Part 3

This is the woman America has hated and persecuted, thrown into jail, deprived of her citizenship, and held up as an example of all that is ignorant, coarse, and base. America will recognize its failure some day, after the brave spirit has done its work—after the spasm of the new war has ushered in quite simply some of the changes which Emma Goldman has been pleading for during her years of fighting. But it takes education to produce such awakenings, and there is no immediate hope of such a general enlightenment. The stupidity of the situation regarding Emma Goldman is that other prophets have raised their spears to the same heights and have been misunderstood or ignored but not outraged by the peculiar ignorance which Americans alone seem capable of. Had Ibsen appeared among us to lecture on the rightness of Nora’s rebellion or to denounce the pillars of society as he did in his writing, he, too, would have been thrown into prison for free speech or accused of a president’s assassination. The cruelty of the situation regarding Emma Goldman is that she has so much work to do which so many people need, and that she cannot break through the prejudice and the superstition surrounding her to get at those dulled ones who need it most. Ten years ago she was preaching, under the most absurd persecution, ideas which thinking people accept as a matter of course today. Now the ignorant public still shudders at her name; the “intellectuals”—especially those of the Greenwich Village radical type—dismiss her casually as a sort of good Christian—one not to be taken too seriously: there are so many more daring revolutionists among their own ranks that they can’t understand why Emma Goldman should make such a stir and get all the credit; the Socialists concede her a personality and condone her failure to attach herself to that line of evolutionary progress which is sure to establish itself. “Unscientific” is their damning judgment of her; her Anarchism is a metaphysical hodge-podge, the outburst of an artistic rather than a scientific temperament. And so they all miss the real issue, namely, that the chief business of the prophet is to usher in those new times which often appear in direct opposition to scientific prediction, and—this above all!—that life in her has a great grandeur.

How do such grotesque misconceptions arise? Why should it have happened that all this misapprehension and ignorance should have grown up about a personality whose mere presence is a benediction and whose friendship compels you toward high goals you had thought unattainable? There is no use asking how or why it happened; it is a perfectly consistent thing to have happened, for it happens to everyone, in greater or less degree, who strives for a new ideal. But if I could only get hold of all the people who are unwilling to understand Emma Goldman and _force_ them to listen to her for an hour:—what a sweet triumph comes with their “Oh, but she’s wonderful!”

And now about her ideas. If you have read Wilde’s _Soul of Man Under Socialism_ you know the essence of Emma Goldman’s Anarchism. What is there about it to cause an epidemic of terror? It is merely the highest ideal of human conduct that has ever been evolved. Well, it is possible to get even the prejudiced to admit this much. Nearly everyone can see that government in its essence is tyranny; that one human being’s authority over another is a degrading thing; that no man should have the power to force his neighbor into a dungeon on the flimsy pretext that punishment is a prevention and a protection; that no man should dare to take the life of another man, on any basis whatever; that crime is really misdirected energy and “criminal types” usually sick people who should be treated as such; that “abnormal” people are those who have not found their work; that people who work should have some share of their production; that the holding of property is a source of many evils; that possessiveness and “bargaining” are mean qualities; that co-operation and sharing are splendid ones; that there should be an equality between giving and taking; that nothing worth while was ever born outside of freedom; and that men _might_ live together on this basis more effectively than on the present one. Even your “reasonable” man will grant you this premise; but then he plays his trump card: It may all be very beautiful—of course it is; _but it can never happen_! Oscar Wilde answered him in this way: “Is this Utopian? A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias.”

Emma Goldman believes this. She does not belong with the rank and file of Anarchists. Cults and “isms” are too restrictive for her. “But you are an extreme Individualist,” the Socialists tell her. “No, I am not,” she answers them. “I hate your rigid Anglo-Saxon individualism. It is just because I am so deeply social that I put my hope in the individual.” It is because she hates injustice of any sort so passionately that she adopted Anarchism as the soundest method of combating it. If you have laws you must accept the abuses of law. Why not be more completely simple—why keep on pretending that we need a machinery which fosters tyrannies instead of giving freedom an unhandicapped path to begin upon its great responsibilities? This was the idealism upon which the American founders built—a minimum of government, at least, when that evil seemed to become a necessity. In her remarkable book that has just been published, Voltarine de Cleyre discusses this phase of the matter brilliantly in a chapter called “Anarchism and American Traditions.” There is no possibility of going into it minutely here, except to ask those who insist upon regarding Anarchism as an unconstructive force to read it.

These are the things Emma Goldman is trying to preach. She does not expect to see a new order spring up in response to her vision; so the facetious ones who poke their stale jokes at the unspeakable humor of a communistic society might save their wit for more legitimate provocations. All she hopes is to quicken the consciousness of those through whom such changes will come—to improve the individual quality. It reminds you of Comte’s suggestion, at the time when he fell deliriously in love, that all the problems of society could be solved on that divine principle. It is like Tolstoy’s dream prophecy—his prediction of the time when there will be neither monogamy nor polygamy, but simply a poetogamy under which people may live freely and beautifully.

And so Emma Goldman continues her work, talking passionately to crowds of people, sickened by audiences who listen merely out of curiosity, disheartened by the vapid applause of those who make their own incapacities the burden of their rebellion, heartbroken by the masses who cannot respond to any ideal, cheered by the few who understand, dedicated to an eternal hope of new values. This is the real Emma Goldman—a visionist, if you will, but at the same time a woman with a deep faith in the superiority of reality to imagination. How she has lived life! How gallantly she makes the big out of the little and accepts without complaining the perverted role which has been thrust at her. To have seen her in her home with its hundreds of books and its charming old pictures of Ibsen and Tolstoy and Nietzsche and Kropotkin; to have seen her friends, her nephews and nieces offering her their high adoration; to have watched her gigantic tenderness, her gorgeous flinging away of self on every possible pretext; to have listened with her to great music in a kind of cosmic hush that music is made by and for such spirits; to have heard her, “the crucified,” talk of the ideal she cherishes and how her expression of it has been so far below her dream; to have compared her, an artist in life, as incapable of spiritual vulgarity as a Rodin or a Beethoven, with a sensitiveness which makes her almost fear beauty, with a sweetness that is overwhelming—to compare her with the vulgarians who denounce her is to fall into a mad rage and long to insult them desperately. I said before that Emma Goldman was the most challenging spirit in America. But she is so much more than that: she is many wonderful things which this article merely touches upon, because it is impossible to express them all.

Science is after all but a reassuring and conciliatory expression of our ignorance.—_Maeterlinck._

Poems

MAXWELL BODENHEIM

Expressions of a Child’s Face

Dawn?—no, the stunted transparency of dawn— Color taken from the birth of a white throat And shaken in a still cup till it gradually reaches strength A sudden scattering of strained light— The smile has lived and seemed to die.

Thought?—no, the invisible shudder of a perfume Trying to leave the shadowy pain of a flesh-flower A whisp of it whips itself away, And leaves the rest—a cool, colorless struggle.

Sadness?—no, the growth of a pale inclination Which knows not what it is; Which tries to form the beginning of a swift question, But has not yet developed trim lips.

And then what seems a smile But is the sleeping body of a laugh. It almost awakes, and throws out Long breaths, in a green and yellow din.

Emotions

I

His anger was a strained yellow wire. You leapt into it thinking to snap it, But it flung you off silently.

II

Her happiness was too apparent— Pleasant flesh in which you sensed heavy blood-clots.

III

Veering, weary birds were her hatreds. They rested on you for years, Then circled away, still weary.

IV

Her sorrows were clumsy, black bandages Which seemed to hide wide wounds, But only covered scratches.

To ——

You are a broad, growing sieve. Men and women come to loosen your supple frame, And weave another slim square into you— Or perhaps a blue oblong, a saffron circle. People fling their powdered souls at you: You seem to loose them, but retain The shifting shadow of a stain on your rigid lines.

To Handpainted Chinaware

Distorted ducks, smirking women and potshaped blossoms Fastened to pale plates, you are dreary symbols of those who painted you. O ducks, you were made by women Who sway in and out of the waters of life, Content to catch morsels of food from birds flying overhead. And you smirking women, were painted by men Who unrolled little souls on plates, Gave them faces which could not quite hide their ugliness ... You alone almost baffle me, potshaped blossoms— Were you fashioned by childless women, who made you the infants Denied them by life?

Study of a Face

Her forehead is the wind-colored, sun-stilled wall of a country church. Trailing cloud-shudders overhead narrow it to a thin band of vague light: Two tarnished, exultant cerements of earth—cheeks—meet it, And the three speak clearly, languidly.

An Old Man Humming a Song

Life was a frayed, pampered lily to him— A lily which still clung to his gray coat, Like an unbidden word whitening the death of a smile. The half-smooth perfume of it touched the slanting, cambric curtain of his soul, And stirred it to low song.

The Spiritual Dangers of Writing Vers Libre

EUNICE TIETJENS

The spiritual dangers that beset a struggling poet are almost as numerous as his creditors, and quite as rampant. And woe unto him who falls a prey to any one of them! For poetry, being the immediate reflection of the spiritual life of its author, degenerates more quickly than almost any other form of human expression when this inner life goes astray.

There is first of all the danger of sentimentality, an ever-present, sticky danger that awaits patiently and imperturbably and has to be met afresh every day. True, if the poet yields to this danger and embraces it skillfully enough, the creditors aforementioned may sometimes be paid and much adulation acquired into the bargain—witness Ella Wheeler Wilcox—but it is at the price of artistic death.

There is the danger of giving the emotions too free rein, of producing, as Arthur Davison Ficke has said in a former number of THE LITTLE REVIEW, merely “an inarticulate cry of emotion” which moves us like “the crying of a child.” Much of our sex poetry is of this type. On the other hand, there is the equally present danger of becoming over-intellectualized—of drying up and blowing away before the wind of human vitality. Edmund Clarence Stedman went that way. Then there is the danger of determined modernity, of resolutely setting out to be “vital” at all costs and crystallizing into mere frozen impetuosity, as Louis Untermeyer has done—and the other danger of dwelling professorially in the past with John Myers O’Hara. There is too the new danger of “cosmicality,” of which John Alford amusingly accuses our American poets of to-day. And there are many, many other pitfalls that the unsuspecting poet must meet and bridge before he can hope to win to the heights of immortality.

But there seems to be a whole new set of dangers, especially virulent, that attend the writing of _vers libre_, free verse, polyrhythmics, or whatever else one may choose to call the free form so prevalent to-day. These dangers are inherent in the form itself and are directly traceable to it. For contrary to the general notion on the subject, it takes a better balanced intellect to write good _vers libre_ than to write in the old verse forms. It is essentially an art for the sophisticated, and the tyro will do well to avoid it.

The first of these dangers, and the one in which all the others take root, is a very insidious peril, and few there be who escape it. It is the danger of being obvious.

In writing rhymed or even rhymeless poetry of a conventional rhythmical pattern the mind is constantly obliged to sift and sort the various images which present themselves—to test them, and turn them this way and that, as one does pieces in a mosaic, till they at last fit more or less perfectly into the pattern. This process, although it sometimes, owing to the physical formation of the language, distorts the poet’s meaning a little, has the great artistic advantage of eliminating many casual first associations, which on careful thought are found not worth saying. It is precisely this winnowing, weighing process which the form of free verse lacks. Anything that comes to mind can be said at once, and with a little instinct for rhythm, is said. The result of this mental laziness is that the ideas expressed are often obvious.

But here a curious phenomenon of the human mind comes into play. Just as a physically lazy man will often perform great mental exertions to avoid moving, so the mind will frequently go to quite as great lengths to find unusual methods of expression to conceal, even from itself, this laziness of first thinking. The result is the attempt to cover with words the fundamental paucity of the ideas.

There are several principal effects which may result from this. One is brutality. A conception which, if spoken simply, is at once recognized as trite, may if said brutally enough pass muster as surprising and “strong.” A crude illustration of this is to be found in the recent war poetry of “mangled forms” and “gushing entrails.” Ezra Pound furnishes the most perfect example. Another effect is the tendency to the grotesque. This device is more successful in deceiving the poet himself than the other, though it has less general appeal. For it is possible, by making a thing grotesque enough, to cover almost completely the underlying conception. Skipwith Cannéll runs this danger, along with lesser men. A third peril is that which besets some of the Imagistes—the danger of reducing the idea to a minimum and relying entirely on the sound and color of the words to carry the poem.

Still another result of the complete loosening of the reins possible in _vers libre_ is the immediate enlargement of the ego. It is not so easy to see why this should result, but it almost invariably does, and has since the days of Whitman. It usually goes to-day with the effect of brutality. The universe divides itself at once into two portions, of which the poet is by far the greater half. “I”—“I”—“I” they say, and again “I”—“I”—“I.” And having said it they appear to be vastly relieved.

The next step is to lay about them gallantly at every person or tendency that has ever annoyed them. “I have been abused” they say, “I have been neglected! You intolerable Philistines, I will get back at you!” It is odd that it never seems to occur to these young men that they can only hit those persons who read them, and that every person who reads them is at least a prospective friend. Those who neglect them they can never reach—and slapping one’s friends is an unprofitable amusement.

Examples of these unfortunate spiritual results of abandoning oneself too recklessly to the free verse form are numerous. James Oppenheim’s latest volume, _Songs for the New Age_—although it is in many ways an excellent work and deserves endorsement by all who really belong to the new age and are not merely accidentally alive to-day—nevertheless shows in places the tendency to obviousness and slack work.

More flagrant examples are to be found elsewhere. Take for instance Orrick Johns. Here are some stanzas from his long poem, _Second Avenue_, which took the prize in Mitchell Kennerley’s _Lyric Year_:

“How often does the wild-bloom smell Over the mountained city reach To hold the tawny boys in spell Or wake the aching girls to speech?

The clouds that drift across the sea And drift across the jagged line Of mist-enshrouded masonry— Hast thou forgotten these are thine?

That drift across the jagged line Which you, my people, reared and built To be a temple and a shrine For gods of iron and of gilt—

Aye, these are thine to heal thy heart, To give thee back the thrill of Youth, To seek therein the gold of Art, And seek the broken shapes of Truth.”

The same Orrick Johns wrote this blatant bit of free verse in _Poetry_ a few months later. Both the paucity of ideas and the enlarged ego are very well shown here:

No man shall ever read me, For I bring about in a gesture what they cannot fathom in a life; Yet I tell Bob and Harry and Bill— It costs me nothing to be kind; If I am a generous adversary, be not deceived, neither be devoted— It is because I despise you. Yet if any man claim to be my peer I shall meet him, For that man has an insolence that I like; I am beholden to him. I know the lightning when I see it, And the toad when I see it ... I warn all pretenders.

But to see the tendencies of which we have spoken in their most exaggerated form it is necessary to go to Ezra Pound, the young self-expatriated American who wails because “that ass, my country, has not employed me.” His earlier work was clean-cut, sensitive poetry, some of it very beautiful. This for example:

PICCADILLY

Beautiful, tragical faces, Ye that were whole, and are so sunken; And, O ye vile, ye that might have been loved, That are so sodden and drunken, Who hath forgotten you?

O wistful, fragile faces, few out of many!

The gross, the coarse, the brazen, God knows I cannot pity them, perhaps, as I should do, But, oh, ye delicate, wistful faces, Who hath forgotten you?

This, from _Blast_, the new English quarterly, is the latest from the same hand. The capitals are his own. The contrast needs no comment:

SALUTATION THE THIRD

Let us deride the smugness of “The Times”: GUFFAW! So much the gagged reviewers, It will pay them when the worms are wriggling in their vitals; These were they who objected to newness, HERE are their TOMB-STONES.

They supported the gag and the ring: A little black BOX contains them. SO shall you be also, You slut-bellied obstructionist, You sworn foe to free speech and good letters, You fungus, you continuous gangrene.

* * * * *

I have seen many who go about with supplications, Afraid to say how they hate you HERE is the taste of my BOOT, CARESS it, lick off the BLACKING.

To attempt to lay the entire onus of so flagrant a spiritual and cerebral degeneration to the writing of _vers libre_ alone is of course impossible. But the tendency is clear. Fortunately, however, we are not all Ezra Pounds and there are still poets balanced enough to appreciate these dangers and to make of free verse the wonderful vehicle it can be in the hands of a genius.

Union

RABINDRANATH TAGORE

(_Translated from the original Bengali by Basanta Koomar Roy, author of “Rabindranath Tagore: The Poet and His Personality.”_)

Beloved, every part of my being craves for the corresponding part of yours. My heart is heavy with its own restlessness, and it yearns to fall senseless on yours.

My eyes linger on your eyes, and my lips long to attain salvation by losing their existence on your lips.

* * * * *

My thirsty heart is crying bitterly for the unveilment of your celestial form.

* * * * *

The heart is deep in the ocean of being, and I sit by the forbidding shore and moan for ever.

But to-night, beloved, I shall enter the mysteries of existence with a bosom heaving with love supreme, and my entire being shall find its eternal union in thine.

War, the Only Hygiene of the World

F. T. MARINETTI

(_Translated from the French by Anne Simon_)

I want to explain to you the difference between Futurism and Anarchism.

Anarchism, denying the infinite principle of human evolution, suspends its impulse at the ideal threshold of universal peace, and before the stupid paradise of interlocked embraces in the open fields and midst the waving of palms.

We, the Futurists, on the contrary, affirm as one of our absolute principles the continuous growth and the unlimited physiological and intellectual progress of Man.

We aim beyond the hypothesis of the amicable fusion of the different races, and we admit the only possible hygiene of the World: War.

The distant goal of the anarchistic conception (a kind of sweet tenderness, sister to baseness) appears to us as an impure gangrene preluding the agony of the races.

The anarchists are satisfied in attacking the political, judicial, and economical branches of the social tree. We strive to do much more than that. We want to uproot and burn its very deepest roots; those that are planted in the brain of man, and are called:

Mania for order.

The desire for the least effort.

The fanatical adoration of the family.

The undue stress laid on sleep, and the repast at a fixed hour.

Cowardly acquiescence or quietism.

Love for the antique and the old.

The unwise preservation of everything that is wicked and sick.

The horror of the new.

Contempt for youth.

Contempt for rebellious minorities.

The veneration for time, for accumulated years, for the dead, and for the dying.

The instinctive need of laws, chains, and impediments.

Horror of violence.

Horror of the unknown and the new.

Fear of a total liberty.

Have you never seen an assemblage of young revolutionaries or anarchists?... _Eh bien_: there is no more discouraging spectacle.