Part 1

THE LITTLE REVIEW

_Literature Drama Music Art_

MARGARET C. ANDERSON EDITOR

JULY, 1914

Poems Charles Ashleigh The Renaissance of Parenthood The Editor "Des Imagistes" Charles Ashleigh Of Rupert Brooke and Other Matters Arthur Davison Ficke The New Loyalty George Burman Foster The Milliner (Poem) Sade Iverson "Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt" Margaret C. Anderson Editorials New York Letter George Soule Dostoevsky's Novels Maurice Lazar Book Discussion: An Unreeling Realist De Witt C. Wing The Revolt of the "Once Born" Eunice Tietjens Verlaine and Tolstoy Alexander S. Kaun Conrad's Quote Henry B. Sell "Clark's Field" Marguerite Swawite The "Savage" Painters A. S. K. Sentence Reviews

Published Monthly

25 cents a copy

MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Publisher CHICAGO Fine Arts Building

$2.50 a year

THE LITTLE REVIEW

Vol. I

JULY, 1914

No. 5

POEMS

CHARLES ASHLEIGH

BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL

(_A Mystery Rime for Little Children of All Ages_)

The rain comes down and veils the hills. Ah, tender rain for aching fields!

The hills are clothed in a mist of rain. (My heart is clothed in a mist of pain.) Ah, mother rain, that laves the field, If I to you my poor soul yield, Will you not cleanse it, soothe it, tend it, Weep upon it 'til 'tis mended? 'Twas sweet to sow, 'tis hard to reap. Come, mother rain, and lull me to sleep. Lull me to sleep and wash me away, Out of the realm of Night and Day, Back to the bourne from whence I came, Seeming alike yet not the same....

Rain, you are more than rain to me. And Lash of Pain may be a Key. Ope, then, the door and tread within. The double Door of Good and Sin Is vanquished. Lo, with bread and wine, The table's spread! The feast is Mine!

LOVE IN THE ABYSS

Amidst the buzz of bawdy tales And the laughter of drinking men, I sat and laughed and shouted also. Yet was I not content. My seared and restless eyes, turning here and there,-- Like my tired soul,-- Seeking new joys and finding them not,-- How oft swept you unseeing.

Until, suddenly,-- And now I know not how I could have missed it,-- My eyes saw into yours, And plumbed the deep wells of newly born desire.

Ah, dear my heart, what things your eyes did speak! Not God's own music of creation's dawn, Revealed to mystic in a holy trance, Could pleasure me more sweetly.

So dear were your lips-- Your lips so kind and regal red. My memory of your lips I cherish As a great possession ...

Ah, flying joy, Caught on the wings of Time ... Tender oasis, Ingemmed in a wilderness of grey!

Kisses, kisses,-- Kisses upon your red lips in the black night ...

When, alone in the long, quiet street, By the door of the tavern, Shielded from sight of those within, The soft rain falling on our heads like a mother's blessing,-- We bartered the clinging kisses of new desire. And, as I held you to me, The whole universe Became informed of God, And lay within my arms.

JEALOUSY

You are possessed by another. How I hate him!

Hear the rational people say: "Jealousy is a primitive thing. A thing of the emotions; not of reason." Fools! You do not know scarlet desire, full-flooded!

Ah, my dearest, Graal of my heart's longing, Your stolen kiss is fresh upon my neck. My lips are full of my secret kiss upon your neck.

You are with another, whom I hate; whom I like well for himself, but hate because he possesses you ...

Your possessor is old and ugly; He can not love you as I can. I can pour out for you the scented treasures of my young love.

Dear night of hope, when you gave me the whispered promise to come to me ...

Stealthy was I and cunning. Friendly and attentive was I to your old lover (if lover he may be called, who is almost incapable of love). And, all the time, I was scheming for you. When the old man was away for an instant-- Oh, golden moment,-- I poured my whispered passion into your ears. When he looked away, or, for a moment, was distracted, with swift undertones I declared myself to you. How dear was your welcoming glance and your quickly toned assent! You had a face so proud. So quiet and poised among the throng. Yet, for once, you gave me your eyes and, in so doing, gave me your priceless body and warm, comradely soul. Ah, flash of answering love that transformed your face! As a jewel of my memory's treasure-casket may it be preserved.

When the drinking-place was closed, we walked along the dark street. Do you remember? We were four, luckily, and the old man was kept busy in conversation, half drunken as he was.

And we, with our secret between us, walked behind. Our hands were tight clasped in the folds of our dress. Tight clasped with the clinging hand caress; you and I trying to put into our hands all the longing that was in us. All the time we were apprehensive of a sudden turning of the old man or the other ...

Then, the whispered troth, and the meeting-place appointed.

And, then, later, boldly, so openly and audaciously it brought no suspicion, Under seeming of wine-induced jollity, we kissed. And they laughed; it seemed a trivial jest to them. But to us it was a sacrament.

But, best of all, my beloved, was the hurried clasping and kissing when we were alone in the dark. Promise of joy to come. Foretaste of the coming ecstasy.

And then we had to part. I and my unaware friend. You and the old man.

As I walked home that night, How I hated him! How I looked up at the pale-golden moon high-hung in the purple sky, and sang in my heart your praise and cursed in my heart your possessor ...

But we will out-wit him.

Young I am and young are you and the Law of Life bids us mate. And a whole world standing between us would be melted and destroyed by the fire of our youth's desire.

THE GLORIOUS ADVENTURE OF GLORIOUS ME

I swim with the tide of life towards the new; I reach out hungered arms to flowing change.-- I smash the awesome totems of my kind; My smarting vision bursts its cramping range.

A thousand voices yell within my soul; A thousand hymns are chanting in my heart.-- I blast the mist of worlds and years apart; I sense the blending glory of the whole.

The sap of flowers and trees, it mounts in me. I feel the child within me cry and turn; The crimson thoughts within me writhe and burn.-- I stand, with craving arms high-flung, before the rimless sea.

And every whirling, passionate star sings melodies to Me; And every bud and every leaf has sought my private ear; And to the quickening soul of Me has told its mystery, As I sit in state in the heart of the world, As I proudly hug the core of the world, As I make me a boat of the whole, wide world ...

And then for new worlds steer.

THE RENAISSANCE OF PARENTHOOD

MARGARET C. ANDERSON

There seems to be a kind of renaissance of motherhood in the air. Ellen Key has just done a book with that title which has come to us too late to be reviewed adequately in this issue; Mrs. Gasquoine Hartley has written _The Age of Mother Power_ which will be brought out in the fall; and in Shaw's new volume of plays (_Misalliance_, _Fanny's First Play_ and _The Dark Lady of the Sonnets_) there is a preface of over a hundred pages devoted to a discussion of parents and children which says some of the most refreshing and important things about that relationship I have ever read.

The home, as such, is rapidly losing its old functions--perhaps it is more accurate to say that it is changing its standards of functioning, and that the present distress merely heralds in a wonderful new conception of family potentiality. But a generalization of this sort can be disputed by any family egotist, so let's get down to particulars. It's all right for the enlightened of the older generation to preach violently that the family is a humbug, as Shaw does; that the child should have all the rights of any other human being, and that there is nothing so futile or so stupid as to try to "control" your children. It's not only all right; it's glorious! But what I'm more interested in, still being of the age that must classify as "daughter," is this:--what are "the children" themselves doing about it? Have their rebellions been anything more than complaints; have they made any real stand for liberty; have they proved themselves worthy of the Shavian championship?

Well--I got hold recently of a human document which answered these questions quite in the affirmative. It was a rather startling thing because, while it offered nothing new on the theory side of the matter, it showed the theory in thoughtful action--which, for all the talk on the subject, is still rare. It was a letter of some twenty pages written by a girl to her mother at the time of a domestic climax when all the bonds of family affection, family idealism and obligation were tending to smother the human truth of the situation, as the girl put it. She was in her early twenties; she had a sister two or three years younger, and both of them had reached at least a sort of economic independence. She had come to the conclusion, after a good many years of rebellion, that the whole fabric of their family life was wrong; and since it was impossible to talk the thing out sensibly--because, as in all families where the children grow up without being given the necessary revaluations, real talk is no more possible than it is between uncongenial strangers--she had decided to discuss it in a letter. That medium does away with the patronage of the parents' refusal to listen seriously:--that "Oh, come now, what do you know about these things?" If the child has anything interesting to say, if he puts any of his rebellion into his writing, the chances are that the parent will read the letter through; and the result is that he'll know more about his child than he has learned in all the years they've been trying to talk with each other and not succeeding. I'm enthusiastic about this kind of family correspondence; it's good training in expression and it clears the air--jolts the "heads" of the family into realizing that the thinking and planning are not all on one side. I once did it myself to my father--put ten pages of closely-written argument on his office desk (so that he'd open it with the same impersonality given to a business communication), in which I explained why I wanted to go away from home and learn to _work_, and why I thought such a course was an intelligent one. The letter accomplished what no amount of talking would have done, because in our talk we rarely got beyond the "Oh, now, you're just a little excited, it will look different in the morning" stage. Father said it was rather a shock to him because he didn't know I had ever figured things out to that extent; but we always understood each other better after that.

However--not to get lost in personalities--this is the letter the girl showed me and which she allows me to quote from partially:

If we are to continue living together in any sort of happiness and growth the entire basis of our present life will have to be changed. We can do it if we're brave enough to do what people usually do only in books:--face the fact squarely that our family life is and has been a failure, and set about to remedy it. It will mean an entire change of home conditions, and these are the terms of the new arrangement:

When I said to you the other day that things would have to go _my_ way now, you were horrified at the conceit of it. To get to facts, there's no conceit in it--because my way is simply the practise of not imposing one's will upon other people. I made the remark merely as a common sense suggestion, and made it out of a seriousness that is desperate. I say "desperate" because I mean that literally: the situation isn't a question of a mere temporary adjustment--just some sort of superficial arrangement so that we can get on pleasantly for a while before the next outbreak comes. The plans Betty and I have discussed have been made in the interest of our whole future lives:--whether we're going to submit (either by surrender or compromise or by just drifting along and not doing anything) to an existence of bickering, nagging, hours spent in the discussion of non-essentials, hideous lack of harmony--the whole stupid programme we've watched working for years and achieving nothing but unhappiness, folly, and a terrible "human waste." You ask us to continue in your way; but from at least three points of view that way has been a failure. I ask you to adopt my way--which has not yet failed. That's why I say it's not conceit, but common sense.

My way is simply this: that we three can live together and work in peace and harmony if this awful bugbear of Authority is dropped out of the scheme. Each of us must go her own way; we're all different, and there's no reason why one should impose her authority on the lives of the others. You say that you should because you're our mother. But that's the thing I want to discuss.

Motherhood isn't infallibility. If a woman is a wise woman she's a wise mother; if she's a foolish woman she's a foolish mother. Because you're our mother doesn't mean that you must always be right; before being a mother you're a human being, and any human being is likely to be wrong. To get down to brutal facts, we think you are _not_ right about the whole thing. We've thought so for years, but now it's come to the time when our thinking must be put into action. We're no longer children; but even as mere infants we thought these things--without having the right to express them. What I'm trying to do now is to express them not as a daughter, but quite impersonally as a human being, as a mere friend, a sister, or anyone who might come to you stating that she believed with all her soul that you were wrong, and also stating, just as impersonally, that she wouldn't think of modeling her line of conduct after that pattern which appeared to her so wrong. We _must_ face the facts; if you do that squarely it doesn't seem so bad, and you stop flinching about it. You get to the point where you're not afraid to face them boldly, and then you begin to _construct_. And this is the only way to clear up the kind of rottenness and decay that flourishes in our family life.

It's in the interest of this achievement that I say the thing a girl isn't supposed to say to her mother--namely, that Betty and I will not any longer subscribe to the things you expect us to. The fact to face just as quickly as possible is this: it's the starting point. When you realize that we feel it's a question of doing this or laying a foundation for lives that are just _half_ lives--hideous perverted things which miss all the beauty that you can put into the short life given you--I think you'll see how serious we are. We're at least two intelligent human beings, if we're nothing else. And why should you ask or expect that we'll submit to a system which to us means stupidity, misery, pettiness--all those things which we've seen working out for years and which, being at least intelligent, we want to keep away from?

That much settled, we can continue to live together in just one way--as three sisters or friends; the motherhood, in so far as it means authority or an attempt to mould us to _your_ way, must be eliminated. A complete new family idealism can be built on such a basis. You will say that it's an abnormal basis for any mother to accept. Of course it is; but the situation is abnormal, and the orthodox remedies aren't applicable.

The reason I say the situation is abnormal is this: usually when a mother objects to her daughters' behavior it is on some definite basis of opposing the things they _do_--like going to too many parties or falling in love with the wrong man. You have very little fault to find with the things we do. Your objections are on a basis of what we _are_--or, rather, of what we _are not_: that we are not orthodox, that we are not hypocrites, that we are not the kind of daughters the Victorians approved of. "Hypocrites" will sound paradoxical; but you have confessed that you would rather have us lie to you than to disagree with you; that you would rather have us be sentimental about "the way a girl should treat her mother" than to learn how we ought to treat ourselves. You call that being "respectful" and think that harmony is possible only under such conditions. We call it being "insulting," and think that it's the one sure way of destroying any chance of harmony. If we respect you it must be because we think you worthy of the truth: anything else is degrading to both sides.

You'll say you can't be satisfied to live with us and not give advice and all the other things that are part of a mother's duty. You may give all the advice you want to; the keynote of the new situation will be that we'll take the advice if we believe it's right; if not we'll ignore it, just as a man ignores his friend's advice when he feels it to be wrong. Of course the wise person doesn't give much advice; he simply lives his life the best way he knows how. That's the only bid he can make for emulation. If we tell you that we don't approve of the creed you have made you mustn't be surprised if we try to formulate one of our own. There's no reason for us to ask you to change just because we're your daughters. You must do as you believe. But you must grant us the same privilege.

We disagree about fundamentals. If our beliefs were merely the vague, unformed ideas of children you might try to change them. But it's too late now. So we can live together harmoniously only if we give up the foolish attempts at "influencing."

We're not living three generations ago. We've had Shaw since then, and parents and children aren't doing the insulting things to each other they used to do. Among intelligent people some of the old issues can never raise their heads again. And so, it's for you to decide:--whether we shall build on the new foundation together or separately.

It might be a play; it's certainly rather good for reality. And what happened? The mother refused to "accept the terms"--which is not surprising, perhaps; and the household broke up into two establishments with results that will disappoint the conservative who thinks those girls should have been soundly beaten. The first wrench of it, the girl said, reminded her of George's parting with Marion in _Tono-Bungay_:--that sense of belonging to each other immensely, that "profound persuasion of irreparable error" in the midst of what seemed profoundly right. "Nothing is simple," Wells wrote in that connection; "every wrong done has a certain justice in it, and every good deed has dregs of evil." But the girl and her mother have learned to be friends as a result of that break, and the latter will tell you now that it was the right thing to have done.

The preface to _Misalliance_ has such a wealth of quotable things in it that the only way to get them appreciated is to quote. Shaw has said much of this before, but it is all so valuable that it ought to be shouted from the housetops:

The people against whom children are wholly unprotected are those who devote themselves to the very mischievous and cruel sort of abortion which is called bringing up a child in the way it should go. Now nobody knows the way a child should go.

What is a child? An experiment. A fresh attempt to produce the just man made perfect: that is, to make humanity divine. And you will vitiate the experiment if you make the slightest attempt to abort it into some fancy figure of your own: for example, your notion of a good man or a womanly woman. If you treat it as a little wild beast to be tamed, or as a pet to be played with, or even as a means to save you trouble and to make money for you (and these are our commonest ways), it may fight its way through in spite of you and save its soul alive; for all its instincts will resist you, and possibly be strengthened in the resistance; but if you begin with its own holiest aspirations, and suborn them for your own purposes, then there is hardly any limit to the mischief you may do.

Francis Place tells us that his father always struck his children when he found one within his reach.... Francis records the habit with bitterness, having reason to thank his stars that his father respected the inside of his head whilst cuffing the outside of it; and this made it easy for Francis to do yeoman's service to his country as that rare and admirable thing, a Free-thinker: the only sort of thinker, I may remark, whose thoughts, and consequently whose religious convictions, command any respect.

Now Mr. Place, senior, would be described by many as a bad father; and I do not contend that he was a conspicuously good one. But as compared with the conventionally good father who deliberately imposes himself on his son as god; who takes advantage of childish credulity and parent worship to persuade his son that what he approves of is right and what he disapproves of is wrong; who imposes a corresponding conduct on the child by a system of prohibitions and penalties, rewards and eulogies, for which he claims divine sanction; compared to this sort of abortionist and monster maker, I say, Place appears almost as a Providence.

A gentleman once wrote to me and said, with an obvious conviction that he was being most reasonable and high minded, that the only thing he beat his children for was failure in perfect obedience and perfect truthfulness. On these attributes, he said, he must insist. As one of them is not a virtue at all, and the other is the attribute of a god, one can imagine what the lives of this gentleman's children would have been if it had been possible for him to live down to his monstrous and foolish pretensions.

The cruelty (of beating a child) must be whitewashed by a moral excuse, and a pretense of reluctance. It must be for the child's good. The assailant must say "This hurts me more than it hurts you." There must be hypocrisy as well as cruelty.

The most excusable parents are those who try to correct their own faults in their offspring. The parent who says to his child: "I am one of the successes of the Almighty: therefore imitate me in every particular or I will have the skin off your back" (a quite common attitude) is a much more absurd figure than the man who, with a pipe in his mouth, thrashes his boy for smoking.