Part 2

How differently is Verhaeren conceived in the Teutonic mind! The Austrian poet, Stefan Zweig,[2] has written an interesting book on the Belgian, an elaborate study of his personality and works, which substantiates my claim that people speak much more successfully about themselves than about others. Herr Zweig appreciates Verhaeren highly (and let me tell you sub rosa, my friend, that his general estimation of the Poet is but a pale echoing of the brilliant Léon Bazalgette in his book _Les célébrités d’aujourd hui_); he considers him the greatest poet living, he names him _the_ European poet in the same sense as Whitman is _the_ American poet. Soon, however, he falls into the Teutonic fallacy of preciseness-by-all-means, of violently accurate definitions which _must_ suit the facts, else—_desto schlimmer für die Fakten_. He wishes us to believe with him that Verhaeren is the poet of socialism, of democracy, that he has proclaimed his great Aye to contemporary life, with its greed, factories, and smoke; that a poet who wants “to be necessary to our time must feel that everything in this time is necessary, and therefore beautiful.” Thus with the German skill in fencing with Hegelian dialectics the critic endeavors to persuade us that Verhaeren must needs love modern life in all its aspects, that he is enraptured with all manifestations of contemporary spirit, from the urban “multitude” to that most hideous platitude, the Eiffel Tower. Mr. Zweig has utterly failed to see that Verhaeren does not feel the present, the contemporary, that he lives spiritually in the past and in the future, while the fleeting present is for him but a _symbol_, an alphabet of monstrous hieroglyphs, the mysteries of which he interprets prophetically. Has he not expressed his endless despair and maddening grief over the tragedy of the all-absorbing monster-city? Has the world not been to him a Golgotha, “an eternal illusion”? To Mr. Zweig Verhaeren is a happy, satisfied lover of all and everything. The poet and the painter, Maximilian Voloshin (one of whose poems appeared in THE LITTLE REVIEW), relates his impression of the Belgian: “When you see him for the first time you notice before anything else a deep furrow cleaving his brow, resembling two wide-spread wings of a flying bird. This furrow is himself. In it is his sorrow, his flight.” I wonder whether Mr. Zweig has observed the furrow; or did he deliberately overlook it in order to save his “structure”?

[2] _Emile Verhaeren_, by Stefan Zweig. [Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.]

Yes, my friend, people seldom succeed in their attempt to interpret others. Would you classify biographies as literature of personality? Perhaps in the sense that they reveal the personality of the biographer, but then it depends upon the value of that personality. Here is an instance. The brother of Parnell writes his Memoirs[3], bringing forth a mass of details and anecdotes of “Charley’s” life. Charles Parnell has always been a fascinating personality to me. Long ago I heard a lecturer speaking on the great Irishman before a European audience of revolutionists; the listeners (by no means Irish!) were enchanted with the figure of the unique leader, with his powerful individuality and skillful strategy. I have pondered many a time over his portrait revealing the mysterious face of a medieval sorcerer, and have looked forward to a work that would help me in gaining a clearer idea of the “uncrowned King of Ireland.” His brother’s memoirs gave me a wealth of information about their family pedigree and about each individual member (their number is considerable), particularly about the writer’s business undertakings. About Charles Parnell I have learned numerous external facts and figures, but his intrinsic self is as little known to me now as before. Of what value is such a book which succeeds merely in introducing to you Mr. John Howard, an Irish gentleman of no particular interest?

[3] _Charles Steward Parnell: A Memoir_, by his brother, John Howard Parnell. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]

It is totally different when you are confronted with such a wonderful individuality as Romain Rolland[4]. Apparently it is a book of essays on Berlioz, Wagner, Saint-Saëns, D’Indy, Strauss, Debussy, and on some aspects of modern music; in reality you come to know the rich personality of Rolland and the reactions of his sensitive, graceful soul on the musical productions of our best-known composers. I am delighted with his influence on my views; not that he has altered them: musical opinions do not let themselves be proved or disproved; but he has _enhanced_ my attitudes, he has made me admire my favorites more profoundly and hate my torturers more thoroughly. Do not let your Editor know that Brahms’s symphonies prove as indigestible to Rolland as they have been to your humble Incurable. It is the reading of such a book that offers me the joy of looking into a great soul, and it reminds me of the exalted experience I have had in reading Wilde’s _Intentions_, or the essays of Przybyszewsky and Arthur Symons.

The unceremonious self-revealment of a great man, of which I spoke in the beginning, does not always appeal to my aesthetic sense. At times my feeling of delicacy is scalded at the sight of a repulsive negligee. It has painfully irritated me to read Dostoevsky’s letters[5] in the English translation: would that the Russians kept their dirty linen at home. The book reveals a petty tragedy of a great personality; eternal want, indebtedness, whimpering, small jealousy, narrowness, intolerance. We learn how most of his books were written in a hurry, under pressure of need, the author being aware of their inadequacy; we learn of his petty envy towards Turgeniev, his slighting of Tolstoy, his bigoted hatred of everything liberal, European, his sturdy opposition to the revolutionists, his obsequious demeanor before high officials. With the exception of a few bright spots, the pages produce the nauseating effect of a pathological museum. Such a pity.

Come, now, friend: _How do you think?_

IBN GABIROL.

[4] _Musicians of To-Day_, by Romain Rolland. [Henry Holt Company, New York.]

[5] _Letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoevsky._ [The Macmillan Company, New York.]

A Note on Paroxysm in Poetry

EDWARD J. O’BRIEN

Paroxysm is the poetic expression of that modern spirit which finds its most notable expression in other arts in the sculpture of Meunier, the polyphonic music of Strauss, the philosophy of Bergson, and the American skyscraper. It is the application of dynamics to poetry. It stands midway between romanticism, which is an escape into the past, and futurism, which is a flight into the future. Paroxysm is deep-rooted in to-day.

M. Nicolas Beauduin, its most noteworthy French exemplar, has many noteworthy disciples in France and Germany, and paroxysm is a well-known force in every literature except that of America, where its unconscious expression in life has been most remarkable. Students will find its philosophy set forth and its current phases in literature duly chronicled in M. Beauduin’s quarterly review, _La Vie des Lettres_. It is only possible here to offer a few very brief hints as to its literary aims and materials:

It aims to be a synthesis of modern industrial and mechanical effort.

It repudiates the ivory tower.

It handles the materials of modern life directly, not in symbols.

It responds to the roar of factories and trains.

The poet is to be “an active lyric,” representing his age.

The poet’s vision is the cinematograph of modern life with its continual mechanical transfiguration.

It is not sentimental.

To art for art’s sake, and art for truth’s sake, it opposes art for life’s sake.

It discards personal sensation; it is not ashamed to be “cosmic.”

The evolution of poetry is to be as rapid and terrible henceforth as material evolution.

It will sing the new man, the man-machine, the multiplied man, the Man-Bird.

It exalts motion and repudiates equilibrium.

It is social.

It feels the need for violent motives of faith, and finds them in the passion of the cities.

It cultivates a scientific technique.

It does not reject any words in forming a vocabulary.

It seeks swift, hurtling, dynamic rhythms.

It is based on “dynamic notions of qualitative duration, of heterogeneous continuity, of multiple and mobile states of consciousness.”

It perceives the elements of poetry contained in modern cities, locomotives, aëroplanes, dreadnoughts, and submarines; in a stock exchange, a Wall Street, or a wheat pit; and in every scientific marvel and in the sonorous song of factories and railways.

It emphasizes their dynamic consciousness.

To sum up: It aims to attain and express with the quick, keen vigor and strength of steel, the whirling, audacious, burning life of our epoch in all the paroxysm of the New Beauty.

When M. Beauduin’s new volume, _La Cité des Hommes_, is translated and published in America, it will be less difficult to estimate the success with which paroxyst poetry may be achieved.

The New Beauty

NICOLAS BEAUDUIN

(_Authorized translation from the French by Edward J. O’Brien_)

Long years the poet had not understood This powerful art bursting from forces in sight, From the tamed element which revolts in cries, From the victory of the spirit Over the passive immensity of matter.

The modern beauty of joy and madness, Of triumph and truth, He saw her, in a passionate rhythm, Flinging down the palaces of doubt and silence, Vanquishing black scepticisms and torpors, Rekindling the universe under her jets of vapor, Destroying the vain mystery that disappears, Covering the entire world with her network of iron, Launching her towers, her bridges, her tunnels, her dockyards, Over all the exasperated continents of the globe.

Ah! the new beauty, ardent, insatiate, Strained toward conquest and the vastest life, She was indeed the god whom nothing resists, Dynamic beauty of swiftness and hope, Rushing ever beyond, out of the blackness, Dancing and paroxyst humanity. He saw her at last, superb before him, Entrapping error, mowing night; She erected on the old barbaric soil Her cathedral with its vertiginous walls, Lit by the mad and whirling suns of the searchlights.

Beauty of brass, beauty of fire, She was there visible as a god. Beauty of vapor, geometric beauty, Modern beauty who builds for her temple and landscape High furnaces casqued with purple and gold, Cities mad beneath their electric lamps, Launching at conquered heaven in spirals of pride, The rut of dynamos and the bustle of windlasses, The multiplied brutal effort of the machines, The fiery flight of aeroplanes in the air, The frantic trolleys under their sheaves of lightnings, And dominating the night of silence and hatred, The terrible thunderous flight of hertzian waves.

The Artist as Master

_The Japanese Print: An Interpretation, by_ Frank Lloyd Wright. [Ralph Fletcher Seymour Company, Chicago.]

HENRY BLACKMAN SELL

“‘A flower is beautiful,’ we say—but why? Because in its geometry and its sensuous qualities it is an embodiment and significant expression of that precious something in ourselves which we instinctively know to be Life, ‘an eye looking out upon us from the great inner sea of beauty,’ a proof of the eternal harmony in the nature of a universe which is too vast and intimate and real for the mere intellect to grasp.”

Yet our materialists would solve the Problem with their material intellects. And our theologians would solve it with their ecclesiastical deductions. The one would put Life in the cold hands of the scientist, expert in fact and figure; the other, gropingly indefinite, in the hands of the spiritual formulaist. Yet both are wrong. The Problem can be solved. The literal, objective guesses of the materialist are but flimsy realisms far from true. The indefinite, abstract dreams of the theologian are but the futile inaptitudes of man calculated to define that which cannot be defined.

But definitions are not what the world needs. The Solution would be interesting, but the Problem is fascinating. It is the Going and not the Goal that holds us to the bitter and the sweet, through mornings, noons, and nights, year by year.

If, then, we grant the Solution but a cold conclusion, and the Goal but a stagnation point, to whom can we turn but to the artists—those spiritual children of that great master who wept when he could find no imperfection in his masterpiece.

The artist, whose interests are in the _interpretations_, and not in the _translations_ of Life, and whose interpretations have given Life all that it holds sacred.

There is no power but has its root in his .... There is no power But his can withold the crown or give it Or make it reverent in the eyes of men.

Written philosophies of artist craftsmen are rare. Their busy lives find little time for penning rules; but when one does speak, it is with the captivating force of original thought: the summary of attainments through many trials and many failures.

And it is with this sure touch of deep artistic experience that Frank Lloyd Wright draws from the geometric beauty of the mystic Japanese prints his philosophy of the artist as master of the Problem.

“Real civilization means for us a right conventionalizing of our original state of nature, just such a conventionalizing as the true artist imposes on natural forms. The law-giver and reformer of social customs must have, however, the artist soul, the artist eye in directing this process, if the light of the race is not to go out. So, art is not alone the expression, but in turn the great conservator and transmitter of the finer sensibilities of a people. More still, it is to show those who shall understand just where and how we shall bring coercion to bear upon the material of human conduct. So the indigenous art of a people is their only prophecy and their school of anointed prophets and kings. Our own art is the only light by which this conventionalizing process we call “civilization” may eventually make its institutions harmonious with the fairest conditions of our individual and social life.

“I wish I might use another word than ‘conventionalizing’ to convey the notion of this magic process of the artist mind, which is the constant haunting reference of this paper, because it is the perpetual, insistent suggestion of this particular art we have discussed. Only an artist, or one with genuine artistic training, is likely, I fear, to realize precisely what the word as here used connotes. Let me illustrate once more. To know a thing (what we can really call knowing), a man must first love the thing and sympathize vividly with it. Egypt thus knew the lotus, and translated the flower to the dignified stone forms of her architecture. Thus was the lotus conventionalized. Greece knew and idealized the acanthus in stone translations. Thus was the acanthus conventionalized. If Egypt or Greece had plucked the flowers as they grew, and given us a mere imitation of them in stone, the stone forms would have died with the original. In translating, however, its very life’s principle into terms of stone well adapted to grace a column capital, the Egyptian artist made it pass through a rarifying spiritual process, whereby its natural character was really intensified and revealed in terms of stone adapted to an architectural use. The lotus gained thus imperishable significance; for the life-principle in the flower is translated—transmuted to terms of building stone to idealize a real need. This is conventionalization. It is reality because it is poetry. As the Egyptian took the lotus, the Greek the acanthus, and the Japanese every natural thing on earth, as we may take and adapt to our highest use in our own way a natural flower or thing, so civilization must take the natural man, to fit him for his place in this great piece of architecture we call the social state. And today, as centuries ago, it is the prophetic artist mind that must reveal this natural state idealized, conventionalized harmoniously with the life-principle of all men. How otherwise shall it be discerned? All the sheer wisdom of science, the cunning of politics and the prayers of religion can but stand and wait for the revelation,—awaiting at the hands of the artist that conventionalization of the free expression of life-principle which shall make our social living beautiful,—organically true. Behind all institutions or dogmatic schemes, whatever their worth may be, or their venerable antiquity,—behind them all is something produced and preserved for its aesthetic worth; the song of the poet, some artist vision, the pattern seen in the mount.

“Now speaking a language all the clearer because not native to us, beggared as we are by material riches, the humble Japanese artist has become greatly significant because he is the interpreter of the one permanent thing in the life of his people; that one permanent thing being the principle of a right conventionalization of life which makes of their native forms the most humanly significant, and most humanly joy-giving as in its ever varied moods and in evanescent loveliness he has made Fujiyama—that image of man in the vast—the God of Nippon.”

Evolution versus Stagnation

(_Being a Debate, with Rare Illustrations, by Major Funkhouser, Mr. Lucian Cary, and The Camera, reported for_ THE LITTLE REVIEW _by Herman Schuchert_.)

Place: Fullerton Hall.

Time: Thursday afternoon, December 10, 1914.

Characters: Mere and supporting members of the Drama League, and others mentioned above; also guards, committees, and a few men.

* * * * *

MAJOR FUNKHOUSER (_his remarks, condensed_).

Censorship of the movies is necessary because it must be.

Buildings, public rights, and milk are censored, and it is good.

Fifty per cent of a movie audience is under fifteen years of age.

I may be wrong sometimes, but I pass what I think they should see.

We must be big-brothers to our citizens of lesser intelligence.

I told my four daughters only what I thought they should know.

I believe in telling women as little as they may really need.

The working class wants salacious stuff; we must prevent.

These excerpts from banned films will illustrate my points:

* * * * *

THE CINEMATOGRAPH (_its pictures, briefly mentioned_).

Woman and man clutching each other in a raging, although amiable, passion.

Boy being taught how to pick pockets.

Hold-up.

Woman and man in furious love-experiments.

Mexicans burning bodies of dead rebels.

Doctors dressing Mexican battle-wounds.

Woman and man preparing the furnace of love.

Woman and man ....

Woman ....

Man ....

* * * * *

MR. LUCIAN CARY (_his ideas, pieced together_).

These pictures are positively abominable.

No human being could possibly want to see them.

If we must have censorship, the Major’s is as good as any.

Censorship with flaws is preferable to perfect censorship because perfect censorship would abolish the necessity of one’s judgment.

Imperfect censorship permits us, by its slips, to exercise our minds.

In no other civilized country is there such restriction.

Artists in America must keep their keenest visions to themselves.

Censorship deadens human perceptions.

Who wants cloistered virtues when true health is possible?

Man must learn to judge for himself; and he surely will do so.

America is unprecedented in its timidity of tastes and convictions.

* * * * *

MRS. HENDERSON _(in a bored manner)_.

It isn’t a question of arbitrary standard; it’s purely aesthetic.

The Major passes films of the most flagrant sentimentality.

Only legal restrictions are made, and these are futile.

The only satisfactory standard is that of individual taste.

Of course, the title of this debate was not quite the one used on this article. It was very tame—the title. But not so with the films. The Major had evidently selected his choicest ones—and a goodly number of these—which were reeled off in swift succession. Murder trod on the heels of love. Flaming moments of lust were split up by stage-robbers. Nigger babies, whose crime was that they didn’t need clothes, followed suicides.

Your reporter was fortunate enough to find an acquaintance, sitting in the rear of the hall. This lady married a man of millions. He liked the way she did _Florodora_—liked it so well that he gave her a chance, which she has since made much of. She is charming, because she has retained the frankness of the stage and merely exchanged the shoddy furs and diamonds for the real thing. She confided that _The Follies_ were simply right, and that the Drama League was radically opposed to the movies in any or all forms, and that she adored winter because it kept reminding her of Christmas. She is a supporting member of the League, and the only one present who waived her constitutional prerogative of a front seat. Her sisters-in-league were availing themselves of their privilege. They wanted to be where they could not get out, in case the pictures were really good.

And they were—sickening. Not a member left. Not a whisper. All eyes focused upon the screen, where horrors of war and of love (in which there seemed to be nothing fair) were showing. When their nervous systems could stand no more, some lady’s locomotive and oral powers returned, and the reel was stopped.

Then came Mr. Cary, who found it difficult not to speak over their heads with his simple language and big ideas. The audience whispered and began to show the tips of countless yellow-feathers. They could stand horrible pictures; but this talk was too much. It was too sane and calm and cutting. Yellow feathers showed, full length. Women left in twos and threes, although the first person to go out was a male. Cary’s short, admirable paragraphs were divided in this manner:—three ladies on the right of the hall would balance their departure under cover, as it were, of the departure of three sisters on the left. This mental cowardice was worse than the pictures.

An intolerable discussion followed. A huge wave of ancient yet ever-modern philistinism raised itself among the majority of those who remained, and surged across the hall to drown Mr. Cary and Mrs. Henderson. Major Funkhouser found his feet again, and assumed the big-brother-protector attitude, to repeated grand-stand advantages. As long as they had seen the pictures, what matter if the public didn’t? Evolution lost the day. Stagnation was an immediate success. Your reporter left, grinning.

Free, dost thou call thyself? Thy ruling thought would I hear of, and not that thou hast escaped from a yoke.—_Nietzsche._

Dawn in the Hills

FLORENCE KIPER FRANK

Out of the vast, Flooding and flowering the cool, skyey vast, Day, day at last! Squandering, spilling, pouring white-flecked fire, Higher and higher The light of the sun mounts into the dim of the sky. And all the little fields that lie At the foot of the hills that hold them in mothering tender, Sweet with translucent, shimmering green, Lay themselves bare to the sun, and the hill-trees slender, Upward reaching thin arms of prayer, A-shiver with ecstasy, tipped with sheen, Sway to the quivering call of the fresh-stirring air.