Part 2

Pardon me, friend, I cannot speak _sina ira_ on this question; out of respect for Mr. Wilson’s request, let us “change the subject.” Come out where we can observe in silence the symphony of autumnal sunset. The Slavs call this month “Listopad,” the fall of leaves; do you recall Tschaikovsky’s _Farewell Ye Forests_? Sing it in silence, in that eloquent silence of which Maeterlinck had so beautifully spoken. I say _had_, for my heart is full of anxiety for that Belgian with the face of an obstinate coachman. His last works reveal symptoms of Monomania, that sword of Damocles that hangs over many a profound thinker, particularly so if the thinker is inclined towards mysticism. Maeterlinck, as no one else, has felt the mystery of our world; his works echoed his awe before the unknown, the impenetrable, but also his love for the mysterious, his rejoicing at the fact that there are in our life things unexplainable and incomprehensible. His latest essays[2] show signs of dizziness, as of a man who stands on the brink of an abyss. I fear for him; I fear that the artist has lost his equilibrium and is obsessed with phantasms, psychometry, and other nonsense. The veil of mystery irritates him, he craves to rend it asunder, to answer all riddles, to clarify all obscurities, to interpret the unknowable; as a result he falls into the pit of charlatanism and credulity.

[2] _The Unknown Guest_, by Maurice Maeterlinck. [Dodd, Mead and Company, New York.]

If there were no more insoluble questions nor impenetrable riddles, infinity would not be infinite; and we should have forever to curse the fate that placed us in a universe proportionate to our intelligence. All that exists would be but a gateless prison, an irreparable evil and mistake. The unknown and unknowable are necessary to our happiness. In any case I would not wish my worst enemy, were his understanding a thousand times loftier and a thousandfold mightier than mine, to be condemned eternally to inhabit a world of which he had surprised an essential secret and of which, as a man, he had begun to grasp the least atom.

These words were written by Maeterlinck a few years ago in his essay, _Our Eternity_. He has surely gone astray since. The last book is written in a dull pale style, in a tone of a professional table-rapper, enumerating legions of “facts” to prove the theory of psychometry or whatever it may be, forgetting his own words of some time ago: “Facts are nothing but the laggards, the spies, and camp followers of the great forces we cannot see.” What a tragedy!

Was Dostoevsky a mystic? Undoubtedly so, but not exclusively so. Far from being a monomaniac, he applied his genius to various aspects of life and wistfully absorbed the realistic manifestations of his fellow-beings as well as the inner struggles of their souls. Dostoevsky is the Cézanne of the novel. With the same eagerness that Cézanne puts into his endeavor to produce the “treeness” of a tree, brushing aside irrelevant details, does Dostoevsky strive to present the “soulness” of a soul, stripping it of its veils and demonstrating its throbbing nudeness before our terrified eyes. We fear him, for he is cruel and takes great pleasure in torturing us, in bringing us to the verge of hysteria; we fear him, for we feel uneasy when we are shown a nude soul. Perhaps he owed his wonderful clairvoyancy to his ill health, a feature that reminds us of his great disciple, Nietzsche. I do not know which is more awesome in Raskolnikov[3]: his physical, realistic tortures, or his mysterious dreams and hallucinations. In all his heroes: the winged murderer who wished to kill a principle; the harlot, Sonya, who sells her body for the sake of her drunkard father and her stepmother; the father, Marmeladov, whose monologues in the tavern present the most heart-gripping rhapsody of sorrow and despair; the perversed nobleman, Svidrigailov, broad-hearted and cynical, who jokingly blows out his brains—in the whole gallery of his morbid types Dostoevsky mingles the real with the fantastic, makes us wander in the labyrinth of illusionary facts and preternatural dreams, brings us in dizzily-close touch with the nuances of palpitating souls, and leaves us mentally maimed and stupefied. I think of Dostoevsky as of a Demon, a Russian Demon, the sorrowful Demon of the poet Lermontov, the graceful humane Mephistopheles of the sculptor Antokolsky.

[3] _Crime and Punishment_, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]

The tragedy of Raskolnikov is twofold: he is a Russian and an intellectual. The craving, religious soul of the child of the endless melancholy plains, keened by a profound, analytic intellect seeks in vain an outlet for its strivings and doubtings in the land where interrogation marks are officially forbidden. The young man should have plunged into the Revolution, the broad-breasted river that has welcomed thousands of Russian youth; but Dostoevsky willed not his hero to take the logical road. The epileptic Demon hated the “Possessed” revolutionists; he saw the Russian ideal in Christian suffering. “He is a great poet, but an abominable creature, quite Christian in his emotions and at the same time quite _sadique_. His whole morality is what you have baptised slave-morality”—this from Dr. Brandes’s letter to Nietzsche,—a specimen of professorial nomenclature.

I am thinking of a threefold—nay, of a manifold—tragedy of a young man, who, besides being a Russian and an intellectual, is a revolutionist and is a son of the eternal Ahasver, the people that have borne for centuries the double cross of being persecuted and of teaching their persecutors. What makes this tragedy still more tragic is the element of grim irony that enters it as in those of Attic Greece: the Russian-Jewish-Anarchist is hurled by Fate into the country of Matter-of-Fact, your United States. The boy is poetic, sentimental, idealistic; imbued with the lofty traditions of the Narodovoltzy, the Russian saints-revolutionists, he craves for a heroic deed, for an act of self-sacrifice for the “people.” “Ah, the People! The grand, mysterious, yet so near and real, People....”[4] He attempts to shoot an oppressor of the people, is delivered to the Justice, and is sentenced to twenty-two years of prison confinement. The curtain falls, but does the tragedy end here? No, it only begins.

[4] _Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist_, by Alexander Berkman. [Mother Earth Company, New York.]

For he who lives more lives than one More deaths than one must die.

Raskolnikov wanted to kill a principle; he wanted to rid the world of a useless old pawnbroker, in order to enable himself to _live_ a useful life. He failed; the principle remained deadly alive in the form of a gnawing conscience. “I am an aesthetic louse,” he bitterly denounces himself. Alexander Berkman wanted to _die_ for a principle, to render the people a service through his death. He has failed. At least he has thought so. The Attentat produced neither the material nor the moral effect that the idealist had expected. Society condemned him, of course; the strikers, for whose benefit he eagerly gave his life, looked upon his act as on a grave misfortune that would augment their misery; even his comrades, except a very few, disapproved of his heroic deed. The icy reality sobered the naïve Russian. Was it worth while? For the “people?”

The _Memoirs_ have stirred me more profoundly than Dostoevsky’s _Memoirs from a House of the Dead_, far more than Wilde’s _De Profundis_: the tragedy here is so much more complex, more appalling in its utter illogicality. On the other hand the book is written so sincerely, so heartedly, so ingenuously, that you feel the wings of the martyr’s soul flapping upon yours. Berkman becomes so near, so dear, that it pains to think of him. You are with him throughout his vicissitudes; you share his anguish, loneliness, suicidal moods; your spirit and your body undergo the same inhuman tortures, the same unnecessary cruelties, that he describes so simply, so modestly; you rejoice in his pale prison joys, your heart goes out to the gentle boy, Johnny, who whispers through the dungeon wall his love for Sashenka; you weep over the death of Dick, the friendly sparrow whose chirping sounded like heavenly music to the prisoner; you are filled with admiration and love for the Girl who hovers somewhere outside like a goddess, “immutable,” devoted, noble, reserved; you are, lastly, out in the free, and how deeply you sympathize with the sufferer when he flees human beings and solicitous friends.... When I read through the bleeding pages, I felt like falling on my knees and kissing the feet of the unknown, yet so dear, martyr. Surely, thou hast known suffering....

Don’t sneer at my incurable sentimentality, you happy normal. The tragedy of Alexander Berkman is common to all of us, transplanted wild flowers. It is the tragedy of getting the surrogate for the real thing. Berkman and the Girl passionately kissing the allegorical figure of the Social Revolution—isn’t this the symbol of the empty grey life in this normal land? What do you offer the seeking, striving, courageous souls but surrogates, substitutes? Your radicals—they are nauseating! They chatter about Nietzsche and Stirner and Whitman, wave the red flag and scream about individual freedom; but let one of them transgress the seventh commandment or commit any thing that is not _comme il faut_ according to their code, and lo, the radicalism has evaporated, and the atavistic mouldy morality has come to demonstrate its wrinkled face. Has not John Most repudiated the act of his disciple, Berkman, because it was a _real_ act and not a paper allegory? Of course, Most was German....

Hush! Were we not going to observe in silence the purple-crimson crucifixion of autumnal Phoebus? I have been as silent as the Barber of Scheherezade. Woe me, the Incurable!

IBN GABIROL.

Sufficience

HELEN HOYT

I wish no guardian angel: I do not seek fairies in the trees: The trees are enough in themselves.

On Poetry

Aesthetics and Common-Sense

LLEWELLYN JONES

Poetry, we are often told, cannot be defined but—by way of consolation—can always be recognized. Unfortunately the latter half of that statement seems no longer true, especially of latter-day poetry. Fratricidal strife between makers of _vers libre_ and formalists goes on merrily, while the people whose contribution to poetry is their appreciation of it—and purchase of it—are not unnaturally playing safe and buying Longfellow in padded ooze.

I always thought I could recognize authentic poetry on most themes and even flattered myself that I had some little understanding of the psychology of its production. Latterly two voices have come to me, one affirming that I was right in my prejudice that all durable verse should have content as well as form, should have meaning as well as sound—though in closest union with the sound,—that, in short, the poet should be a thinker as well as a craftsman; an emotional thinker, of course, if that term be permitted, but not a mere clairaudient wielder of words. And then I heard a voice which bid me forget all that and list to

Long breaths, in a green and yellow din.

Hastening to give credit where it is due, let me remind the readers of THE LITTLE REVIEW that this is the last line of a poem by Maxwell Bodenheim in the last number of that periodical. I trust that Mr. Bodenheim will forgive me for using him to point a moral and adorn a critical article, especially as I shall have to compare him with Wordsworth before I get through, and shall have to ask him whether he is not carrying the Wordsworthian tradition just a little too far into the region of the individual and subjective, into the unknown territory of the most isolated thing in the world: the human mind in those regions of it which have not been socially disciplined into the categories which make communication possible between mind and mind.

The other voice which I have mentioned is that of Professor S. B. Gass, of the University of Nebraska, who writes on Literature as a Fine Art in _The Mid-West Quarterly_ for July.

Professor Gass takes the very sane position that words are the socially-created tools—arbitrary symbols, he calls them—to give us “not the thing itself, but something about the thing—some relationship, some classification, some generalization, some cause, some effect, some attribute, something that goes on wholly in the mind and is not sensuously present in the thing itself.” And that work, he continues, is thought, and it proceeds by statement. But undoubtedly words have sensuous sounds and sensuous denotations and connotations. Professor Gass admits this, but regards their sensuous properties—and especially, I imagine he would insist, their sensuous sounds based on physiological accident—as secondary. Hence, to him, Imagism would be a use of words for purely secondary results. And that is decadence: “Decadence arises out of the primary pursuit of secondary functions.” Now Wordsworth and the romantic school generally used words in this way, and so, logically enough, Professor Gass classifies Wordsworth as a decadent. In doing so we fear he exhibits an intellect too prone to dichotomize. He cuts human psychology up into too many and too water-tight compartments. When he quotes Wordsworth’s

... I saw a crowd, A host of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

he seems to forget that there is more in that poem than its imagism—as we would call it now; that it is record of a personal experience, that is not only a trespass on the domain of the painter (to speak as if we agreed with our critic) but that it is a personal reaction to the picture painted in those words, that it tells us something that no mere picture could do. The poem, in fact, is a picture plus a story of the effect of the picture upon a human soul.

But the point in which I agree with Professor Gass is that—whatever the ultimate purpose of literature, including the lyric; whether, as he says, it is “a reflection of human nature, intellectual in its mode, critical in its spirit, and moral in its function”; or whether it is legitimate to regard its rhythms in words and “secondary” connotations and associations of words as materials for an art rather than for a criticism of life—the point beyond all this that I think fundamental is that literature does what it does—inform, enlighten, or transport—by understandable statement.

Certainly all appreciation of literature that dares to voice itself—that is all criticism—must proceed on this supposition, and it is just this supposition that is flouted by some of Mr. Bodenheim’s poems.

Take the following, for instance:

TO ——

You are a broad, growing sieve. Men and women come to you to loosen your supple frame, And weave another slim square into you— Or perhaps a blue oblong, a saffron circle. People fling their powdered souls at you: You seem to lose them, but retain The shifting shadow of a stain on your rigid lines.

Now obviously there is no sense in this in the ordinary intellectualistic meaning of the word sense. Unlike most poetry, it cannot be analyzed into a content which we might say was expressed suitably or unsuitably in a form. If, then, it be a good poem, we must look elsewhere for its excellence. I would hesitate to find that excellence in the mere sound of the words. Is it then in their associations? Arthur Ransome, the English critic, accounts for the peculiar effect of poetry by its use of what he calls potential language—of words which by long association have come to mean more than they say, that have not only a denotation like scientific words, but a sometimes definite, sometimes hazy, connotation, an emotional content over and above what is intellectually given in their purely etymological content. Does this help us here? I am afraid not. Personally I have always associated sieves with ashes and garden-earth (there is also a little triangular sieve that fits into kitchen sinks). Blue oblongs and saffron circles remind me of advertising posters and futurist pictures; while—I admit a certain poetic quality of a sort here—powdered souls remind me of Aubrey Beardsley.

But, perhaps, the ultimate objection to this poem as it stands is the fact that I have an uneasy suspicion that some printer may have transposed some of these expressions. For would it not really have made better sense if the poem had spoken of a saffron oblong and a blue square? Certainly if I choose to think that that is what it must have been originally no other reader, on the face of the matter, could convince me otherwise. While, if another reader told me that Mr. Bodenheim had once studied geometry and therefore could not possibly have written about a “slim square”, I would be quite unable to convince him otherwise.

But—it will be objected—it is quite unfair to any poem to analyze it word by word. It spoils its beauty. I challenge the assertion, and even assert the opposite. As a matter of fact, it is only by analysis that we can tell good poetry from bad poetry. For instance:

Crown him with many crowns The lamb upon his throne.

Analyze that and it straightway appears the nonsense that it really is. But, on the other hand, take this poem of Francis Thompson’s (I quote only a part):

Does the fish soar to find the ocean, The eagle plunge to find the air— That we ask of the stars in motion If they have rumour of thee there?

Not where the wheeling systems darken, And our benumbed conceiving soars!— The drift of pinions, would we hearken, Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.

The angels keep their ancient places;— Turn but a stone, and start a wing! ’Tis ye, ’tis your estrangèd faces, That miss the many-splendored thing.

Now that poem, it will be observed, is not unrelated in subject to the two lines quoted just above it. And yet, how it defies any effort to analyze it out into anything else than itself. Rhythm, cosmic picturings, the homely metaphors of the dusty road, all combine to place us in an attitude toward, to give us a feeling for, reality, which is different from, and nobler than, those of the man who has either never read this poem, never read the same message in other poetic language, or—what is more to the point—never managed to get for himself the same experience which dictated that poem.

For, after all, if I were to agree with Professor Gass that poetry (as a part of literature) is not a fine art, it would be because I think it more than a fine art. Because I think the function of poetry is not merely to be a verbal picture art or a verbal music art, but to be an organon of reconciliation between art and life. The best poems, I think, will be found to be those which alter our consciousness in such a way that our inward, and even our outward, lives are altered. The poet sees the world as we do not see it. Consequently, he can put a new complexion on it for us. The world is pluralistic, and so are we. Intellectually we may be of the twentieth century, but emotionally we may be born out of our due season. Then let the poet of that due season mediate to us the emotional life that we need. Living in America, we may, through him, reach Greece or India. By his aid we may conquer the real world; by his aid we may flee from it if it threatens to conquer us. By his aid alone we may get outside of our own skins and into the very heart of the world.

What, then, shall we say, when poetry offers to conduct us into a world of growing sieves, slim squares, powdered souls, cool, colorless struggles, the obstetrical adventures of white throats, and green and yellow dins?

I have heard of a book which explains the fourth dimension. If I ever get a chance to read that book, and if I find that I can understand the fourth dimension, I shall have another shot at the appreciation of this poetry. For I have a slumbering shadow of a pale-gray idea (if I, too, may wax poetic) that in the sphere of the fourth dimension a slim square would be a perfectly possible conception.

I shall arise and go home now and read some poems by the late Mr. Meredith who is popularly supposed to be obscure.

In Defense of Vers Libre

ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE

(_A reply to “Spiritual Dangers of Writing Vers Libre” by Eunice Tietjens in the November issue of The Little Review_)

The properly qualified judge of poetry can have no doubts about _vers libre_; if he doubts it, he is no judge. He belongs to that class of hide-bound conservatives who are unwilling to discard the old merely because it is old. He does not yet understand that the newest is always the best. Worst of all, he does not appreciate the value of Freedom.

Freedom is the greatest of boons to the artist. The soul of the artist must not be hampered by unnecessary constraints. The old fixed verse-forms—such as the sonnet, blank verse, and all the other familiar metres—were exactly as cramping to the free creating spirit of the poet as the peculiar spaces and arches of the Sistine Chapel were to the designing instinct of Michael Angelo. Lamentable misfortune! that his Sibyls had to occupy those awkward corners. How much would they not have gained in grandeur could they have had all outdoors to expand in!

All outdoors is just what _vers libre_ affords the poet of today. He is no longer under the necessity of moulding his thought into an artificial pattern, compressing it to a predetermined form; it can remain fluent, unsubjugated, formless, like a spontaneous emotional cry. No longer need he accept such fatal and stereotyped bondage as that under which Milton labored when the iron mechanics of blank verse forced him to standardize, to conventionalize, his emotion in such lines as—

O dark dark dark amid the blaze of noon, Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse Without all hope of day!...

To be honest, we must admit that there was something sickly and soul-destroying about the earlier verse-forms. The too-honeyed sweetness and metrical constraint of _Paradise Lost_ has always secretly repelled the true judge of poetry; and Shakespeare’s Sonnets have never been thoroughly satisfactory just because of the fatal necessity under which the author worked, of rhyming his lines in conformity with a fixed order. How could spiritual originality survive such an ordeal?

It would be unwise, however, to condemn the whole body of past poets; for certain of the earlier practitioners did, in their rudimentary way, see the light. Milton in _Sampson Agonistes_, in the midst of passages of the old-fashioned regular blank verse, introduced several choruses in _vers libre_; and these could perhaps hardly be surpassed by any English or American poet now living. As everyone knows, Walt Whitman (see _The Poets of Barbarism_ by George Santayana) used _vers libre_ profusely. In fact, there extends backward from us an unbroken chain of distinguished _vers libre_ tradition, through Whitman, Matthew Arnold, Southey, Shelley, Milton, and many others; the chain ends only with that first “probably arboreal” singer just antedating the first discoverer of regular rhythm. _Vers libre_ is as old as the hills, and we shall always have it with us.

The one defect of the earlier practitioners of _vers libre_ was that they did not have the wit to erect it into a cult. They used the free form only when it seemed to them essentially appropriate to the matter:—that is to say, they used it sporadically, desultorily. Today we know better. Today we know that the free form must be used ever and always. _In hoc signo vinces!_

As a modern poet admirably says—