Part 7

What charms us at once in this personality, and renders the reading of the book a constant enchantment, is a most wonderful imagination—an imagination at the same time creative and representative, rich, varied, overflowing with images and themes. All that life and nature offer is the domain of this imagination; it wakes up at the most unexpected moment and seizes the unseen detail, giving us an idea of the wonderful wanderings through which it must take the person fortunate enough to possess it. Now it is a temple; now a church; now a beggar; a blue scarf; the distant notes of a flute; or the nocturnal noises of a London street, which starts it on its way. At other times we find the imagination at play with itself, so to speak, creating out of nothing a historical or legendary atmosphere, or opening a philosophical vista, as in _The Great Adventure of Max Breuck_, _The Basket_, or the poem from which the book takes its name. Each one of these poems (and several others also) has its own special atmosphere, precise in its complexity and different from all the others.

In the style itself, in the development of the subjects, one finds the same quality. It seems as if the pen were too slow to note the multiple images which offer themselves to the mind of the poet. They accumulate themselves, sometimes, in a manner not unlike that of Victor Hugo, forming long periods in which the idea is turned in all possible ways, presented from all angles and in every natural or artificial light.

It is not only the richness of the images, but their quality, which reveals the power of Miss Lowell’s imagination. We all experience at every minute of our lives an infinity of sensations of which we are more or less conscious. It might almost be said that we are poets in exactly the measure that we realize and enjoy our sensations. The real poet not only registers his sensations, but is able to awaken in the mind of his readers the sudden recollection of those visual or auditive impressions which have never before reached his consciousness. This is what often delights us in _Sword Blades and Poppy Seed_. It gratifies us to feel that we are able to understand these subtle comparisons, these curious and unexpected alliances of words, such as those in the first poem of the book, where, to define certain shades of porcelains the poet speaks

Of lustres with so evanescent a sheen Their colours are felt, but never seen.

Also in the first poem entitled _Miscast_, where she speaks of her mind as

So keen, that it nicks off the floating fringes of passers-by, So sharp, that the air would turn its edge Were it to be twisted in flight.

To help her imagination, Miss Lowell possesses a faculty which belongs only to the happy few: the gift of words. The astonishing description of arms and vases in the first poem is but one example, if one of the best, of this rare gift.

It is necessary also, in order to study thoroughly this interesting and complex personality, to mention the great dramatic quality of some of the long poems in the book. From that point of view, _The Great Adventure of Max Breuck_ seems to me the most interesting. And there is much to be said of the sincerity and depth of sentiment in such poems as _A Gift_, _Stupidity_, _Patience_, _Absence_. All these short poems have something unique about them and constitute one of the greatest charms, and an important part of the value, of the book. It is almost incredible that a little poem like _Obligation_, for example, should contain such a world of thought and restrained sentiment in its ten short lines. I have chosen this poem as the type of this genre, because it characterizes perhaps better than any other this very special trait of Miss Lowell’s talent:

Hold your apron wide That I may pour my gifts into it, So that scarcely shall your two arms hinder them From falling to the ground.

I would pour them upon you And cover you, For greatly do I feel this need Of giving you something, Even these poor things.

Dearest of my heart.

There is, in these few lines, a simplicity so naive, a sincerity so complete, and at the same time such an intensity of feeling, that we almost feel while reading it as if we were composing it ourselves. And everybody knows that this is the mark of genius. It is rare to attain such perfection in thought and in form as we find in these short poems, which stand on their stems, straight and pure, like wild flowers opening their hearts to the sun.

I should like, in conclusion, to speak of the very new and effective attempts of the author in the free use of all possible rhythms. The preface presents the author’s point of view, but I may add that she has been especially skilful in the adaptation of the rhythms to the subjects, a thing which requires great poetic tact and musical sense. To study this side of the book would carry us too far, for to do it properly a long article written especially on the subject would be necessary.

To those who love poetry, and who are at the same time interested in the progress of new schools, this book must be of the greatest value.

MAGDELAINE CARRET.

The Man and the Artist

_Achievement, by E. Temple Thurston._ [_D. Appleton and Company, New York._]

“Every man knows himself; but there are few women with all their experience of men who act as if they knew anything about them.” “For it is only in moments that men are dispassionate about women, while half their lives through women are being dispassionate about men.” Why is it that such glistening generalities prove invariably attractive to the “general reader”? Perhaps the poor maligned g. r. fancies he is getting “tips” on the values of his neighbors’ lives, or interminable “good leads” as to his own adventures. Perhaps the fatuous distinctions merely tickle the sex-vanity. Undoubtedly the same word-wisdom, offered in regard to mankind and without the alluring distinction between man and woman, would secure but half the attention. This attention seems no whit slackened if the generalities are manifestly unfair by reason of their fealty to traditionalism, as Mr. Thurston’s statements of this ilk are apt to be.

The foregoing generality is not unfair to Mr. Thurston, since this attractive bait is offered without stint in his latest novel _Achievement_. In fact, the theme of the book is that ancient perennial among popular themes: the conflict between a man and his loves; in this case finding its redemption from the usual in that the protagonist is the man’s work rather than the man.

Yet, in spite of these sops to Cerberus, the book does not hold. It is but another of the multiplying outputs of today which are interesting to the critic alone, and to him only as a study in the pathology of the creative instinct. The lay-reader will find himself nodding over the crucial scenes or will lose his place time and again, if he persist in reading to the end. If a sense of justice will not permit him to judge the whole by a part, his persistence is tribute only to the undeniable sincerity of aim felt throughout the work. A stronger tribute, of course, is the mere length of this review; the fact, that is, that whatever of critic be in the reading mind is drawn to reiterate questions and puzzle over their answer, as to the reason for the falling short of this novel from the better standards, manifestly striven after.

The reader who does concern himself, then, with _Achievement_ will be puzzled, perhaps irritated, by the insistent question: “But what is the matter?” There is a certain mastery of words; there is honesty and sensitiveness of treatment, to a degree beyond the usual; moreover, side by side with the theme proper, is carried a sympathetic and reverent revelation of the mind of a creative artist, in this case, a painter; a study alone sufficient to redeem the work from the stigma of triteness. These qualities should carry any novel into favor at least; might be expected to overshadow the noticeable unevenness of work, astonishing in an author of E. Temple Thurston’s apprenticeship. But the book fails to convince. The only lasting impression it leaves is the question, “Why inadequate?”

Perhaps the answer lies in the inadequacy of the theme itself. This may be voiced, in both its major and minor keys, through Mr. Thurston’s own words, “For as it is the tragedy of women when the romance of love is gone from them, so it is the tragedy of men, when their work is done.” Had the author juggled the words of that sentence a bit—had it read so: “The realization that the romance of love has gone out from one’s life is no more a tragedy than the instant when one knows that his work is done”; could the author have conceived this theme, the subject of achievement would have compelled a more worthy treatment. Had he been able to think of women and men as alike potent, whether creators or lovers, then his picture of the creator in Richard Furlong fertilized by the lover in him might have been adequate.

The greatest need of today is a pronoun of the common gender. It is beginning to be recognized that the generation now growing up to face the ultimate issues of living is one which will declare that spiritual experience is basically an unsexed phenomenon. Woman of today has been heard to declare that whatever charge can be made about man’s potentialities, even his propensities, can be charged alike to the woman. This is no meaningless attitude. Neither is it naive nor amusingly unscientific, when the young girl of the future lifts her voice and sings out, “Before she is woman or he is a man, man and woman are alike persons.” In this theorem, difficult to word, lies the fertile germ of suffrage, feminism, suffragettism, militantism, and all the other lifted voices of woman.

No one of the women of Mr. Thurston’s portrayal is of value to herself or to the lives about her, except as a woman, a slave or queen of man, his toy or his inspiration, life’s parasite. The author would answer that he is not attempting a study of woman, but of an artist achieving by means of woman. None the less, if all the women who influence his artist were drawn in as hunchbacks, we would resent the distorted picture, the hypothesis that woman is essentially hunchbacked. Thus, since all the women in _Achievement_ are traditionally paralyzed women, we resent the generic theme of art under influence of womanhood. In order to receive serious audience today, any portrayal of woman, indirectly or directly, must recognize that there are genuine women as there are men, who live in terms of selfhood rather than in terms of sex.

The denouement is the usual stock company curtain. However, if so many pistol shots per volume is a stipulation in the novelist’s contract, it must be conceded him that his telling of the murder is admirably simple. A more admirable simplicity is attained in the trenchant description of the murderer’s psychology after the deed. The author is to be congratulated for missing that “opportunity” for analysis, of which the usual fiction writer spins chapter after chapter, morbid, a snare to catch cheap horror and pity, a spider-web for flies.

That the scene of the last two pages should have been written once is regrettable. That these pages were not cut out hastily as soon as written is unforgivable in an author who desires so profoundly to be in sympathy with the artist who has achieved.

R.

Ethel Sidgwick’s Books

[_Small, Maynard and Company, Boston._]

I cannot let another issue of THE LITTLE REVIEW go to press without some mention of Ethel Sidgwick. Last year, with a sense of worship, I read _Succession_, the second volume of a trilogy devoted to the story of a boy-wonder violinist. To find such subtlety, such radiance, such art—to find such music!—in a piece of fiction was an unforgettable experience. Music has never been so richly treated in fiction—except in _Jean Christophe_, which of course is the master work of the last years. I felt that I had never comprehended any character so fully as I did little Antoine, and I still feel that way. This year on Christmas day, as a sort of special celebration, I read the first volume, _Promise_. It is just as interesting, though there is not such a brilliant concentration of art in it. But isn’t there some way to make these books known? They will never be popular; but it is tragic to think of their not getting to the people who would value them. Their publishers would far rather advertise their cheap fiction than to try to force Ethel Sidgwick on a nation that does not demand good work of novelists.

Oxford and Genius

_Sinister Street, by Compton Mackenzie._ [_D. Appleton and Company, New York._]

E. Temple Thurston attracted attention here before Compton Mackenzie did, but the latter is as far ahead of him now as is Gilbert Canaan, whose _Peter Homunculus_ came out about the time of Thurston’s _City of Beautiful Nonsense_. These three young Englishmen know how to write English prose; Mackenzie and Canaan know how to tell big stories. _Sinister Street_ is much too important a book to be reviewed in less than three or four pages at least. The first part of it tells of the modern man at Oxford—“a more complete account of the mind of a young man of our day than has been written previously in English, an account which presents some of the things that Thackeray meant when he complained that his public would not permit him to tell all he wished about Pendennis, and a good many more besides,” as Lucien Cary has said. It is so extremely well done that the second part of the volume—the hero’s reactions to life after Oxford—comes with a sense of forced writing. Perhaps the war had something to do with it. We shall try to review this book more at length later.

“Without Machiavellian Subtlety”

_The War and Culture, by John Cowper Powys._ [_G. Arnold Shaw, New York._]

Among all the patriotic rubbish that has been heaped upon the book market since the outbreak of the European war, Mr. Powys’s pamphlet presents at least not dull reading. The brilliant lecturer unmasques the underlying motives of German statesmen who have accepted Machiavellian principles, “without acquiring Machiavellian subtlety.” He successfully attacks Münsterberg and other apologists for the Fatherland, who endeavor to present their country in the image of an innocent lamb dragged into the bloody struggle by greedy barbarians. Mr. Powys’ mission is a negative one, and there it ends. He falls flat as soon as he attempts to idealize and to glorify the Allies. His speculation that the present war is a struggle of ideas, of individualism versus state, of soul versus machine, is far fetched.

The Reader Critic

Mr. Powys on Dostoevsky

(_A reader sends us these jottings from one of Mr. Powys’s lectures._)

Shudders of life....

I have only one thing to do—to bring you into a strange mass of palpable darkness with something moving in it. Dostoevsky is really a great mass, a volume, not a cloud nor a pillar of fire nor a puff of smoke, but a vast, formless, shapeless mass of darkness, palpable and drawing you towards itself.

Reading him is dangerous because of the inherent sense of fear likely to be accentuated in those who are a little mad and whose madness takes on the form of fear. We go on a visit to a mad house, to hospitals with Dostoevsky. But with him this whole world suddenly changes into a mad house. It is all haunting mad houses and hospitals filled with us maniacs of the particular fear we are subject to.

(Life is all a running away—a distraction. We are running away when we are talking, when we are making love—then more than ever, perhaps.)

In Dostoevsky we suddenly realize that these Russians are ourselves. If the religion, mysticism, liberalism, despotism they possess were only Russian there are excellent books written by travellers in Russia for us to read. But Dostoevsky is different. If I could but mesmerize you.... It is like reading the gospels in childhood, being overrun and overthrown by fate and then after one has lived meeting the words of the childhood situations and making associations.

I do not think of him as an artist, though he is a great one. You do not _think_ of him.... In ordinary life we suppress half the things and more we might say. Vanity and fear are the ultimate things. In Dostoevsky the people tug and scrape at one anothers’ vain nerves with adder’s poison. He gives one the sensation of discovering one’s self and betraying one’s self. He reveals as friends talking and discussing in the small hours of the morning reveal themselves to one another. The talk may be a describing of the animal functions of the human body. But in reality it is the psychic tingling, electric vibrations which the physiological structure exerts upon mind! Mind! Mind! Dostoevsky is interested in what people actually feel. He is more with people who have written diaries than with so-called realistic novelists. One gets from him a sense of perversion of human imagination.... He is the most important of novelists; full of ripples and vibrations of imagination. Everybody has imagination. The things we do are nothing. Imagination is the only thing over which Will has no power.

Nietzsche says that he got all his contemporary philosophy from Dostoevsky. He got from him even his idea of the inner circle of aristocratic souls who really rule the world, are themselves unhappy, and take with others to places which they (these others) cannot enter. Dostoevsky thinks that the secret of the world is in abandonment, perversion; Nietzsche in harness, stiffness, the gay, the strong, the beautiful, aristocratic, dominant.... Nietzsche with all his reality does not describe life as it is. Zarathustra is a dream—impossible perhaps. But Dostoevsky does describe life. Nietzsche’s man is absolutely alone—has his own hell. Dostoevsky’s has that too, but in a different way. He gives the feeling of a third person where two are alone. Do not think that Dostoevsky is a mystic. The essential thing is that you have this sense of a third person to which genius appeals. Dostoevsky is a stronger as well as a truer one than even Nietzsche himself.

Nietzsche is as a skater upon the ice, a dancer upon a tight rope who remains a white, balanced figure on the surface. Dostoevsky plunges—into a darkness full of voices. You must get there by a form of perversion. Every one of his characters is incurably hurt. Nietzscheans harden their hearts and live on the surface. All Dostoevsky people are weak. He thinks that only out of weakness will redemption come; abandonment to every emotion. In that he is Dionysian.... Dostoevsky I cannot put into words. Perversion; Disease; God is Disease; God is Pain; Dostoevsky depicts how Disease gives one illumination. We have an idea that we must be well. Even Nietzsche says that. The Greeks said it ages ago. Dostoevsky says “No; I offer you a new value.” He has a lust for fools—understands the mania that people have of making fools of themselves. God is Folly; God is Cruelty—perhaps an epicene God.

Dostoevsky is a cerebralist. His specialty is imaginative reactions. All the lusts that have stretched their wailing arms, all the hopes, all the goblins.... In sex as in everything else people are not what they are doing; they are in that vortex of what they imagine themselves. Dostoevsky understands all that. Those frank-spoken people who think they know sex are puritans on the other side. They have no imagination.

We can overestimate what Dostoevsky has from Russia and not attribute what he is to himself. Other Russians are Russians—Turgeniev, Tolstoy, Andreyev, Chekhov, Gorky—but they are not as big as he is; perhaps they are more of the broader stamp.

... Constance Garnett’s translations are masterpieces. The French are too artistic to translate Dostoevsky.... No one can approach Dostoevsky in creating a saint. Russia as the spiritual bringer-back of the world to Christianity—this runs through his works. He is _the_ Christian. His books are full of translations from Scripture. He understands the underlying psychology of the gospels. Nietzsche said that putting the gospels with the art of the Old Testament was a crime in the name of Art. The Old Testament is undoubtedly finer art, but the New is psychology—masterly.

VERS LIBRE AND COMMON SENSE

_Clinton Masseck, St. Louis_:

_Vers Libre_ has no inconsiderable tradition in English verse, as Mr. Arthur Ficke has recently pointed out in THE LITTLE REVIEW. Its progress in French poetry, particularly among modern writers, is familiar to all students. And if we were inclined to forget or to forgive Whitman (meaning in politer terms to accept him and his followers), the recent verse of the Imagiste group and such writers as Miss Amy Lowell and Mr. Max Bodenheim in our own midst would be likely to force our attention to this interesting form—if I may employ this word in no paradoxical sense.

But _vers libre_ is of the moment—new, if you will, in its present appeal. Its modern themes, its unique figures of speech, its wide practice, both in this country and in England, mark it as a new movement, or at least a new recrudescence.

Anything new invites attack; anything new in literature perhaps warrants attack. If it can stand the test, by just such a token, it is worth consideration. But there are those to whom the new is always a thing to be attacked—because it is new, because it is inexplicable according to their own canons of emotion and intellect. Francis Jeffrey, with his famous caption on Wordsworth, “This will never do,” has his echo, futile and otherwise, in every generation of critics. And so we have Mr. Llewellyn Jones, in the January issue of THE LITTLE REVIEW, sending up his protest against _vers libre_ in general and Mr. Bodenheim in particular.

Mr. Jones is markedly distressed. If he were not so much in earnest and so decently—or indecently—polite, so “suedy,” so suave, even scholastic in his handling, he might be amusing. He is also distinctly pugnacious and, as most pugnacious people are inclined to be, he is curiously inconsistent.

In fact, it is a little difficult to determine why Mr. Jones cannot accept Bodenheim. (He is guilty of reading Meredith, “popularly supposed to be obscure.”) Because our poet writes of “a world of growing sieves, slim squares, powdered souls, cool, colorless struggles, the obstetrical adventures of white throats, and green and yellow dins,” and because Mr. Jones, in the smallness of his soul or environment, has never been able to concoct or to conceive of poetry couched in this garb—let us grant the idea behind it—he straightway announces “This will never do.” Wordsworth, after being so thoroughly “sieved” by the critics, still lives; the divine essence of romanticism was not killed by Jeffrey and his thunder-pellet phrase. Courage, Mr. Bodenheim!

Yet in a really admirable paragraph of summary as to the function of poetry and the relation of a poet to his audience, Mr. Jones lays down the dictum that “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.... By his aid alone we may get outside of our own skins and into the very heart of the world.”