Part 5

I regard the book with that peculiar affection which results from sacrifice ... in no drawing-room sense of the word. Dozens of my books were purchased with money which ought to have been spent upon what are called the necessities of life. Many a time I have stood before a stall, or a bookseller's window, torn by conflict of intellectual desire and bodily need. At the very hour of dinner, when my stomach clamored for food, I have been stopped by sight of a volume so long coveted, and marked at so advantageous a price, that I could not let it go; yet to buy it meant pangs of famine. My Heyne's Tibullus was grasped at such a moment. It lay on the stall of the old book-shop in Goodge Street--a stall where now and then one found an excellent thing among quantities of rubbish. Sixpence was the price--sixpence! At that time I used to eat my mid-day meal (of course, my dinner) at a coffee-shop in Oxford Street, one of the real old coffee-shops, such as now, I suppose, can hardly be found. Sixpence was all I had--yes, all I had in the world; it would purchase a plate of meat and vegetables. But I did not dare to hope that the Tibullus would wait until the morrow, when a certain small sum fell due me. I paced the pavement, fingering the coppers in my pocket, eyeing the stall, two appetites at combat within me. The book was bought and I went home with it, and as I made a dinner of bread and butter I gloated over the pages.

New York Letter

GEORGE SOULE

Hilaire Belloc is coming to America next fall for a lecturing tour. It is well to take stock of him, so that we shall know what to expect. He is clever, and a Catholic--that tells the whole story. We don't know exactly how he will say it, but we know what he will say. Through various smiling subtleties and paradoxes he will attack democracy, feminism, socialism, individualistic rebellion of any kind. It is quite possible that he will aim a few careless shots at Montessori, the discussion of sex questions in public, Galsworthy, and Bernard Shaw. He is a masculine, English, Agnes Repplier. He will entertain his cultivated audiences, and give them the impression that he is very modern and daring.

It is curious how the thinking mind immediately discounts the testimony of one who is known to have given his allegiance to an embracing authority of any kind. Whether the authority in question is the Vatican, Karl Marx, Business, Nietzsche, or Theodore Roosevelt, we know the man's whole mind is likely to be colored with it, and that the evidence is probably of less importance to him than his case. Yet there is always a moral suspicion against the man who refuses to enroll himself under any banner. He seems dead, inhuman, academic. March to the drums, salute the colors, or admit there is no blood in you! It is good that most of mankind does so. The strongest army (not necessarily the largest) will win, and the battle must come for the sake of the victory.

Therefore, let the radicals welcome Mr. Belloc as a good enemy. He stands for a sincere, highly organized, and powerful propaganda which cannot be ignored on the modern battlefield. On account of their worship of authority the Catholics have a solidarity which no other movement can boast. For the same reason they are doomed to an eternal enmity with adventurous souls, those who fight for change of any kind. They seem often to be in accord with advancing thinkers because they condemn present conditions. But closer investigation will always show that instead of pointing to the future they cling to the past. Mgr. Benson, during his recent visit to New York, stated in private conversation that present social conditions are intolerable. He went on to say that an ideal society can be attained only under feudalism, with the church in control.

There will be no more danger from the Catholics than from any other army as long as we know what they are fighting for, and are able to recognize their irregular troops.

But let there be no complacency among the enemies of the church on the ground that it may not be really in the field, or has not artillery when it gets there. Without investigation of any kind, I have heard of two books attacking the church which were suppressed by their publishers at the demand of Catholic authorities. In each case the weapon was a threat to withdraw an extensive text book business from the house in question. Naturally, the parties to the matter have not been anxious to give it publicity. A magazine which published an article displeasing to Catholics received a letter threatening it with black-listing. There appears to be a well organized and efficient church publicity bureau to attend to these and other matters. A proposal was recently made by a Catholic journal that priests in confessional impose as penance the subscription to Catholic papers and the purchase of Catholic books, at the same time warning the people against secular publications. This was discussed with some approval by America, the New York Jesuit weekly, which regretfully admitted, however, that in the end Catholic publications must depend "mainly on their merit." We are likely to ignore such mediæval methods until we find them obstructing some actual movement of importance. They do obstruct such movements, however, sometimes very annoyingly.

All these methods are but the natural and blameless working of the doctrine of intolerance. And perhaps their greatest danger is that their temporary success will induce the opposing armies to use the same weapon and so shackle themselves. The intolerance of the Puritan was a natural result of his bitter struggle, yet it produced a century of aesthetic darkness. The advanced opponents of the Puritan era are now uttering pronunciamentos and personalities that are Archiepiscopal in their intolerance.

But, you say, intolerance is necessary in the soldier. He must hate his enemy and seek not only to dislodge but to silence his opponent. Well, I will admit that when the soldier is in battle he must shoot to kill. But there is a new kind of soldier developing who is more valuable to man than the old. He joins the army not so much because of the magic of the colors as because of the necessity of the cause and its temporary usefulness in serving the truth behind it. Just as he will not march to war without reason, so he will stop fighting his immediate enemy when his cause is won, and will not go on to bickering and pillage. He is ready to enlist under a new banner at any moment when a new banner represents a more glorious cause than the old. His General is not a god, but a leader. His freedom of choice is always the biggest asset of his strength. Therefore he cannot be intolerant. He is strong, hard, efficient, relentless, but never pompous or slavish. How much time the world has lost eliminating armies of strong men whose fatal fault was excessive, unreasoning loyalty!

That, after all, solves the riddle of my second paragraph. And if the soldier must subordinate his cause to his truth, how much more so the General and the King! The General has very little time to hate his enemy. He must know their strength, study their methods, adopt the best of their ideas, spy out the country, plan a campaign. He orders slaughter not for revenge or hatred, but for success. Therefore it is of supreme importance that his success be worth while.

And the King, the man who selects the cause and fires men to battle. The nearer he comes to an assertion of infallibility the surer is the final defeat of his cause. If he will allow no room for change and growth, change and growth will sweep him aside. We need big men who will not enlist under colors, but are always pushing back the horizon of truth. Distrust the leader who has found the final answer to the riddle. Some day shall we not have a Messiah who shall begin by saying: "Do not found in my name any church, cult, or school. If a man question my message, listen to him closely and learn what truth he has. Always seek the new, the more perfect. Always grow out from the fixed. So shall you begin a race of Kings greater than I."

Correspondence

Miss Columbia: An Old-Fashioned Girl

That the United States of America is young is a truism which needs no stating, and unfortunately its youth is hopelessly fettered in the strings of tradition.

Ferrero says that aesthetic taste in America shows itself in bathrooms; and certainly in plumbing we do seem to have a taste above that of the rest of the world. In other things America fears originality and change far more even than England does. Miss Columbia is a bright girl, sitting in a schoolroom, with well-worn editions of the English classics on the book-shelves. Miss Columbia writes verses and stories following the most approved models; she succeeds rather well, but, after all, they are only school essays. It seems impossible for Americans to have the courage to admit that Life is as they see it. Hence the shallow and frivolous optimism which hangs like an obscuring fog over practically all our writing. It would be a convention were it not that we think we believe it; it would be a conviction only that we never look at it close enough to test it. The vogue, a year or two ago, of Mr. Robert Haven Schauffler's Scum o' the Earth is a case in point. It deals with the problem of immigration, not as it is, but as it might be if it were. The poem is imitative as art, and false as life, but it flatters an existing condition, and paints a sore to represent healthy flesh; wherefore America hails it with content. Americans are afraid of Life, in the Victorian manner. A Catholic said to me, some time ago: "Sex is dirty." This sacrilege is a thoroughly Victorian sentiment, but sex alone does not come under the ban; pain, squalor, and, above all, the fact that virtue and effort frequently go unrewarded, are facts to which, in America, one must shut one's eyes. Miss Columbia is very young, and her gold must be minted before she recognizes it; in the matrix it looks insignificant to her inexperienced eyes.

Style is not manner, but personality. And the fact that our poets and story writers keep to the old forms and expressions proves (does it not?) that they have no inward urging which makes them find old molds too cramping.

In a play of George Cohan's, Broadway Jones, you have the best of middle-class America--its good points and its limitations. Perhaps this is even better brought out in his other play, Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford. "Crude," you say; "childish!" Quite true, but entirely and absolutely America. For the United States is governed by the Great God: Mediocrity! The middle-class, or, as we call him, "the man in the street," rules. Neither the gaunt simplicities of the lower class (although we talk a great deal about the lower class), nor the simplicities of the educated and intellectually alert, can leaven the lump of self-satisfied commonplaceness. Not only don't we know, but we don't want to know. An American writer, who had lived in Europe long enough to forget the peculiar American temper, was sufficiently ingenuous as to propose to the editor of one of our best-known magazines a series of three articles on six contemporary French poets. They were refused, because his clientèle did not care to read of things of which they knew nothing. "They will know less than I," said the editor, "and I have only heard of two of these names."

We are a little better off as regards our musical taste, because music is a universal language, and we can hear music in the "original," so to say. In music, again, our output is more in accordance with the spirit of the whole world.

This does not mean that there are not good writers in America. There are. But most of them write "dans le goût d'avant-hier." I am only telling you that Miss Columbia is in her artistic 'teens, and is as unimaginatively conventional as is the human animal at the same age. And, again like the human animal, she was not so childish when she was a baby. Paul Revere, riding across the Middlesex Fells to rouse the minute men, was like any adult man on a job which he shrewdly suspects will change the fate of nations. Poe and Whitman were not exactly childish. But were Poe writing today, he would be told that his subjects were "unimportant" and that he "lacked social consciousness." For we in America are suffering from a pathological outlook on the world. Our activities function along the line of preventive medicine for communities. The richness and variety of personality is lost sight of in the lump. We forget that admirable truth set forth in the poem beginning "Little drops of water."

And then, too, poor America is so many different kinds of persons and places. What we are going to be lies on the lap of the Gods. But it seems quite clear that, whatever it is, it will not be Anglo-Saxon.

Go to any vaudeville theatre and you will see Americans "turkey-trotting" to an intricately syncopated music we have dubbed "rag-time." No European can dance it with just that zip and swing. It is a purely American thing. Stop a minute! Do you realize that this is America's first original contribution to the arts! Low or high, that is not the point; it is America's own product, and for that reason I regret to see the tango superseding it, although the tango is a better dance. I am told by those who know, that dancing is the first art practised by primitive peoples. I believe that in our "turkey-trotting" and "rag-time" we have the earliest artistic gropings of a new race. Our musicians scorn "rag-time," and it takes the clear eye of a Frenchman to see its interest. Debussy has seen it in his Minstrels.

AMY LOWELL.

Poetry to the Uttermost

We are afraid. We are all horribly afraid. The seal of poetic propriety is laid upon our lips, the burden of tradition bows us down. Crouched and abject beneath the dominance of the slave-driver, gap-toothed Custom, we set our shoulders to the toil--the useless toil--of dragging through the mile-years of simoom-whipped sand the impassive statue of Mediocrity.

What, if the vulture scream above us, can we dare to tell the meaning of its cry? Sharp will descend the whip of circumstance to warn that otherwhere the nightingales are singing under a full-orbed moon and we must sing of them.

Does an all-reckless slave defy his Maker with a thunderbolt of blasphemy, forged in the furnace of his agony? Straight comes the penalty decreeing silence and neglect unless we chant apocalyptic anodynes.

If the challenge of the blood outbeats the clanging of the bonds and in the glowing dusk man and woman cling to each other until the uttermost is won, shall this be told in paean and in song? Not unless social usage has been satisfied and it be ascertained that desire has given place to design, that love has been exchanged for lucre, and that marriage has been substituted for mating; then are we bidden cull from the common-casket of permitted phrases the veil, the orange-flower wreath, and all the weary paraphernalia of convention, and write an epithalamium to the plaudits of the admiring throng.

Rituals began in poetry. And since all rituals today have lost most of their ancient power, serving to soothe and charm instead of to stir and challenge, we look to the poetry of today to lay the web whereon the rituals of the future shall be spun. Let not that web possess one strand of mediocrity. Platitudinizing is no pattern for the future. If we are fain to cry aloud, let our throats crack thereat; if we would hurl defiance, let us not fear to charge after our javelins and find our freedom in the breach ourselves have made.

Every true poet has the uttermost within, if he or she will but give it voice. Oh, poets of every craft, give of the uttermost! Better a single cry like The Ballad of Reading Gaol, like Bianca, like When I am dead and sister to the dust--to touch on a few moderns only--than a lumber-loft of pretty and tuneful voicings of the themes that please but do not satisfy. There are those of us who read whose blood runs hot and red as well as yours. Dare, O you poets of every craft! Rise to the cry! Your hearts are high and full of gallantry, the world is waiting to be led by you to heights before unscaled. Shake cowardice away and dare!

FRANCIS ROLT-WHEELER.

Reflections of a Dilettante

All art is symbolical. A mere presentation of things as they are seen by our physical eye is photography, not art. Yet there exists a Symbolistic school in contradistinction to other currents such as Realism, Impressionism, Neo-Romanticism, etc. Is not this a misnomer? Can we say, for instance, that Beaudélaire's Fleurs du Mal were symbols, while Goethe gave us but realistic reproductions of actual life? Should we exclude Whitman from the Symbolists for the reason that his poems are less fantastic, nearer to life than those of Poe? What about Vereshchagin: was not his brush symbolistic because he adhered to realistic methods? Obviously, an artist presents not objects but ideas, and the symbolisticity of a certain work of art is rather a question of method and degree.

Perhaps we should differentiate artists according to their relationship with and attitude towards the public. The realist--and under this elastic term we may understand likewise the romanticist and the impressionist--is definite in his interpretation of life, is outspoken and clear in conveying his conceptions; he drags us unto his point of view, makes us see through his eyes and take for granted his impressions. He says to us: "Thus I see the world. Thus life and nature are reflected in my mind. This is precisely what I mean; please do not misinterpret me." We are bound to obey; the artist--provided he is a real artist--forces upon us his eyeglasses, and we follow his directions.

The purely Symbolistic artist, on the other hand, grants freedom to the public. Vague tones, dim outlines, abstract figures, imperceptible moods, misty reflections, make his art unyielding to a definite interpretation. All he imposes upon us is an atmosphere, into which we are invited to come and co-create. Here is a canvas, here are colors, here are moods; go ahead and make out of them what you like. We are thus left to our own guidance; we are enabled to put our ego into the artist's work, we are free to find in it whatever reflections we choose and to form our own conceptions. If we succeed in solving the problem, if we make the symbol live in our imagination, we experience the bliss of creation; should we fail in our task, should the symbol remain meaningless to us, we conclude that the given atmosphere is alien to our mind. Music of all arts is the most symbolical. True, Wagner and Strauss have endeavored to impose upon the listener leit-motifs, to dictate the public an interpretation of specific tones, but they have failed in their attempts to introduce a sort of a "key" to music; we remain autonomous in "explaining" Siegfried and Don Quixote.

Which of the methods is preferable? I should resent any narrow decision on this point. A crystalline September day or a purple-crimson sunset, how can we choose? We delight in both, but in one case we admire the visible beauty, while in the other we make one step forward and complement the seen splendor with strokes of our creative imagination. Perhaps my non-partisanship is due to my dilettantism; as it is, I approach a book or a picture with one scale: is it a work of art? If it is, then any method is justifiable, no matter how differently it may appeal to the individual taste.

Yet--and there is no inconsistency in my statement--I do discriminate in art productions in so far as my personal affections are concerned. Great as my delight is in the arts of Tolstoi and Zola, of Rubens and Corot, of Brahms and Massenet, of Pavlova and Karsavina, my mind is more akin to the mystic utterances of Maeterlinck and Brusov, to the hazy landscapes of Whistler and to the unreal women of Bakst, to the narcotic music of Debussy and Rachmaninov, to the wavy rhythm of Duncan and St. Denis. It is with them, with the latter, that I erect fantastic castles of my own designs and find expression of my moods and whims. I may not understand all of the Cubists and Futurists, but I owe them many new thoughts and emotions which I had not realized before having seen the new art. Schoenberg's pieces still irritate my conventional ear, but I allow him credit for discovering new possibilities in the region of sound interpretation. We, plain mortals, who are doomed to contemplate art without having the gift to contribute to it, we are envious of genius and crave for freedom in co-creating with the artist. Hence my love for Bergson who appeals to the creative instinct of man; for him I abandoned Nietzsche, my former idol: it is so much more pleasant and feasible to be a creative being than to strive to become a perfect super-being.

ALEXANDER S. KAUN.

The Immortality of the Soul

Bergson argues that there is a spiritual entity behind all science and that it is impossible for scientists to go beyond a certain point in developing a knowledge of whence we came. Clara E. Laughlin, in writing a review of The Truth about Woman, by Mrs. Walter M. Gallichan, accuses the writer of possessing a short-sighted, astigmatic vision of "whereuntoness." She winds up her discussion with the sob of an ultra religionist by accusing Mrs. Gallichan of having left out a most important point in her discussion--that of the immortality of the soul. To quote Miss Laughlin exactly:

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

Very fortunately for the future of her book, Mrs. Gallichan ignores the religionist except to say of religion, "I am certain that in us the religious impulse and the sex impulse are one."

Mrs. Gallichan's book is a scientific discussion of woman yesterday and today, without any attempt at sentimentalism. Her analysis is perfect and decidedly constructive. She goes back to prehistoric times and discusses in scientific phraseology how woman has progressed through the ages, and describes the part she has taken in establishing civilizations. Nowhere does she forget that she is writing for posterity and indulge in the petty foibles that are sometimes so noticeable in the work of women who write on feminism.

LEE A. STONE.