Part 7

A word of reassurance for Mr. Thomas Hardy. This Sauerkraut-gem, _The Man of Genius_, has had _seven_ editions in Germany, and has aroused wide enthusiasm there, as witnessed by the numerous press-notices exaltingly praising the great idealist Tuerck, written by professors, Geheimraths, Hofraths, catholics, protestants, and even by socialists! Now, pray, ought there be any fear for the Nietzscheanization of the Fatherland?

K.

Kilmer’s Confession

_Trees, and Other Poems_, by Joyce Kilmer. [George H. Doran Company, New York.]

Mr. Kilmer furnishes the following prose account of his convictions: “I am catholic in my tastes and Catholic in religion, am socially a democrat and politically a Democrat. I am a special writer on the staff of the _New York Times Sunday Magazine_, the _Times Review of Books_ and the _Literary Digest_. I am bored by Feminism, Futurism, Free Love.” This is perhaps a more succinct expression of his facility of faith than can be found in his verse. Readers should thank him for it, because it renders unnecessary any further attempt to discover what he believes.

At the opening of the volume, Mr. Kilmer quotes the following stanza from Coventry Patmore:

Mine is no horse with wings, to gain The region of the Spheral chime He does but drag a rumbling wain, Cheered by the coupled bells of rhyme.

This, too, is useful, because it frankly warns us against looking in his verse for anything which is not there.

Within his self-imposed limitations, Mr. Kilmer has done good work. The amusing couplets about _Servant Girl and Grocer’s Boy_ have pleased countless newspaper readers, _The Twelve-Forty-Five_ is a graphic description of the feeling produced by a late suburban train, _To a Young Poet Who Killed Himself_ is an obvious rebuke to the small-hearted versifier, and _Old Poets_ is a comfortable exposition of the philosophy of comfort. The religious poems will probably not be moving to anyone who does not share Mr. Kilmer’s creed.

Mr. Kilmer’s work is glossy with a simplicity more easy-going than profound. Though he is young himself, he obviously does not sympathize with young poets, of whom he writes:

There is no peace to be taken With poets who are young, For they worry about the wars to be fought And the songs that must be sung.

His ideal is that of the “old poet”:—

But the old man knows that he’s in his chair And that God’s on His throne in the sky. So he sits by his fire in comfort And he lets the world spin by.

G. S.

Hilarious Iconoclasm

_Art_, by Clive Bell. [Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York.]

It is an exquisite pleasure to disagree with Clive Bell! Like a fierce Hun he whirls through the art galleries of Europe, and smashes all venerated masterpieces into a heap of rubbish, sparing but the Byzantine Primitives and some of the Post-Impressionists. Between these two epochs he sees a hideous gap; not more than one in a hundred of the works produced between 1450 and 1850 is he willing to accept as a work of art. It naturally hurts to witness the slaughter of your old friends, such as Michelangelo, Velasquez, Whistler; but our Attila performs his massacre so beautifully, with such a charming sense of humor, that you cannot help admiring the paradoxical feats. What but a good-humored smile will provoke in you such a prank, e. g.: “Nietzsche’s preposterous nonsense knocked the bottom out of nonsense more preposterous and far more vile”? The best part of it is the fact that the author does not attempt to convince you in anything, for neither is he convinced in the infallibility of his hypotheses. The book is a relucent gem among the recent dull and heavy works of art.

Comments of an Idler on Three New Books

_Eris: A Dramatic Allegory_, by Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff (Moffatt, Yard), is, we are told on the cover, “full of vigorous enthusiasm, and embodies the philosophy of Henri Bergson,” to whom on a flyleaf the book is duly dedicated. It is in careful rhythmic blank verse; a dialogue, principally, between “Man” and “Thought,” with “Past” and “Future” now and then interrupting. The allegory is prefaced by a portrait of the author by Helleu; we trust an unfair one. A strangely bovine expression greets us from under a plumed black hat and from over shoulders and arms drawn like a Goops. Helleu made lovely things once; why this?

In _Eris_ we find Man hurling defiance at Thought, who taunts him, “You cannot vanquish me while Life endures.” Discussion between them on this point covers some forty pages of melodious argument. Six of these (and they are consecutive) form a fairly comprehensive guide-book to a trip around the world, as Man, distracted, stops off at many well-known points seeking to escape pursuing Thought.

In Venice I spread sail with Capulet And plied an oar across the green lagoons The soft air vibrant with the minstrels’ song: I dreamed in Pisa’s woodland and the gulf Of Lerici, where once again I heard The lyrich echo of pure Shelley’s voice. On Pæstum’s glory and on Dougga’s mount I studied metope and fluted frieze—

And so on. “Man” finally reaches Mount Parnassus—

The mighty throne of Zeus Hides like a cloud-veiled mist within the heavens; I am so near divinity it seems That I could tread the pathway of the stars;

but “Thought” comes hurrying along, two pages later. Man cries to him desperately:

Envelope me within the cosmic heart Freed of my separate hideous entity, Blown with the wingéd dust from whence I came!

They struggle together, and Man plunges over the cliff. Thought, “assuming a sudden intenser magnitude, rises out of the dust of Man” (the stage directions seem a little confused here) and shouts:

At last to conquer after æons of strife— The reeling stars man’s silent sepulchre.

There are graceful lines and pictures, occasionally a good simile. Technically the lines are too smooth, too neatly finished, each in its little five-iambic jacket. The lyrics lack singing quality. There is a tedious list, two pages, of famous ladies—Helen, Sappho, Salammbo, from Eve to the Virgin Mary—as Man cries to Past, “What woman are you in disguise?” Swinburne did this gorgeously somewhere, making each speak; but these do not—they do not even live.

Totally different is my second volume of verse—_The Sea is Kind_, by T. Sturge Moore (Houghton Mifflin). A letter from the publishers suggests that “like Noyes and Masefield, T. Sturge Moore may have a message to American lovers of poetry.” I am an American lover of poetry and an eager one; therefore, I was hopeful; but I am oppressed by the obligation of doing justice to the initial poem in the book, viz.: _The Sea is Kind_, because I cannot tell at all what it is about. Several people, by name Evarne and Plexaura, females, and Menaleas and Eucritos, males, seem to be talking high talk by the edge of the sea—about ships and storms and nymphs and kindred things. Evarne speaks at great length in rough pentameters, quoting others more obscure, if possible, than herself.

The handsome scowler smiled. Then with a royal gesture of content Addressed our wonder.

* * * * *

“But devastation from mine inroads stretches “Across Euphrates further than they dare. “The industrious Ninevite, the huckster grey “With watching scored tale lengthen down his wall “Beneath his hatred Median debtor’s name, “Dread me, and hang near casement, over door, “To guard each southward-facing aperture, “Rude effigies smaller than this of me.— “Charm bootless ’gainst my veering pillared dust “Which chokes each sluice in vainly watered gardens, “Dessicates the velvet prudency of roses, “And leaves green gummy tendrils like to naught “But ravelled dry and dusty ends of cord”;

and so on for a long, long while. It may be wonderful; I dare say it is.

The last two-thirds of the volume is taken up with short poems arranged in groups addressed to various persons—Tagore, Yeats, and Moore, among them. There is more clarity here. One discerns an autobiographic wistfulness in these stanzas entitled: _A Poet in the Spring Regrets Having Wed So Late in Life_.

Some things, that we shall never know, Are eloquent today, Belittling our experience, though We loved and were gay:

For those, whose younger hands are free With a body not their own, Taste delicacies of intimacy Which we have not known.

Primrose, narcissus, daffodil, In sudden April plenty, Flourish as tender fancies thrill Spouses at twenty!

There seems something strangely improper about this, considering the strict propriety of the theme.

One group of two is addressed to Charles Ricketts. _The Serpent_ begins

Hail Pytho; thou lithe length of gleaming plates!

and _The Panther_ thus:

Consider now the Panther, such a beast.

One question addressed to the Panther is:

Dost, cloyed by rich meats spicy as the south, Expose thy fevered palate to the cool, Which, like snow melting in an emperor’s mouth, Helps make excess thy life’s ironic rule?

Consider now Sturge Moore, our bewilderment in trying to ascertain what you wish us to think about such things as these, and consider too a transposition of the first line of a well-known poem about a Tiger, to read, “Consider now the Tiger.”

The group to Yeats has one called _The Phantom of a Rose_. An explanatory footnote tells us that a girl returning from a ball drops a rose from her bosom and dreams that a youth, the perfect emanation of the flower, rises and invites her to dance.

She ached to rise, she yearned to speak, She strove to smile, but proved too weak; As one in quicksand neck-deep, Wild with the will, has no power to leap; Her limbs like a sunken ferry-boat Lay logged with sleep, and could not float. She had danced too often at the ball, She had fluttered, nodded, and smiled too much. Tears formed in her heart: they did not fall.

* * * * *

He rose, and danced a visible song; With rhythmic gesture he contended Against her trance; and proved so strong That the grapes of his thought wore the bloom of his mood, While her soul tasted and understood.

“Her limbs like a sunken ferry-boat.” A happy simile! We recognize the sensation.

In _Judith_, one of the group to Moore, a vigorous note is sounded. This is good, and maybe the rest is too; I do not know. It rolls above my head.

_The Spirit of Life_, a series of nine essays by Mowry Saben (Mitchell Kennerley), is the kind of book that makes me savagely controversial and then cross for heeding it at all. Its platitudinous optimism meanders along through some two hundred and fifty pages under various chapter headings: Nature, Morals, Sex, Heroes, etc. The first sentence is: “There are many great Truths that can be expressed only by means of paradox”; and the last, “If life means nothing, if the universe means nothing, then reform is only an illusory word, which has come to confuse us upon the highway of Despair; but if in our highest ideals we may find the real meaning of our personal lines, because they are the quintessence of the spiritual universe, whose avatars we should be, there is nothing too glorious for the heart of man to conceive.” All in between is just like that.

All persons, and there are many, who are determined willy nilly to believe the world a nice place; who, confronted with the unlovely, the stark, gaping and horrid, cast down their eyes exclaiming “It is not there,” will take solid comfort in _The Spirit of Life_. It is like the millions of sermons droned out one day in seven all over the land to patient folk who no longer know why they come nor why they stay to hear.

But this is a review, not a diatribe—so “consider now” the Spirit.

The first essay is called _Nature_. It quotes freely from Peter Bell, and also reprints something about tongues in trees and sermons in stones. Turning the leaves we catch the names of Burroughs, Whitman, and Thoreau. Toward the end is this:

Everything exists for him who is great enough to envisage it. The life that now is reveals man as the crowning glory of Nature, the goal of evolution. In the end the earth does but shelter our bones, not our thoughts and aspirations.

Skipping the rest, we turn quickly to _Sex_, hoping something from the vitality of the theme, and come to this:

To attack Sex as one of the joys of life would be foolish and deservedly futile.... I am certain that sex is a sweetener of the cup of life, but one must not therefore infer that there can never be too much sweetening, for there can be, even to the point of danger from spiritual diabetes.

Immortal phrase, “Spiritual diabetes.” Several pages of this essay are devoted to episodes in the life of insects, all pointing a painful lesson to man:

... and there are spiders doomed to be eaten by the female as soon as they have demonstrated their masculinity. Thus are we taught how little permanence is possessed by an organization which yields only the instinct of passionate desire for sex.

Here is boldness,—

I cannot indorse the ascetic ideal that holds the love of man for woman to be but a snare for the spirit. The great poetry of Dante alone is sufficient to refute so baseless a claim.

Why quote further? There are indubitably certain good things in the book, but they are by Goethe, Carlyle, Emerson, Dante, Shakespeare, Whitman, et al.

A. M.

An Unacademic Literary Survey

_Modern English Literature_: From Chaucer to the Present Day, by G. H. Mair. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]

Good histories of English literature are rare, and Mr. Mair’s book should accordingly be given a warm welcome, for it combines brevity with comprehensiveness of treatment in a very unusual manner. Mr. Mair not only writes well and knows his subject, but he seems instinctively to know what his readers will want—and he supplies it.

For instance, we do not remember that popular histories of English literature bother to tell such a detail as how the chronological order of Shakespeare’s plays is determined, but Mr. Mair’s telling of that will show the layman just what literary scholarship means, and in conjunction with his other remarks on our knowledge of Shakespeare it will rescue the uninformed from the chance of falling into such errors as the Baconian theory.

The book, however, is not one of higher and textual criticism and chronology. It is a work of appreciation, and the appreciation is that of a modern man. It is obvious that Chaucer might be treated in a manner quite alien to the interests of the man of today who is not a scholar, but the treatment of his work which ends in joining his hands to those of Charles Dickens as workers in a kindred quest is one that is well calculated to persuade even the philistine that Chaucer is a figure of passable interest to him.

It is the mark of the live man to recognize genius, and the manner in which Mr. Mair treats the genius of that great poet, John Donne, is in vivid contrast to the way in which it is usually treated in histories of English literature. For example:

Very different ... is the closely packed style of Donne, who, Milton apart, is the greatest English writer of the century, though his obscurity has kept him out of general reading. No poetry in English, not even Browning’s, is more difficult to understand. The obscurity of Donne and Browning proceed from such similar causes that they are worth examining together. In both, as in the obscure passages in Shakespeare’s later plays, obscurity arises not because the poet says too little, but because he attempts to say too much. He huddles a new thought on the one before it, before the first has had time to express itself; he sees things or analyzes emotions so swiftly and subtly himself that he forgets the slower comprehension of his readers; he is for analyzing things far deeper than the ordinary mind commonly can. His wide and curious knowledge finds terms and likenesses to express his meaning unknown to us; he sees things from a dozen points of view at once and tumbles a hint of each separate vision in a heap out on to the page; his restless intellect finds new and subtler shades of emotion and thought invisible to other pairs of eyes, and cannot, because speech is modeled on the average of our intelligences, find words to express them; he is always trembling on the brink of the inarticulate. All this applies to both Donne and Browning, and the comparison could be pushed farther still. Both draw the knowledge which is the main cause of their obscurity from the bypaths of mediævalism. Browning’s _Sordello_ is obscure because he knows too much about mediæval Italian history: Donne’s _Anniversary_ because he is too deeply read in mediæval scholasticism and speculation. Both make themselves more difficult to the reader who is familiar with the poetry of their contemporaries by the disconcerting freshness of their point of view. Seventeenth-century love poetry was idyllic and idealist; Donne’s is passionate and realistic to the point of cynicism. To read him after reading Browne and Johnson is to have the same shock as reading Browning after Tennyson. Both poets are salutary in the strong and biting antidote they bring to sentimentalism in thought and melodious facility in writing. They are corrective of lazy thinking and lazy composition.

Another feature in which this book differs from others of its kind is that the author is not afraid to bring the record down to the work of his contemporaries, and the struggles of Mr. Shaw with the bourgeois world, and the era opened by M. J. Synge and the Irish literary renascence, are here sympathetically dealt with.

L. J.

Overemphasized Purity

_Love’s Legend_, by Fielding Hall. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]

With a somewhat overemphasized regard for purity, Fielding Hall approaches the narration of this honeymoon trip down a Burmese river. The novel—if such a dissertation on the early marriage state could be called a novel—is told in rather peculiar fashion, by the man and woman alternately, at first, and later on with the help of two more people.

The man is prone to burst forth into fairy tales to explain every point of argument to Lesbia. He tells her of a beautiful princess who was blindfolded and kept within an enclosed garden that she might never know the ways of man.

“They told her that the bandage made her see more clearly than if her eyes were free. For they had painted images upon the inside of her bandage and told her they were real.”

Silence.

“And she believed it. Then came a Prince. He wooed the Princess and he won her. So he took her with him out of her garden. They came into the world and passed into a forest. There they were quite alone.

“Take off your bandage,” said the Prince. “Look at the world and me.”

“I am afraid,” she sighed; “the world is evil.”

“It is God’s world,” the Prince replied. “He lives in it.”

“They told me that God lived in Heaven, far off, not here,” she answered.

“They told you wrong; open and you will see.”

“I will not look,” she said, “I fear the devil.”

“Your beauty is all cold,” he said, “your heart beats not!”

“What is a heart?” she asked.

“That which gives life,” he answered; “my heart beats strongly and it longs for an answer. You have a heart as strong maybe as mine. But it is sealed. Will you not let me loose it?”

“I am afraid,” she answered.

“Then I will tell you what he did. He held the Princess in his arms all despite herself and tore the bandage from her eyes.”

... “Did she let him do it?”

“She heard his voice and all despite herself she let him do his will.”

Mr. Hall voices these inanities with the appalling conceit of one who rushes in where even the best of writers tread with circumspection. And the worst of it is, that his rash feet have carried him nowhere, except, perhaps, into a limelight that is likely to prove embarrassing.

W. T. HOLLINGSWORTH.

Sentence Reviews

_Russia: The Country of Extremes_, by N. Jarintzoff. [Henry Holt & Co., New York.] A mosaic of essays on various aspects of Russian life, some of them of tremendous interest. Of particular importance are the chapters on “Studentchestvo” and on “Agents Provocateurs,” which deal with the political movements of the country. Although the book lacks unity, the English reader will find in it a wealth of information and a helpful interpretation of Russian misty reality. Reproductions from several great Russian paintings are excellent.

_New Songs of Zion_; a Zionist Anthology, edited by S. Roth, New York. If this anthology was intended to serve as an echo of the Zionist movement, it will appear as a _testimonia pauperitatis_. The lofty ideal of forming a cultural center in Palestine for the Wandering Jew is very pallidly reflected in the naive verses of American boys and girls. Israel Zangwill is also represented with a few shallow effusions to the astonishment of those who admire his sense of humor. The translations from _Byalik_ are tolerable, and I heartily recommend the English reader to get acquainted through them with one of the greatest living poets who is known only to readers of Hebrew.

_The Two Great Art Epochs_, by Emma Louise Parry. [A. C. McClurg & Company, Chicago.] Complete and instructive as a text-book for the history of art from earliest Egypt down to the decline of Renaissance—if there is still need for such text-books. The wretchedness of the reproductions is irritating.

_Changing Russia_, by Stephen Graham. [John Lane Company, New York.] Sentimental observations of a poetic tramp who bewails the inevitable transformation of patriarchal, agricultural Russia into a capitalistic state. Excellent descriptions of the picturesque shore of the Black Sea; interesting, though often erroneous, notes on the “Intelligentzia.” Mr. Graham has been religiously tramping the globe for many years, and his love for nature and primitive life is manifest in every book of his.

_Bellamy_, by Elinor Mordaunt. [John Lane Company, New York.] Cleverly written, this chronicle of Walter Bellamy, a dynamic English obviosity, exploiter of silk pajamas, exhibits a man who is sufficiently honest to devote his life to himself.

_Hebrew and Babylonian Traditions_, by Morris Jastron. [Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York.] An exhaustive, cool, cautious treatment of the much-polemised question as to the primacy of one or the other of the two ancient civilizations. Of great value to the student of comparative religion.

_The Rise of the Working Class_, by Algernon Sidney Crapsey. [The Century Company, New York.] An optimistic book by an ex-clergyman. Many things are cited as working class gains and benefits which that class would willingly reject. As appendix, there is a long panegyric of that mountebank, Lloyd George, in which he is hailed as a social and economic savior of the “People.”