Part 2

I said just now that M. de Gourmont was an example of the tradition of European culture, and since Paris, we are mostly agreed, is the centre of European culture, and since Remy de Gourmont is a Parisian of Parisians, we may count him, I think, as one of the best examples of Latin or West European culture now living. I rather dwell upon this aspect of Remy de Gourmont as the man of supreme culture since that quality has so suddenly and so startlingly come into public discussion. It is extremely difficult to say precisely what culture is; and a definition of culture naturally varies with differences of race and temperaments. John Addington Symonds, in his interesting and illuminating essay on this subject, defines culture as “the raising of previously-educated faculties to their highest potencies by the conscious effort of their possessors.” And it might be added to this excellent definition that the feature of Latin or West European culture which most distinguishes it from the culture of other countries is a wideness of interest, a great general “cultivating” of all the faculties of the mind and character as opposed to the extreme development of one single faculty.

Remy de Gourmont is indeed so admirable an example of the type of culture I have briefly indicated that it is difficult to think of any form of intellectual activity which has not at one time or another received his attention. He has been a founder of reviews—among them the famous _Mercure de France_—and an editor of reviews. He has written prefaces for modern authors and for ancient authors—both poets and prose-writers. As a literary critic it is perhaps not too much to say that in his time and generation he ranks as Sainte-Beuve did in his. Under his name will be found five volumes of _Promenades Littéraires_, collections of essays dealing with the widest possible range of literary subjects—from Petronius to Guillaume de Machaut, from the Goliardi to the latest “roman passionnel.” His _Livres des Masques_ are one of the most considerable acquisitions to the criticism of French literature during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In these two books will be found amazingly penetrating studies of men so diverse as the de Goncourt brothers and Maeterlinck, while American readers should be especially interested in his studies of the two Franco-American poets, Stuart Merrill and Francis Vielé-Griffin. As an admirer of Huysmans, M. Remy de Gourmont was naturally interested in the mystic, Christian Latin poets. And the fruit of several years’ study of these authors was that notable and unique book _Le Latin Mystique_. It is no exaggeration to say that hardly anyone else could have made these writers interesting to anyone but the specialist. One can almost imagine M. de Gourmont being challenged to produce a book which would appeal not only to savants but to the lover of general culture. This mystic Latin poetry had, until Huysmans’ day, been almost entirely neglected by students of beautiful things. But Remy de Gourmont, treating the subject as a poet in love with poetry—not as a pedant or a professor or a book-maker—has produced a work which is at once a criticism and an anthology of the literature produced during those thousand years which we ignorantly call the “Dark Ages.”

These investigations into an almost forgotten and strangely attractive literature were not without effect upon his purely creative work. This effect can be best seen in his _Litanies_, a series of curious and, verbally, extremely beautiful prose-poems, full of assonances, of internal rhymes, of strange symbols, of sonorous rhythms and of fantastic images. Again in his prose, in works like _Le Pèlerin du Silence_ and _D’un Pays Lointain_; in his poetry—especially in _Les Saints du Paradis_—this influence is most marked.

In books like _La Physique de l’Amour_, _Le Chemin de Velours_, the series of _Promenades Philosophiques_ and _Epilogues_, we have an entirely different kind of intellectual activity—lettered, it is true, but with that incisiveness and clarity of style and thought which mark French prose as the finest in the modern world. In these books problems of philosophy, of morals, of everyday conduct and national and international affairs, problems of music, of painting, of all the arts and sciences, are discussed with a brilliance and an originality not always palatable to the gloomier and duller elements of French society.

One must not ask for too clear a definition of M. de Gourmont’s philosophy. He is just sufficient of a mystic to enjoy being misunderstood, and of a nature so ironical that his most innocent-looking statements are traps for the unwary. He is an individualist—true to his type of culture. Perhaps if he were very closely questioned he would smile and say that he belonged to the “tradition des libres esprits.”

In addition to these many works, of so diverse a character that they might well be the result of the labours of several men rather than of one, he has written several novels, one or two of which at their appearance were the literary sensation of the hour; he has devoted much time to the study of aesthetic questions and has published two or three volumes on the subject; beyond all this he has produced a modern French rendering of Aucassin and Nicolette, a translation from the Spanish and a couple of original plays! And in his little flat on the rive gauche, not far from St. Sulpice, among his books, he still writes every day words of encouragement for anxious Paris, still finds time to observe and reflect and to let the rest of the world know what is happening in France.

Words Out of Waking

HELEN HOYT

In the warm, fragrant darkness We lay, Side by side, Straight; And your voice That had been silent Came to me through the dark Asking, _Do you smell the lilacs?_ You, half in sleep, Speaking softly,— Indistinctly. Then it seemed to me, A sudden moment, As if we lay in our graves, And you were speaking across From your mound to mine: In the springtime, Speaking of lilacs,— With muffled voice through the grass.

Who Wants Blue Silk Roses?

SADE IVERSON

The battlefields are very far away: No friend of mine fights on them—and no foe. I have not sickened at the battle stench, Nor seen the tragic trenches where men die. I am a woman, walking quietly, And fond of peace and place and fireside cheer, Yet here, afar from strife, the grey Uhlans Have battered down my door, let in the rain, And put me out, purse-empty, on the street.

Strange, say you? Chance of war! Samaritans, I’m past all succor;—slain in my pocket-book. My little shop for hats—chic hats, oddities— Is shut as tight as Juliet Capulet’s tomb. “Bad times” has stood me up against the wall: “Bad times” in Uhlan gear, takes certain aim. (And firing squads have always stone cold eyes.)

All winter long, I’ve peeped out on the street, To watch my little customers go by In conscious rectitude and home-made hats; Home-made to noble ends! Not that they’ve less Than once they had. They’ve more—a bran new creed. Economists approve: the fashion’s set. “How fine and sensible the women are,” You hear the men commenting on the train. “My wife is trimming her own hats.” “And mine.” “I like to see the women suit themselves To present needs.” “And I. It’s fine, I say. Some little good comes out of this sad war.” (Ah, yes, but half a sausage and a roll, Was all the food I’d had in twenty hours!)

_Now_ that would seem a feast. The cupboard’s bare. Well, here’s a chance to put my luck to test. Who goes a-roving when the pot is full? Say, comrades, comrades, let’s set out tonight, And brew our mulligan behind the ties. No more I’ll sit alone to play propriety; I sell no more blue roses, hear me swear But when the snows are gone, I’ll scent mayweed Beside the fences, till some purple noon, I find the passion flower, in panoply, Awaiting me, and I shall stoop and pick.

But do not think I am without a friend! I have my own familiar Imp for company— The secret, mocking creature of my heart, Which keeps me laughing when I’m set to cry, And fleers the cautions I thought principles. He’s captain now. We’ll see how he’ll provide, For food and drink and thought, and company. Let him advise what lens I’d best look through. Nero, they say, chose green; fools like rose-red. The Imp and I may stand for sun-bright truth, And smoke our glasses if we prove too frail.

Come hunger, then, and want, or any shame. If Chatterton dare starve, why should not we? We’ll travel far—though without carfare, dears, And with shoe-soles that let in pavement slush. But now I shall find out if dry-shod feet Discount the wet ones. Live down the superstitions, So I say. Ducks think wet feet are best. Come, come, my Imp. Let’s start. Our fat landlord Has locked the door on us and taken the key.

(When you are passing by the little shop, Remember one who wanted you for friend; A victim of the war, without a faith, But carrying a banner—a white field, And no word written on it. Yes, think of one, Who lacks a watchword, and wears no disguise, And arm in arm with impish laughter, seeks for Life.)

“Mother Jones” and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

MARGARET C. ANDERSON

Mother Jones and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn have been talking in Chicago and I went to hear them both, expecting to be captivated by the former and disappointed in the latter. But it turned out just the other way.

Mother Jones is all the things you have heard her to be—vigorous, almost sprightly in her eighty-two years, witty, shrewd, kindly, hopeful of great social changes, with snappy little blue eyes and a complexion like a girl of eighteen and a tongue like an automatic revolver. You feel you’d rather have her get after you with fire crackers, as she did to a man in some Western hotel when she wanted to drive him out of town (and succeeded), than to have her side against you in an argument. Right or wrong, she would make you appear to be hopelessly wrong; and certainly on any practical matter you would have a suspicion that she was right anyhow. She is consistent and convincing. But there is one thing none of the magazine articles has said about her: Mother Jones is a completely simple human being, in the least flattering sense of the word. She suffers because men are sent to jail and children are killed in strikes, and she spends every day of her life working toward the prevention of these things. But she lives on no more subtle plane of adjustments to a difficult universe. You can’t associate her with any sort of intense personal struggle. If temperament is the capacity to react, as I heard some one define it the other day, then Mother Jones is as untemperamental a person as I’ve ever seen. She acts; she doesn’t react at all. She has neither a complex nor an interesting mind; she has a well-informed one. She has read a lot—chiefly history and economics. She hasn’t read philosophy or psychology, I think. She hasn’t needed to: her knowledge of psychology is that sweeping and rather crude kind that comes with years of hard experience in which there has been little time for observation. If you asked her to sympathize with a man who had killed himself because he loved too greatly, I can rather hear her say that if men would keep busy they wouldn’t have time for such notions. Life to her is reduced to a matter of two antagonisms: the struggle between Capital and Labor. Other things, such as Art, for instance,—well, she makes you feel it’s a little impertinent to expect her to waste time like that; she is too busy trying to outwit the “damned sewer rats,” as she calls Burns’ detectives or other obstacles to peace and freedom. Mother Jones has a lot of effective phrases of that sort; I think she wants to see if she can make you blanch before she decides really to trust you; and then of course, as she says, “My boys wouldn’t understand me if I talked nice and ladylike all the time.” Underneath all this there is a charming old gentlewoman, full of delicate courtesies that win for her the splendid chivalry of the rough men she spends her life among.

The man who took me to see her made an unfortunate remark. He told her that I wanted to write an article about her, and asked if she wouldn’t tell me how she got started in her work. (I tried to stop him in time, but it was no use.) She gave me one scornful look and then flashed at him: “That’s a woman’s question. No man ever asks me such a fool thing, but women always do. How do I know how I got started? I was always a worker—that’s all.” Another of her simplifications is that there are two kinds of people—those who work and those who don’t. She seemed to put me with the latter, and it was my instinct from the first that she didn’t approve of me. She just treated me politely, and it was rather awful. She kept insisting that women know nothing about Labor—which is _almost_ quite true—and of course she didn’t neglect to mention her aversion for the suffragists. But most of the time she told us stories, chuckling heartily whenever she could say anything particularly explosive. She described her recent trip to New York, and I remember her vivid account of a visit she made the Colony Club. She said all the women came tripping in on high heels, bent forward at an ominous angle that made her think of cats ready to spring on a mouse. “I’ve got no time for such idiots,” she finished. “And look at the crazy ones in this town, walking in a mayor’s parade and yelling like wildcats instead of staying at home where they might be reading and learning to educate their children.”

That night we went to hear her talk to an organization of painters and found her irresistible. But she did little except entertain them—particularly with stories in which she herself figured as the white-haired heroine, wading across streams in water up to her waist to outwit the police, or forcibly throwing a Burns detective out of her audience. The painters shrieked with joy at that, and it really was good to hear. She had suspected a certain man who had been going to her meetings, so one night she asked him to leave. He refused, but she insisted. He said, “I won’t go and I’d like to see anybody who can make me.” “Well,” she answered, “we’ll see about that”; and she stepped down from the platform, took him by the throat, held him so tightly “that his tongue stuck out,” and marched him out of the hall. He didn’t bother her any more. These things, told in her blunt, snappy way, are overwhelmingly funny—and stirring too. But what you like most about her is her sudden falling into seriousness, and the way she says, “Now, my boys, _stick together_. Solidarity is the only method by which we can beat the system.”

Mother Jones has no patience with anarchism: “Don’t talk to me about philosophies of an ideal society that will happen some time long after I’m in my grave. What I’m after is to do something for my class while I’m still alive. I believe in accomplishing things.” She has none of the anarchist’s hatred of government; she merely wants our present system humanized. And she has a lot of little prejudices about people and things: about Bill Haywood, for instance, who “divides Labor against itself,” as she says—and says untruly.

On the whole she is just what you would have expected—except that she’s more amusing. There is absolutely nothing of the artist in her. She is imaginative in the large way a child is; in fact Mother Jones is a child in the sense a grown-up can’t be without losing a lot.

* * * * *

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, “the girl agitator,” has an even more consistent point of view than Mother Jones, and she has the advantage of being without prejudices. Her face has more subtlety, more interest for the analyst, than Mother Jones’s obvious compressed mouth and quick eyes; but it has little of that stamp of multiple reactions which make Emma Goldman’s face such a fascinating “subject.” There is a touch of Irish poetry in it—something wistful and something stern.

Miss Flynn gave three talks—on Birth Control, on Violence in Relation to the Labor Movement, and on Solidarity: Labor’s Road to Freedom—but I could only hear the last one, which everyone said was the least interesting of the three. There was only a handful of workers there, and she was so informing that the place ought to have been crowded with all the good people who think the I. W. W. is an organization of unintelligent outcasts whose only competence lies in throwing hammers into printing presses, etc., etc. Miss Flynn is more articulate than any I. W. W. I have heard, and she is freer from the stock phrases that give so many of the very earnest young workers in the movement something of pathos. I like these I. W. W. people a lot. They are not only offering an efficient program of labor; they are getting close to a workable philosophy of life. They are even capable of a virtue no working-class organization is supposed to be overburdened with: hardness of thought. As Miss Flynn said: “Don’t pamper yourselves. It’s not a _sacrifice_ to fight for your own freedom!” Of course this group has its camp followers who do it no end of damage; but then the Socialists have their “practical” fanatics who are so awfully practical they always look at the trees instead of the forest, and the Anarchists have their soulful members who yearn for martyrdom and blubber about the duty of suffering for a cause. The best of the Industrial Workers are neither visionless nor sentimental. They have no interest in being martyrs; they are workers. Miss Flynn is of the best of these.

The Poetry Bookshop

(_35 Devonshire Street, London_)

AMY LOWELL

I well remember the first time I went to the Poetry Bookshop. It was in July, 1913. I had read of it in a stray number of _The Poetry Review_ that had drifted my way. The idea attracted me at once, and I determined to have a look at it during the summer. There was something alluringly crazy about anyone’s starting a bookshop for the sale of poetry alone. Poetry is at once my trade and my religion. All decent poets worship their art and slave at it, and I am no exception to the rule. But I have my “afternoons out” with their temptations, and the greatest of these is a bookshop. Here was the combination: a poetry bookshop. I turned to it as inevitably as a magnet to the pole.

It was after a visit to one of those large and flourishing establishments where every sort of book is sold that you do not want to read; where rows and rows of the classics you wish you could read again for the first time flaunt from the shelves in gaudy leather bindings, and a whole counter labours to support the newest and dullest novels, and another is covered with monographs which instruct you minutely as to how to grow fruit-trees, catch salmon, handle golf clubs, or bicycle through the home counties. It was in one of these “emporiums,” after the usual “We can get it for you, Madam,” that I broke into open revolt and started off to The Poetry Bookshop.

I knew it was somewhere near the British Museum. “Off Theobald’s Road,” I told the taxi driver, and settled down to looking out of the window, for London, whether on foot or driving, is a never-ending interest to me. Theobald’s Road is one of those large, busy thoroughfares, which cut across London in all directions, and off it, to the left in my case, we turned into a quiet, rather run-down little street, Devonshire Street. A swinging sign about half-way down it attracted me. It was shaped like a shield and blue, if I remember rightly, and on it were painted three torches. All this was determined as the taxi approached. That must be my place, I thought, and it was.

We drew up at the door of a shop—unmistakably a shop, because it had a big shopwindow. It did not need the name, “The Poetry Bookshop” in excellently designed, big, black letters over the window, to tell me that I had arrived.

I did not go in at once. I like to take my temptations gradually, nibbling at them bit by bit and tasting, before gulping them down as full-fledged crimes. I nibbled at that window. It was broad and high, and the books were displayed in it in the singularly fascinating manner which American booksellers jeer at and call “English window dressing.” All these books were poetry, or about poetry; that is, of course, all the ones that were not plays. There were long strips of ballads hanging down, like 18th century broadsides, each one topped by a crude woodcut in glaring reds, and blues, and yellows. The nibbling was so delightful that I collected quite a crowd of street urchins about me, wondering what the lady was looking so long into the window for, before I had done.

Then I went in, but even the window had not prepared me for the shop inside. It was a room rather than a shop, for there was a smart fire burning in the grate, and there were chairs, and settles, and a big table covered with the latest publications. The walls were lined with shelves, and under the window was a little ledge entirely filled with reviews from all over the world. The familiar cover of _Poetry_ made me feel quite at home, but the eclecticism of the proprietor was at once evidenced by the presence of _The Poetry Journal_ and _Poet Lore_, periodicals of whose existence I should not have expected him to be aware. There was also _The Poetry Review_, from which I knew he had severed himself, so it was obvious that the proprietor cared very much to be fair.

I turned to the shelves, and my surprise was even greater. There were a lot of shelves, all round the room and even over the chimney-breast. Every volume of poetry recently published was there. That I had expected, but what I had not expected was that all the classics were there too. Not bound into mausoleums, “handsome editions in handsome bindings, which no gentleman’s library should be without,” but readable volumes, for the reader who wants to read.

There was not a bit of glass in the shop, all was open and touchable. Of course I touched, and opened, and browsed. There were French books, too, and Italian. It goes without saying that the book I wanted was there. I know I bought it, and others, and came out laden and happy.

I did not meet Mr. Monro on this first visit, and I do not now remember exactly when I did meet him. My sojourns in the shop were many, and at this distance have become confused. But I did meet him sometime, and found an earnest, quiet gentleman, the very opposite from the crank. But even at the first visit I had felt the bookshop to be not “crazy” at all, but an answer to a very real need.

It has been my experience that people who really do things (in contradistinction to talking about them) are very straightforward, sensible persons, without sentimentalism in the pursuit of their ideal. Mr. Monro was exactly this. He was spending his energy to give poetry the dignity and charm of presentation it had lost at the hands of the commercial booksellers; he was encouraging poets and allowing their books a chance; but he did not talk ideals, nor dress like a combination of a fool and a wild animal. He was too busy to pose, he was just “on the job.” And what “on the job” meant and means is best told by giving the history of his enterprise.