The Little Review, April 1914 (Vol. 1, No. 2)
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Title: The Little Review, April 1914 (Vol. 1, No. 2)

Author: Various

Editor: Margaret C. Anderson

Release date: July 13, 2020 [eBook #62634]
Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LITTLE REVIEW, APRIL 1914 (VOL. 1, NO. 2) ***

The Little Review

Literature Drama Music Art

MARGARET C. ANDERSON
EDITOR

APRIL, 1914

“The Germ” | | 1
Rebellion | George Soule | 3
Man and Superman | George Burman Foster | 3
Lines for Two Futurists | Arthur Davison Ficke | 8
A New Winged Victory | Margaret C. Anderson | 9
Correspondence: | |
Two Views of H. G. Wells | | 12
Rupert Brooke and Whitman | | 15
More About “The New Note” | | 16
Sonnet | Sara Teasdale | 17
Sonnet | Eunice Tietjens | 18
The Critics’ Critic | M. H. P. | 18
Women and the Life Struggle | Clara E. Laughlin | 20
“Change” | | 24
The Poetry of Alice Meynell | Llewellyn Jones | 25
An Ancient Radical | William L. Chenery | 28
Equal Suffrage: The First Real Test | Henry Blackman Sell | 30
Education of Yesterday and Today | William Saphier | 31
Some Book Reviews | | 33
New York Letter | George Soule | 46
William Butler Yeats to American Poets | | 47
Letters to the Little Review | | 49
The Best Sellers | | 55

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The Little Review

Vol. I

APRIL, 1914

No. 2

Copyright, 1914, by Margaret C. Anderson.

“The Germ”

In 1850 an astounding thing happened in England. A little group of artists and poets, known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, began the publication of a magazine. It was to be given over to “thoughts towards nature in poetry, literature, and art”; and it was called The Germ.

The idea was Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s, who was then just twenty-two years old. Thomas Woolner, of the same age, and Holman Hunt and Millais, both somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty, were dragged willingly into the plan. William Michael Rossetti, aged nineteen, was made editor; James Collinson and Frederick George Stephens were added to the four original P. R. B.’s; John Lucas Tupper, Ford Madox Brown, Walter Howell Deverell, William Cave Thomas, John Hancock, and Coventry Patmore were intimately connected with the project; and Christina, then eighteen, offered her poems for publication therein.

The Germ was published for four months, and then it died. Like all serious things it could find no immediate audience; like all revolutionary things it was called juvenile and regarded with shyness; and like all original and beautiful things it has managed to stay very much alive. For, in 1899, a limited edition of The Germ in facsimile was brought out, and William Michael Rossetti wrote an extensive introduction for it in which he described minutely the whole glorious undertaking. It is these facsimiles that we have been looking through with such awe, and which tell such an interesting story.

Here was a league of “unquiet and ambitious young spirits, bent upon making a fresh start of their own, and a clean sweep of some effete respectabilities.” On the night of December 19, 1849, when the first issue of the magazine was impending, they met in Dante Rossetti’s studio at 72 Newman Street to discuss a change of title. The P. R. B. Journal and Thoughts Towards Nature (the “extra-peculiar” suggestion of Dante, according to his brother) had been discarded, and Mr. Cave Thomas had drawn up a list of sixty-five possibilities, among them The Seed, The Scroll, The Harbinger, First Thoughts, The Sower, The Truth-Seeker, The Acorn, and The Germ. The last was decided upon and the first issue came out about the first of January. Seven hundred copies were printed and about two hundred sold. This wasn’t encouraging, so the second issue was limited to five hundred; but it sold even less well than the first, and the P. R. B.’s were at the end of their resources. Then the printing-firm came to the rescue and undertook the responsibility of two more numbers. The title was changed to Art and Poetry, being Thoughts towards Nature, conducted principally by Artists; but “all efforts proved useless.... People would not buy The Germ, and would scarcely consent to know of its existence. So the magazine breathed its last, and its obsequies were conducted in the strictest privacy.”

It did attract some critical attention, however. The Critic wrote: “We cannot contemplate this young and rising school in art and literature without the most ardent anticipation of something great to grow from it, something new and worthy of our age, and we bid them godspeed upon the path they have adventured.” Others remarked that the poetry in The Germ was all beautiful, “marred by not a few affectations—the genuine metal, but wanting to be purified from its dross”; “much of it of extraordinary merit, and equal to anything that any of our known poets could write, save Tennyson....”

Well—the situation demands a philosopher. We might undertake the rôle ourselves, except that we’re too near the situation, having just started a magazine with certain high hopes of our own.

On the cover of each issue of The Germ appeared this poem by William Rossetti, the mastery of which, some one said, would require a Browning Society’s united intellects:

When whoso merely hath a little thought

Will plainly think the thought which is in him—

Not imaging another’s bright or dim,

Not mangling with new words what others taught;

When whoso speaks, from having either sought

Or only found,—will speak, not just to skim

A shallow surface with words made and trim,

But in that very speech the matter brought:

Be not too keen to cry—“So this is all!—

A thing I might myself have thought as well,

But would not say it, for it was not worth!”

Ask: “Is this truth?” For is it still to tell

That be the theme a point or the whole earth,

Truth is a circle, perfect, great or small?

Patmore’s The Seasons, Christina Rossetti’s Dream Land, Dante’s My Sister’s Sleep and Hand and Soul, Woolner’s My Beautiful Lady and Of My Lady in Death, Tupper’s The Subject in Art, William Rossetti’s Her First Season, and a long review of Clough’s Bothic of Toper-na-fuosich make up the first number. In the others are The Blessed Damozel, Christina’s An End and A Pause of Thought, Patmore’s Stars and Moon, John Orchard’s Dialogue on Art, and many other things of value, concluding with a review of Browning’s Christmas Eve and Easter Day, in which William Rossetti establishes with elaborate seriousness, through six pages of solemn and awesome sentences, that “Browning’s style is copious and certainly not other than appropriate”; that if you will understand him, you shall.

All this came to our mind the other day when some one accused us of being “juvenile.” What hideous stigma was thereby put upon us? The only grievous thing about juvenility is its unwillingness to be frank; it usually tries to appear very, very old and very, very wise. The Germ was quite frankly young; otherwise it could not have been so full of death poetry, for it is youth’s most natural affectation to steep itself in death. But The Germ might have been even more “juvenile” and so avoided some of the heavy, sumptuous sentences in that Browning review. It would have gained in readableness without any possible sacrifice of beauty or truth. In their poetry the Pre-Raphaelites were as simple and spontaneous as children; in their criticism they were rhetorical. Our sympathy is somehow very strongly with the spontaneity—whatever dark juvenile crimes it may be guilty of—in the eyes of those who merely look but do not see.

Rebellion

George Soule

Sing me no song of the wind and rain—

The wind and the rain are better.

I’ll swing to the road on the gusty plain

Without any load,

And shatter your fetter.

And when you sing of the strange, bright sea,

I’ll leave your dark little singing

For the plunging shore where foam leaps free

And long waves roar

And gulls go winging.

Sorrow-dark ladies you’ve dreamed afar;

I stay not to hear their praises.

But here is a woman you cannot mar,

In life arrayed;

Her spirit blazes.

I shall not stiffen and die in your songs,

Flatten between your pages,

But trample the earth and jostle the throngs,

Try out life’s worth—

And burst all cages!

Man and Superman

George Burman Foster

In his voluptuous vagabondage Rousseau at length halted at Paris, where he managed to worry through some inconstant years. The thing that saved the day for him was the fragment of a pamphlet that blew across his path in one of his rambles, announcing a prize to be awarded by the Academy of Dijon for the best answer to an extraordinary question. Had the renascence of the arts and sciences ennobled morals? That was a flash of lightning which lit up a murky night and helped this bewildered and lonely wanderer to get his bearings. Thoughts came to him demoniacally which shaped his entire future and won him no small place in the history of humanity.

Answer is “No!” said Rousseau. And his answer was awarded the academic prize.

It seems strange that the history of his times sided with Rousseau’s “No.” Certainly it was the first fiery meteor of the French revolution. It pronounced the first damnatory sentence upon a culture that had already reached the point of collapse. In his own body and soul Rousseau had bitterly experienced the curse of this culture. It was largely responsible for his heart’s abnormal yearning whose glow was consuming him. Instead of ennobling morals this culture had inwardly barbarized man. Then it galvanized and painted the outside of life. And then life became a glittering lie.

Thus Rousseau became prophet in this desert of culture, and called men to repentance. “Back from culture to nature,” was his radical cry; back from what man has made out of himself to what nature meant him to be. Nature gave man free use of his limbs; culture has bound them with all sorts of bindings, until he is stiff, and short-winded, and crippled. According to nature man lives his own life; man is what he seems and seems what he is; according to culture he is cunning, and crafty, and mendacious.

The eighteenth-century man of culture hearkened with attentive soul to the dirge in which one of its noblest sons vented his tortured heart. The melancholy music bruised from this prophet’s heart silenced the wit and ridicule of even a Voltaire, who wanted to know, however, whether “the idea was that man was to go on all fours again.” In a few decades the feet of revolutionary Frenchmen were at the door ready, with few and short prayers, to bear to its last abode that culture whose moral worth even a French Academy had called in question, and for whose moral condemnation had awarded the first prize.

Now it is our turn! What is the good of our culture? Such is the query of a host of people who know nothing thereof save the wounds it has inflicted upon them—a host of people who face our culture with the bitter feeling that they have created it with the sweat of their brows, but have not been permitted to taste its joys. Such, too, is the query of others who, satiated with its beneficence, have been its pioneers,—a John Stuart Mill, political economist, who doubts whether all our cultural progress has mitigated the sufferings of a single human being; a Huxley, naturalist, who finds the present condition of the larger part of humanity so intolerable today that, were no way of improvement to be found, he would welcome the collision of a kindly comet that would smash our petty planet into smithereens.

Also, there is your proletariat. And there is your culture on summits far out of his reach. The more inaccessible it is, shining there with a radiance that never falls upon him, the less does he reflect that all is not gold that glitters. Then there is your philanthropist, foremost in culture of mind and heart, surveying the masses far beneath him, in the slime and grime of life, and doubting at last whether any labor of love can lift men up to where he thinks men ought to be; whether, after all, it can bring joy to men who are sick and sore with the load of life.

Not to be partial, one may magnanimously cite your philistine also—the man of “the golden mean,” the “man of sanity,” as mediocrity has ever brand-marked itself, who “hates ultra.” For the life of him your philistine cannot understand how a “reasonable” man can have any doubt about our culture. Does he not read in his favorite newspaper how gloriously we have progressed? Does he not encore the prodigious achievements of our technique? Has he not heard his crack spellbinder orate on the cultural felicity that follows our flag? Down with the disloyalty of highbrow doubters!

Now it was from an entirely different side, indeed it was from an entirely different standpoint, that Friedrich Nietzsche contemplated modern culture, particularly the national culture of the German Fatherland. What horrified him was not simply the content, but the criterion, of our culture. He sharply scrutinized the ideals which we set ourselves in our culture. He found not simply our achievements but our ideals, ourselves even, so inferior, so vulgar, so contemptible, that he began to doubt whether even the Germans could be recognized as a culture people or not. Hence Nietzsche became the most ruthless iconoclast of our culture. Unlike the majority, unlike the scholars, the philanthropists, the philistines, Nietzsche was not moved by the misery of the masses, by the great social need of our time. He did not regret that the boon of our culture was shared by so few, inasmuch as, in his opinion, this boon was of very doubtful value. He found our life so barbarous, so culture-hostile, that he still missed the first elements of a true culture among us.

Hence Nietzsche lunged against status quo. He did what he himself called “unzeitmässig,” untimely. He flung a question, more burning than any other, into our time—more burning than even the social question, constituting indeed the main part of that question. It was the question as to how man fared in this culture—the question as to what man got out of it and as to what it got out of man.

Never before had this question been put as Nietzsche put it. We should recall that Nietzsche was not one of those who had experienced the extremes of either plenty or want, nor was he one of those who filled the wide space between the two. To him, the pessimism of the discontented and the optimism of the fortunate and the satisfied were alike superficial, if not impertinent. It was not a question of “happiness” at all. In bitter, biting sarcasm he says, with reference to the English utilitarian “happiness morality”: “I do not seek my happiness; only an Englishman seeks his happiness; I seek my work.”

No; his was a question which his conscience put to culture. Was it a “culture of the earth, or of man?” Here Nietzsche probes home. And he alone did it. The most diverse censors of our time had not seen and said that no matter how desirable, no matter how gloriously conceived the new order of things might be, man must be the decisive thing; man must tip the scales. It was this that went against the grain. Mightier machines, larger cities, better apartments, bigger schools, what was the good of it all, et id omne genus, if new and greater men did not arise? So said Nietzsche. And he said it with high scorn to a generation which had forgotten that man is not for “culture,” but culture for man; of man, by man, for man.

Every people seems to pass through a period in which it is obsessed with the idea that the causes of popular prosperity are at once motive and criterion of culture; that the natural laws of economics are the universally valid norms of the ebb and flow of human values; that a balance on the balance sheet to the good, the satisfactoriness of the statistics of exports and imports to the wishes of the interested parties, are an occasion for jubilation over the ascent which life has compassed. Harbor some scruple as to whether the jubilation be warranted or not, and you are at once pilloried as a pessimist and a malcontent. And yet had there been no Nietzsche there would still remain Cicero’s warning: “Woe to a people whose wealth grows but whose men decay.” But there was a Nietzsche, and he dared to call even his Fatherland Europe’s “flat country”—flat was a hard word for a land that could once boast of so many poets and thinkers. But now the flatter the better! But now no peaks to scale, no yawning abysses on whose edges one grows dizzy! Nothing a single step removed from the ordinary, the conventional! Now heights and depths, distinctions and distances, these are valid in the world of quantity, not of quality; of possession, not of being; of tax tables, not of human essence and human power! Now all men are equal! But Nietzsche knew that if men are equal they are not free; if free they are not equal. With a fury and a fire that literally consumed him, he dedicated himself to the task of leading men up out of this flatness, away from this leveling—up to an appreciation of the potential—not the actual—greatness of man’s life. Greatness is not yet man’s verity but his vocation, his true and idiomatic destiny. Greatness? This is a man’s strength of will; the unfolding of a free personality. To say I will is to be a man. All human values are embraced in this I will. To produce men who can say I will is at once the task and the test of culture. This I will is the climax and goal of man. In this I will vanishes every fearsome and disquieting I must, every compulsion of outer necessity. Not the passive adjustment of man to nature, but the active adjustment of nature to man; nature outside of him and nature inside of him—that is human calling and human culture. Vanishes, also, every I ought. Man refuses to be ridden by a duty spook, but subordinates even duty to himself. Duty, too, is for the sake of man, not man for the sake of duty. In the depths of his own being, man reserves the sovereign right to speak his yes and his no to duty. To his own will he subjects all good and all evil taught him by others, past or present, and thus occupies a standpoint “beyond good and evil.” Lord of the Sabbath? Yes, but lord also of standards sanctified by their antiquity; lord of all the standards of life; lord of all that has been written or thought or done. “And thou, O lord, art more than they!” Thou—thou alone—art central and supreme and sacred and inviolable. “Bring forth the royal diadem and crown him lord of all!”

But not yet! Alas, there are no such lords, no such will-men, personality-men! Such men are not Gegenwartsmenschen, present day men, but Zukunftsmenschen, future day men; not reality but task—our task. That future man will surpass present man as much as present man surpasses the monkey which he in his development has left behind. We are bridges from monkey to superman. Superman! In him at last, at last, all that is unliving, unfree, withered and weak, all that is sickly in man, shall be obliterated; and all the forces that are great and creative shall be unfolded and molded into cultural values.

This is the meaning of the superman of Friedrich Nietzsche. Malice and ignorance have vied—vainly we may now hope—in caricaturing it. The way to superman is the rugged, steep mountain path up to conscious deed and mighty achievement; not the gentle incline down to stupid indulgence, indolent disposition, enervating or bestial impulsive life. Not that! Superman is precisely the man who overcomes the man of today aweary of life and athirst for death.

This preaching of Superman might be called Messianic. It is the bold faith that we are not the last word of the Word of life; it is the glad hope that the best treasures, the greatest deeds, the supreme goals of humankind are still in the future. Nietzsche’s message is a breath of spring blowing over the land proclaiming the advent of an issue from the womb of time of something greater, better than anything we have been, than anything we have called good or great; the advent of a new day when our best songs now will be our worst then; our noblest thoughts now our basest then; our highest achievements now, our poorest by-products then.

We shall usher in that day; superman shall be our will, our deed! Superman gives our life worth. Ours is the new, exhilarating responsibility, swallowing up and nullifying all the petty responsibilities which fret us today. We have to justify our lives to that great future, to that coming one, to our children. They, through us, must be greater, better, freer, than all of us put together. We are worth our contribution to the achievement of future man. Nay, only superman can justify the history of the cosmos! Consider pre-human and sub-human life, red in tooth and claw; consider human life, often not much better and sometimes much worse; consider ourselves, our meanness and our mediocrity. Is this all? Is this warrant for the long human and pre-human story? Can you escape the conviction that but for superman the eternal gestation and agony of cosmic maternity admits of no rational vindication?

Breed, then, with a view of breeding supermen. Marriage? Let this be not for ease, not for the propagation of yourselves; the pushing of yourselves into your children, parents, but for the creation of something new, of superman! Education? Not to assimilate the children to us, to the past, but to free them from us; not Vaterland, but Kinderland, must be our concern. Children shall not “sit at our feet” but stand upon our shoulders, that they may have a freer and broader sweep of the horizon. And in our children we shall love the Coming One, prepare the way for Superman, that free, great man who shall have conquered present petty man with all his slave instincts! Such, at all events, are the dreams of the great poetic and prophetic philosopher of the German Fatherland of today.

All great things have first to wander about the earth as enormous and awe-inspiring caricatures.—Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil.

Plato will always be an object of admiration and reverence to men who would rather see vast images of uncertain objects reflected from illuminated clouds, than representations of things in their just proportions, measurable, tangible, and convertible to household use.—Walter Savage Landor in Imaginary Conversations, Vol. 2.

Cultivation will breed in any man a certainty of the uncertainty of his most assured convictions.—Samuel Butler in Life and Habit.

Knowledge is in an inchoate state as long as it is capable of logical treatment; it must be transmitted into that sense or instinct which rises altogether above the sphere in which words can have being at all, otherwise it is not yet vital.—Samuel Butler in Life and Habit.

Lines for Two Futurists

Arthur Davison Ficke

Why does all of sharp and new

That our modern days can brew

Culminate in you?

This chaotic age’s wine

You have drunk—and now decline

Any anodyne.

On the broken walls you stand,

Peering toward some stony land

With eye-shading hand.

Is it lonely as you peer?

Do you never miss, in fear,

Simple things and dear,

Half-remembered, left behind?

Or are backward glances blind

Here where the wind

Round the outposts sweeps and cries—

And each distant hearthlight dies

To your peering eyes?...

I too stand where you have stood;

And the fever fills my blood

With your cruel mood.

Yet some backward longings press

On my heart: yea, I confess

My soul’s heaviness.

Me a homesick tremor thrills

As I dream how sunlight fills

My familiar hills.

Me the yesterdays still hold—

Liegeman still unto the old

Stories sweetly told.

Into that profound unknown

Where the earthquake forces strown

Shake each pilèd stone

Look; and exultance smites

Me with joy; the splintered heights

Call me with fierce lights.

But a piety still dwells

In my bones; my spirit knells

Solemnly farewells

To safe halls where I was born—

To old haunts I leave forlorn

For this perilous morn.

Yet I come! I cannot stay!

Be it bitter night, or day

Glorious,—your way

I must tread; and on the walls,

Where this flame-swept future calls

To fierce miracles,

Lo, I greet you here! But me

Mock not lightly. I come free—

But with agony.

A New Winged Victory

Angel Island, by Inez Haynes Gillmore. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]

Angel Island is several rare things: original, profound, flaming. It leaves you with a gasping sense of having been swept through the skies; and also with that feeling of new life which comes with a plunge into cold, deep seas. Angel Island is a new kind of Winged Victory!

Innumerable books have been written about the conflict of the sexes, about the emergence of the new woman. Most of them are dull books. But Mrs. Gillmore’s is beautiful and exciting. I kept thinking as I read it: here is something absolutely new, absolutely authentic; something so full of vision and truth that it’s like getting to the top of a mountain for the sunrise. Its freshness and its clearness are like cool morning mists that the sun has shot through.

But to discard vague phrases and get to the story—for it is not a tract, but a novel—or rather a poetic allegory—that that Mrs. Gillmore has written. Five men of representative modern types—a professor, a libertine, a soldier of fortune, a “mere mutt-man,” and an artist—are shipwrecked on a tropical island. After a few days their attention is caught by what appears to be huge birds flying through the heavens. The birds come nearer and prove to be winged women! Then comes the story of their wooing, their capture, their ultimate evolution into what modern women have decided they want to be: humanists.

However, this is going too fast. The only way to appreciate Angel Island is to be conscious of the art of it as you read. Beginning with the shipwreck, Mrs. Gillmore creates a series of brilliant pictures that culminate in the flying orgies of the bird-women.

... All this was intensified by the anarchy of sea and sky, by the incessant explosion of the waves, by the wind which seemed to sweep from end to end of a liquefying universe, by a downpour which threatened to beat their sodden bodies to pulp, by all the connotation of terror that lay in the darkness and in their unguarded condition on a barbarous, semi-tropical coast....

The storm, which had seemed to worry the whole universe in its grip, had died finally but it had died hard. On a quieted earth, the sea alone showed signs of revolution. The waves, monstrous, towering, swollen, were still marching on to the beach with a machine-like regularity that was swift and ponderous at the same time.... Beyond the wave-line, under a cover of foam, the jaded sea lay feebly palpitant like an old man asleep....

They had watched the sun come up over the trees at their back. And it was as if they had seen a sunrise for the first time in their lives. To them it was neither beautiful nor familiar; it was sinister and strange. A chill, that was not of the dawn but of death itself, lay over everything. The morning wind was the breath of the tomb, the smells that came to them from the island bore the taint of mortality, the very sun seemed icy. They suffered—the five survivors of the night’s tragedy—with a scarifying sense of disillusion with Nature....

The sun was racing up a sky smooth and clear as gray glass. It dropped on the torn green sea a shimmer that was almost dazzling; but there was something incongruous about that—as though Nature had covered her victim with a spangled scarf. It brought out millions of sparkles in the white sand; and there seemed something calculating about that—as though she were bribing them with jewels to forget....

Dozens of waves flashed and crashed their way up the beach; but now they trailed an iridescent network of foam over the lilac-gray sand. The sun raced high; but now it poured a flood of light on the green-gray water. The air grew bright and brighter. The earth grew warm and warmer. Blue came into the sky, deepened—and the sea reflected it. Suddenly the world was one huge glittering bubble, half of which was the brilliant azure sky and half the burnished azure sea.

All this is gorgeous enough—this clear, vivid painting of nature. But when Mrs. Gillmore turns her hand to the supernatural, she is simply ravishing. For instance:

The semi-tropical moon was at its full. Huge, white, embossed, cut out, it did not shine—it glared from the sky. It made a melted moonstone of the atmosphere. It faded the few clouds to a sapphire-gray, just touched here and there with the chalky dot of a star. It slashed a silver trail across a sea jet-black except where the waves rimmed it with snow. Up in the white enchantment, but not far above them, the strange air-creatures were flying. They were not birds; they were winged women!

Darting, diving, glancing, curving, wheeling, they interwove in what seemed the premeditated figures of an aerial dance.... Their wings, like enormous scimitars, caught the moonlight, flashed it back. For an interval, they played close in a group inextricably intertwined, a revolving ball of vivid color. Then, as if seized by a common impulse, they stretched, hand in hand, in a line across the sky—drifted. The moonlight flooded them full, caught glitter and gleam from wing-sockets, shot shimmer and sheen from wing-tips, sent cataracts of iridescent color pulsing between. Snow-silver one, brilliant green and gold another, dazzling blue the next, luminous orange a fourth, flaming flamingo scarlet the last, their colors seemed half liquid, half light. One moment the whole figure would flare into a splendid blaze, as if an inner mechanism had suddenly turned on all the electricity; the next, the blaze died down to the fairy glisten given by the moonlight.

As if by one impulse, they began finally to fly upward. Higher and higher they rose, still hand in hand.... One instant, relaxed, they seemed tiny galleons, all sails set, that floated lazily, the sport of an aerial sea; another, supple and sinuous, they seemed monstrous fish whose fins triumphantly clove the air, monarchs of that aerial sea.

A little of this and there came another impulse. The great wings furled close like blades leaping back to scabbard; the flying-girls dropped sheer in a dizzying fall. Half-way to the ground, they stopped simultaneously as if caught by some invisible air plateau. The great feathery fans opened—and this time the men got the whipping whirr of them—spread high, palpitated with color. From this lower level, the girls began to fall again, but gently, like dropping clouds.... They paused an instant and fluttered like a swarm of butterflies undecided where to go.... Then they turned out to sea, streaming through the air in line still, but one behind the other. And for the first time, sound came from them; they threw off peals of girl-laughter that fell like handfuls of diamonds. Their mirth ended in a long, eerie cry.

To me, that is wonderful work—one jeweled word after another. And it’s sustained through the whole book. But of course, after this first sense of ravishment with her pictures, you touch upon the deeper wonder of Mrs. Gillmore—her ideas. There are enough ideas in Angel Island to equip the women who are fighting for selfhood with armour that is absolutely hole proof.

The winged women differ in type as widely as the men; and each man chooses very quickly the type that appeals to him most. The libertine wants the big blond one, whom they’ve named “Peachy”; the professor likes Chiquita, the very feminine, unintellectual one; Billy, the mere man, falls violently and reverently in love with the radiant Julia, the leader of the group and the one your interest centers in immediately. Julia has a personality: she appears to be “pushed on by some intellectual or artistic impulse, to express by the symbols of her complicated flight some theory, some philosophy of life.” She seems always to shine. She is a creator. In short, Julia thinks.

The men plan capture and finally accomplish it by a time-honored method: that of arousing the women’s curiosity. Then follows a tragic episode when they cut the captives’ wings, making flight impossible. Of course, marriage is the next step, and later, children are born on Angel Island—little girl children with wings, and boys without them. But all this time Julia has refused to marry Billy, though she’s in love with him. Her only reason is that something tells her to wait.

Inevitably the women mourn the loss of their wings; and just as they become reconciled to a second-hand joy in their daughters’ flights, Peachy’s husband informs her that flying is unwomanly—that woman’s place is in the home, not in the air (!)—and that their daughter must be shorn of her wings as soon as she’s eighteen.

What next? Rebellion, with Julia shining gloriously as leader. She had been waiting for this. And in ten pages of profound, simple, magnificent talk—if only every woman in the world would read it!—she explains to the others that they must learn to walk. Peachy objects, because she dislikes the earth. “There are stars in the air,” she argues. “But we never reached them,” answers Julia. The earth is a good place, and they must learn to live in it. Besides, their children will fly better for learning to walk, and walk better for knowing how to fly; and she prophesies that then will be born to one of them a boy child with wings.

The women hide and master the art of walking. While they’re doing this their poor wings have a chance to grow a little, and by the time the men are ready to capture and subdue them a second time they have achieved a combination of walking and flying that puts them beyond reach. Then the men submit ... and Julia asks Billy to marry her.

That’s all, except one short chapter about Julia. She has a son with wings! And then she dies—radiant, white, goddess-woman, whose life had been so fine a thing. The beauty of it all simply overwhelmed me.

All of which points to several important conclusions. First, that Mrs. Gillmore is a poet and prophet of golden values. Second, that prejudice is the most foolish thing in the world. A general prejudice against that obvious form of comedy called farce might cause you to miss The Legend of Leonore. And a stubborn caution in regard to allegories—which, I concede, generally are unsubtle—might keep you from Angel Island.

Correspondence

Two Views of H. G. Wells

I am just reading The Passionate Friends, and every time I read anything of Wells’s I wonder why it is I don’t like him better. The World Set Free that has been running in The Century was intensely worth while, I thought—really prophetic. One tasted something almost divine; human nature is capable of such wonderful undreamed of things! It was like Tennyson prophesying the Federation of the World, airships, etc. Wells does seem inspired in some ways. But every time I read any of his novels—well, you remember I have a distinct mid-Victorian flavor that has to be reckoned with. I wasn’t brought up in a minister’s family for nothing! I suppose it’s what we used to call our conscience. Mine isn’t much good, alas; I sometimes think of it as a little old Victorian lady. She sits in the background of my consciousness and knits and knits and nods her head. Meanwhile I go blithely about, espousing all sorts of causes and thinking out all sorts of theories—imagining, you know, that I’m perfectly free. Suddenly she wakes up—she lays aside her knitting with a determined air and says, “Mary Martha, what are you thinking about! Stop that right now; I’m ashamed of you.” And she has authority, too, you know. I stop. Ridiculous, isn’t it?—but so it is.

And every time I read a Wells novel my little old lady folds her hands and sits up very primly and says, “Aha, you’re reading something of that man’s again. Well, I’m not asleep—I’m right on the job and I know just what I think of him.” So you see! And the worst—or the best—of it is that I agree with her. I can’t like him. I read along and it’s all so reasonable—he’s so clever and he thinks; but his conclusions are all so weak—if he comes to any. One passage in The Passionate Friends has made me furious. How can a man who’s at all worth while be so really wicked—(another word gone out of style). I mean this:

It is manifestly true that for the most of us free talk, intimate association, and any real fellowship between men and women turns with extreme readiness to love. And that being so, it follows that under existing conditions the unrestricted meeting and companionship of men and women in society is a notorious sham, a merely dangerous pretence of encounters. The safe reality beneath those liberal appearances is that a woman must be content with the easy friendship of other women and of one man only, letting a superficial friendship towards all other men veil impassable abysses of separation, and a man must in the same way have one sole woman intimate.... To me that is an intolerable state of affairs, but is reality.

Now can you suppose that is Wells’s own reasoning that he puts into the mouth of his unfortunate hero? Talk about Edith Wharton being thin-lipped in the pursuit of her heroines—that’s a great deal better than being loose-lipped; don’t you agree with me? It may be true, and I rather think to some extent it is true, that a man cannot have an absorbing friendship with a woman and not run the risk of falling in love. But what does that prove? That he should be allowed free rein and carry on as many liaisons veiled under the name of friendship as he chooses? Or unveiled, rather, for Wells seems to want everything in the open. He’s like a child who says: Here’s a very dangerous beast in a flimsy, inadequate cage. Frequently he escapes from it and has to be put back in. Let’s abolish the cage and let the beast run about openly, doing what it wants. And the good old-fashioned word for that beast is lust, and it should be caged; if the cage is getting more and more inadequate it’s only a piece with what Agnes Repplier calls our loss of nerve. How I liked that article of hers! What in the name of sense are we in this world for if not to build up a character? That’s all that amounts to anything, and it comes from countless denials and countless responses to duty. And what Goethe said, some time ago, is still everlastingly true: “Entbehren sollst Du, sollst entbehren!” (Deny yourself, deny, deny.) He ought to know, too, because he tried indulgence, goodness knows, and knew the dregs at the bottom of that cup. And I can’t forgive Wells. He knows better than to let people make all manner of experiment with such things. They wouldn’t even be happy; for happiness is built of stability, loyalty, character, and again character. My husband said, after reading that passage in The Passionate Friends, “The trouble with him and the class he writes of is that they aren’t busy enough. Let ’em work for a living, be interested in something vitally for ten hours out of the twenty-four, and they’ll forget all about their neighbors’ wives and be content with good men friends and casual women friends.”

The trouble lies with poor old human nature, I guess, and the way it wants what it cannot and ought not to have. But Wells says all unreality is hateful to him. Let’s tear down the barriers, let’s show up for what we are. Poor Smith wants something his neighbor has—well, let’s give it to him, whether it’s his neighbor’s success or his wife or his happiness. Nature is still unbearably ugly in lots of ways. When we can train it to be unselfish and disinterested then it will be time to tear down barriers.

Lady Mary in The Passionate Friends is an unconvincing character, too. I can conceive of a woman who will take all of a man’s possessions, giving him nothing in return, not even fidelity, but I cannot conceive of her justifying herself unless she is an utter moral degenerate. The danger of such writers as Wells is that they are plausible enough till you look below the surface. He tries to represent Lady Mary as charming, but she, it seems to me, even more than modern society which he arraigns, is “honeycombed and rotten with evil.”

“M. M.”

The description of a “little old Victorian lady” who sits in the background of our consciousness and plays conscience for us is charming; but.... She’s a sweet-faced little lady to whom the universe is as clear as crystal and as simple as plane geometry. She is always knitting, and what she knits is a fine web of sentimentality with which to cover the nakedness of truth—“for it is not seemly, my dear, that anything, even truth, should be naked.”

This web of hers is as fine as soft silk and as strong as chain mail. It’s sticky, too. And it clothes truth so thoroughly that she grows unrecognizable to any but the most penetrating searcher—to H. G. Wells, for instance. It’s natural enough that the old lady should dislike Wells, for he’s found her out; he’s made the astonishing discovery that underneath the web life is not sentimentally simple. He discloses to her scandalized eyes various unfortunate facts which she has done her best to conceal, as for instance the fact that there is such a thing as sex.

“Sex,” says Wells in effect in every one of his novels, “is a disturbing element, the disturbing element, in life. So long as sex exists it is a physical impossibility that life should be the sweetly pretty parlor game our little Victorian lady would have it.”

Right here the husband of the little lady has something to say: “The trouble with him and the class he writes of,” he announces, “is that they aren’t busy enough. Let ’em work for a living, be interested in something vitally for ten hours out of the twenty-four, and they’ll forget all about their neighbors’ wives and be content with good men friends and casual women friends.” This is an excellent example of what Wells finds the next most disturbing element in life—“muddle-headedness,” the lack of ability to think straight, to think things through. “Let Wells be vitally interested in something for ten hours of the twenty-four!” Doesn’t he see that if Wells had ever limited himself to ten hours of interest he would be making shirts today? It is because Wells works twenty-five hours of the twenty-four at being “vitally interested in something” that he is one of the major prophets of our time. And the thing in which he is interested is life itself, the great unsolvable mystery, life which extends below the simple, polished surface that is all the Victorian lady knows as the sea extends below its glassy smoothness on a summer day.

One of the greatest things that Wells has done for some of us who came on him young enough so that our minds did not close automatically at his first startling revelation, is this: he taught us to look at life squarely, without moral cant, and with a scientific disregard as to whether it pleased us personally or not. We may not always agree with him—very likely we don’t—but at least we must face the issue squarely and not take refuge in the vague sentimentality and slushy hopefulness of the Victorian lady.

Wells states facts and very frequently lets it go at that. Witness the shock this method is to our little old lady. She asks how anyone at all worth while can be so “really wicked” as to write about sex and society as he does.

She admits that what he says is a fact, but—it sticks out like a jagged, untidy rock from the smooth surface of things; therefore it is wicked. As a matter of fact that statement of his has no more to do with morality, is no more wicked, or virtuous, than the statement of a physical fact—to say, for instance, that glass breaks when hurled against a stone wall. It is unfortunate, but it is not “wicked.”

No, the day of Victorianism is past. We are slashing away the web, we are learning to think. It is a slow and painful process and we know not yet where the struggle will end. But at least we shall be nearer to the divine nakedness of truth. If Wells has done nothing else than to prove to us how much of our thinking is dictated not by our own souls but by the artificially-imposed sentimentality of the “little old Victorian lady” he has done a full man’s work. And we who owe our emancipation largely to his vision can never be too thankful to him.

Frances Trevor.

Rupert Brooke and Whitman

You treated Brooke in a masterly way in the last issue. I saw many things I hadn’t seen before, and understood the Wagner better. But I disagree with you in one way.

The Wagner and the Channel Passage are merely clever realistic satire—that’s always worth while. But it’s the thought behind the Menelaus and Helen sort of thing that I don’t like. Of course there’s no doubt that Helen grew wrinkled and peevish. But to say that therefore Paris in his grave was better off than Menelaus living is just a bit decadent, isn’t it? I’m forced to picture Brooke as the sort of chap who couldn’t enjoy a good dinner if he had to wash the dishes afterward:—instead of regarding dishwashing as a natural variety of living that could be thoroughly enjoyable with shirtsleeves and a pipe. I’m afraid he wouldn’t play American football for fear of getting his face dirty. He’s just a bit finicky about life. He’s afraid to commit himself for fear he’ll have to endure something about which he can’t weave golden syllables. That’s the reason I don’t agree with you about Whitman liking all of him. Whitman was frank about the whole world, dirt and all, and he accepted it enthusiastically. Brooke writes about dirt in such a way as to make it seem horrible.

This poem of Whitman’s will prove my point:

Afoot and light hearted, I take to the open road;

Healthy, free, the world before me,

The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good fortune—I myself am good fortune;

Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, heed nothing;

Strong and content I travel the open road.

The earth—that is sufficient;

I do not want the constellations any nearer,

I know they are very well where they are;

I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

Still, here I carry my old delicious burdens;

I carry them, men and women—I carry them with me wherever I go.

I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them;

I am filled with them and I will fill them in return.

You road I enter upon and look around! I believe that you are not all that is here;

I believe that much unseen is also here.

Here the profound lesson of reception, neither preference nor denial;

The black and his woolly head, the felon, the diseased, the illiterate person, are not denied;

The birth, the hasting after the physician; the beggar’s tramp, the drunkard’s stagger, the laughing party of mechanics,

The escaped youth, the rich person’s carriage, the fop, the eloping couple,

The early marketman, the hearse, the moving of furniture into town, the return back from town,

They pass—I also pass—anything passes—none may be interdicted;

None but are accepted—none but are dear to me.

Mon enfant! I give you my hand!

I give you my love more precious than money;

I give you myself before preaching or law;

Will you give me yourself? Will you come travel with me?

Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?

Beside this, doesn’t the Menelaus and Helen seem like an orchid?—a very beautiful, rich orchid, to be sure, but not of the Whitman family.

George Soule.

More About the “New Note”

The idea of “the new note” might be worked out more fully, but after all little or nothing would be gained by elaboration. Given this note of craft love all the rest must follow, as the spirit of self-revelation, which is also a part of the new note, will follow any true present-day love of craft. You will remember we once discussed Coningsby Dawson’s The Garden Without Walls. What I quarreled with in that book was that the writer looked outside of himself for his material. Even realists have done this—as, for example, Howells; and to that extent have failed. The master Zola failed here. Why do we so prize the work of Whitman, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Twain, and Fielding? Is it not because as we read we are constantly saying to ourselves, “This book is true. A man of flesh and blood like myself has lived the substance of it. In the love of his craft he has done the most difficult of all things: revealed the workings of his own soul and mind”?

To get near to the social advance for which all moderns hunger, is it not necessary to have first of all understanding? How can I love my neighbor if I do not understand him? And it is just in the wider diffusion of this understanding that the work of a great writer helps the advance of mankind. I would like to have you think much of this in your attitude toward all present-day writers. It is so easy for them to bluff us from our position, and I know from my own experience how baffling it is constantly to be coming upon good, well-done work that is false.

In this connection I am tempted to give you the substance of a formula I have just worked out. It lies here before me, and if you will accept it in the comradely spirit in which it is offered I shall be glad. It is the most delicate and the most unbelievably difficult task to catch, understand, and record your own mood. The thing must be done simply and without pretense or windiness, for the moment these creep in your record is no longer a record, but a mere mass of words meaning nothing. The value of such a record is not in the facts caught and recorded but in the fact of your having been able truthfully to make the record—something within yourself will tell you when you have not done it truthfully. I myself believe that when a man can thus stand aside from himself, recording simply and truthfully the inner workings of his own mind, he will be prepared to record truthfully the workings of other minds. In every man or woman dwell dozens of men and women, and the highly imaginative individual will lead fifty lives. Surely this can be said if it can be said that the unimaginative individual has led one life.

The practice of constantly and persistently making such a record as this will prove invaluable to the person who wishes to become a true critic of writing in the new spirit. Whenever he finds himself baffled in drawing a character or in judging one drawn by another, let him turn thus in upon himself, trusting with child-like simplicity and honesty the truth that lives in his own mind. Indeed, one of the great rewards of living with small children is to watch their faith in themselves and to try to emulate them in this art.

If the practice spoken of above is followed diligently, a kind of partnership will in time spring up between the hand and the brain of the writer. He will find himself becoming in truth a cattle herder, a drug clerk, a murderer, for the benefit of the hand that is writing of these, or the brain that is judging the work of another who has written of these.

To be sure this result will not always follow, and even after long and patient following of the system one will run into barren periods when the brain and the hand do not co-ordinate. In such a period it seems to me the part of wisdom to drop your work and begin again patiently making a record of the workings of your own mind, trying to put down truthfully those workings during the period of failure. I would like to scold every one who writes, or who has to do with writing, into adopting this practice, which has been such a help and such a delight to me.

Sherwood Anderson.

To E

Sara Teasdale

The door was opened and I saw you there

And for the first time heard you speak my name,

Then like the sun your sweetness overcame

My shy and shadowy mood; I was aware

That joy was hidden in your happy hair,

And that for you love held no hint of shame;

My eyes caught light from yours, within whose flame

Humor and passion have an equal share.

How many times since then have I not seen

Your great eyes widen when you talk of love,

And darken slowly with a far desire;

How many times since then your soul has been

Clear to my gaze as curving skies above,

Wearing like them a raiment made of fire.

To S

Eunice Tietjens

From my life’s outer orbit, where the night

That bounds my knowledge still is pierced through

By far-off singing planets such as you,

Whose faint, sweet voices come to me like light

In disembodied beauty, keen and bright,—

From this far orbit to my nearer view

You came one day, grown tangible and true

And warm with sympathy and fair with sight.

Then I who still had loved your distant voice,

Your songs, shot through with beauty and with tears

And woven magic of the wistful years,

I felt the listless heart of me rejoice

And stir again, that had lain stunned so long,

Since I had you, yourself a living song.

The Critics’ Critic

Agnes Repplier on Popular Education

Through all of Miss Repplier’s latest essays in The Atlantic runs a note of appeal for the sterner virtues, which she thinks are in danger of dying out under modern conditions. So persistently is this note, admirable in itself, sounded, that we wonder if it doesn’t hark back a bit to Sparta, and the casting away of the unfit. When it comes to the question of an education broad enough to fit the needs of every child, we may all pause and take a deep breath. We may not approve of a school of moving pictures, advocated by Judge Lindsey, and yet we may not wish to go to the other extreme of severe discipline advocated by Miss Repplier. If only all children were of exactly the same type, so that the same kind of schooling would suffice for all their needs! Or even if they could come from the same kind of homes with more or less similar ideals!

Let us hear what she and Mr. Lindsey have to say about Tony—(Tony is a boy who does not like school as it is at present organized). “Mr. Edison is coming to the rescue of Tony,” says Judge Lindsey. “He will take him away from me and put him in a school that is not a school at all but just one big game.... There will be something moving, something doing at that school all the time. When I tell him about it Tony shouts ‘Hooray for Mr. Edison!’ right in front of the battery, just as he used to say ‘To hell wid de cop!’” On the other hand:—“The old time teacher,” says Miss Repplier, “sought to spur the pupil to keen and combative effort, rather than beguile him into knowledge with cunning games and lantern slides.... The old time parent set a high value on self discipline and self control.”

But can she believe for one moment that Tony’s parents ever dreamed of “setting a high value on self discipline and self control?” Or that Tony’s sister was taught to “read aloud with correctness and expression, to write notes with propriety and grace, and to play backgammon and whist?” ...

Figurez-vous! And so, if we can reach little Tony’s darkened vision by the simple method of moving pictures, keep him off the streets until he learns at least not to become a hardened criminal—are we not that much to the good? Tony will never, never be ambassador to the court of St. James (or if he is going to be, he’ll be it in spite of movies!) but he may be a fairly honest, happy fruit vendor some day, instead of No. 207 in a cell. Useless to cite the dull boys in school, who absolutely refused pedagogic training and later blazed their way—luminaries—through the world, when once they had found the work that interested them. To interest, stimulate, and arouse is the prelude to work; and precious few kiddies, except those who don’t really need it, do enough work that they dislike to strengthen their little characters. But even if they do, are those who will not to have nothing?

Of course, education is a thing that can’t be disposed of in a few well meaning phrases. Miss Repplier may be right, too, in what she says of the education of Montaigne. You remember he learned to talk Latin under a tutor, at an early age, in much the same way that our modern young ones learn French and German.

“All the boy gained by the most elaborate system ever devised for the saving of labor,” she says, “was that he over-skipped the lower forms in school. What he lost was the habit of mastering his prescript lessons, which he seems to have disliked heartily.” But how does any one know that that was all he gained? I should hardly select Montaigne as my model, if I were trying to point out the ill effects of any particular type of education. Besides, whatever its effect may have been on him, I should hate to lose the mental picture of the little lad Latinizing with the “simple folk of Perigord.” Charming little lad, and wonderful old father, doing his best to elevate and help his boy. No, decidedly; whatever Miss Repplier may do to dispose of Tony and his ilk, I am glad she had nothing whatever to do with the education of Montaigne!

The Little Review

Since it appears to be my duty to read all the critical journals and dissect their contents for these columns, I can’t in good faith neglect The Little Review. I have just devoured the first issue. What can I say about the superb “announcement”? I agree ardently with it. It needed to be said; the magazine needed to be born. There’s no quarrel between art and life except where one or the other is kept back of the door. Anyone with a keen appreciation of art can’t help appreciating life too, and Mrs. Jones who runs away from her husband can’t fairly stand for “life.” Besides, why should anybody object to a thing because it’s transitorial? Everything is transitorial. It must either grow or perish.

Mr. Wing’s criticism of Mr. Faust is admirable—direct, unpretentious, sound. But you must let me register a slight objection to Dr. Foster’s Nietzsche article. It seems to me there’s just too much enthusiasm to be borne by what he actually says. When I came to the end of that third paragraph on page fifteen I sneaked back to Galsworthy’s letter and found an answering twinkle in its eye. I felt like going up to Dr. Foster with a grin, putting my hand on his shoulder and saying, “My dear man, a candidate for major prophet doesn’t need political speeches. It is really not half so important that we unregenerate should give three cheers for him as that we should live his truth. Won’t you forget a little of this sound and fury and tell us as simply as you can just what it is that you want us to do?”

I went from his article with the impression that here was a man who was very enthusiastic about Mr. Nietzsche. I’m sure that’s not the impression Dr. Foster intended to make. But I have a feeling that pure enthusiasm wasting itself in little geysers is intrinsically ridiculous. Enthusiasm should grow trees and put magic in violets—and that can’t be done with undue quickness, or in any but the most simple way. Nobody cares about the sap except for what it does. And, anyhow, it always makes me savage to be orated at, or told that my soul will be damned if I don’t admit the particular authority of Mr. Jehovah or Mr. Nietzsche or Mr. anybody else.

That’s all by the way, however, and the impression of the magazine as a whole is clear, true, swift. Its impact can’t be forgotten. You haven’t attained your ideal—which is right; but you’ve done so well you’ll have to scratch to keep up the speed,—which is right, too.

M. H. P.

Women and the Life Struggle

Clara E. Laughlin.

The Truth About Women, by C. Gasquoine Hartley (Mrs. Walter M. Gallichan). [Dodd, Mead & Company, New York.]

Mrs. Gallichan has not told the whole truth about woman; but she has told as much of it as has been told by any one writer except Olive Schreiner; and although she has made no important discovery, educed no brilliant new conclusion, she has summarized the best of all that has been said in a book which can scarcely fail to render notable service.

It is interesting to recall how the truth about women has been disclosed. The voice of Mary Wollstonecraft, crying in the wilderness, in 1792, pleaded that “if woman be not prepared by education to become the companion of man, she will stop the progress of knowledge; for truth must be common to all.” Yet it was nearly sixty years before Frederick Denison Maurice was able to open Queen’s College, and give a few English women the opportunity of an education. (In America, Mary Lyon had already broken ground for the higher education of her countrywomen.)

Here and there, in those days, an intrepid female declared herself a believer in woman’s rights; but her pretensions were scarcely honored to the point even of ridicule. Women were inferior creatures, designed and ordered by God to be subordinate to men. Didn’t everything go to prove it? And, indeed, nearly everything seemed to!

In 1861, several scholarly gentlemen in Europe were delving in fields of research where they were destined to upturn facts of great interest to the inferior sex. One of these was John Stuart Mill, whose impassioned protest against the subjection of women was then being written, although it was not published until eight years later. Another was Henry Maine, who was disclosing some significant things about the ancient law on which our modern laws are founded. Another was Lecky, who was gathering material for his History of European Morals, from Augustus to Charlemagne, and—incidentally—discovering that “natural history of morals” wherewith he was to shock the world in 1869. But two of the others were searching back of Augustus—“back” of him both in point of time and also in degree of civilization. One of these was Bachofen, a German, who published, in 1861, Das Mutterrecht, in which he made it clear that women had not always been subordinate, dependent, but among primitive peoples had been the rulers of their race. McLennan’s Primitive Marriage, published in 1865, brought prominently to British thinkers this quite-new contention of woman as a creature born to rule, but defrauded and degraded.

Then, in 1871, Darwin startled the world with The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex; and those who accepted his theory of evolution had to revise all their previous notions about the relations of the sexes.

During the next quarter-century many minds were busy with this wholesale revision of ideas, but nothing signal was set forth until Charlotte Stetson—working with the historical data of Maine and Mill and Lecky and their followers, with the ethnological data of Bachofen and McLennan, and many more, and with the natural history of morals as Darwin and Wallace and Huxley and their school disclosed it—declared that the enslavement of women was economic in its origin and in its final analysis. This was not the whole truth, but it was so important a part of the whole that the book Women and Economics may be said to have given the most productive stimulus the feminist movement had had since The Descent of Man.

Scores, almost hundreds, of books dealing with some phase or other of woman’s history, appeared in the next few years. But while many of them were valuable, and some were all but invaluable, none of them was epoch-marking until Olive Schreiner put forth her magnificent fragment on Woman and Labor, the chapter on Parasitism being the noblest and most pregnant thing that any student of woman has given to the world. Olive Schreiner saw much further into the question of women and economics than Charlotte Stetson knew how to see. She has a greater vision. She perceives that women are ennobled by what they do—just as men are—and that they are degraded by being denied creative, productive labor—not by being denied the full reward of their toil.

Mrs. Gallichan does not advance upon the contribution of Mrs. Schreiner, as Mrs. Schreiner did upon that of Mrs. Stetson; but she had less opportunity to do so: Mrs. Schreiner did not leave so much for some one else to say. But Mrs. Gallichan has summarized all that has been said more fully than any other writer has done; and she has done it so interestingly, so ably, that she deserves grateful praise.

Her book has three sections: the biological, the historical, and the modern.

Let no one resent or think useless an analogy between animal love-matings and our own. In tracing the evolution of our love-passions from the sexual relations of other mammals, and back to those of their ancestors, and to the humbler, though scarcely less beautiful, ancestors of these, we shall discover what must be considered as essential and should be lasting, and what is false in the conditions and character of the sexes today; and thereby we shall gain at once warning in what directions to pause, and new hope to send us forward. We shall learn that there are factors in our sex-impulses that require to be lived down as out-of-date and no longer beneficial to the social needs of life. But encouragement will come as, looking backwards, we learn how the mighty dynamic of sex-love has evolved in fineness, without losing in intensity, how it is tending to become more mutual, more beautiful, more lasting.

Two suggestions which Mrs. Gallichan makes in the biological section are especially striking. One is derived from the bee, and one from the spider. The bee, she reminds us, belongs

to a highly evolved and complex society, which may be said to represent a very perfected and extreme socialism. In this society the vast majority of the population—the workers—are sterile females, and of the drones, or males, only a very few at the most are ever functional. Reproduction is carried on by the queen-mother ... specialized for maternity and incapable of any other function.... I have little doubt that something which is at least analogous to the sterilization of the female bees is present among ourselves. The complexity of our social conditions, resulting in the great disproportion between the number of the sexes, has tended to set aside a great number of women from the normal expression of their sex functions.

The danger to society, when maternity shall be left to the stupid parasitic women who are unable to exist as workers, is pointed out by Mrs. Gallichan; as is also that exaggerated form of matriarchy which is realized among the ants and bees. And she reminds women who are workers, not mothers, that in the bee-workers the ovipositor becomes a poisoned sting. She warns women not to become like the sterile bees; but she warns them also against state endowment of motherhood. And she does not suggest how the great excess of women are to become mothers without reorganizing society.

The second example she cites in warning, the common spider, whose courtship customs Darwin described in The Descent of Man, is “a case of female superiority carried to a savage conclusion.” And from this female who ruthlessly devours her lover, Mrs. Gallichan deduces a theory for “many of those wrongs which women have suffered at the hands of men. Man, acting instinctively, has rebelled, not so much, I think, against woman as against this driving hunger within himself, which forces him helpless into her power.”

The stages by which parasitism was transferred from the male to the female still need some elucidation—like the stages by which marriage passed from endogamy to exogamy. But Mrs. Gallichan’s suggestion about the male preserving himself by appearing as self-sufficient and as dominant as he can, is highly interesting. It will probably not be long before we know a great deal more of this.

In the historical section of her book, Mrs. Gallichan devotes four admirable chapters to the mother-age civilization, and four others to the position of women in Egypt, Babylon, Greece, and Rome.

Of immense significance is the relation between the enviable status of women in Egypt and that love of peace and of peaceful pursuits which characterized the Egyptian people. War, patriarchy, and the subjection of women, have gone hand in hand. Social organizations in which might was right have minimized the worth of women; those in which ingenuity, resourcefulness, and ideality were set above brute force have given women most justice.

Mrs. Gallichan’s chapter on the women of Athens and of Sparta is most suggestive. So is that on the women of Rome.

In her modern section she discusses women and labor:

The old way of looking at the patriarchal family was, from one point of thought, perfectly right and reasonable as long as every woman was ensured the protection of, and maintenance by, some man. Nor do I think there was any unhappiness or degradation involved to women in this co-operation of the old days, where the man went out to work and the woman stayed to do work at least equally valuable in the home. It was, as a rule, a co-operation of love, and in any case it was an equal partnership in work. But what was true once is not true now. We are living in a continually changing development and modification of the old tradition of the relationship of woman and man.... The women of one class have been forced into labor by the sharp driving of hunger. Among the women of the other class have arisen a great number who have turned to seek occupation from an entirely different cause, the no less bitter driving of an unstimulating and ineffective existence, a kind of boiling-over of women’s energy wasted, causing a revolt of the woman-soul against a life of confused purposes, achieving by accident what is achieved at all. Between the women who have the finest opportunities and the women who have none there is this common kinship—the wastage not so much of woman as of womanhood.

She considers “the women who have been forced into the cheating, damning struggle for life,” and urges that “the life-blood of women, that should be given to the race, is being stitched into our ready-made clothes; washed and ironed into our linen; poured into our adulterated foods”; and so on. But her reasoning in this chapter is not very clear. Women, to avoid parasitism, must work, and only a relatively small proportion of them can now find in their homes work enough to keep them self-sustaining. Protest against the sweating of women is not only philanthropic—it is perfectly sound political economy. Women workers not only should be protected against long hours, unnecessary risks, insanitary surroundings, merciless nerve tension, and the computation of their wages on a basis of their assured ability to live partly by their labor and partly by the legitimatized or unlegitimatized sale of their sex; but this can, and must, be done. Yet, when all this has been accomplished, will Mrs. Gallichan feel satisfied that the struggle for life is not “cheating, damning,” if owing to conditions we cannot regulate that struggle fails also to comprehend the struggle to give life, to reproduce?

It is because we are the mothers of men that we claim to be free.

This is the keynote of her book. But she is by no means clear in her mind as to how the mothers of men are to maintain themselves in a freedom which shall be real, not merely conceded; nor as to how the millions of women who, under our monogamous societies, cannot be permanently mated, are to justify their struggle for existence by becoming “mothers of men.”

The something that Mrs. Gallichan lacks, not in her retrospect so much as in her previsioning, has been lacked by many of the great investigators and writers who have built up the magnificent literature of evolution and evolutionary philosophy: she has an admirable survey of the “whenceness” of life and love and labor, but a short-sighted, astigmatic vision of its “whereuntoness.”

If the sole purpose of life and love and labor, among humans as among lower animals, is to continue life, to transmit the life-force, then indeed are those frustrated, futile creatures who are cheated, or who cheat themselves, out of rendering this one service to the world which can justify them for having lived in it.

But if, as most of us believe, we are more than just links in the human chain; if we have a relation to eternity as well as to history and to posterity, there are splendid interpretations of our struggles that Mrs. Gallichan does not apprehend. If souls are immortal, life is more than the perpetuation of species, or even than the improvement of the race; it is the place allotted to us for the development of that imperishable part which we are to carry hence, and through eternity. And any effort of ours which helps other souls to realize the best that life can give, to seek the best that immortality can perpetuate, may splendidly justify our existence.

Mrs. Gallichan’s conclusion about religion is that it is an “opium” to which women resort when they have no proper outlet for their sex-impulses. “I am certain,” she says, “that in us the religious impulse and the sex impulse are one.” And when she was able to satisfy the sex impulse, she no longer had any need of or interest in religion.

The limitations this puts upon her interpretation of life are too obvious to need cataloging. And this is the reason she signally fails to tell the whole of the truth about woman. This is the reason why the latter chapters of her book, in which she writes of marriage and divorce and prostitution, are of less worth to the generality of readers than the earlier ones; though this is not to say that these chapters do not contain a very great deal of vigorous thinking and excellent suggestion. But to anyone who holds that the continuance of life is the principal justification for having lived, yet deplores free love and state endowment of mothers, there is inevitably an appalling waste, for the elimination of which she may well be staggered to suggest a remedy.

Mrs. Gallichan’s book is not constructive in effect. But it is so excellently analytical, as far as it goes, that it can scarcely fail to provoke a great deal of thought.

“Change”

There is coming soon, to the Fine Arts Theatre—that charming Chicago home of the Irish Players and of “the new note” in drama—a play with an interesting title. It is called Change. It is to be given by the Welsh Players—which fact alone has a thrill in it. But the theme is even more compelling.

Two old God-fearing Welsh people have denied themselves of comforts and pleasures to give their sons an education. Then, when they expect to reap the benefits of the sacrifice, three unexpected and awful things happen: the student son has so fallen under the influence of modern skepticism as to be forced to abandon his father’s Calvinistic creed. The second one has become soaked with socialism and syndicalism. The third, a chronic invalid, is a Christian and a comfort; but he is killed, quite unnecessarily, in a labor conflict instigated by his brother. Then—the two old people again, alone. What can a playwright do with such a situation? Nothing, certainly, to attract a “capacity house.” But we shall be among the first of that small minority who likes thinking in the theatre to hear what Mr. Francis has to say. His theme is tremendous.

The Poetry of Alice Meynell

Llewellyn Jones

Not least among the stirring events of our present poetical renaissance are the publication of the collected editions of the works of Alice Meynell and Francis Thompson (Scribner). Spiritually akin, mutually influencing one another in material as in more subtle ways, their poetry stands in vivid contrast to the muse of our younger singers, the makers of what English critics hail as a new Georgian Age. That this difference gives them an added significance, and not as some critics have said, a lessened one, is the burden of the present appreciation of the poems of Alice Meynell. For there is a tendency for the reader who is intoxicated with poetic modernity to reason somewhat after this fashion. Here, he will say,—as indeed Mr. Austin Harrison has said of Francis Thompson—is a “reed pipe of neo-mediaevalism ... a poet of the gargoyle,” not of this modern world, and so neither in sympathy of thought or melody with us of the twentieth century, its free life and vers libre. All this, of course, because, Francis Thompson was—as is Mrs. Meynell—a child of the Catholic Church. Our supposititious reader will continue to the effect that there is no spiritual profit to be had in reading these poets when the modern attitude is to be found in such writers as W. W. Gibson, Masefield, and Hardy. But in so arguing, our reader will be entirely wrong as to the facts, and mistaken in his whole manner of approach to the realm of poetic values.

Mr. Max Eastman, in his charming book, The Enjoyment of Poetry, lays stress on the fact that poetry is not primarily the registering of emotions but the expression of keen realizations. A mathematical concept may arouse an emotion, but the poet makes the actual emotion transmissible by his selective power in picking out the focal point of the experience by which it is aroused. If poetry is essentially realization of life, then we have no longer any excuse for asking our poets to share our doctrinal views before we consent to read them. On the contrary, we should be more anxious to read Mrs. Meynell than Mr. Gibson, if we are modernists, for Mr. Gibson may, conceivably, not be able to tell us anything we have not already felt. Mrs. Meynell, on the other hand, can inform our feelings with fresh aspects of experience, and she does so abundantly. Her Catholicism is not mediaevalism, but, in so far as it is translatable into her poetry it is simply a vocabulary for the expression of certain emotional realizations of life which we modernists find it very hard to express because we do not have the necessary vocabulary. What can be more modern than the doctrine of the immanence of God and his abode in man, that much-discussed “social gospel?” Yet the following poem, not in spite of but through its Catholic terminology, heightens our realization of brotherhood and dependence one upon another. It is entitled The Unknown God:

One of the crowd went up,

And knelt before the Paten and the Cup,

Received the Lord, returned in peace, and prayed

Close to my side; then in my heart I said:

“O Christ, in this man’s life—

This stranger who is Thine—in all his strife,

All his felicity, his good and ill,

In the assaulted stronghold of his will,

“I do confess Thee here,

Alive within this life; I know Thee near

Within this lonely conscience, closed away

Within this brother’s solitary day.

“Christ in his unknown heart,

His intellect unknown—this love, this art,

This battle and this peace, this destiny

That I shall never know, look upon me!

“Christ in his numbered breath,

Christ in his beating heart and in his death,

Christ in his mystery! From that secret place

And from that separate dwelling, give me grace.”

The spectacle of a general communion again gives Mrs. Meynell inspiration for a poem whose last two stanzas apply equally as well to the secular, evolutionary view of salvation as they do to the ecclesiastical view, and whose last stanza is most suggestive in the light it throws upon the puzzling discrepancy between the littleness of man and the unlimited material vast in which he finds himself a floating speck:

I saw this people as a field of flowers,

Each grown at such a price

The sum of unimaginable powers

Did no more than suffice.

A thousand single central daisies they,

A thousand of the one;

For each, the entire monopoly of day;

For each, the whole of the devoted sun.

Even so typically modern a philosopher as Henri Bergson would find one of his leading and rather baffling ideas beautifully realized in one of Mrs. Meynell’s sonnets. Matter, Bergson tells us, in all its manifestations is moulded by a spiritual push from behind it, so that the sensible world is not a mosaic of atoms obeying fixed laws but rather a cosmic compromise between matter and spirit, a modus vivendi the operation of which would seem very different to us were our viewpoint that of pure spirit. Says Mrs. Meynell in To a Daisy:

Slight as thou art, thou art enough to hide

Like all created things, secrets from me,

And stand, a barrier to eternity.

And I, how can I praise thee well and wide

From where I dwell—upon the hither side?

Thou little veil for so great mystery,

When shall I penetrate all things and thee,

And then look back? For this I must abide,

Till thou shalt grow and fold and be unfurled

Literally between me and the world.

Then I shall drink from in beneath a spring,

And from a poet’s side shall read his book.

O daisy mine, what shall it be to look

From God’s side even of such a simple thing?

The sense of what might, perhaps, be called restrained paradox in that sonnet, is frequently met with in Mrs. Meynell’s writings, and it corresponds to aspects of reality which the old religious phraseology she has so freshly minted for us is alone fitted to convey. The Young Neophyte is a beautiful sonnet enshrining the fatefulness of every human action, the gift of the full flower which is implicit in the gift of the smallest bud, the preparation we are constantly making for crises which are yet hidden in the future. Thoughts in Separation also deals with the paradoxical overcoming of the handicaps of personal absence of our friends through community of thought and feeling. Not only are these paradoxes in human psychology delicately set forth by the poet, but those darker ones of human work and destiny are consolingly illuminated in such a poem as Builders of Ruins—which does not depend for its quality of consolation upon anything foreign to its poetic truth.

One poem in the book is, perhaps, most remarkable for the light it throws upon the sense in which the term poetic truth may be used, and as showing the difference between the poetic, the realizable, and, therefore, the true side of a religion—the side Matthew Arnold was so anxious to keep—and the mere theological framework, always smelling of unreality and always in need of renovation. The poem may stand as a warning against confusing real poetry—in whose truth we need not be afraid to trust because its author does not inhabit our own thought world—with versified theology. If all of Mrs. Meynell’s work were like her Messina, 1908, then the critic and reader who now mistakenly shun her would be right. And the poem is a curious commentary upon Mr. Eastman’s insistence that poetry is realization. For in her other poems the author has presented those aspects of her religion which are verifiable in experience. Perhaps the quotations given above bear out that point. But one aspect of religious thought has now been pretty generally abandoned, not because it has ever been proven false, but because we have never succeeded in realizing it for ourselves. The God of orthodox church theodicy never did “make good”; Christ, the Saints, and even the very material form of the cross itself had to mediate between man and the divine. And it is precisely in the one case in this book where Mrs. Meynell tries to present the governing rather than the immanent God to us that she fails—as, if poetry be realization, we should expect her to fail. The first stanza of the poem addressed to the Deity describes in a few bold strokes the wreck of Messina, and ends with the lines:

Destroyer, we have cowered beneath Thine own

Immediate unintelligible hand.

The second stanza describes the missions of mercy to the stricken city, and ends:

... our shattered fingers feel

Thy mediate and intelligible hand.

The essential weakness of this dependence for poetic effect upon the two adjectives and their negatives is no less obvious than the weakness of the poet’s attribution of such apparently impulsive and then retractatory conduct to a God whose ways must either be explicable in terms of a human sense of order or not made the subject of human discourse at all.

Mrs. Meynell describes herself in one of these poems as a singer of a single mood. Some of her critics have taken her at her word and saved themselves some trouble thereby in their task of appreciation. But as a matter of fact, she should not be taken at her own modest estimate, for her one mood is such a pervasive one, such a large and sane mood, that it pays to look at more than one aspect of life through its coloring. And in truth, besides her better-known poems which need no further mention here, The Lady Poverty and Renouncement, for example, there will be found within the small compass of her beautifully-housed collection of verse many aspects of nature, all of them instinct with a mystic shimmer of life, as well as aspects of the innermost life of man which it is given to few spirits to sing in words—only, in fact, to those spirits whose effort it is to make their poetry

Plain, behind oracles ... and past

All symbols, simple; perfect, heavenly-wild,

The song some loaded poets reach at last—

The kings that found a Child.

To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive, and it is not denied to criticism to have it; but then criticism must be sincere, simple, flexible, ardent, ever widening its knowledge.—Matthew Arnold in Essays in Criticism (First Series).

An Ancient Radical

William L. Chenery

Euripides and His Age, by Gilbert Murray. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]

The “conspiracy of silence” which oppressed the youth of those of us who were born in the late Victorian era never seems more hateful than when some master hand connects the present labors of liberty with the strivings of the infinite past. In some fashion the dominating spirits of a generation ago contrived to make the struggles for human freedom appear as ugly isolated episodes without precursors or ancestry. They forgot the Shelleys and the Godwins and they even denied the significance of the classic forerunners of today’s ardent prophets.

There were happy exceptions. Some of us cherish the teachings of a Virginia professor who, as far as the adolescent capacities of his students permitted, bridged the gap between Socrates’s free questionings and the contemporary yearnings for a world of uncompromising justice and beauty. What that Southern student did for his small band of followers Gilbert Murray has long been doing for the great world. His present contribution belongs to that satisfying series, The Home University Library. Incidentally, one reflects that this Home University is one of the few institutions of learning which has completely avoided the blinders so many are complacently wearing. The Euripides of Murray suggests to the author—and to the reader, one may claim—both Tolstoi and Ibsen. But, one hastens to state, Professor Murray is too learned and thoughtful a man to paint a revolutionary Euripides such as The Masses—much as one loves that exuberant Don Quixote—would delight to honor and to portray. His onset, however, catches us:

“Every man who possesses real vitality can be seen as the resultant of two forces,” says Murray. “He is first the child of a particular age, society, convention; of what we may call in one word a tradition. He is secondly, in one degree or another, a rebel against that tradition. And the best traditions make the best rebels. Euripides is the child of a strong and splendid tradition and is, together with Plato, the fiercest of all rebels against it.... Euripides, like ourselves, comes in an age of criticism, following upon an age of movement and action. And for the most part, like ourselves, he accepts the general standards on which the movement and action were based. He accepts the Athenian ideals of free thought, free speech, democracy, ‘virtue,’ and patriotism. He arraigns his country because she is false to them.”

The suffragist and the feminist movements have recently brought the great dramatist to his proper appreciation in respect to women. Some of the passages in the Medea are quoted as often in suffragist campaigns as the words of Bernard Shaw or of Olive Schreiner. This Greek is sometimes said to be the first literary man who understood women. For that reason, as Professor Murray so charmingly emphasizes, Euripides was ever accounted a woman hater, despite even the implications of his great chorus which sings so nobly woman’s destined rise as a power in the world. His statement of the cause of barbarian woman against a civilized man who has wronged her is incomparably more contemporary than Madam Butterfly, and with Murray we may doubt “if ever the deserted one has found such words of fire as Medea speaks.” And, as the author continues, “Medea is not only a barbarian; she is also a woman, and fights the horrible war that lies, an eternally latent possibility, between woman and man. Some of the most profound and wounding things said both by Medea and Jason might almost be labelled in a book of extracts ‘Any Wife to Any Husband’ or ‘Any Husband to Any Wife.’”

The change which came over the spirit of Euripides’s vision, as Athens itself was transformed by empire lust from the first glories of Pericles, suggest again the purifying satire of our ablest moderns. War is hateful and the picture which the Attic dramatist drew of the horrors of dying Troy leave little to the present imagination. Euripides accordingly became as popular in imperialistic Athens as was Bebel among the Kaiser’s ministers. Murray interprets this phase magnificently. He concludes: “This scene, with the parting between Andromache and the child which follows, seems to me perhaps the most heartrending in all the tragic literature of the world. After rising from it one understands Aristotle’s judgment of Euripides as the ‘most tragic of the poets.’” One has only to recall the brave gentleness of Hector’s wife, described first in Homeric words, to agree with the present author.

On the purely critical side Professor Murray’s words are vastly important. Especially valuable is his discussion of the chorus and the deus ex machina concerning which so much error has been taught since Horace wrote on the art of poetry. But this small book is not designed for those whose interest in Greek drama is technical. It is Euripides, the philosopher; Euripides, the satirist of his times; Euripides, the preacher of lofty virtues, the apostle of new men and more righteous gods, who concerns the great awakening world of 1914. The intellectual battles which Euripides fought on behalf of Athens have been waged again and often for the millions who slumber and are content. They are being fought now with an intensity unprecedented. So it brings courage and it brings calm to realize the continuity of the conflict, and to recall the signal victories of the olden days. Gilbert Murray’s achievements are too numerous to permit praise. One may only say now that the present book is in line with the fine things of his past; that by virtue of his labors the world agony for liberty and justice and beauty reveals new phases of the intrinsic dignity and honor which have been its possession since men desired better things.

For those whose lives are chaotic personal loves must also be chaotic; this or that passion, malice, a jesting humor, some physical lust, gratified vanity, egotistical pride, will rule and limit the relationship and color its ultimate futility.—H. G. Wells in First and Last Things.

Isn’t it possible to be pedantic in the demand for simplicity? It’s a cry which, if I notice aright, nature has a jaunty way of disregarding. Command a rosebush in the stress of June to purge itself; coerce a convolvulus out of the paths of catachresis. Amen!—Some Letters of William Vaughn Moody.

Equal Suffrage: The First Real Test

Henry Blackman Sell

The query of the anti-suffragist—“Will the women really use suffrage if they have it”—was rather conclusively answered in the affirmative at Chicago aldermanic elections on April 7, when equal suffrage was given its first real test in an American city of first rank. This election brought out many interesting incidents which might be considered as having “laboratory” value.

It has been contended by the “antis” that the women would be bad losers; that they would not support the non-partisan ideals which are becoming a definite part of our “new patriotism”; that the result of equal suffrage would simply be one of double vote, wives voting as their husbands decided; that the women coming out in the first enthusiasm of registration would not take the same interest in the prosaic work at the polls; that the fights against bad nominees would result either in a duplication of man-run campaigns, or in ineffective and lady-like campaigns.

The first of these contentions was proved untrue to even the most casual observer at the polls on election day. The women were fighting uphill all the way, and where the so-termed “suffrage men” were slightly unpleasant in their attitude towards the “antis,” the women were all cheerfulness and all refreshing encouragement. As one explained: “It has been the most wonderful feeling, working shoulder to shoulder with the men in something that has really been our duty all along.”

Nine women candidates were up for election and not one was chosen; and yet, after talking with five defeated women candidates and three defeated men candidates, I concluded that the women knew more about the philosophy of politics and its sad uncertainties than men who had been contesting for years.

True, election to office is but a by-product of political experience; it is a most coveted by-product, nevertheless, and when a woman like Marion Drake, who ran a close race against Chicago’s “bad” alderman, says, at the closing of the polls, “I have not been elected, but every minute of the time I have expended has been worth while and I shall try again at the next election,”—it shows the right spirit and the fundamental error in the assertion that women cannot lose gracefully.

Non-partisanism could be given no real test, for these ideals seemed necessary of application in only two or three wards. In one—the twenty-first—an alderman with a bad record was up for re-election in opposition to a Republican of no particular merit. The women got together, with the aid of some of the better men, and selected a non-partisan candidate. This man was elected directly through the efforts of the women who, Republican, Democratic, and Progressive, rallied in true non-partisan spirit to his aid.

As to the control of the women’s votes by the men: it is interesting to note that in the more intelligent wards there was considerable variance between the men and the women, while in the wards of the poorer and less intellectually-inclined portions of the city the votes ran a great deal alike.

The women came out in good numbers and, as a matter of fact, the masculine vote was considerably higher than usual; but even with this advantage, the registered women outvoted the registered men by a small per cent.

The campaigns conducted by the various women were distinctly different from the ordinary political campaigns. They were dignified, straightforward, strong, and effective. Miss Drake, in her campaign against John Coughlin, colloquially and delicately known as “Bathhouse John,”—the name originating from the fact that the gentleman in question received his political training as a mopper and rubber in one of Chicago’s most infamous bath houses,—made a direct appeal, in a house to house, voter to voter, canvass of her ward. In this way she told over two-thirds of the people of the “Bathhouse’s” territory all about the gentleman, his ambitions, his desires, and his insidious motives. And while she was defeated, it must be remembered that though Coughlin received a sufficient plurality, he by no means attained his boast:—“I’ll beat that skirt by 8,000 votes.” In fact, where his plurality at the last elections was approximately eight to one, this year it was less than two-and-a-half to one, making an obvious deduction that Miss Drake’s campaign was decidedly successful even though she did not win.

The Education of Yesterday and Today

William Saphier

The Education of Karl Witte, translated by Leo Wiener and edited by H. Addington Bruce. [Thomas Y. Crowell Company, New York.]

Mr. Saphier is a Roumanian who came to this country only a few years ago and learned English. The following review is his first attempt at writing, and we print it just as it came to us, hoping our readers will find it as interesting as we did.

French, Italian, English, Greek, and German at the age of nine, a Ph.D. degree at fourteen, a doctor of laws and an appointment to the teaching staff of the Berlin University at sixteen—these were some of the achievements of Karl Witte. Or shall I say of pastor Witte, the father? For the boy had very little to do with it: he was merely a piece of putty in the able hands of a strong-willed man who knew what he wanted and how to get it. A child of ordinary abilities, according to pastor Witte and others, Karl absorbed an enormous amount of knowledge in a comparatively short time, as a result of a method of education which began almost as soon as he showed intelligence.

The book, originally written about one hundred years ago when scientific advice on the subject was lacking, is a remarkable document. It is full of useful information and practical hints to parents and people interested in the education of children, even in this day of scientific methods and conflicting authorities. But as we might have expected, the discipline reminds us a little of the German “Kaserne.” The spilling of a little milk on the tablecloth was punished by enforced abstinence from all foods except bread and salt. Punishment as a remedy for an offense is always wrong, because it does not prove the responsibility of the act to the child.

The spirit in which pastor Witte went about his task is shown in the following passage:

The firmness in executing my purpose went so far that even our house dog knew the emphasis of the words: “I must work,” and calmed down the moment we spoke these words softly into his ears. Almost from the outset this made an enormous impression on Karl. He soon became accustomed to look upon his work time as something sacred.

The development of intellectual and moral courage, the most important qualities any man or woman may possess, were neglected, at least were not given the attention they deserve. To inculcate in the child a desire for liberty and social equality, he overlooks entirely.

The father is really the more remarkable of the two. A product of the method of education prevailing at the time, he stands as a refutation of his own theories. Pastor Witte conceived and carried out an idea successfully. He did something, at least theoretically, worth while. The son died at eighty-three. Now what difference would it have made either to the boy or to the world if his appointment to the teaching staff of Berlin had come at a later date? Most methods of education aim at the training of the senses and the accumulation of facts. While these are necessary, I think the speed at which this is done is immaterial to the child.

Some of the finest men and women, who made this a better world to live in, had no scientific training in their childhood or later. We need not go back to history to find them. Maxime Gorky, for instance, lost his parents before he was four years old, and began to read under the supervision of a cook at sixteen. Jack London is another instance that suggests itself readily to one’s mind.

Of course these are exceptional people, but take the thousands of able and brainy men and women in labor organizations and idealists in all walks of life. Usually they had very little attention from their parents, either because they had no time or did not know enough. These men and women who had to rub up against the rough edges of our money-making machinery and to stand squarely on their feet facing this world and its problems,—willing to lend a hand, yes, even to give their lives for the betterment of social and economic conditions—these persons are worthy of the name.

Now I don’t want to say anything against the early training of children. The kindergarten and all the methods of early training in schools have come into existence because there is a real need for them. Parents, for many reasons, no longer have the time to train their own children; but we expect results from education in general that cannot be accomplished.

What good are all the learning and scientific facts that we have accumulated up to now, if we don’t use them to make our life richer and more beautiful? Knowledge and ability are worthless if there is no moral and intellectual courage to back them up. Pastor Witte thought the education of his son finished when he reached the age of sixteen. We today do things in the same spirit. We get things done. Nothing slow about us. The result, of course, is very poor; nobody is satisfied. Our experts, always ready with advice on any and everything, tell us that what we need is technical training to provide industry with efficient help. These educators do not see that the difficulty is not with the child but with industrial conditions. They are going to fit the child to this misery called modern industry. But remove the possibility of the unscrupulous taking advantage of the inexperienced and simple-minded, and many of the so-called educational problems will disappear.

Some Book Reviews

A New-Old Tagore Play

Chitra: A Play in One Act, by Rabindranath Tagore. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]

Nothing is more irritating to a really modern critic than to have to join in a chorus of universal praise. It is particularly irritating when the person acclaimed is a Nobel prize winner, for surely those of us who sit in private judgment in secluded places ought to be able to discern values subtler than the ones open to the eyes of some mysterious frock-coated and silk-hatted jury of professors in Stockholm, or wherever it may be. The very marrow in the bones of criticism curdles at the thought of agreeing with a popular award.

But a certain native honesty and a distinct desire to spread good news obliges one, in the case of Chitra, to withhold the amiable dissecting knife. The play is far too beautiful to serve as a cadaver for the illustration of either the anatomist’s skill or the facts of anatomy. Let it be confessed that this reviewer, who was about to send the book back with a refusal to review any work of Tagore, found, after reading a few lines, that he was forced to go on; and that having once gone on, he preferred to write the review rather than to give up the book.

This play was written twenty-five years ago, and belongs, therefore, to that earlier strata of Tagore’s life which is to the normal mind so much more alluring than the latter detritus that seems to have accumulated over him. His later work appears to be old with the old age of Asia and with the old age of himself. Its fundamental feeling is the only too familiar impulse to recline on the bosom of a remote God. We who regard this attitude as a perversion of manhood will turn from it with relief to the earlier writing, in which the very life-blood of our own hearts seems quivering with the intimations of a better-than-godlike beauty.

As I have suggested, there is very little that can rationally be said about this play Chitra. To indicate something of the nature of so perfect a work is the sole office that I can profitably perform.

Chitra, daughter of a King who had no sons, was brought up to live the life and perform the activities of a man, with a man’s hardness of frame and a man’s directness of will. One day while hunting in the forest, she found sleeping in her path Arjuna, the great warrior of the Kuru Clan. “Then for the first time in my life I felt myself a woman, and knew that a man was before me....” Going to the gods of love, Chitra obtained from them the gift of a perfect and world-vanquishing beauty to last for one year only; and returning to Arjuna she overcame by this invincible weapon the monastic vows which he had taken upon himself, and swept him away into the wild and glorious current of her year of beauty. Thus the year begins:

Chitra

At evening I lay down on a grassy bed strewn with the petals of spring flowers, and recollected the wonderful praise of my beauty I had heard from Arjuna;—drinking drop by drop the honey that I had stored during the long day. The history of my past life, like that of my former existences, was forgotten. I felt like a flower, which has but a few fleeting hours to listen to all the humming of the woodlands and then must lower its eyes from the sky, bend its head, and at a breath give itself up to the dust without a cry, thus ending the short story of a perfect moment that has neither past nor future.

Vasanta (The God of Love)

A limitless life of glory can bloom and spend itself in a morning.

Madana (The God of the Seasons)

Like an endless meaning in the narrow span of a song.

Chitra

The southern breeze caressed me to sleep. From the flowering malati bower overhead silent kisses dropped over my body. On my hair, my breast, my feet, each flower chose a bed to die on. I slept. And suddenly, in the depth of my sleep, I felt as if some intense eager look, like tapering fingers of flame, touched my slumbering body. I started up and saw the Hermit standing before me. The moon had moved to the west, peering through the leaves to espy this wonder of divine art wrought in a fragile human frame. The air was heavy with perfume; the silence of the night was vocal with the chirping of crickets; the reflections of the trees hung motionless in the lake; and with his staff in his hand he stood, tall and straight and still, like a forest tree. It seemed to me that I had, on opening my eyes, died to all realities of life and undergone a dream birth into a shadow land. Shame slipped to my feet like loosened clothes. I heard his call—“Beloved, my most beloved!” And all my forgotten lives united as one and responded to it. I said, “Take me, take all I am!” And I stretched out my arms to him. The moon set behind the trees. Heaven and earth, time and space, pleasure and pain, death and life merged together in an unbearable ecstasy.... With the first gleam of light, the first twitter of birds, I rose up and sat leaning on my left arm. He lay asleep with a vague smile about his lips like the crescent moon in the morning. The rosy-red glow of the dawn fell upon his noble forehead. I sighed and stood up. I drew together the leafy lianas to screen the streaming sun from his face. I looked about me and saw the same old earth. I remembered what I used to be, and ran and ran like a deer afraid of her own shadow, through the forest path strewn with shephali flowers. I found a lonely nook, and sitting down covered my face with both hands, and tried to weep and cry. But no tears came to my eyes.

Madana

Alas, thou daughter of mortals! I stole from the divine storehouse the fragrant wine of heaven, filled with it one earthly night to the brim, and placed it in thy hand to drink—yet still I hear this cry of anguish!...

A few words, a half dozen pages of prose modulated to perform an office as subtle as that of blank verse, give us the exquisite essence of the year that follows; and toward the end there steal into it notes of the inadequacy which the great warrior feels in this perfection, and his desire for the old and harsher round of human life. Thus the year ends:

Madana

Tonight is thy last night.

Vasanta

The loveliness of your body will return tomorrow to the inexhaustible stores of the spring. The ruddy tint of thy lips, freed from the memory of Arjuna’s kisses, will bud anew as a pair of fresh asoka leaves, and the soft, white glow of thy skin will be born again in a hundred fragrant jasmine flowers.

Chitra

O gods, grant me this my prayer! Tonight, in its last hour, let my beauty flash its brightest, like the final flicker of a dying flame.

Madana

Thou shalt have thy wish.

And as it ends, and as Chitra realizes that there is to fall from her that radiance which has been, for a year, the sole bond between her and her lover, and also the sole barrier between the real her and him, she finds that his profounder longing has changed into a desire for the companionship of that strong and eager boy-woman that she was before her transformation.

Chitra (cloaked)

My lord, has the cup been drained to the last drop? Is this indeed the end? No; when all is done something still remains, and that is my last sacrifice at your feet.

I brought from the garden of heaven flowers of incomparable beauty with which to worship you, god of my heart. If the rites are over, if the flowers have faded, let me throw them out of the temple (unveiling in her original male attire). Now, look at your worshipper with gracious eyes.

I am not beautifully perfect as the flowers with which I worshipped. I have many flaws and blemishes. I am a traveller in the great world-path, my garments are dirty, and my feet are bleeding with thorns. Where should I achieve flower-beauty, the unsullied loveliness of a moment’s life? The gift that I proudly bring you is the heart of a woman. Here have all pains and joys gathered, the hopes and fears and shames of a daughter of the dust; here love springs up struggling toward immortal life. Herein lies an imperfection which yet is noble and grand. If the flower-service is finished, my master, accept this as your servant for the days to come!

I am Chitra, the king’s daughter. Perhaps you will remember the day when a woman came to you in the temple of Shiva, her body loaded with ornaments and finery. That shameless woman came to court you as though she were a man. You rejected her; you did well. My lord, I am that woman. She was my disguise. Then by the boon of gods I obtained for a year the most radiant form that a mortal ever wore, and wearied my hero’s heart with the burden of that deceit. Most surely I am not that woman.

I am Chitra. No goddess to be worshipped, nor yet the object of common pity to be brushed aside like a moth with indifference. If you deign to keep me by your side in the path of danger and daring, if you allow me to share the great duties of your life, then you will know my true self. If your babe, whom I am nourishing in my womb, be born a son, I shall myself teach him to be a second Arjuna, and send him to you when the time comes, and then at last you will truly know me. Today I can only offer you Chitra, the daughter of a king.

Arjuna

Beloved, my life is full.

Arthur Davison Ficke.

An Unorthodox View of Burroughs

Our Friend John Burroughs, by Clara Barrus. [Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.]

That title engenders a resentment in me, a sense of unfitness. It is an epitome of a popular approval which has cheapened the word “friendship.” If Walt Whitman, John Muir, and Francis F. Browne had jointly written of Burroughs, the words “our friend” in the title of their collaboration would have been inevitable and nice. The common disregard of so unimportant a matter as this seems to be in the author’s opinion exhibits the crass liberties which the public is wont to take with personalities. The result is that a great man may become popular and useful before he is understood.

Burroughs happily is both read and understood. His popularity therefore is wholesome. But the mild and consistent protest which his life has been and is against the necessary artificialities in which most of his “friends” live has never drawn them into a comprehending, practicing sympathy with it. He is read, applauded, and envied—but not followed. His softness and gentle unconcern with affairs are the antitheses of those dynamic qualities which confer leadership and vitalize men’s impulses and deeds. His urban admirers go to the country to rusticate and picnic but not to live a life like his. He does too much speculative thinking to give his attitude toward the world an opportunity to go home to his readers.

Whitman, with a similar indifference to a following, drives men into the open road; Thoreau lures them to Walden Ponds to repeat his experiment; Ik Marvel persuades them to farm; David Grayson charms city folk back to the land, to anchor and live. Burroughs attracts visitors to Slabsides. He is on the verge of becoming an institution, a curiosity. His life has been a personal success. He is young in spirit and surprisingly robust at nearly eighty years of age—he is seventy-seven this month—and I daresay that his obvious failure to lead his readers towards country homes of their own or seriously to interest them in the art of simple living has never given him the slightest pain. He has assumed no responsibility for the ways of the world. Nature is capable of working out her own salvation during a future eternity. A leaf on a tree does not quarrel with or attempt to reform its personal kin. It functions alone; the life of which it is a part must take care of horticultural sociology. Burroughs to me acknowledges himself to be a leaf on the great tree. That is exceedingly interesting; but endow leaves with reason, give them an expanding consciousness, and their functions must change. Burroughs would require to be more than a predestinated leaf if his fellows were leaves.

By virtue of society’s struggle and industry, in which Burroughs is not interested, he has made of the world, so far as he is concerned, a quiet, beautiful outdoor cathedral, domed by the sky, its chief priest being fed and clothed by the slaves of productive industry in your world and mine. With great respect and admiration I pronounce him a sagacious man, a clever leaf that has employed its reason with remarkable personal advantage. In Burroughs’ world the tragedies, strife, and noise that we experience do not exist; his cathedral is a by-product and he is a modest beneficiary of humanity’s work. In relation to the masses of people it is as unreal as it is unproductive of racial fitness to persist in the world as most men know it. He loves to dream, think, and write in his cathedral; what is going on outside does not disturb him. He revels in the leisure, order, and security which the outsiders have provided. He assures us that it is pleasant and satisfying, and we honor and reward him for the information, but I should like to ask him whether the largest freedom and selfhood that are achievable apart from working, conflicting, warring men are not themselves fundamentally artificial.

Burroughs does not seem to be sufficiently alive to suspect that he has missed something greater than personal contentment. A reader of everything that he has published, I never, until I read the autobiographical sketches in this work, felt the pity and unsocial contempt—not for the man but for the type—which I have here tried to express.

D. C. W.

Another Masefield Tragedy

The Tragedy of Pompey the Great, by John Masefield. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]

Creative artist that he is, Masefield moves forward into amazing clearness, heightened by flashes of poetic light, the scenes of nearly two thousand years ago in Rome. The fidelity of this tragedy to the facts of history, and the remarkable extent to which it reproduces the overwhelming glory of a great struggle, are new proofs of the author’s special affinity with the sanguinary deeds of heroic men. Masefield’s plays and narrative poems give the element of tragedy something of its old vividness and nobility in art. Some of his phrases sound like the fall of a guillotine. He is a master of the magic of objectifying tremendous unrealities. He hates feeble passions; wanton courage and oaken physical power in action are the big things that he likes to ennoble with poetic treatment. And his success is incomparable, so far as his contemporaries are concerned.

Masefield’s great characters, true to the glossed facts of life, in crises exhibit indwelling cave-men. His frankness and honesty are themselves tragical. Life is full of and inseparable from tragedy. Pompey “saw a madman in Egypt. He was eyeless with staring at the sun. He said that ideas come out of the East, like locusts. They settle on the nations and give them life; and then pass on, dying, to the wilds, to end in some scratch on a bone, by a cave-man’s fire.” The old warrior lies awake, thinking. “What are we?” he asks Lucceius, and that actor in a great play replies, “Who knows? Dust with a tragic purpose. Then an end.” Masefield surveys the recorded history of the past, sees into the heart of the present and exclaims, “Tragedy!” And of course that is in his own life; otherwise he could not see it apart from himself. In sheer desperation he endues dust with a “tragic purpose,” but he does not believe so much as he hopes that a “purpose” inheres in that resultant of life, for in the big poem with which he summarizes the record of Pompey he says:

And all their passionate hearts are dust,

And dust the great idea that burned

In various flames of love and lust

Till the world’s brain was turned.

God, moving darkly in men’s brains,

Using their passions as his tool,

Brings freedom with a tyrant’s chains

And wisdom with the fool.

Blindly and bloodily we drift,

Our interests clog our hearts with dreams,

God make my brooding soul a rift

Through which a meaning gleams.

The Tragedy of Pompey the Great, unlike any Shaw play or even The Tragedy of Nan, is not good reading; its short sentences, tragic with import, are mere outlines. But they drive incarnate reality into one’s soul.

What was the tragedy of Pompey? Well, it began hundreds of years before he was born; he was the accidental embodiment of it. He had earned security and peace. He had aided Caesar in conquering Gaul. “Caesar would never have been anybody if Pompey hadn’t backed him.” But that tyrant’s lust for power provoked a civil war, and the end was “a blind, turbulent heaving towards freedom.” Pompey’s dream of freedom—his conviction that power was in too few hands—cost him his life. To him Rome was inwardly “a great democratic power struggling with obsolete laws.” He declared that “Rome must be settled. The crowd must have more power.” But Pompey’s dream was shallow and human, even if great, for, regarding the “thought of the world” as of transcendent importance, he asks, “For what else are we fighting but to control the thought of the world? What else matters?”

History seems to try to repeat itself. Lentulus, fearing that they were losing Rome, said to Pompey, “You have done nothing.” The reply—“Wait”—has a modern sound. Pompey was preparing to fight Caesar, but public opinion, voiced by Metellus, excitedly demanded, “but at once. Give him no time to win recruits by success. Give them no time here. The rabble don’t hesitate. They don’t understand a man who hesitates.”

That too might have been said by a modern American newspaper, affecting to speak for the crowd.

Philip, beloved of the maiden Antistia, is fanatically true to his master, whom he would follow “To the desert. To the night without stars. To the wastes of the seas. To the two-forked flame.” To him this blind devotion meant more than Antistia’s love. “We shall have to put off our marriage,” he said to her, and she, speaking from the deep heart of the mother, unachieved, answered:

Why, thus it is. We put off and put off till youth’s gone, and strength’s gone, and beauty’s gone. Till we two dry sticks mumble by the fire together, wondering what there was in life, when the sap ran.... When you kiss the dry old hag, Philip, you’ll remember these arms that lay wide on the bed, waiting, empty. Years. You’ll remember this beauty. All this beauty. That would have borne you sons but for your master.

Whatever the fate of Pompey, Antistia’s was the supreme tragedy.

DeWitt C. Wing.

A Net to Snare the Sun

The World Set Free, by H. G. Wells. [E. P. Dutton and Company, New York.]

Do you remember the little verse of Kipling’s in the Just So Stories about the small person who kept so many serving men

“One million Hows, two million Wheres,

And seven million Whys?”

There’s something very much like that small person in a decidedly larger person called H. G. Wells. For all the great sweep and astonishing convincingness of his later novels he still keeps the child-like quality of asking startling questions about everything in the universe. He still wants to know: “Why can’t I catch the sun, and what would happen if I did?”

In his last half dozen novels he has been asking about various phases of our modern society, politics, and the sex question. But in this latest book, The World Set Free, he goes back to a type of question that interested him some years ago, the type half fanciful and half sociological that produced In the Days of the Comet, The Time Machine, and When the Sleeper Wakes. But this book is not entirely like the earlier ones. For one thing the science is for the first time so nearly possible that it is almost probable, and for another this book is the work of an older, quieter soul with less regard for externals and with more faith in the ultimate high hope for mankind.

What Wells has asked himself this time is: “What would happen if man were suddenly given command over an unlimited amount of physical power?” He brings this about by modern chemistry. A scientist discovers a new theory of matter which enables him to break down metals by radio-activity and so generate practically limitless power. The first use the world makes of this power is to go to war. We can hardly quarrel with Wells for the improbability of this because it sweeps the board so clear for his reconstruction period, which is the heart of the story.

A strange story it is; one whose hero is mankind—mankind in the bulk, groping, struggling, trying half blindly to adapt himself to the new conditions, and at last, after a desperate period of reconstruction, coming out into the sunlight, triumphant, clean, and at peace. Now and then an individual is caught up for an instant into the story, transfigured for the moment by circumstances into a mouthpiece for the mass of mankind,—a scientist, a middle-class Englishman who wrote his memoirs, the Slavic Fox, a dying prophet of the later age,—but for the most part it is just mankind who speaks. Wells, by the great sweep and vision of his ideas and the almost super-human handling of the technical difficulties of such an impersonal story, succeeds in raising us for a moment out of our personal selves so that we are completely identified with the race, and view its later successes with a serene and personal pride.

Each of us becomes a link in the great chain of humanity that reaches from the cave man through the “chuckle-headed youth” to the dying professor, the men who dreamed of snaring the sun in a net and taming it to their hand. “Ye auld red thing ...” we say with the chuckle-headed youth, “We’ll have you yet!” And the dying prophet cries for each of us to the setting orb:

“Old Sun, I gather myself together out of the pools of the individual that have held me dispersed so long. I gather my billion thoughts into science and my million wills into a common purpose. Well may you slink down behind the mountain from me, well may you cower....”

Eunice Tietjens.

A $10,000 Novel

Diane of the Green Van, by Leona Dalrymple. [The Reilly and Britton Company, Chicago.]

About the middle of last December Mr. F. K. Reilly sent a telegram to a Miss Leona Dalrymple of Passaic, New Jersey, in which he asked: “May I call upon you Thursday afternoon?” The telegram was the result of the $10,000 prize contest which the Reilly and Britton Company had planned early in the year; and Miss Dalrymple had just been announced as the winner by the three judges—S. S. McClure, Ida Tarbell, and George N. Madison. She knew nothing of this, however, though she thought Mr. Reilly’s telegram must mean an interest in her work; so she replied calmly that she would be pleased to see him on Thursday. Then Mr. Reilly’s eyes begin to twinkle, as he tells the story, for it is rather a joke to set out on a journey with a $10,000 check in your pocket for an unsuspecting young woman. Even when he explained to her and presented the check she remained calm—though she is only twenty-eight years old and this was her first taste of real fame. She told Mr. Reilly that she had another novel which she hoped might interest him—but he took the words out of her mouth by saying that he had come prepared to make a contract for it!

So much for the latest of modern fairy tales. Diane of the Green Van is the prize-winning novel, and, despite our first suspicion of it because of that very fact, it proves to be a good one. Miss Dalrymple loves the outdoors, and her present story of an American girl who goes jaunting in a van in the Florida Everglades was suggested by a newspaper clipping about an adventurous young Englishwoman who managed to break away from conventions once a year and roam the country in a gipsy wagon. Not all “best sellers” have as much real charm as this one. Perhaps its freshness and spontaneity are due to the fact that it had to be written in six weeks for the contest.

Miss Dalrymple has stated that her purpose in writing novels is to “entertain wholesomely through optimism and romance.” Usually that type of purpose is linked up with a sentimentality which means being sweet at the expense of truth. But this author is not that sort: in expressing her dislike of sex stories, for instance, she attributes their shortcomings to treatment, not to material—“since there is absolutely no subject under the sun which may not be treated with perfect good taste in a novel.” She has also stated that in her opinion the modern woman is over-sexed—a popular though altogether wrong-headed view which we mean some time to argue with her in these columns.

Slime and the Breath of Life

The Russian Novel, translated from the French of Le Vicomte E. M. de Vogüe by Colonel H. A. Sawyer. [George H. Doran Company, New York.]

Although this book was written in 1886, its treatments of Pushkin, Gogol, Turgeneff, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy are now first made accessible to the English reader, and will still be worth his attention. In fact one reads them with a growing regret that the author, who died in 1910, did not continue his interpretation of the Russian spirit as the religious and mystic tone of its nihilism gradually faded and left us the bleaker outlook of such men as Gorky. With Tolstoy, however—“probably the greatest demonstrator of life which has arisen since Goethe”—the book closes.

The author treats his subject from the standpoint of a certain formula which he finds to hold throughout the range of that realism which succeeded the romanticism of Pushkin—a romanticism which disappeared in 1840. Thereafter there grew up the great realistic school which gives Russia the leadership of the world in the field of realistic fiction—a leadership due partly to the temperamental standpoint of the Russian, adapted for just the kind of work which the great realistic novel involves, and partly to the importance of the novel as the vehicle of those ideas which the censor barred from every other channel of expression.

In the bible we are told that God made man out of the slime of the earth and breathed into him the breath of life. In those words is the secret of the Russian realistic novel. For the realism of his own country the author of this work has little praise. Because, he says, it lacked that human sympathy which saw in man not only the slime of the earth but the breath of life, it is barren.

Dickens, on the other hand, and George Eliot gave to English realism a standpoint which was moulded, nay, impregnated through and through, with the religion of that book to which Mary Evans had renounced formal allegiance—the Protestant bible. In fact, De Vogüe goes so far as to say that some of her writing, for instance “the meeting between Dinah and Lisbeth,” is biblical in the quality of its appeal, and might have been written by the hand that gave us Ruth.

This spirit, but without the Anglo-Saxon hardness, is the spirit of Russian realism. It has all the photographic accuracy, the preocupation with all types of life that distinguishes French realism; but the preoccupation with the divine, the mystical turning away from the things of this world, is also present. The sympathy of Gogol is intensified to painfulness in Dostoevsky and is apotheosized into a new religion of renunciation in Tolstoy.

And because (in contrast to the French) the Russians “disentangled themselves from these excesses, and like the English gave realism a superior beauty moved by the same moral spirit of a compassion cleansed of all impurities and glorified by the spirit of the gospels”—because of this De Vogüe regards Russian realistic literature as the one force that can rejuvenate the literary art of the European nations.

The author writes with the authority of long study and gives us a sufficient basis for what we must now do ourselves—namely, read comtemporary Russian literature and ask ourselves what it tells us; whether or not it tells us that Christian realism is a contradiction in terms.

Llewellyn Jones.

A Drama of the Two Generations

Nowadays: A Contemporaneous Comedy in Three Acts, by George Middleton. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]

Some little theatre company ought to send eight of its members on tour through all the smaller cities of the country in Nowadays. It would be the most effective way in the world to awaken the people of those slumbering places to the really amazing revolutions in contemporary life—and incidentally in the contemporary theatre. For one thing, it shows how parents and children are gradually bridging the foolish gulf between the generations—the gulf that Shaw has called the degrading objection of youth to age; for another, it reflects the extraordinary renaissance that has come to our theatre since the first visit of the Irish Players.

Mr. Middleton takes a typical small-town family—a father, mother, son, and daughter—and leads them through a domestic crisis that has probably been the sad lot of most modern families. The daughter, like all proper young women, has an ambition: she wants to be a sculptor. The mother understands, having had similar longings before she married a man who made it his business to suppress them. The father refuses to listen to the daughter’s idea, and tells her that if she goes to New York it will be without his help. But she goes; and the play opens with her first visit home. The son, a weakling without ability of any sort except to spend money and sow wild oats, has also left home; but he has managed to live very comfortably because of a monthly allowance from his father. The justice of the situation harks back to the antique theory that even a weak boy has more right to the splendors of the world than a girl of any type.

Diana’s father refuses to think about woman suffrage. “I don’t have to think about something I feel. I tell you, if we had woman suffrage, women would all vote like their husbands.”

“They say it would double the ignorant vote,” answers Diana’s friend, Peter, the journalist, who has encouraged her in rebelling.

“He’s a good-natured old fossil,” Peter says later to Diana. And when the girl insists that she loves her father anyhow, Peter says, “I love radishes, but they don’t agree with me. If he had a new idea he’d die of dropsy.”

The result of Diana’s visit is to produce certain rebellions in her mother, who goes back to New York with her to help make a home of that lonely little flat, and to revive her own early ambitions as a painter. Later the father succumbs to the new order. It is all good “comedy”; also it’s tremendously good thinking. If only it could be read by all the people who misunderstand the surging modern spirit that is riding so bravely through traditions and inheritances.

But Nowadays has another value besides that of its story. It is made of the stuff of the new drama; it fulfills our demand that the theatre shall give us the truth about life in a simple way. However, we shall talk more about this in another issue.

Our Mr. Wrenn and Us

Our Mr. Wrenn, by Sinclair Lewis. [Harper and Brothers, New York.]

The poverty of American workaday criticism has rarely shown more threadbare than in the fact that of all the reviews of Our Mr. Wrenn, a first novel by Sinclair Lewis, a new author, not one has mentioned the idea under the book.

They have been good reviews, too, as reviews go. Many have praised the book, have talked around it, described its characters, attempted to classify it—under names so various as Locke, Wells, and Dickens. Yet so expected is the novel that means nothing, and so dead is critical vision, that no one has thought to say “Here is a new American writer. What is in his soul?”

Let me prove the point. “Our Mr. Wrenn” is a mouse-like little clerk in the office of a New York novelty company. He is called “Our Mr. Wrenn” in business correspondence by the manager of the firm. He is overshadowed by “the job.” He lives uncomfortably in Mrs. Zapp’s downtown boarding house. Because the author can see, various figures from the drab stream one meets in the street are made human. Because the author has whimsicality and scorn and sympathy, the book has humor and satire and pathos. All these things have been noted by the critics.

Mr. Wrenn is not always “Our.” He becomes his own in the gorgeously illustrated travel leaflets sent out by steamship companies. Eventually he does go to England on a cattle steamer. He is “Bill Wrenn” and licks a tough. He meets adventures—Istra, an over-fine artist girl who likes him because he’s real. In the end he pathetically sees her soar above him and sails back to America, where he goes into the office again, falls in love with a sweet little lingerie-counter clerk, marries, and “settles down.” All these things the critics have told us.

But Mr. Wrenn is at once glorious and pathetic, not only because he says “Gee!” when he has the emotions of a poet. It isn’t only the little things of the book that twist our smiles.

There is an epic conflict between Mr. Wrenn of the job and Bill Wrenn of the sunsets and the sea. Our Mr. Wrenn, oppressed and bullied, scuttling out of the way, not quite daring to think his own thoughts or dream his own dreams, not knowing quite enough to understand the great things of the world—this man is everywhere in New York, in America; he is in our own souls. And when he musters courage to become Bill Wrenn, when he sets out on dangerous quests and loves strange beauty, he becomes a conqueror who rallies with him the great of history, and stands on the high places of our own spirits.

Pitifully inadequate Bill Wrenn is, of course. The lonely tragedy of that conventionally “happy ending” has escaped the critics. The drab, the commonplace, creep over Bill again without his knowing it. That’s the frightful part of it. It’s very like what appears to happen to everybody. Our Mr. Wrenn he is at the end, sunk in comfort and forgetting his flags in sunsets.

It is a poignant, bitterly human novel. After reading it in sympathy one cannot lean back in satisfaction and write commonplaces. It leads to understandings and resolutions. When we learn to demand such things of American writers, their primary purpose will then cease to be either to entertain or to “teach a lesson.”

Gilbert Alden.

Lantern Gleams

Little Essays in Literature and Life, by Richard Burton. [The Century Company, New York.]

Readers of The Bellman will welcome in this permanent form many little lantern gleams of thought that have been shed athwart their path by this unacademically-minded incumbent of a Minnesota chair.

Mr. Burton flashes his lamp fitfully over a large area, and shows us loitering spots as well as boggy ground it were well to avoid. Opening his book at random, we find here a hint on reading and here a warning gleam over some political or social morass.

When the morass is a deep one, however, we must not expect to sound its depths with a lantern gleam, and so sometimes Mr. Burton disappoints us. Thus in discussing the individual and society he merely tells us what we all know: that we pay for the advantage of sociality, of mutual comfort, and support by the loss of individuality, by the growth of a fear to do the thing that commends itself to our best judgment. But what must we do? Must we fill in this particular morass by throwing in all the individuals? Or will the individuals be able to jump it? Mr. Burton is discreet on such points.

More satisfactory than that essay and others like it are those on literature. Under “Books and Men” the author deplores the tendency which characterized Chaucer (“Farewell my books and my devotion”) of drawing an antithesis between men and books, between literature and life. Literature has its origin in life and its apparent separation from it is an accidental result of the printed book method of spreading what used to be spread by the human voice alone or in chorus.

Illiam Dhone.

About Nietzsche

Nietzsche and Other Exponents of Individualism, by Paul Carus. [The Open Court Publishing Company, Chicago.]

Expositions of Nietzsche are usually written by uncritical disciples with little knowledge of formal philosophy. In so far as Nietzsche was a poet, some of these productions may be of value in spots, but in so far as Nietzsche was an intellectual critic of life they are worthless.

Dr. Carus writes from the standpoint of a philosopher in the most formal sense of that word. To him Nietzsche the thundering voice of protest named Zarathustra is of less importance than Nietzsche the extreme nominalist. The chief value of his work therefore is purely informative. He will certainly not send the philosophic debutante further into the matter.

Even from the purely informative side, however, Dr. Carus’s work is delimited by his own attitude, which is that of the old time believer in the validity of universals. Recurrence, uniformity, eternal norms of things behind the changing phenomena are the foundations of Dr. Carus’s stated or implied world view.

He therefore treats Nietzsche as simply a forerunner of such, to him, mischievous people as William James and Henri Bergson. He takes great pains, indeed, to show that there are many Nietzsches, and among them he classes George Moore, on the strength of extracts from his Confessions of a Young Man. Of more value than that is his consideration of the philosophy of Stirner—mainly because Stirner is not so well known as Nietzsche, nor so well as he deserves to be on his merits.

One undoubted merit the book has, and that is the industrious collection of personal recollections of Nietzsche and of Nietzsche portraits which Dr. Carus has brought together in its pages. These will give the book a positive value to the Nietzsche enthusiast, while the sight of Dr. Carus’s cool, scholastic temperament trying to drench the burning bush of Nietzsche will at least interest him.

Illiam Dhone.

Feminism and New Music

Anthony the Absolute, by Samuel Merwin. [The Century Company, New York.]

It is interesting to watch the struggles of an essentially chivalrous masculine soul caught in the whirlpool of modern feminism. Samuel Merwin, ever since the old days of A Short Line War and Calumet K., written in collaboration with Henry Kitchell Webster, has held towards women the attitude of the knight errant. Recently, as shown in The Citadel, The Charmed Life of Miss Austin, and even more strongly in this latest book, Anthony the Absolute, he has become a determined feminist. But the attitude has not changed. Formerly his hero laid at the feet of the lady of his choice as much wealth, fame, and position as he could acquire; this latest hero gives her in the same spirit a career and the chance to develop her own personality. Mr. Merwin says: “The man who deliberately stops a woman’s growth—no matter what his traditions; no matter what his fears for her—is doing a monstrous thing, a thing for which he must some day answer to the God of all life.” He is still the knight errant. It is still man who permits woman to develop.

None the less it is a very readable tale. The male characters are all clearly and convincingly drawn, not without humor. The lady is a little nebulous, but very charming. Illustrating the absoluteness of Anthony and serving as an introduction to the charming Heloise is an interesting musical theme. The scene is laid in China, where Anthony is studying primitive music, and Heloise is able to sing for him a perfect close-interval scale, in eighth tones instead of the “barbarous” half and whole tones of the piano scale.

Unfortunately Mr. Merwin has permitted himself to be led by the exigencies of a popular magazine, in which the story appeared in serial form, into giving the tale a certain meretricious air of sex allurement which it fundamentally does not possess. On the whole, except in a certain technical facility in handling the situations and sustaining the tension of the plot, Anthony the Absolute is a decided falling below the really splendid standard of excellence which Mr. Merwin set for himself in The Citadel.

Eunice Tietjens.

Of all our funny little Pantheon the absurd little god who gets the least of my service is the one labeled “Personal Dignity.”—Some Letters of William Vaughn Moody.

New York Letter

George Soule

Is it true that a Chicago woman’s club recently declared any book to be immoral which contains a character whom you wouldn’t invite into your home to meet your daughter? If so, the world is to be congratulated, because all novels except the Rollo Books are labeled immoral, and we needn’t worry any more about the word. Provided, of course, that the daughters of this particular woman’s club are sheltered as carefully as they should be, having been brought up by such mothers.

I’m afraid only authors and publishers know just how threatening this fear of “immoral” books is getting to be. The most significant American novelist has just written a masterful book which has been declined by two at least of the oldest and best publishing houses because it is “too frank.” The men in charge want to publish it; they think the world ought to have a chance at it. But they are afraid. And the author, unlike most authors under similar circumstances, won’t modify the book. He says he’ll wait twenty-five years, if necessary, but he won’t change a word. And yet, if the book were published, some people would accuse him of “pandering to commercialism.”

Don’t blame the publisher. Mitchell Kennerley came near being fined hundreds of dollars and sent to jail recently for issuing Hagar Revelly—a serious though by no means a great novel. Anthony Comstock, who earns his living by attempting to suppress anything which he happens to consider immoral, is likely at any time to pick out a good piece of work for his thunderbolts—and he is a government official in the post office department. You can’t tell what he is going to do next. Everybody remembers his ill-advised censorship of Paul Chabas’s delicate and inoffensive little September Morn; yet in every cheap picture-store window in New York there is now displayed without protest a photograph of a nude woman which makes no pretense to art or beauty.

Not many people know that six men decide what Boston may or may not read. The Watch and Ward Society, a group of puritans backed up by the blue laws of the state, have long been active in this pharisaical undertaking and from time to time have arrested booksellers. The booksellers in self-defense have recently formed a committee of three to act with three members of this society. When a new book comes along which anybody “suspects,” it is put before the joint committee, and if that decides against it, Boston cannot buy it except by mail. The Devil’s Garden only barely escaped, because somebody had read to the end of the book and labeled it “religious.” In other words, it teaches a lesson. But the same argument did not save Witter Bynner’s Tiger.

Magazine editors will tell you similar facts by the hour. The Metropolitan was recently held up by the post office because it contained photographs of nude statuary—from the winter exhibition of the National Academy!

We shall not rid ourselves of this vicious situation by simply getting enraged at the censors. The truth is, they are too well entrenched in public opinion. The people who enforce the law are ignorant postal clerks, clergymen of archaic convictions, and lower court judges of the tobacco-chewing, corner-saloon type to whom any thought of sex is necessarily nasty. But behind them is the man who is always saying that such and such a book or play “oughtn’t to be allowed.” He is always wanting to protect “the young,” or somebody else, although he rarely reads books himself, and probably would resent interference with his own often vicious pleasures. His mind is essentially rotten. He is incapable of understanding the pure beauty of the human body, because he has seen so many “musical comedies.” He would be shocked by the statement that passion is a beautiful element of nature toward which we should be reverent. He has a sense of propriety, not so much about what should be done as about what should be said. And then there is the vast Florence Barclay contingent, largely women, who, because they don’t know what the world is like, don’t want to know, and don’t think anybody should be allowed to know.

The trouble with censorship is that we always want it to apply to other people, never to ourselves. It is our national weakness that we try to prescribe conduct by law, instead of seeing that the individual is strong and truth-seeing, and leaving conduct to take care of itself, allowing ideas to fight their own battles. If we must have a censorship, let it be in the hands of the strong and intelligent. Let us forbid all books which are not true. Mental and moral fibre is really vitiated by the Florence Barclay sort of thing. People brought up on that are enemies of light and progress. Their world is an exercise-place for impossible ethics. Their emotion is washed-out sentiment. Courage and vigor are unknown to them. And the worst of it is that their soft and clinging hands are wrapped about the rest of us, as they try to drag us down from the rain-washed skies of the morning to their stuffy hair-cloth religion and pink-candy pleasures.

The fight between the writers and the censors is sure to grow bitter in the next few years; both sides are getting more determined every day. But such crises are welcomed by the adventurous. We shall end not only by riding over our small opponents, but by carrying with us an army awakened to the true issues of art and life.

William Butler Yeats to American Poets

The current number of Poetry prints a speech that William Butler Yeats made during his recent visit to Chicago, in which he took occasion to warn his confreres in America against a number of besetting sins. He said, in part:

Twenty-five years ago a celebrated writer from South Africa said she lived in the East End of London because only there could she see the faces of people without a mask. To this Oscar Wilde replied that he lived in the West End because nothing interested him but the mask. After a week of lecturing I am too tired to assume a mask, so I will address my remarks especially to a fellow craftsman. For since coming to Chicago I have read several times a poem by Mr. Lindsay, one which will be in the anthologies, General Booth Enters Into Heaven. This poem is stripped bare of ornament; it has an earnest simplicity, a strange beauty, and you know Bacon said, “There is no excellent beauty without strangeness.” ...

I have lived a good many years and have read many writers. When I was younger than Mr. Lindsay, and was beginning to write in Ireland, there was all around me the rhetorical poetry of the Irish politicians. We young writers rebelled against that rhetoric; there was too much of it and to a great extent it was meaningless. When I went to London I found a group of young lyric writers who were also against rhetoric. We formed the Rhymers’ Club; we used to meet and read our poems to one another, and we tried to rid them of rhetoric.

But now, when I open the ordinary American magazine, I find that all we rebelled against in those early days—the sentimentality, the rhetoric, the “moral uplift”—still exists here. Not because you are too far from England, but because you are too far from Paris.

It is from Paris that nearly all the great influences in art and literature have come, from the time of Chaucer until now. Today the metrical experiments of French poets are overwhelming in their variety and delicacy. The best English writing is dominated by French criticism; in France is the great critical mind.

The Victorians forgot this; also, they forgot the austerity of art and began to preach. When I saw Paul Verlaine in Paris, he told me that he could not translate Tennyson because he was “too Anglais, too noble”—“when he should be broken-hearted he has too many reminiscences.”

We in England, our little group of rhymers, were weary of all this. We wanted to get rid not only of rhetoric but of poetic diction. We tried to strip away everything that was artificial, to get a style like speech, as simple as the simplest prose, like a cry of the heart....

Real enjoyment of a beautiful thing is not achieved when a poet tries to teach. It is not the business of a poet to instruct his age. He should be too humble to instruct his age. His business is merely to express himself, whatever that self may be. I would have all American poets keep in mind the example of François Villon.

So you who are readers should encourage American poets to strive to become very simple, very humble. Your poet must put the fervor of his life into his work, giving you his emotions before the world, the evil with the good, not thinking whether he is a good man or a bad man, or whether he is teaching you. A poet does not know whether he is a good man. If he is a good man, he probably thinks he is a bad man.

Poetry that is naturally simple, that might exist as the simplest prose, should have instantaneousness of effect, provided it finds the right audience. You may have to wait years for that audience, but when it is found that instantaneousness of effect is produced....

We rebelled against rhetoric, and now there is a group of younger poets who dare to call us rhetorical. When I returned to London from Ireland, I had a young man go over all my work with me to eliminate the abstract. This was an American poet, Ezra Pound. Much of his work is experimental; his work will come slowly, he will make many an experiment before he comes into his own. I should like to read to you two poems of permanent value, The Ballad of the Goodly Fere and The Return. This last is, I think, the most beautiful poem that has been written in the free form, one of the few in which I find real organic rhythm. A great many poets use vers libre because they think it is easier to write than rhymed verse, but it is much more difficult.

The whole movement of poetry is toward pictures, sensuous images, away from rhetoric, from the abstract, toward humility. But I fear I am now becoming rhetorical. I have been driven into Irish public life—how can I avoid rhetoric?

Letters to The Little Review

What an insouciant little pagan paper you flourish before our bewildered eyes! Please accept the congratulations of a stranger.

But you must not scoff at age, little bright eyes, for some day you, too, will know age; and you should not jeer at robustness of form, slim one, for the time may come when you, too, will find the burdens of flesh upon you. Above all, do not proclaim too loudly the substitution of Nietzsche for Jesus of the Little Town in the niche of your invisible temple, for when you are broken and forgotten there is no comfort in the Overman.

One thing more: Restraint is sometimes better than expression. One who has learned this lesson cannot refrain from saying this apropos of the first paragraphs in the criticism of The Dark Flower. Do not give folk a chance to misunderstand you. Being a woman, you have to pay too high a price for moments of high intellectual orgy.

Forgive all this and go on valiantly.

Sade Iverson.
Chicago.

I am greatly indebted for a copy of The Little Review. I take this opportunity of stating that the publication is one of the cleverest and best things I have seen. It deserves success, for it contains stuff which will compare very favorably with the best that is being written.

G. Frank Lydston.
Chicago.

Will you allow me to congratulate you on your magnificent effort in bringing out The Little Review?

I have found it very refreshing after having suffered for so long by reading the so-called book review magazines that have no right to more than passing notice.

You have accomplished wonders, and if your efforts of the future come up to those put into the first number of The Little Review, your success is assured.

The best wish I can offer is that its path may be covered with roses and bordered with the trees of prosperity.

Again congratulating you, I am, with every good wish, very truly yours,

Lee A. Stone, M. D.
Chicago.

The Little Review came this morning! And I have read it all! And I love it! Much more than I expected, to be perfectly honest! I feared something too radical—too modern—if that is possible. If it had been like The Masses—well, I can never express my contempt for that sheet. But you’re perfectly sane, intelligent, readable, and enthusiastic—gloriously so!

Your description of Kreisler is worth much to me. It is precisely what I have always felt about him. Paderewski, too. But I think the Mason and Hamlin reference a little too commercial. I realize you want The Little Review to be straightforward, honest, intimate, etc., but I fear that kind of thing will be taken as advertisement and not as a personal belief and enthusiasm.

If I should never know anything more of Mr. George Soule than his sonnet and New York letter I should have to like him. The man who could feel and write that last paragraph is a splendid type.

But the whole thing is beautiful, and worth while, whether you agree with it all or not. A thousand congratulations!

Agnes Darrow.
Dayton, Ohio.

[Of course our remarks about the Mason and Hamlin violated all journalistic traditions. But traditions are so likely to need violation, and diplomacy and caution are such uninteresting qualities! What we feel and tried to say about that piano is that it’s as definitely a work of art as good poetry or good music. Why not say so, quite naturally? We know something of the man who is responsible for its quality of tone; he’s as authentic an artist as those musicians who create on his foundations. Is there any reason why such an achievement is not to be mentioned in a journal that means to devote itself to beauty? Is anything vital ever gained by a cautious regard for “on dit”? Above all, if one can discover no importance in journalistic tradition of that type, why defer to it?—The Editor.]

I haven’t got over your beautiful magazine yet. Don’t let anybody keep you from making it a truthful expression of yourself—but you won’t.

First of all, it’s beautifully made. You couldn’t have done better typographically. It’s the most inviting magazine published. I like the color and the paper label.

Second, its spirit blows keen and with a pure fragrance. If you can continue to show such freshness you will have gone far toward achieving the goal Mr. Galsworthy urges—that “sleeping out under the stars” which cleans our hearts of all things artificial.

With sincerest congratulations,

Henry S.
New York.

I am very much pleased with the first issue of The Little Review. I am very glad to know that such a thing should be started, and it should be both a cause and an effect of better times in literature. I shall do everything I can to make it better known.

William Lyon Phelps.
Yale University.

When I found that the local bookstores had sold out their first orders of The Little Review I was delighted; for it meant folks were interested in the fledgeling. The first number deserves the praise and congratulations of everybody interested in literature; everything in it is fine, even unto the composition of the “ad” pages. With its fresh, cheerful note The Little Review very fittingly comes forth on the first day of Spring. Long may it spread sweetness and light.

W. W. G.
Chicago.

There are so many things that I admire in the first issue of The Little Review that I find it difficult to decide just where to begin. It was like taking up a copy of the Preludes of Debussy for the first time; after playing them over and over again I found it difficult to know whether it was what he said or the way he said it which held the greater charm for me. I congratulate you most sincerely on the distinct personal quality which is so evident in your magazine and you may count upon me to rejoice with you if it meets with anything like the great success which it so distinctly merits.

F. L. R.
Chicago.

Your new publication has just fallen into my hands. The vital thing!

I cannot begin to tell you what its pulsating, teeming import means to me. I know nothing today in magazine form that will mean so much to busy, thinking people.

Nannie C. Love.
Indianapolis.

Please let me offer my sincerest congratulations and my warmest wishes for the continued success of The Little Review. There are numerous points in the first issue that I should like to discuss with you; I must warn you that you are tempting your readers and must not be surprised if you are overwhelmed with letters, questioning, approving, and criticising.

The foreword strikes such a splendid note! I hope no criticism will influence you to change it.

You agree, evidently, with the point that The Dark Flower suggests a Greek classic; so do I. But, conceding that, how could you have been surprised that countless people care nothing for it? Don’t you know that the majority of people in the world do not really “possess” the Greek classics? Without the background of the world’s thought, ages ago, and its progress—unless we agree with Alfred Russell Wallace that we have made no progress—can’t you see that The Dark Flower could genuinely startle many people? So I beg for less sharpness toward those who do not feel the wonder of it. The tragedy is in their lives.

For just the same reason Jean Christophe belongs to a few, comparatively. If you had never before felt the power of a great epic, could you really grasp this one? Modern as we claim to be—and independent—must there not be some foundation? Oh dear!—I do want to tell you why I think Vanity Fair is greater than Succession and why Ysaye’s music is inspired—when I listen, at least. But one can’t go on forever.

Since the “Critics’ Critic” expressed a doubt about that quotation from Euripides and since you insisted that it sounded like a Gilbert Murray translation, you may be glad to know that it is both. But you quoted it wrong. It is from Aeolus, a lost play, and this is the correct version:

This Cyprian,

She is a thousand, thousand changing things;

She brings more pain than any god; she brings

More joy. I cannot judge her. May it be

An hour of mercy when she looks on me.

I do agree that “a million, million changing things” is somehow more perfect; I even agree now, though not at first, with the order of attributes: “She brings more joy than any god, she brings more pain.” On a re-reading of Aeolus I am taken with the way you misquoted it. Joy was surely first in the Greek’s life. And of course the human beauty of the thing made me think immediately of the way Mrs. Browning “struck off” Euripides:

Our Euripides, the human,

With his droppings of warm tears

And his touches of things common

Till they rose to touch the spheres!

Katherine Tappert.
Davenport, Iowa.

... I don’t know when I’ve read anything so inspiring as that letter from Galsworthy. Can’t all of you who are helping to make the magazine arrange to march up to it mentally and present your “copy” for approval before you decide to print it?

I like the article on Paderewski and the one about The Dark Flower. But do be careful of “beauty” and “passion.” It’s easy to make them commonplace. Also spare your adjectives a bit; you don’t need an adjective for everything. I realize that your abbreviations are made in the interest of readableness, but however informal you want to make it you only succeed in sounding hideously colloquial. It doesn’t read well, and it makes me feel that you’re trying to achieve through the style what ought to be achieved quite simply through the material itself. Not that I approve of anything stilted, but you can easily overdo the other side of it. And wouldn’t it be better to leave some of the things unsigned? People who don’t know that the various Anderson contributors are unrelated will think it’s rather a family monopoly.

The Ficke poems are exquisite; and how I love Nicholas Vachel Lindsay’s! Also I like the New York letter very much, but George Soule’s Major Symphony could just as well be unwritten. Poetry has to be so much better than that to be real poetry. Another thing: I think your quotations from Succession weren’t as efficient as you hoped. It’s a book that can’t well be quoted except to one who knows it.

You wanted frankness, so here it is. Otherwise, I have nothing but praise for the whole glorious undertaking!

Lois Allen Peters.
Philadelphia.

[Being a sister of the editor, Mrs. Peters speaks her mind with a freedom that enchants us. It also helps us—though we want to shake her for one or two of those remarks. However—may her letter serve as a model to timid but opinionated readers!—The Editor.]

If you will allow me to be perfectly frank about your first issue, I should like to tell you that The Little Review seems rather too esthetic in tone and spirit to avoid being “restrictive”—a wish you expressed in your editorial. There is not enough variety in it, for one thing. For another, some of its critical judgments are too personal—are too largely temperamental judgments—to be of any permanent value. You seem to have set out to exploit personalities; and there’s a juvenility in many of the articles that I’m afraid you’ll all blush for in ten years.

A Well-Meaning Critic.

The first number of The Little Review came as a delightful surprise and I have enjoyed reading it. I particularly appreciate the spirit of appreciation running through the pages, which I believe will be of inestimable service to young writers, if you are able to keep it up.

M. K.
New York.

The Little Review looks very interesting. I hope to have the pleasure of reading it through very soon, but at the moment my small sister is devouring it and refuses absolutely to give it up. If you are as successful in pleasing women generally as you have been in pleasing her you need have no fear for the success of the magazine.

J. C. P.
New York.

Professor Foster’s essay on The Prophet of a New Culture is magnificent—a soul-searching, heart-breaking bit of writing, fiery and tragic. Nicholas Vachel Lindsay’s How a Little Girl Danced is a delightful thing—airy, high-minded, and full of his burning spirit. In fact, The Little Review is full of things that one reads with a keen zest.

W. L. C.
Denver.

The Little Review came to hand promptly, but I was unable to read it until last night. That is where I made my first mistake, as I had been denying myself a very pleasant two hours. My second mistake was in having read it at all, as it has now become one of those eight or ten journals which are always welcome and more or less necessary. Ten journals each month (and some weeklies), quietly yet insistently urging me to take them up, are like those good friends who tempt me with an outing in Spring when work is crowding. So with The Little Review. It has with one reading become a distinctly individual friend.

W. M. L.
Philadelphia.

Your Little Review has just reached me. I took it home for leisurely examination on Sunday. I congratulate you upon launching and hope that you’ll meet no adverse trade winds in your voyage. Its atmosphere is certainly anything but editorial, and you’ve put plenty of your own personality into it. And what a delightfully charming letter is that from Galsworthy!

I should take sharp issue with you on one or two slight points could I face you across a lunch table, but as it is, I tuck my differences away, with a sigh of envy at your enthusiasm, and the sincere wish that you may always keep it.

With best wishes for your good luck.

Beatrice L. Miller.
Boston.

I think your first number very interesting indeed, and congratulate you on your fine start. I am always delighted with every new manifestation of the life and enthusiasm in Chicago!

With best wishes for your future.

Alice C. Henderson.
Chicago.

... I’ve fallen in love with M. H. P., “The Critics’ Critic.” She’s just the sort of person I’d like to go and talk with this afternoon. Please ask her to write a letter properly sitting on Agnes Repplier for her Atlantic essays. A very delicate, cultured, polite little woman sitting behind a tea-table in her aloof apartment, and given over to well-bred sneering at things she doesn’t know anything about—that’s how I picture Miss Repplier.

A Contributor.

The Little Review is here, and I have so enjoyed going over it.

It is a great first number and sets a pace that would have made most of us breathless before we started; but anyone can know it isn’t so with you, from that last paragraph of your announcement. It was lovely!

I loved the Paderewski, too. Was there anything more wonderful than the glory of the Funeral March as he played it the afternoon of his first recital here this winter? I know you heard it from the way you write of it. An emotion that brings the tears and makes the sobs struggle in the back of your throat is always worth living through, and I wouldn’t have missed it for worlds.

With the best of good wishes.

Mabel Reber.
Chicago.

I want to tell you how very good the first issue of The Little Review is. I don’t know what the succeeding numbers will be like, but you have set a pace in this one that will demand some vigorous effort to keep up. After that “gripping” announcement no one will doubt the real purpose of the Review and the fine optimism that is behind it. I don’t have to believe everything you are going to print, but if those who write it do, by all means keep them together. And don’t let George Soule get away.

It’s too early to make suggestions, but I should say that Number One is well balanced and very readable, and I like the trick of throwing the light on from different angles—like the Galsworthy and Nietzsche discussions. The tone is high, and I am quite sure I never read more intelligent reviews anywhere.

Good luck to The Little Review!

J. D. Marney.
Springfield, Ill.

Will you let me thank you for giving me a very pleasant experience in reading the first copy of The Little Review? There are many things in the first number which arouse one’s interest, though I am not sure that I would at all agree in all the critical judgments which are there pronounced. Anyway, you will let me wish you all success, and wave you my hand with the hope that The Little Review shall be the biggest review in the country.

D. W. Wylie.
Iowa City, Iowa.

Congratulations must be pouring in on you from all sides, but I want, just the same, to add my voice to the chorus of “Bravos” that surrounds you.

The Little Review is a triumph. It even outdoes my picture of it; and that is saying much, for I have known it was to be something exceptionally nice.

It is a delight to look at, showing somebody’s good personal taste; and the contents—well, I like them lots more than I could say adequately or put in this space.

Blessings on you and the heartiest congratulations to all concerned in the making of The Little Review.

Margaret T. Corwin.
New Haven, Conn.

I am pleased with its general appearance, and the contents are inspiring—full of the spirit of youth. I wish The Little Review every success.

Georgia M. Weston.
Geneva, Ill.

The initial number of The Little Review has impressed me so favorably that I want some of my friends also to share in its appreciation.

You surely have made a fine beginning and, in my judgment, cannot do better than to adopt as the creed of The Little Review the sound and encouraging advice given in Mr. Galsworthy’s inspiring letter.

Albert H. Loeb.
Chicago.

From the first page to the last book announcement I have read The Little Review with pride and delight.

Its sincerity attracts me even more than its obvious literary merit, and its comprehensiveness and quality will appeal to all who read at all—especially to those who go below the surface.

Alethea F. Grimsley.
Springfield, Ill.

Thank you so much for The Little Review! I liked it from the moment I saw it, both outside and in. I like particularly the personal note you put into your writing. It’s as though you were really talking to me and telling me how you feel about The Dark Flower and Paderewski and dear Little Antoine with his bad room that was “pretty but stupid for the sound.”

With best wishes to you in your beautiful, big undertaking.

Zetta Gay Whitson.
Chicago.

The “Best Sellers”

The following books, arranged in order of popularity, have been “bestsellers” in Chicago during March:

The Inside of the Cup | Winston Churchill | Macmillan
Diane of the Green Van | Leona Dalrymple | Reilly and Britton
Pollyanna | Eleanor Porter | L. C. Page
Laddie | Gene Stratton-Porter | Doubleday, Page
T. Tembarom | Frances Hodgson Burnett | Century
Sunshine Jane | Anne Warner | Little, Brown
The Woman Thou Gavest Me | Hall Caine | Lippincott
Cap’n Dan’s Daughter | Joseph C. Lincoln | Appleton
Passionate Friends | H. G. Wells | Harper
Old Valentines | S. H. Havens | Houghton Mifflin
The Devil’s Garden | W. B. Maxwell | Bobbs-Merrill
The White Linen Nurse | Eleanor Abbott | Century
When Ghost Meets Ghost | William DeMorgan | Henry Holt
The After House | Mary Roberts Rinehart | Houghton Mifflin
The Iron Trail | Rex Beach | Harper
The Dark Hollow | Anne Katherine Green | Dodd, Mead
The Rocks of Valpre | E. H. Dell | Putnam
The Light of Western Stars | Zane Gray | Harper
Peg o’ My Heart | Hartley Manners | Dodd, Mead
The Dark Flower | John Galsworthy | Scribner
Daddy Long Legs | Jean Webster | Century
It Happened in Egypt | C. N. and A. M. Williamson | Doubleday, Page
Darkness and Dawn | George Allan England | Small, Maynard
The Forester’s Daughter | Hamlin Garland | Harper
Westways | S. Weir Mitchell | Century
My Wife’s Hidden Life | Anonymous | Rand, McNally
Home | Anonymous | Century
The Valley of the Moon | Jack London | Macmillan
The Harvester | Gene Stratton-Porter | Doubleday, Page
Gold | Stewart Edward White | Doubleday, Page
A People’s Man | E. Phillips Oppenheim | Little, Brown
The Way Home | Basil King | Harper
Martha by the Day | Julie M. Lippman | Holt
The Rosary | Florence Barclay | Putnam
Making Over Martha | Julie M. Lippman | Holt
| NON-FICTION |
Crowds | Gerald Stanley Lee | Doubleday, Page
Alone in the Wilderness | Joseph Knowles | Small, Maynard
Autobiography | Theodore Roosevelt | Macmillan
What Men Live By | Richard C. Cabot | Houghton Mifflin
The Gardener | Rabindranath Tagore | Macmillan
The Modern Dances | Ellen Walker | Saul

The Little Review is now on sale in the following bookstores:

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Vaughn and Gamme.
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Chicago:
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McClurg’s.
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W. S. Lord, Evanston.

Pittsburg:
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Springfield, Mass.:
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Minneapolis:
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A. H. Smythe’s.

By John Galsworthy

The Dark Flower

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This splendid story of love which has drawn more attention than anything else Mr. Galsworthy ever wrote, is now in its fourth large edition.

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John Galsworthy’s Plays

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“Mr. Galsworthy deals with the problem of woman’s economic independence, her opportunity and preparation for self-support outside the refuge of marriage....

“‘The Fugitive’ is an admirable piece of dramatic writing. The undeviating exposition of the situation in the first act is certainly the best thing Mr. Galsworthy has yet done in the dramatic field.”

—New York Tribune.

The Pigeon

A Fantasy in Three Acts

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A Domestic Drama in Three Acts.

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A Tragedy in Four Acts.

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Three of these plays—“Justice,” “The Little Dream,” and “The Eldest Son”—have been published in the more convenient form of one volume, entitled “Plays by John Galsworthy, Second Series.”

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My First Years as a Frenchwoman 1876-1879

By Mary King Waddington, author of “Letters of a Diplomat’s Wife,” “Italian Letters of a Diplomat’s Wife,” etc.

$2.50 net; postage extra.

The years this volume embraces were three of the most critical in the life of the French Republic. Their principal events and conspicuous characters are vividly described by an expert writer who was within the inmost circles of society and diplomacy—she was the daughter of President King of Columbia, and had just married M. William Waddington, one of the leading French diplomats and statesmen of the time.

Notes of a Son and Brother

By Henry James.

Illustrated. With drawings by William James. $2.50 net; postage extra.

Harvard, as it was in the days when, first William, and then Henry, James were undergraduates, is pictured and commented upon by these two famous brothers—by William James through a series of letters written at the time. The book carries forward the early lives of William and Henry, which was begun in “A Small Boy and Others,” published a year ago. Among the distinguished men pictured in its pages are John LaFarge, Hunt, Professor Norton, Professor Childs, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was a close friend of Henry James, Senior.

North Africa and the Desert

By George E. Woodberry. $2.00 net; postage extra.

This is one of that very small group of books in which a man of genuine poetic vision has permanently registered the color and spirit of a region and a race. It is as full of atmosphere and sympathetic interpretation as any that have been written. Chapters like that on “Figuig,” “Tougourt,” “Tripoli,” and “On the Mat”—a thoughtful study of Islam—have a rare value and beauty.

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The fact that this narrative describes the only successful attempt to climb this continent’s highest mountain peak, and that the writer led the successful expedition, is enough to give it an intense interest. But when the writer happens to be as sensitive as an artist to all the sights and sounds and incidents of his great adventure, and to be so skilful a writer to convey everything to the reader, the value and interest of the book are irresistible.

Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled

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4 Park Street, Boston 1914 16 E. 40th St., New York

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What Men Live By

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Our Friend John Burroughs

By Dr. CLARA BARRUS

The increasing thousands of lovers of John Burroughs and his writings will welcome this intimate book about the man, his life, and his personality. A picturesque and vivid account of his youth, written by Mr. Burroughs himself, is a prominent and important feature.

Illustrated. $2.00 net. Postage extra.

Annals and Memoirs of the Court of Peking

By J. O. P. BLAND and EDMUND BACKHOUSE

“An extraordinarily vivid picture of life at the Court of Peking from the middle of the sixteenth century down to our day.”—London Truth.

“Of the importance to us today of understanding or endeavoring to understand the Chinese, no one will entertain a doubt, and therefore we heartily welcome a book like this in which the attempt is made, and made, we believe, successfully, to trace cause and effect back to the buried foundations of Chinese philosophy and civilization and to look at things from the Chinese point of view.”—London Globe.

Lavishly illustrated. $4.50 net. Postage extra.

In the Old Paths

By ARTHUR GRANT

A series of delightful essays, by a popular English writer, which recreate with charm and delicacy some of the great scenes of literature. Using as a starting-point some poet, Mr. Grant writes of the country in which he lived, or which lives in his work, and allows a sensitive fancy to draw pictures of the past.

Illustrated. $1.50 net. Postage extra.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson: The Story of His Life

By MARY THACHER HIGGINSON

This intimate biography tells for the first time the full story of the life of one of the most interesting of American soldiers and writers. Fully illustrated from portraits, views of Colonel Higginson’s homes, friends, etc., and with facsimiles of interesting manuscripts.

Illustrated. $3.00 net. Postage extra.

The Ministry of Art

By RALPH ADAMS CRAM

Among the subjects discussed are: Art as an Expression of Religion, the Place of Fine Arts in Public Education, the Significance of the Gothic Revival in American Architecture, American University Architecture.

These papers all embody and eloquently exploit that view of the relation of mediæval ideals to modern life which has made the author the most brilliant exponent of Gothic architecture in America.

$1.50 net. Postage extra.

Elia W. Peattie’s

THE PRECIPICE

“One of the most significant novels that have appeared this season ... so absolutely true to life that it is hard to consider it fiction.”—Boston Post.

“A book which men and women alike will be better for reading, of which any true hearted author might be proud.... The author knows life and human nature thoroughly, and she has written out of ripened perceptions and a full heart.”—Chicago Record Herald.

“An intimate and sympathetic study of new-century womanhood ... presents a profoundly interesting survey of the new social order of things.”—Philadelphia North American.

With frontispiece. $1.35 net. Postage extra.

The $10,000 Prize Novel

Diane of the Green Van

The Season’s Great Success

By Leona Dalrymple

Viewed even in the critical light of the high standard set for the winner of a ten-thousand-dollar prize, “Diane of the Green Van” fully measures up to the expectations of the novel-reading public.

This is why it heads the list of best sellers in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia. The advertising value of a big prize offer may account in some degree for the heavy advance sale—although the wholesale buyers ordered after reading. Nothing but sheer merit can account for the extremely large retail sale. Friend-to-friend commendation is steadily increasing over-the-counter demand.

The judges—the readers—all gave “Diane” first place among five hundred manuscripts, many of them by first-class authors. The trade has applauded the choice. Reviewers have called “Diane of the Green Van” well worth the big prize.

We should like to be able to publish the list of twenty or more successful writers who entered stories. On reputation alone, their work would have gone far; but we feel that the story of “Diane” will go farther.

“Here are expectation and enthusiasm justified alike. It is a clear, clean, clever romance.... It combines the love and intrigue of the ‘Zenda’ tale with the freedom of a Locke or Farnol story of broad highways.”—New York World.

“Just what countless pleased readers will devour with avidity.... Gracefully written, vivid in style and suggestion.... Bright and breezy and exciting.”—Chicago Record Herald.

“The tale has unusual dramatic grip, much brilliancy of dialogue.... It is the sort of narrative that no one willingly lays down until the last page has been turned.”—Philadelphia North American.

“The novel throbs with the youthful joy of living and the enchantments of summer hover over its pages. Everywhere is there originality in the invention of the incidents and subtlety in the delineation of characters.”—Chicago Tribune.

“A heroine whose fascination richly merits study. A hero who will capture the heart of the reader from the moment of his first appearance.”—Boston Globe.

“So good a thing, a thing so romantic and thrilling, we have not seen in—lo, these many moons of story telling.”—Louisville Post.

“Diane” is a tale with the freshness and spontaneity of youth, with the rich personality of the author shining through its diverting pages. In its imagination and clever dialogue and plot it strikes the keynote of popular appeal. At the same time, “Diane” has all the essentials of lasting popularity. The publishers feel justified in predicting a long journey for the Green Van and its charming young mistress. ($1.35 net)

Publishers The Reilly & Britton Co. Chicago

A New “Frank Danby” and Other Spring Leaders

FRANK DANBY’S
Finest and Most Powerful Work

FULL SWING

Ready April 30th

A book in whose rushing current glow two love stories of heart-gripping interest, passion and tears are mingled in Frank Danby’s masterly work, “Full Swing.” Vivid, forceful, rich in character-drawing that challenges comparison with the best in English fiction—the author has added a supreme touch to her book—a new type of heroine, incredible as that may appear. A new type that nevertheless is as credible as your oldest friend—who wins and holds your heart through startling incidents that would wreck a less powerful book with the doubt of their possibility. With dramatic scenes in abundance throughout the book, the interest increases steadily to the very end. No jaded reader, seeking a new sensation in literature, will be able to lay down the volume until the tale is finished. $1.35 net. Postage, extra.

The Full of the Moon

By CAROLINE LOCKHART, Illustrated in color, $1.25 net. Postage extra.

JEANNETTE L. GILDER, in the Chicago Tribune:

“It would not surprise me if ‘The Full of the Moon’ proves to be the most popular of Miss Lockhart’s novels, and if it does not ultimately find its way to the stage I will be very much surprised, for it has all the elements of popular drama in it.”

The Best Man

By GRACE LIVINGSTON HILL LUTZ, Illustrated in color. $1.25 net. Postage extra.

NEW YORK TIMES:

“A romance of startling adventure. The action is rapid, everything moves in a breathless whirl.”

The Red Emerald

By JOHN REED SCOTT, Illustrated in color. $1.25 net. Postage extra.

PHILADELPHIA RECORD:

“As always, Mr. Scott exudes modernity, his dialogue scintillates.... His viewpoint is that of a man of the world.... His courage falters not even before Grundy, hence his vogue among the pleasure lovers. That this is his best book many declare.”

Anybody But Anne

By CAROLYN WELLS, Illustrated in color. $1.25 net. Postage extra.

BOSTON HERALD:

“The character of Fleming Stone appears even more wonderful and plausible than in Miss Wells’ earlier stories. The tale is a baffling one, and the suspense is well sustained.”

OUTDOOR BOOKS

The Practical Book of Garden Architecture

Fountains, Gateways, Pergolas, Tennis Courts, Lakes and Baths, Arches, Cascades, Windmills, Temples, Spring Houses, Bridges, Terraces, Water Towers, etc., etc.

By PHEBE WESTCOTT HUMPHREYS.

Frontispiece in color. 120 illustrations from actual examples of Garden Architecture and House surroundings. Square octavo. Ornamental cloth, in a box, $5.00 net. Postpaid. $5.25.

A volume for the owner developing his property, large or small, for the amateur or professional garden architect, for the artist, student and nature lover.

The Flower Finder

By GEORGE LINCOLN WALTON, M.D.

590 illus. Limp leather. $2.00 net. Postage extra.

CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER:—“What’s that flower over there in the field? You’ll find out in ‘The Flower Finder’. Gives many color charts and sketches; grouped so that you can easily find what you are looking for; is bound in leather that permits it to be slipped in the pocket.”

The Training of a Forester

By GIFFORD PINCHOT.

8 illus. $1.00 net. Postage extra.

Just the book to put in the hands of the young man who loves outdoor life. Mr. Pinchot has written an inspiring volume on the profession which he has brought so forcibly to public attention.

J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
PUBLISHERS PHILADELPHIA

IMPORTANT NEW BOOKS

THE SOUTH AMERICAN TOUR

By Annie S. Peck

Author of “A Search for the Apex of America”

With 87 illustrations mainly from photographs by the author.

This is the first guide to THE SOUTH AMERICAN TOUR which is adequate and up-to-date in its treatment, dealing importantly with the subject both in its commercial and pleasure aspects.

8vo. Net $2.50

A BOOKMAN’S LETTERS

By Sir W. Robertson Nicoll, M.A., LL.D.

These papers here collected, forty-eight in all, deal with various literary personalities, problems and impressions and show Sir William Nicoll in his most genial and leisured spirit.

Octavo. Net $1.75

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON’S EDINBURGH DAYS

By E. Blantyre Simpson

The hitherto untold record of the boyhood days of Stevenson—the most valuable recent contribution to Stevensoniana.

Fully illustrated. Octavo. Net $2.00

MADAME ROYALE

By Ernest Daudet

Translated from the French by Mrs. Rodolph Stawell

The story of Madame Royale, daughter of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, covers the French Revolution, the tragic execution of her parents, and the mystery of the lost Dauphin. Ernest Daudet tells this story in a form which reads like fiction—impressionistic, racy—but is no less truth.

Illustrated. Octavo. Net $3.50

MY FATHER: W. T. Stead

By Estelle W. Stead

The Record of the Personal and Spiritual Experience of W. T. STEAD.

An extraordinary light cast on the life of the great journalist who ordered his life on direct messages from another world.

Octavo. Net $2.50

THINKING BLACK

With many illustrations and maps.

By Dan Crawford, F.R.G.S.

Twenty-two Years Without a Break in the Long Grass of Central Africa. A brilliant and original book which will take its place among the Classics of the Missions. What Paton did for the New Hebrides, Cary for India, and Mackey for Uganda, Crawford has done for Central Africa.

Octavo. Net $2.00

THE NEW TESTAMENT: A New Translation

By James Moffatt, D.D., D.Litt.

Dr. Moffatt is one of the most distinguished living scholars of the Greek New Testament. He is also a profound student of modern literature. He has re-translated with the view of giving a modern literary version which shall be verbally accurate in its equivalents for the Greek phrases. It is a work which awakens enthusiasm by its distinguished choice of language and which stirs up thought by its originality of rendering.

Small Quarto. Net $1.50

FICTION

EAST OF THE SHADOWS

By Mrs. Hubert Barclay

Author of “A Dream of Blue Roses,” etc.

One of the most original love stories that ever was penned—narrating a woman’s power to restore romance.

12mo. Net $1.25

THE HOUR OF CONFLICT

By Hamilton Gibbs

The story of a man who achieved the extraordinary through remorseful recollection of early wrongdoing.

12mo. Net $1.25

GILLESPIE

By J. Macdougall Hay

A strong, daring, original piece of work, which exhibits that rare but unmistakable quality of permanency.

12mo. Net $1.40

A DOUBTFUL CHARACTER

By Mrs. Baillie-Reynolds

An enigmatic love-story by the author of “Out of the Night,” “A Make-Shift Marriage,” etc.

12mo. Net $1.25

ANOTHER MAN’S SHOES

A Mystery Novel

By Victor Bridges

Many a man leads a double life—this man lived the life of a double in a desperate attempt to cheat destiny.

12mo. Net $1.25

FORTITUDE

By Hugh Walpole

The novel that places Hugh Walpole in the front rank of novelists today. A story of inspiring courage.

12mo. Net $1.40

JEAN AND LOUISE

By Antonin Dusserre

From the French by John M. Raphael with pen portrait of the author by Marguerite Audoux, author of “Marie Claire”

The chief claim of this novel is its entire difference from all other novels. It discovers a new territory and exploring it with beauty and tenderness, makes it appeal in the delicacy and sweetness of its atmosphere and character portraiture.

12mo. $1.20

DOWN AMONG MEN

By Will Levington Comfort

Author of “Routledge Rides Alone”

The high-tide of Mr. Comfort’s art—bigger than his previous novels.

12mo. Net $1.25

THE STORY OF LOUIE

By Oliver Onions

The story of Louie, an experimenter in Life, triumphantly completes Oliver Onions’ remarkable trilogy begun in “In Accordance With the Evidence” and carried through “The Debit Account.”

12mo. Net $1.25

AT ALL BOOKSELLERS

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY, New York
Publishers in America for HODDER & STOUGHTON

You Can Examine These Books
at Home

Thanks to the Parcel Post they will come to your door on approval. Look them over at your leisure and return them if not satisfactory.

Use Coupon Below

PENROD

By BOOTH TARKINGTON

Author of “Monsieur Beaucaire,” “The Gentleman From Indiana,” etc.

It you ever were a boy, if you ever had one, or if you remember your scalawag brother in those days when his last short pair of trousers were fast becoming inadequate to his needs, then the exploits of the unregenerate Penrod will recall some of the most harrowing yet amusing experiences of your life. When a boy is a real boy there is nothing under heaven in his class. JUST OUT. Really illustrated by Gordan Grant. Net, $1.25.

ADE’S FABLES

By GEORGE ADE

Author of “Fables in Slang,” “Knocking the Neighbors,” etc.

“Fables in Slang” up to date. How “Tango Teas,” “Buzzing Blondines” and “Speedy Sprites” appear to George Ade, artist of whimsical and amusing English. Illustrated by John T. McCutcheon. Net $1.00. JUST OUT.

MY GARDEN DOCTOR

By FRANCES DUNCAN

How a sickly lady gave up doctors and nostrums for the cultivation of a garden, and how in the end she was cured. A delightful little romance. JUST OUT. Net $1.00.

THE MEXICAN PEOPLE; THEIR STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM

By L. GUTIERREZ DE LARA and EDGCUMB PINCHON

The first true expression of the voice of the Mexican people. A history of the Revolution written by a participator and a leader of the movement. Illustrated. Net $1.50. JUST OUT.

The Carpenter and the Rich Man

By BOUCK WHITE

Author of “The Call of the Carpenter”

A book that puts Christ’s doctrine of the immorality of the swollen fortune fairly up to people of today and shows how impossible it will be to stem the tide of social unrest unless the movement is robbed of its terrors by the application of Christ’s idea of true fellowship. JUST OUT. Net $1.25.

DOUBLEDAY. PAGE & COMPANY,
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Gentlemen:—Please send me on approval by parcel post the following books. It is understood that if they do not prove satisfactory I may return them, the bill for the same being cancelled.

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CHANCE

By JOSEPH CONRAD

Author of “Youth,” “Typhoon,” etc.

“Chance” is a novel of the effect of circumstances on character. In the case of Flora de Barral, Chance was finally on her side, though for a long time the reader is left in thick and thrilling uncertainty. Although we never see her face to face, but only reflected, she is one of the most appealing heroines in modern fiction. New York Times. JUST OUT, net, $1.35.

A SON OF THE AGES

By STANLEY WATERLOO

Author of “The Story of Ab,” etc.

The Darwinian theory in fiction. The story of Scar, who, unlike common mortals, lives through the ages and so traces the descent of man. Illustrated by Craig Johns. Net $1.25. JUST OUT.

ST. LOUIS: A CIVIC MASQUE

By PERCY MACKAYE

The acting version of the masque, which is to be performed in the latter part of May in connection with the St. Louis pageant. Net $1.00. Ready May 15th.

THE PANAMA CANAL

By FREDERIC J. HASKIN

Author of “The American Government.”

The story of the Canal with Col. Goethals’s O. K. A complete account of the great work from its inception to its completion. Illustrated. Net $1.35 JUST OUT.

AMERICA AND THE PHILIPPINES

By CARL CROW

The story of the result of the sixteen years American occupation of the islands, which shows the success that has been achieved and opportunity offered in our island possessions. JUST OUT. Illustrated. Net $2.00.

Psychology and Social Sanity

By HUGO MÜNSTERBERG

The closing link in Professor Münsterberg’s popular books on the application of modern psychology to the practical tasks of life—how psychology can help us in settling social problems and contribute to social soundness. In it he discusses the sex problem, socialism, our jury system, investors and investments and other topics of public interest. JUST OUT. Net $1.25.

Doubleday, Page & Company
Garden City, New York

TITTA
RUFFO

THE WORLD’S
GREATEST BARITONE

Writes of the

Mason &
Hamlin

THE MAJESTIC HOTEL COMPANY
BERL SEGAL
GENERAL MANAGER

Nov. 16, 1912.

Mason & Hamlin Piano Company,
New York, N. Y.

Gentlemen:

The Mason & Hamlin Piano used by me during my operatic engagement in this country has been a source of great pleasure.

Its beautiful singing tone is remarkable. Such qualities for the vocalists or pianiste must be a great inspiration. I know of no piano that gives me so much satisfaction and heartily recommend it to those of my profession.

Mason & Hamlin should feel proud of their great achievement in producing those wonderful instruments.

Sincerely yours,
Titta Ruffo.

Cable Piano Company
Wabash and Jackson

Some New McClurg Books

The Coming Hawaii

By JOSEPH KING GOODRICH

Beginning with Captain Cook and even earlier navigators, the history of this “Paradise of the Pacific” is briefly told. Descriptions of the character and life of the natives and newcomers follow, and full space is given to the attractions of the islands for tourists and settlers. The products, business and possibilities receive abundant mention, and little worthy of interest is left untouched. The volume is a timely addition to the “The World Today Series.” The statistics are up to date. Illustrated. Net $1.50

Junipero Serra, His Life and His Work

By A. H. FITCH

The present biography is an attempt to supply the need for a popular account of the life and labors of the simple Franciscan monk, whose memory is reverenced and honored by California. Illustrated. Net $1.50

Cubists and Post-Impressionism

By ARTHUR JEROME EDDY

Author of “Delight; the Soul of Art,” and “The New Competition”

This remarkable work is far more than an exposition of certain styles of painting, but while broadly historical and descriptive of many men and schools, presents a plea for the public to react to new impressions, and a defence of freedom for the artist to express himself untrammeled by the past. Illustrated by twenty-four color plates and over forty half-tones of the pictures under discussion. Boxed. Net $3.00

The Art of Story-Telling

By JULIA DARROW COWLES

Out of her broad experience and love for the work, Miss Cowles tells how the art can be made to minister the highest service. She describes story-telling in the home and in the school, and treats at length of different kinds of stories—fables, myths, hero tales, Bible, and many other kinds which may delight and help the children. Parents, teachers, and others who would use this art most profitably and happily, will find here just what they want. Net $1.00

Gerhart Hauptmann: His Life and Work

By KARL HOLL

Gerhart Hauptmann is as yet only known to English readers by some of his works, although since he obtained the Nobel Prize for literature, English and American interest in his work has increased. Dr. Holl describes his personal life and character, and his works from the first epic, afterward suppressed, to the present time. This is a most important piece of critical literature, both on account of its intrinsic merits and because it is alone in its field. Net $1.00

Earmarks of Literature

By ARTHUR E. BOSTWICK

Author of “The Different West.” The things which make good books good are here made clear and interesting for popular reading by the librarian of the St. Louis Public Library, who has gathered and grouped together many things that are herein discussed in readable and compact form. The makers of literature are discussed, and other important features of the subject are admirably treated. Net 90 cents

Right Living: Messages to Youth from Men Who Have Achieved

Edited by HOMER H. COOPER

Men and women who have achieved high place in many departments of life, most of their names being known nation-wide, are the authors of the messages of this book. The articles are characterized by a peculiarly living touch because in most cases specially spoken to or written for a body of students, and in recent months. Net $1.00

A. C. McCLURG & CO.
Publishers CHICAGO

THE DRAMATIC WORKS OF GERHART HAUPTMANN

¶ Four volumes of this edition, epoch-making in dramatic literature, authorized by Hauptmann, and published with his co-operation, are ready. The set will consist of six or more volumes. The editor, Professor Ludwig Lewisohn, supplies an introduction to each.

VOLUME I

BEFORE DAWN
THE WEAVERS
THE BEAVER COAT
THE CONFLAGRATION

VOLUME II

DRAYMAN HENSCHEL
ROSE BERND
THE RATS

VOLUME III

THE RECONCILIATION
LONELY LIVES
COLLEAGUE CRAMPTON
MICHAEL KRAMER

VOLUME IV

HANNELE
THE SUNKEN BELL
HENRY OF AUE

At all bookstores. Each, 12mo., cloth, $1.50 net; each weighs about 24 ounces.

B. W. HUEBSCH, Publisher, 225 Fifth avenue, New York

SUBSCRIPTION BLANK

The Little Review,
Fine Arts Building, Chicago.

I enclose $2.50 for which please send me The Little Review for one year, beginning with the ............. issue. I also send the names and addresses of persons who would like to receive specimen copies.

_____________________
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Transcriber’s Notes

Advertisements were collected at the end of the text.

The original spelling was mostly preserved. A few obvious typographical errors were silently corrected. Further corrections are listed here (before/after):

- ... true: “Euch behren sollst ...
... true: “Entbehren sollst ...

- ... Du, sollst eutbehren!” (Deny yourself, ...
... Du, sollst entbehren!” (Deny yourself, ...

- ... To have the sense or creative activity is the ...
... To have the sense of creative activity is the ...

- ... up a copy of the Preludes of Debessy ...
... up a copy of the Preludes of Debussy ...

- ... will be like, but you have set a place in ...
... will be like, but you have set a pace in ...

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LITTLE REVIEW, APRIL 1914 (VOL. 1, NO. 2) ***

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Table of Contents

- The Little Review
- “The Germ”
- Rebellion
- Man and Superman
- Lines for Two Futurists
- A New Winged Victory

- Correspondence

- Two Views of H. G. Wells
- Rupert Brooke and Whitman
- More About the “New Note”

- To E

- To S

- The Critics’ Critic

- The Little Review

- Women and the Life Struggle
- “Change”
- The Poetry of Alice Meynell
- An Ancient Radical
- Equal Suffrage: The First Real Test
- The Education of Yesterday and Today

- Some Book Reviews

- A New-Old Tagore Play
- An Unorthodox View of Burroughs
- Another Masefield Tragedy
- A Net to Snare the Sun
- A $10,000 Novel
- Slime and the Breath of Life
- A Drama of the Two Generations
- Our Mr. Wrenn and Us
- Lantern Gleams
- About Nietzsche
- Feminism and New Music

- New York Letter
- William Butler Yeats to American Poets
- Letters to The Little Review
- The “Best Sellers”
- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE