, owing to the fact that the children are taught to consider themselves as lost and damned sinners--in Adam's fall they sinned all! Consequently the remote hope of bliss in "Jerusalem the golden with milk and honey blest" could not assuage the grief nor silence the terror and torture that filled the child mind. "Would that there were no eternity!"--often this must have been the secret thought of German children, and not of these alone.

This is the eternity of fear.

From the nursery and school to the world of thought! From gruesome pictures and poetry of the enigma of eternity to the solution in systems of the philosophers and theologians. From Rist of the Thirty Years' War to Spinoza with imperturbable philosophic calm--such was the great change through which many a German child passed--Spinoza who won his deepest insight into life by viewing all things _sub specie aeternitatis_. Or from Rist to Schleiermacher, who unveiled the august mystery of humanness as eternity in the heart--as eternity internal, dynamic, living, present, not external, mechanical, fixed, and future. It was the great transition from orthodoxy to romanticism.

Or else from all these men to _Friedrich Nietzsche_, him that was the godless one, who, in the end of the ages, also sang a song, a new song, of eternity. He both celebrated eternity in song and made no problem of it. He lived it and loved it as his first and truest love--plighted his soul's troth in unwavering loyalty: "Denn ich liebe dich, o Ewigkeit!" From dull and gloomy dreams and anxious fears did this eternity awaken him, from mortal ills did it redeem his life. Nietzsche had wistfully peered into the world's enigmatic darkness, his seeking and skeptical soul had chafed over the riddles and contradictions of life--no meaning, he cried, in this senseless play of life and death, truth and error; and only illusion and folly in all that men called joy and sorrow. There came to him, then, revelation of a new, of an eternal life. The present, with all the kaleidoscopic changes of life's little day, makes ready its own recurrence, each part of time being but a ring linked with the next, the whole becoming the ring of eternity, the true marriage ring of humanity--the seal and stay of an eternal bond between man and Ever-creative, Ever-reincarnating Life!

Ich liebe dich, o Ewigkeit. Perfect love casts out fear. This is the eternity of love. The godless one would lead the German heart, and all hearts, from "_Donnerworte_" and "_Schwerte_," from the _fear_ of eternity to the _love_ of eternity.

That is what Nietzsche would do. But is such an undertaking worth while in a day like ours? What does man care about eternity--his life so swift and short that he does not know on one day what he did or thought or wanted the day before? His treasures in time, will not his heart be there also, seeking its right and content there? Money ruling the world, time ruling money, why talk of eternity at all? A jolly hour, a sprig of mirth plucked by the way, is not that what the man of modern culture longs for, is it not enough to satisfy such longing as his? The earth overpopulated as it is with _Augenblicksmenschen_, as Nietzsche would say, and not with _Ewigkeitsmenschen_, why recall the love and hope of a long lost past?

Such queries may give us pause, but they may not stampede us. We may not forget that Professor Münsterberg, of Harvard, has written a great book bearing the impressive title, _The Eternal Values_. Nor may we be blind to the evidence that the thought so clearly and singularly espoused by the bearers of the better ideals of our new time is that of _the imminent and constant eternity in the human heart_, as unfolded by Spinoza and Schleiermacher and Nietzsche. Indeed, the question as to _what values are eternal values_, this eternity question, is central in our modern culture. Very superficial indeed would be our evaluation of modern life, most un-understood indeed would be the riddle of the soul of this life, did we ignore the ever clearer, ever mightier longing for eternity in this soul's abyss, and the unification of all deeper spirits upon the high task of giving an eternal content to our culture.

By taking some illustrations, one can see the need to supply the latter profound view to the former superficial judgment, if one is to do justice to the new movements of life in the modern world.

There is your modern poet. At first sight he seems to lack the illumination of that eternal light which never was on land or sea. You see the scorching sun beating upon the lone pilgrim as he plods through the burning sand to a goalless goal. You see faded, pale shadows. You do not meet with an idea that makes you feel that the poet yearns to interpret some eternal thought to this life of ours. Instead, life speaks only of itself and from itself. This is an abomination in the eyes of those who call themselves _Ewigkeitsmenschen_. They call it naturalistic, materialistic art. They upbraid an era in which a poet may dare to dissociate his poetry from the eternal ideal. Then you look again, you read more carefully, and you see the whole matter differently. The eternity that men claimed for their _thought_ is indeed gone. But eternity itself, the eternity of life, that is not gone, that abides. This realistic man of modern poetry, the more really he is apprehended, stands before us as the embodiment of a _necessity_, a necessity that transcends the individual, yet lives and weaves in him, a necessity that enunciates the law of life in the destiny of the individual--power of darkness or dawn of a new day! But necessity, law of life, this is but another name for eternity.

And there again is your modern painter. He, too, presents us with a bit, often a tiny bit, of reality, of nature. A rotten trunk of some old tree; a dilapidated hut on a ledge; some God-forsaken nook of earth, lost and forgotten of man; a bent and broken man with his hoe; some poor wretch with pistol against his skull; some traveller bleeding unbandaged by the roadside--there they all are in the galleries of our modern realism. But look again, and you will see that the keen observant eye of your artist serves an artist's heart, seeks and finds eternity, and directs our slower vision to the eternal mystery he has found, the most inspiring of all mysteries--viz., greatness in the least and lowest, glory and beauty in the offensive and repellant, invaluable human worth and nobility in the depraved and downtrodden!

There also is your man of science as he moves out along new paths. Storming the sky, unlocking all the eternities so long sought for behind the world, what does the scientist's supreme power and consecration consist in but his steadfast and strenuous search for eternity? He not only seeks, he finds. He finds eternal life and eternal love in the daintiest fern, in the tiniest lichen. In the very dust beneath our feet he descries what was there before men were at all. He points us to men as they emerge from the unplumbed æonian abyss, bearing in their bodies still visible and tangible traces of an eternal life. He reveals an eternal content of being in all that lives and weaves and moves.

Truly, if there is no sign of an eternity in which we live, there is no sign of an eternity at all. But if you were to bring to its simplest and truest expression all that is great and overmastering in the life of the human spirit today, you would then have once again the exultant Zarathustra song: "Ich liebe dich, o Ewigkeit!" All that lends true worth to the life that now is and is to be, is contained in this song. A _present_ eternity we seek as the one thing needful. What we love must be near us, we must feel it and grasp it. Be it never so remote, it is the magic of love to bring the remote nigh our hearts, or, better still, to conquer space and time, so that there is no near and no far, only a life and love that is eternal!

To create such Ewigkeitsmenschen is the great goal of the new life, the prophecy of a new culture. For this new culture we need men who feel something in their own being that uplifts them above all the experience of the present, much as they may seem imprisoned therein, men who dominate life in a royal fashion, men who in confident freedom do not mind the storms which would hurl them from their path. We need men who survey the great connections of the world from peak to peak and overbridge them with their own souls, men who release destiny from its isolation and articulate it in the eternal cycle of human life, men whose own being contains all life according to its eternal substance, uttering their "yea and amen" to all that is called life as they blissfully surrender to the beauty of existence. This is the great apocalypse, life's cryptic mystery-manual, whose seven seals the poet-prophet of this new culture, Friedrich Nietzsche, has broken.

What is yet to be? What will a day, a year, bring forth? If the eye is far-seeing and far-seeking, what will the next century bring forth? The darkness tenting like thick clouds upon the mountains of the future mystifies, and the days, the times, the years, the centuries, coerce man under the burden of all their darknesses until he is a-weary even before he has taken up his pilgrimage into the untrodden. Then there flashes from the love of eternity a clear light which kindles the light of the future: _we ourselves are this light!_ Our existence is the cloud hanging heavily over the hills, cloud with prophetic and positive light, from which redeeming beams shall break.

Behind us lies the whole long grim past, a huge grave, with countless gravestones--the silent city of the dead which holds all that has been ever dear to the heart, all youth with their glad faces and forms, all glances of love, all divine moments. And all the dead compel all the living to conflict that the living may be controlled by life and not by death. From their graves the dead direct their deadliest shafts at the heart, at the living, to drag them down into the embrace of death. But something stirs in man that cannot be wounded, cannot be buried--_man's will_. The will bursts all tombs hewn from rocks, demolishes all graves, creates resurrections out of them, smashes churches and abbeys that heaven's pure eye may gaze through their rent roofs--the will building and bearing eternities! And who, through love of eternity, controls future and past, finds the earth quivering with new creative words, is himself such a word, even binds good and evil together, making the evilest worthy of being the sauce of life.

Ewigkeitsmensch!--the wind from the unexplored swells his sail, seafarer's gale roaring in from the boundless. When time and space vanish from sight, vanish coasts also, the last fetters drop away: the body feels its weight and burden is past! How shall we go about rescuing ourselves from this torture and casting off this oppression?

In a strange fanatical vision, Nietzsche shows how he became an eternity-preacher, an eternity-sculptor. The vision is more novel than that of the Ascension which biblical legends narrate. The disciples of Jesus gaze upon their Master mounting heavenward into the clouds, and they hear strange words of the Christ coming down from heaven again to abide with them all the days till the end of the world. Nietzsche does not speak of the second advent of the Christ, of a recurrence of a single item of being, but of an eternal recurrence of all things, of all men, all moments and happenings of all life! Eternal return--to live life so that we would live each and all of it over again--to live it all so that it would be worth being not once but once again forever and forever--to be joint creator of a cosmos in which what is shall be fit--to be once yet again everlastingly--that is our, and Being's, final flawless test, passing which, no Great White Throne may fill us with dismay! There is the heart's harrowing cry: Could I but begin and live it--all over again, how different I would do! Would we like to do all that we have done over again? do them again eternally? Would we like to say and hear all the senseless prattle over again forever? Horrible thought! It were well to live and speak so that our existence can stand the fiery test of a Nietzschean eternity--live now in a way that it would be worth while to live again. It were indeed well to fill each fleeting moment of time with what is worthy to be the content of eternity. Eternity the criterion of time--that is really a great thought. To be sure, there is no eternal recurrence, and it is not clear that Nietzsche meant to say that there was. Faith in the eternal recurrence of all things, Nietzsche means this,--so at all events it seems to me,--to be a mirror in which we may recognize the true full worth of our life, a life in which there is nothing to be forgotten, nothing to be regretted, nothing done to be undone, because all is freed from the limitations of space and time and from external contingencies, and stands there in its great eternal necessity, because eternal, good, and godly even, in this necessity itself. Then we would not only live our life over again precisely as we lived it, we would live it in the light of the eternity again, ever again. No error, and folly would we then wish out of our life, because in this love of eternity it is precisely from error and folly that the truth grows which lights our faith. No weakness, no stumbling and falling, would we wish out of our life, because in the eternal illumination, power grows from all these experiences which enables us to mount above them, and gives us the victory in every bitter battle of life. No, our life is not lived from the right point of view, until we can sing it out in the song whose name is--Recurrence! We do not know the worth of the honor until we can dedicate to it that song whose meaning is: "_In alle Ewigkeit!_"

Ye say that a good cause will even sanctify war! I tell you, it
is the good war that sanctifies every cause!--_Nietzsche._

The Restaurant Violin

GEORGE SOULE

(_Another picture of our violinist_)

A brook
Which murmured me to high afternoon fields,
Where came a shower,
And after that, the long, straight call of the low sun
To the green-gold and winking purple of every leaf
And the long shadows between the hills.
And every leaf was glad
And the earth was comforted,
Breathing up freshly,
And the hills were full of joy,
And the clouds remained in the west
In ecstasy of color because of the sun.
Out of hidden trees
A wood-thrush sang.

And then I heard the restaurant--
Crashing of spoons on trays,
The dip, dip, dip, of the big rotary fans,
The chink of the cash-register, the clatter of money into the tray,
And people talking loudly, with mirthless laughter,
And munching, munching, munching.

Over it mocked the violin--
The rain fell and the sun called,
And there returned unto the violin,
And entered with glory into the violin
Final loneliness.
Then the pianist selected something from a musical comedy.

Editorials

_Our Third New Poet_

Maxwell Bodenheim was born in Natchez, Mississippi, twenty-two years ago, was educated in the Memphis, Tennessee, schools, served three years in the U. S. regular army, and is at present studying law and art in Chicago. He has written poetry for six years without having had a single poem accepted--in fact, he has had exactly three hundred and seventeen rejection slips from the astute editors of American magazines. He addresses to them the following poem:

_The Poet Speaks To Those Who Scorn Him_

I have taken tons of carbon in my hand,
Shriveled them, with a thought, to a small diamond:
And tried to sell it to men who call it glass.
It was glass in a sense--
Glass which with terrible exactness,
Showed them big, hideous souls
Dwarfed by the splendor of its immense clarity,
Like forests pressed to specks by the height of a mountain.

His first acceptance came from Miss Harriet Monroe, who prints five of his poems in the August issue of _Poetry_. "My creed," says Mr. Bodenheim "(if I can be said to have one), is this: Most of the things which men call beautiful are ugly to me, and some of the things they call ugly are beautiful. Men and deeds are subjects for prose, not poetry. I am not concerned with life, but with that which lies behind life. I am an intense admirer of Ezra Pound's," he always adds; "I worship him."

_Sade Iverson, Unknown_

We wish the mysterious poet who sent us _The Milliner_--which we liked profoundly and printed in our last issue--would come in to see us. The poem arrived one day in April with a modest little note: "Something about your magazine--perhaps the essential actuality of it--has moved me to make 'the simple confession' which I enclose. Print it if it is good enough; throw it in the waste basket if it is not." But though we have tried various investigations we have not been able to find out who this remarkable Sade Iverson is. She was the first person to send us a congratulatory letter about THE LITTLE REVIEW. In it she warned us that restraint is better than expression; but _The Milliner_ will stand as a stronger refutation of that advice than anything we can say. We want very much to know Sade Iverson. After reading her poem Mr. Bodenheim wrote the following:

_To Sade Iverson_

I wonder if you scooped out your entire melted soul
With shaking hands, and spilled it into this
Slim-necked but bulging-bodied flagon--
So slim-necked that my sticking lips
Must fight for wonderful drops.

"_Blast_"

The typical gamin, the street-urchin with his tongue in his cheek, crying in an infinitely wise childish treble that the world is an exciting place after all, and that even if you are so burned out that you can't taste your gin straight any more you can still put pepper in it,--this street-urchin has at last invaded the quarterlies. We have known him already in the dailies, the weeklies, the monthlies, the bound volume; but up to now the quarterlies have seemed dignified and safe. But the last bulwark of conservatism has fallen; the march of progress is unchecked!

_Blast_ is the name of the new magazine, published in London by John Lane. Let us take it as it comes. The cover--after you have seen the cover you know all--is of a peculiar brilliancy, something between magenta and lavender, about the color of an acute sick-headache. Running slantingly across both the front and the back is the single word BLAST in solid black-faced type three inches high. That is all, but it is enough.

Inside there is much food for thought. At least one feels sure there must be much food for thought, if only one could come near enough to understanding it to think about it.

First there are twelve pages of what seem to be the rare-bit dream of a type-setter, but which on closer inspection prove to be a table of curses, much like the old table which has now been cut from the Anglican prayer-book. "BLAST" they say "CURSE! DAMN"--"England, France, Humor, Sport, years 1837 to 1900, Rotten Menagerie, castor-oil." "CURSE" also "those who will hang over this manifesto with SILLY CANINES exposed." After these twelve pages come half the number of blessings, again from the prayer-book. "BLESS" they say "England, all ports, the Hairdresser, Humor, France, and castor-oil."

Then comes the Manifesto. No woman of the olden times found without a shift could be more shamed than a new cult today found without a Manifesto. This one begins: "Beyond action and reaction we would establish ourselves." It proceeds with jaunty violence to settle the artistic problems of the world. Nonetheless there is much wisdom in the Manifesto. But you must read it for yourselves to understand it. This announcement is signed with eleven names, of which the best-known in this country are probably Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis (the editor), Richard Aldington, and Gaudier Brzeska.

A group of poems by Ezra Pound follows. After the mental indigestion of the first few pages we cannot be too grateful to Mr. Pound for putting English words together in such a manner that they at least make sentences. More than that, they make in places excellent satire. Then follows a long prose play (at least we should guess it to be prose) by Wyndham Lewis, called _The Enemy of the Stars_. Seven-tenths of it consists of stage directions. Here is a sample:

Fungi of sullen violet thoughts, investing primitive vegetation.
Groping hands strummed Byzantine organ of his mind, producing
monotonous black fugue.

The plot unfortunately escaped our perusal, hiding itself in verbiage. But undoubtedly there is one.

The number also contains the beginning of a serial story by Richard Aldington, a remarkably vivid short story by Rebecca West called _The Indissolubility of Matrimony_, and _Vortices_ by the editor. The whole is copiously sown with Cubist drawings which must be seen to be appreciated.

So the quarterly street-urchin makes his bow on the literary stage. How much of his singular make-up will prove to be juvenile spleen and how much genuine integrity only time can tell. In the meanwhile his tongue is in his cheek.--E. T.

_The Stigma of Knowing It All_

One of the most exasperating things that can happen to a thinking person is to be told this: "You would be much more forceful if you weren't so sure you knew it all." How much time we all waste in vague, unthoughtful generalizations of this sort! The only person who really thinks he "knows it all" is that misguided soul who is always asking for advice, always giving advice, and eternally ignoring both that which he gives and which he receives. He is as muddled as a clear pool that has been stirred up with a stick; but the ripples convince him that the stirring-up has touched many shores. The person to whom the stigma of "knowing it all" is most often attached is he who believes that he knows something about himself and very little about anybody else. He is that person who takes care of his own problems with a certain ardor, with a sense of keen clearness, like the shining of a star through his deep, unmuddled pool. He has realized Arnold's _Self-Dependence_. But the muddled ones can never forgive him for that joy with which the stars perform their shining; nor can they ever understand the stupor of helplessness which descends upon him when he is asked to direct some one else's shining. Therefore, they argue, he is self-sufficient; and the adjective is a curse. Some one has said, quite untruly, that people never know the important things about themselves. But the only thing in the world a man can _really_ know is himself; and it is his chief business to push self-knowledge beyond its obvious boundaries to those reaches where even change becomes a comprehended element. The gist of the whole matter is this: People who know themselves are the only ones with whom we are wholly protected from that stupid and offensive practice of dictatorship; also, they are the only ones capable of receiving counsel with intelligence.

My Middle Name

My middle name rhymes not with satchel,
So please do not pronounce it "Vatchel."
My middle name rhymes not with rock hell,
So please do not pronounce it "Vock Hell."
My middle name rhymes not with hash hell,
So please do not pronounce it "Vasch Hell."
My middle name rhymes not with bottle,
So please do not pronounce it "Vottle,"
My name is just the same as Rachel,
With V for R;
Please call me Vachel.

_Nicholas Vachel Lindsay._

"Baboosya"

Catherine Breshkovskaya is a legendary woman even for Russia. She is now seventy-three years old; about half of her life has been spent in prison and exile; in 1910 she was once more arrested on the ground of her revolutionary activity, but thanks to the intercession of prominent European and American liberals, the verdict was mild:--Siberia, but without hard labor. Last year the ever-young Babooshka ("little grandmother," her pet name among the revolutionists) attempted to escape, failed, and was subsequently transferred to the terrible Yakutsk region, where she is now slowly dwindling away. The _Russkoye Bogatstwo_ prints two letters--two human documents--miraculously smuggled through the rigid net of the Siberian police system. One is a letter written by Breshkovskaya to a friend; it reveals a great woman--great even in little things. She speaks at length on the miserable life of the exiles; on her plans to mitigate their sufferings by planting vegetables to be used for food and also to be sold on the market; and on other apparently little matters--little when we consider the grandiose activity of the gray revolutionist in the recent past. Her letter is full of love and anxiety for her comrades, but she refers very little to herself. The only plaintive note is heard in these lines:

My wanderings around the little island have come to a stop. I
seldom see mountains, water, and woods, and on the streets there
is either dust or mud--which I have no desire to look upon. Soon
the steamers will discontinue their course. The mail comes only
once a week.

This is all she says about her own existence in the dead land, but we hear more about it from the second letter, written by a young exile:

... Her flight was discovered, she was recaptured, and she is
imprisoned now in Irkutsk. She holds herself bravely, but I know
this bravery. I fear that this flight will kill the Baboosya; she
has been ill so often and has had to suffer for herself and for
others.... Yakutsk will completely ruin her health.

Most of the exiles feel bereaved. Despite the sharply-defined
individuality of each of them, the Babooshka appeared as a
spiritual mother to them all, able to encourage, to lift up, to
console. The weak asked her for strength; the strong--for
counsel. How much endurance and patience she must have had to
assist each and every one, to appeal for money, for clothes, etc.
Her heart went out to the hapless exiles, oppressed, moneyless,
bootless, under the grim Siberian conditions. And how great was
her joy at the receipt of a package from some good friends! She
spread out the things, looked at them, and sang "Oy, how full,
how full is the coffer" (a popular folk-song), with tears of joy
in her eyes. Then she proceeded to distribute the bounty: to one
a warm shirt, to the other woolen stockings, or a fur-hat. To the
children she sent milk....

What a simple tale, friends.

I recall a few lines from a clumsy poem written by an American woman after the trial of Breshkovskaya. Upton Sinclair considered it one of the twenty-five greatest!

In all the world this day there is no soul
Freer than you, Breshkovskaya....
For you are free of self and free of fear....

... You are too great for pity. After you
We send not sobs but songs; and all our days
We shall walk bravelier knowing where you are.

Obituary of a Poet

FLOYD DELL

Adonais is dead--dead in the flush of youth, with all of life before him.

Yes, but perhaps that is not such a bad thing.

"He had so much of promise!" That's the trouble. When the promise petered out--as it usually does--what then?

As it is, he will never have to see his great hopes dwindle. He will never have to bolster himself against disillusion.

Adonais has known the sweet of life--he has known the glory of youth, and the gay companionship of men, and the taste of good liquor in the mouth. He has known the joy of hard work, and the joy of roaming the streets, idle and curious, feeling the beauty of the world; he has known the joy of love.

Fortunate Adonais!

He did not know that it was possible for the love of women to become to him a cheap article, to be appraised with practiced eye and perhaps tossed carelessly aside; he was a lover--

And now he will never be cruel or careless about love, an exploiter and parasite of women. He will never have to emerge, with false hope and courage, from the humiliation of the Keeley cure. He will never parade the streets with a dyed moustache--a broken-down boulevardier.

He will never read with secret malignant envy the enthusiastic words of reviewers about the writings of younger men. He will never foregather with other has-beens in the charitable precincts of a club, to exchange compliments and listen hungrily to the accents of praise. He will never be a perambulating tombstone to a forgotten poet.

He is dead in the flush of youth--

Lucky Adonais!

Humbugging the Public

HENRY BLACKMAN SELL

In the palmy days of the sideshow P. T. Barnum let fall a pat little phrase which might be called the Great American Excuse: "the public likes to be humbugged." The showman referred directly to the amusement-seeking public, and applied his half truth to that rural pageant, the circus; but it was an easy phrase, it suited the purpose of men who were anxious to deceive and to mountebank, and it was snapped up. Today, when a man is caught with a shameful misrepresentation he laughs sheepishly and repeats that the public likes to be humbugged.

But does it?

We are The Public, you are The Public, and none of us likes to be humbugged!

Then how is it that this proverbialism has gained such credence in this country?

We are a new people. Our country is a great international whirlpool of ideas. New music, old music, new theories, old theories, new pictures, old pictures, new standards, old standards meet here and are spun about us with hysteria-like speed.

We do not want to appear ignorant of the newest thought or the oldest convention. We strive for an impossible universalism, and we accept many a mountebank at his face value because we are unable to settle his true worth, immediately, and because we feel that we must give a decision immediately.

Our credulity is stretched almost to the breaking point every hour of every day of the year, for wonders seem never to cease and the quality of the genuine has given rise to the quantity of the false.

We are gullible because we as a nation are alive to the possibility of the impossible.

We have gained a reputation for loving to be cheated because we have the almost national virtue of being able to lose, smile, and again strive, BUT we do not love it. And in the end the only one who really loses is the charlatan who sooner or later awakens to a realization of the bare hollowness of his false and petty philosophy, "the public likes to be humbugged."

The New York Letter

GEORGE SOULE

The future of _The Century_ is the engrossing topic among the writers and publishers in New York. No startling change in editorial policy is contemplated. Possibly the perception of the modern and future world which the magazine has begun to show under the guidance of Mr. Yard will be more apparent. The principal topic for speculation, however, is whether a "high-class" illustrated magazine selling for thirty-five cents can be a financial success, or even self-supporting. It is an open secret that none of them has been making money for some time. With this question readers who are interested in the contents of _The Century_ have no concern except the single rather important one that if present conditions continue long enough the magazine will cease to exist, at least in its present form.

Here, as in every other literary field, the strengthening of the machinery of commerce has enabled the product of transient popularity to interfere seriously with the thing that is done for its own sake. The "lowbrow" rules. An illustrated magazine is made possible by its advertising, and the advertisers want large circulation. Some of them do, it is true, look also for "quality" of circulation, but their standard of quality has nothing to do with taste, literary or otherwise; it measures merely "spending power." And the aristocracy of intellect has only a shadowy identity with the aristocracy of wealth. There are thousands of "automobile owners" who would never think of wading through even an _Atlantic Monthly_ article.

Are there enough people in the United States who will buy an ably edited "high-class" magazine to attract a profitable number of advertisers? That is the question which remains to be answered. A probable answer is that there may be enough, but that it will be a herculean task to get them all buying the same magazine. The people who will pay thirty-five cents for the privilege of reading literature of real thought and ideals are now pretty well divided into parties, ranging all the way from old-line republicans to anarchists. Twenty years ago we had a much more homogeneous culture:--people who had any consciousness of their minds were allied in their fundamental ideals. If an intelligent magazine prints anything vital now, it is bound to offend a large portion of its public. Quite possibly in ten more years there will be only two kinds of general magazines left--those which are frankly "lowbrow," and those which do not care for large profits, depend on uncommercial writers, and are manufactured so cheaply that they do not need much advertising in order to exist. Mr. Yard has a strong belief in the success of his attempt to prove the contrary. It will indeed be a glorious victory if without compromise _The Century_ can weld together a large, intelligent public.

The plight of the theatres is strictly analogous to that of the magazines. The moving-pictures have wiped out their galleries and decimated their balconies. A well-filled orchestra is not quite enough to support the usual production. The managers have either capitulated to the films entirely by putting "movies" on their stages, or have attempted to get the deserters back by competing with the films through the use of cheapened drama. Melodramatic farce, with an abundance of action, is the only form of play which is not now a drug on the managerial market. That is, to be sure, a respectable form of amusement, but there are some of us who would like occasionally to see something else. Perhaps the little theatres, like the little reviews, will become our refuge. Some of us believe that the managers who still stick to live actors would be better off if they would stop trying to compete with the moving-picture on its own ground and produce solid work for which the legitimate stage is alone adapted. We can substantiate our theory by the fact that at one time this spring nearly the only successful plays in New York were the revivals of Fitch's _The Truth_ and Wilde's _Lady Windermere's Fan_. But the temper of most managers and playwrights is not encouraging. Not many days ago a group of successful writers were gathered for the week-end at the house of a producer. One of them was reading a new manuscript. Another interrupted him to say quite seriously: "That's not right, old chap. You ought to get a laugh two-thirds of the way down that page." Whereupon the reader inserted a "joke" about a Ford car and an automobile.

There is a danger, however, in the little theatre idea. Little theatres may grow to have the same sort of insincere "style" and disgusting appeal to social snobbery which are the characteristics of magazines like _Vogue_. As in the case of the magazines, the best thing that could happen would be the appearance of a genius of so much life and power that he could drive the crowds before him and produce his plays in the open air of real public appreciation. The coming of the moving-picture has only aggravated a problem which was previously acute. The crisis is here; for that we must be grateful to the films and the cheap magazines. Shall the rule of the people produce nothing better than a race of commercial craftsmen whose only thought is to make money by exploiting the least worthy instincts of the people? Or shall we produce at least a few courageous leaders who, speaking out of their own authority, shall lead the people after them? The faithful can, while they are waiting, keep alive the sacred fires and scan the horizon for the new prophet. His victory can come, not by compromise, but by aggressive power.

There is one growing form of drama which is genuine in its art and may become popular in its appeal; the development of this is being carefully watched by those who are alert. It is but a step from a moving-picture such as D'Annunzio's Cabiria to a spectacle such as Reinhardt's _The Miracle_. The latter is coming to us next winter; Madison Square Garden will be its stage. Sheldon has written an unusual spectacle play which George Tyler will produce. Let these things not be confused with such orgies of stage-setting as _The Garden of Allah_; it is quite possible to use the visual element as a principal means of "getting over" the dramatic expression without doing so badly. To condemn all such productions because some of them happen to be over-realistic, is to condemn all painting because of Meissonier.

May it not be that a great trouble of our drama has been the failure to recognize the fact that the picture is just as important an element of the stage as the dialogue? Every French actress receives a thorough training in pantomime; in America anyone with a sensitive eye will squirm under the inept and ugly line-compositions presented by our actresses in their gestures. And as for stage-setting, the height of our ambition has seemed to be to get a door that will really slam, or to fill the stage with pink apple-blossoms--the audience will always applaud pink. The resolution of these crude attempts into something that really makes a good appeal to the eye is no new thing; but for a long time we have not been ready for the work of Reinhardt or Gordon Craig on the one side or of the Russian Ballet on the other. Now the moving-pictures are at once educating our eyes to watch drama, and are undermining the support of old-fashioned plays which, through their very excellent mediocrity, prevented the encroachment of new ideas. Let us go to the theatres next fall prepared to trace the beginnings of a new stage art in this country; in the meantime, however, not hoping to escape the flood of cheap and artistically vicious stuff with which the commercial managers and producers will attempt to drown our sensibilities.

There is more active charity in the egoism of a strenuous,
far-seeing soul than in the devotion of a soul that is helpless
and blind.--_Maeterlinck._

Book Discussion

The Gospel According to Moore

_Ave_, by George Moore. [D. Appleton and Company, New York.]

Mr. George Moore has finished his autobiographic triology, _Hail and Farewell_, and has shaken the dust of Ireland from his feet. The Celtic Renaissance must make its way without his help or hindrance. He came, he pondered, he withdrew. In these astonishing volumes we have the whole story of his adventures and his thoughts, and an unrivalled series of impressionistic portraits of his friends. We see Yeats in his long cloak, looking like a melancholy rook; Lady Gregory, the poet's devoted disciple; Edward Martyn and his soul; Plunkett and Gill, the Bouvard and Pécuchet of real life; AE "who settles everybody's difficulties and consoles the afflicted"; Colonel Moore, the author's brother; and we catch an occasional glimpse of Arthur Symons, Synge, James Stephens, and many others. But the book is very different from the ordinary _Sunlights and Shadows of My Short Life_. It is a remarkable piece of self-portraiture and an explanation of the author's attitude toward art and the Christian religion.

It was during the composition of the stories contained in _The Untilled Field_ that Mr. Moore came to realize that the Celt was but a herdsman, and that art had steadily declined in Ireland since the Irish Church was joined to Rome. But what was the reason for this decline? Was it due to the race or to Catholicism? Mr. Moore and his friends discussed this question at length and considered the history of literature in relation to the Roman Catholic Church. Their discoveries astonished him, for the case against Catholicism was even stronger than he had hoped for.

About two thousand years ago the Ecclesiastic started out to crush life, and "in three centuries humility, resignation and obedience were accepted as virtues; the shrines of the gods were abandoned; the beautiful limbs of the lover and athlete were forbidden to the sculptor and the meagre thighs of dying saints were offered him instead. Literature died, for literature can but praise life. Music died, for music can but praise life, and the lugubrious _Dies Irae_ was heard in the fanes. What use had a world for art when the creed current among men was that life is a mean and miserable thing? So amid lugubrious chant and solemn procession the dusk thickened until the moment of deepest night was reached in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries. In the fifteenth century the dawn began in Italy, and sculptors and painters turned their eyes toward Greece." Dante was a Catholic, although not a very orthodox one, and Catholicism can make a valid claim to the cathedrals and the choral music of Vittoria and Palestrina. But the painters of the Renaissance were as pagan as Cæsar Borgia and only chose religious subjects as a pretext for drawing and to meet a certain demand. In fact, the whole spirit of the Renaissance was pagan and progressive, and a return to the Middle Ages was averted when "that disagreeable monk, Savonarola," was burned at the stake. After this new birth came the Reformation, resulting in the Council of Trent, which forbade all speculation on the meaning and value of life and arranged "the Catholic's journey from the cradle to the grave as carefully as any tour planned by that excellent firm, Messrs. Cook and Sons." As a result there has been practically no Catholic literature since that time.

"Art is but praise of life, and it is only through the arts that we can praise life. Life is a rose that withers in the iron fist of dogma, and it was France that forced open the deadly fingers of the Ecclesiastic and allowed the rose to bloom again." Descartes, Rabelais, Montaigne, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Montesquieu, Hugo, Balzac, Gautier, Renan, Taine, Merimee, George Sand, Flaubert, Zola, and Maupassant are all agnostics. The most important Christians are Pascal, Racine, and Corneille, who wrote mere imitations of the Greek drama without any criticism of life, and Verlaine, who embraced the Church in an ecstasy more sensuous than religious. In Germany there are Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche--no Catholics and mainly agnostic. In Russia we find the utterly unmoral Turgenev and Tolstoy, who professed to be a Christian, but, as Mr. Moore points out, did not believe in the Resurrection of the Body. In Italy the main figure since the Reformation is an artist of today, the pagan D'Annunzio. In Spain there is one great Catholic work, _Don Quixote_, but it is completely unethical. Among the Scandinavians, Ibsen, Bjornson, and Strindberg are agnostics. In England the main evidence for the defence is found in Pope, who called himself a Christian, but wrote _The Essay on Man_, and Cardinal Newman, who, according to Carlyle, had a brain like a half-grown rabbit. In America there are Hawthorne, Emerson, Poe, and Whitman--Protestant and agnostic.

The reason for all this has been explained by Mr. Moore again and again. It lies in the fact that the Church has always preferred the obedient and poor in spirit to the courageous and the wise. Religion is strongest among ignorant and weak-minded people, and as far back as the book of Genesis we read of God's anger at the man and woman who ate of the forbidden fruit. "The two great enemies of religion are the desire to live and the desire to know," and the whole tendency of art is to increase and strengthen these desires. Another thing for which the Church is responsible is the present attitude toward love. Mr. Moore writes with pride of "the noble and exalted world that must have existed before Christian doctrine caused men to look upon women with suspicion and bade them to think of angels instead." He insists with Gautier that earth is as beautiful as heaven.

When he had decided that literature was incompatible with dogma, Mr. Moore found himself in a decidedly unpleasant situation. He had changed the course of his life to take part in the Irish Renaissance, and now he realized that the Irish Renaissance was a mere bubble. The whole history of the world showed that literature could not be produced in a Roman Catholic country. The only thing for him to do was to leave Ireland, but in the meanwhile he felt that he must declare himself a Protestant. Between art and religion there could be but one choice for him; the religion must be changed. It is true that he had never acquiesced in any of the dogmas of the Catholic Church, but he had been baptized in that Church, and he had always been considered a Catholic. Protestantism seemed much preferable, because Protestantism leaves the mind very nearly free. In the _Confessions of a Young Man_, he had already expressed his prejudice in its favor. "Look at the nations that have clung to Catholicism, starving moonlighters and starving brigands. The Protestant flag floats on every ocean breeze, the Catholic banner hangs limp in the incensed silence of the Vatican." And so Mr. Moore after several futile interviews with the Anglican priest wrote to _The Irish Times_ announcing his change from the Church of Rome, and began the composition of _Hail and Farewell_ as the best means in his power to liberate his country priestcraft.

P. M. HENRY.

Smile and Scream: Chekhov and Andreyev

_Stories of Russian Life_, by Anton Tchekoff; translated by Marian
Fell. [Charles Scribner's Sons, New York.]

_Savva_ and _The Life of Man_, by Leonid Andreyev; translated from
the French (!) by Thomas Seltzer. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.]