“Change”
There is coming soon, to the Fine Arts Theatre—that charming Chicago home of the Irish Players and of “the new note” in drama—a play with an interesting title. It is called Change. It is to be given by the Welsh Players—which fact alone has a thrill in it. But the theme is even more compelling.
Two old God-fearing Welsh people have denied themselves of comforts and pleasures to give their sons an education. Then, when they expect to reap the benefits of the sacrifice, three unexpected and awful things happen: the student son has so fallen under the influence of modern skepticism as to be forced to abandon his father’s Calvinistic creed. The second one has become soaked with socialism and syndicalism. The third, a chronic invalid, is a Christian and a comfort; but he is killed, quite unnecessarily, in a labor conflict instigated by his brother. Then—the two old people again, alone. What can a playwright do with such a situation? Nothing, certainly, to attract a “capacity house.” But we shall be among the first of that small minority who likes thinking in the theatre to hear what Mr. Francis has to say. His theme is tremendous.
The Poetry of Alice Meynell
Llewellyn Jones
Not least among the stirring events of our present poetical renaissance are the publication of the collected editions of the works of Alice Meynell and Francis Thompson (Scribner). Spiritually akin, mutually influencing one another in material as in more subtle ways, their poetry stands in vivid contrast to the muse of our younger singers, the makers of what English critics hail as a new Georgian Age. That this difference gives them an added significance, and not as some critics have said, a lessened one, is the burden of the present appreciation of the poems of Alice Meynell. For there is a tendency for the reader who is intoxicated with poetic modernity to reason somewhat after this fashion. Here, he will say,—as indeed Mr. Austin Harrison has said of Francis Thompson—is a “reed pipe of neo-mediaevalism ... a poet of the gargoyle,” not of this modern world, and so neither in sympathy of thought or melody with us of the twentieth century, its free life and vers libre. All this, of course, because, Francis Thompson was—as is Mrs. Meynell—a child of the Catholic Church. Our supposititious reader will continue to the effect that there is no spiritual profit to be had in reading these poets when the modern attitude is to be found in such writers as W. W. Gibson, Masefield, and Hardy. But in so arguing, our reader will be entirely wrong as to the facts, and mistaken in his whole manner of approach to the realm of poetic values.
Mr. Max Eastman, in his charming book, The Enjoyment of Poetry, lays stress on the fact that poetry is not primarily the registering of emotions but the expression of keen realizations. A mathematical concept may arouse an emotion, but the poet makes the actual emotion transmissible by his selective power in picking out the focal point of the experience by which it is aroused. If poetry is essentially realization of life, then we have no longer any excuse for asking our poets to share our doctrinal views before we consent to read them. On the contrary, we should be more anxious to read Mrs. Meynell than Mr. Gibson, if we are modernists, for Mr. Gibson may, conceivably, not be able to tell us anything we have not already felt. Mrs. Meynell, on the other hand, can inform our feelings with fresh aspects of experience, and she does so abundantly. Her Catholicism is not mediaevalism, but, in so far as it is translatable into her poetry it is simply a vocabulary for the expression of certain emotional realizations of life which we modernists find it very hard to express because we do not have the necessary vocabulary. What can be more modern than the doctrine of the immanence of God and his abode in man, that much-discussed “social gospel?” Yet the following poem, not in spite of but through its Catholic terminology, heightens our realization of brotherhood and dependence one upon another. It is entitled The Unknown God:
One of the crowd went up,
And knelt before the Paten and the Cup,
Received the Lord, returned in peace, and prayed
Close to my side; then in my heart I said:
“O Christ, in this man’s life—
This stranger who is Thine—in all his strife,
All his felicity, his good and ill,
In the assaulted stronghold of his will,
“I do confess Thee here,
Alive within this life; I know Thee near
Within this lonely conscience, closed away
Within this brother’s solitary day.
“Christ in his unknown heart,
His intellect unknown—this love, this art,
This battle and this peace, this destiny
That I shall never know, look upon me!
“Christ in his numbered breath,
Christ in his beating heart and in his death,
Christ in his mystery! From that secret place
And from that separate dwelling, give me grace.”
The spectacle of a general communion again gives Mrs. Meynell inspiration for a poem whose last two stanzas apply equally as well to the secular, evolutionary view of salvation as they do to the ecclesiastical view, and whose last stanza is most suggestive in the light it throws upon the puzzling discrepancy between the littleness of man and the unlimited material vast in which he finds himself a floating speck:
I saw this people as a field of flowers,
Each grown at such a price
The sum of unimaginable powers
Did no more than suffice.
A thousand single central daisies they,
A thousand of the one;
For each, the entire monopoly of day;
For each, the whole of the devoted sun.
Even so typically modern a philosopher as Henri Bergson would find one of his leading and rather baffling ideas beautifully realized in one of Mrs. Meynell’s sonnets. Matter, Bergson tells us, in all its manifestations is moulded by a spiritual push from behind it, so that the sensible world is not a mosaic of atoms obeying fixed laws but rather a cosmic compromise between matter and spirit, a modus vivendi the operation of which would seem very different to us were our viewpoint that of pure spirit. Says Mrs. Meynell in To a Daisy:
Slight as thou art, thou art enough to hide
Like all created things, secrets from me,
And stand, a barrier to eternity.
And I, how can I praise thee well and wide
From where I dwell—upon the hither side?
Thou little veil for so great mystery,
When shall I penetrate all things and thee,
And then look back? For this I must abide,
Till thou shalt grow and fold and be unfurled
Literally between me and the world.
Then I shall drink from in beneath a spring,
And from a poet’s side shall read his book.
O daisy mine, what shall it be to look
From God’s side even of such a simple thing?
The sense of what might, perhaps, be called restrained paradox in that sonnet, is frequently met with in Mrs. Meynell’s writings, and it corresponds to aspects of reality which the old religious phraseology she has so freshly minted for us is alone fitted to convey. The Young Neophyte is a beautiful sonnet enshrining the fatefulness of every human action, the gift of the full flower which is implicit in the gift of the smallest bud, the preparation we are constantly making for crises which are yet hidden in the future. Thoughts in Separation also deals with the paradoxical overcoming of the handicaps of personal absence of our friends through community of thought and feeling. Not only are these paradoxes in human psychology delicately set forth by the poet, but those darker ones of human work and destiny are consolingly illuminated in such a poem as Builders of Ruins—which does not depend for its quality of consolation upon anything foreign to its poetic truth.
One poem in the book is, perhaps, most remarkable for the light it throws upon the sense in which the term poetic truth may be used, and as showing the difference between the poetic, the realizable, and, therefore, the true side of a religion—the side Matthew Arnold was so anxious to keep—and the mere theological framework, always smelling of unreality and always in need of renovation. The poem may stand as a warning against confusing real poetry—in whose truth we need not be afraid to trust because its author does not inhabit our own thought world—with versified theology. If all of Mrs. Meynell’s work were like her Messina, 1908, then the critic and reader who now mistakenly shun her would be right. And the poem is a curious commentary upon Mr. Eastman’s insistence that poetry is realization. For in her other poems the author has presented those aspects of her religion which are verifiable in experience. Perhaps the quotations given above bear out that point. But one aspect of religious thought has now been pretty generally abandoned, not because it has ever been proven false, but because we have never succeeded in realizing it for ourselves. The God of orthodox church theodicy never did “make good”; Christ, the Saints, and even the very material form of the cross itself had to mediate between man and the divine. And it is precisely in the one case in this book where Mrs. Meynell tries to present the governing rather than the immanent God to us that she fails—as, if poetry be realization, we should expect her to fail. The first stanza of the poem addressed to the Deity describes in a few bold strokes the wreck of Messina, and ends with the lines:
Destroyer, we have cowered beneath Thine own
Immediate unintelligible hand.
The second stanza describes the missions of mercy to the stricken city, and ends:
... our shattered fingers feel
Thy mediate and intelligible hand.
The essential weakness of this dependence for poetic effect upon the two adjectives and their negatives is no less obvious than the weakness of the poet’s attribution of such apparently impulsive and then retractatory conduct to a God whose ways must either be explicable in terms of a human sense of order or not made the subject of human discourse at all.
Mrs. Meynell describes herself in one of these poems as a singer of a single mood. Some of her critics have taken her at her word and saved themselves some trouble thereby in their task of appreciation. But as a matter of fact, she should not be taken at her own modest estimate, for her one mood is such a pervasive one, such a large and sane mood, that it pays to look at more than one aspect of life through its coloring. And in truth, besides her better-known poems which need no further mention here, The Lady Poverty and Renouncement, for example, there will be found within the small compass of her beautifully-housed collection of verse many aspects of nature, all of them instinct with a mystic shimmer of life, as well as aspects of the innermost life of man which it is given to few spirits to sing in words—only, in fact, to those spirits whose effort it is to make their poetry
Plain, behind oracles ... and past
All symbols, simple; perfect, heavenly-wild,
The song some loaded poets reach at last—
The kings that found a Child.
To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive, and it is not denied to criticism to have it; but then criticism must be sincere, simple, flexible, ardent, ever widening its knowledge.—Matthew Arnold in Essays in Criticism (First Series).
An Ancient Radical
William L. Chenery
Euripides and His Age, by Gilbert Murray. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]
The “conspiracy of silence” which oppressed the youth of those of us who were born in the late Victorian era never seems more hateful than when some master hand connects the present labors of liberty with the strivings of the infinite past. In some fashion the dominating spirits of a generation ago contrived to make the struggles for human freedom appear as ugly isolated episodes without precursors or ancestry. They forgot the Shelleys and the Godwins and they even denied the significance of the classic forerunners of today’s ardent prophets.
There were happy exceptions. Some of us cherish the teachings of a Virginia professor who, as far as the adolescent capacities of his students permitted, bridged the gap between Socrates’s free questionings and the contemporary yearnings for a world of uncompromising justice and beauty. What that Southern student did for his small band of followers Gilbert Murray has long been doing for the great world. His present contribution belongs to that satisfying series, The Home University Library. Incidentally, one reflects that this Home University is one of the few institutions of learning which has completely avoided the blinders so many are complacently wearing. The Euripides of Murray suggests to the author—and to the reader, one may claim—both Tolstoi and Ibsen. But, one hastens to state, Professor Murray is too learned and thoughtful a man to paint a revolutionary Euripides such as The Masses—much as one loves that exuberant Don Quixote—would delight to honor and to portray. His onset, however, catches us:
“Every man who possesses real vitality can be seen as the resultant of two forces,” says Murray. “He is first the child of a particular age, society, convention; of what we may call in one word a tradition. He is secondly, in one degree or another, a rebel against that tradition. And the best traditions make the best rebels. Euripides is the child of a strong and splendid tradition and is, together with Plato, the fiercest of all rebels against it.... Euripides, like ourselves, comes in an age of criticism, following upon an age of movement and action. And for the most part, like ourselves, he accepts the general standards on which the movement and action were based. He accepts the Athenian ideals of free thought, free speech, democracy, ‘virtue,’ and patriotism. He arraigns his country because she is false to them.”
The suffragist and the feminist movements have recently brought the great dramatist to his proper appreciation in respect to women. Some of the passages in the Medea are quoted as often in suffragist campaigns as the words of Bernard Shaw or of Olive Schreiner. This Greek is sometimes said to be the first literary man who understood women. For that reason, as Professor Murray so charmingly emphasizes, Euripides was ever accounted a woman hater, despite even the implications of his great chorus which sings so nobly woman’s destined rise as a power in the world. His statement of the cause of barbarian woman against a civilized man who has wronged her is incomparably more contemporary than Madam Butterfly, and with Murray we may doubt “if ever the deserted one has found such words of fire as Medea speaks.” And, as the author continues, “Medea is not only a barbarian; she is also a woman, and fights the horrible war that lies, an eternally latent possibility, between woman and man. Some of the most profound and wounding things said both by Medea and Jason might almost be labelled in a book of extracts ‘Any Wife to Any Husband’ or ‘Any Husband to Any Wife.’”
The change which came over the spirit of Euripides’s vision, as Athens itself was transformed by empire lust from the first glories of Pericles, suggest again the purifying satire of our ablest moderns. War is hateful and the picture which the Attic dramatist drew of the horrors of dying Troy leave little to the present imagination. Euripides accordingly became as popular in imperialistic Athens as was Bebel among the Kaiser’s ministers. Murray interprets this phase magnificently. He concludes: “This scene, with the parting between Andromache and the child which follows, seems to me perhaps the most heartrending in all the tragic literature of the world. After rising from it one understands Aristotle’s judgment of Euripides as the ‘most tragic of the poets.’” One has only to recall the brave gentleness of Hector’s wife, described first in Homeric words, to agree with the present author.
On the purely critical side Professor Murray’s words are vastly important. Especially valuable is his discussion of the chorus and the deus ex machina concerning which so much error has been taught since Horace wrote on the art of poetry. But this small book is not designed for those whose interest in Greek drama is technical. It is Euripides, the philosopher; Euripides, the satirist of his times; Euripides, the preacher of lofty virtues, the apostle of new men and more righteous gods, who concerns the great awakening world of 1914. The intellectual battles which Euripides fought on behalf of Athens have been waged again and often for the millions who slumber and are content. They are being fought now with an intensity unprecedented. So it brings courage and it brings calm to realize the continuity of the conflict, and to recall the signal victories of the olden days. Gilbert Murray’s achievements are too numerous to permit praise. One may only say now that the present book is in line with the fine things of his past; that by virtue of his labors the world agony for liberty and justice and beauty reveals new phases of the intrinsic dignity and honor which have been its possession since men desired better things.
For those whose lives are chaotic personal loves must also be chaotic; this or that passion, malice, a jesting humor, some physical lust, gratified vanity, egotistical pride, will rule and limit the relationship and color its ultimate futility.—H. G. Wells in First and Last Things.
Isn’t it possible to be pedantic in the demand for simplicity? It’s a cry which, if I notice aright, nature has a jaunty way of disregarding. Command a rosebush in the stress of June to purge itself; coerce a convolvulus out of the paths of catachresis. Amen!—Some Letters of William Vaughn Moody.
Equal Suffrage: The First Real Test
Henry Blackman Sell
The query of the anti-suffragist—“Will the women really use suffrage if they have it”—was rather conclusively answered in the affirmative at Chicago aldermanic elections on April 7, when equal suffrage was given its first real test in an American city of first rank. This election brought out many interesting incidents which might be considered as having “laboratory” value.
It has been contended by the “antis” that the women would be bad losers; that they would not support the non-partisan ideals which are becoming a definite part of our “new patriotism”; that the result of equal suffrage would simply be one of double vote, wives voting as their husbands decided; that the women coming out in the first enthusiasm of registration would not take the same interest in the prosaic work at the polls; that the fights against bad nominees would result either in a duplication of man-run campaigns, or in ineffective and lady-like campaigns.
The first of these contentions was proved untrue to even the most casual observer at the polls on election day. The women were fighting uphill all the way, and where the so-termed “suffrage men” were slightly unpleasant in their attitude towards the “antis,” the women were all cheerfulness and all refreshing encouragement. As one explained: “It has been the most wonderful feeling, working shoulder to shoulder with the men in something that has really been our duty all along.”
Nine women candidates were up for election and not one was chosen; and yet, after talking with five defeated women candidates and three defeated men candidates, I concluded that the women knew more about the philosophy of politics and its sad uncertainties than men who had been contesting for years.
True, election to office is but a by-product of political experience; it is a most coveted by-product, nevertheless, and when a woman like Marion Drake, who ran a close race against Chicago’s “bad” alderman, says, at the closing of the polls, “I have not been elected, but every minute of the time I have expended has been worth while and I shall try again at the next election,”—it shows the right spirit and the fundamental error in the assertion that women cannot lose gracefully.
Non-partisanism could be given no real test, for these ideals seemed necessary of application in only two or three wards. In one—the twenty-first—an alderman with a bad record was up for re-election in opposition to a Republican of no particular merit. The women got together, with the aid of some of the better men, and selected a non-partisan candidate. This man was elected directly through the efforts of the women who, Republican, Democratic, and Progressive, rallied in true non-partisan spirit to his aid.
As to the control of the women’s votes by the men: it is interesting to note that in the more intelligent wards there was considerable variance between the men and the women, while in the wards of the poorer and less intellectually-inclined portions of the city the votes ran a great deal alike.
The women came out in good numbers and, as a matter of fact, the masculine vote was considerably higher than usual; but even with this advantage, the registered women outvoted the registered men by a small per cent.
The campaigns conducted by the various women were distinctly different from the ordinary political campaigns. They were dignified, straightforward, strong, and effective. Miss Drake, in her campaign against John Coughlin, colloquially and delicately known as “Bathhouse John,”—the name originating from the fact that the gentleman in question received his political training as a mopper and rubber in one of Chicago’s most infamous bath houses,—made a direct appeal, in a house to house, voter to voter, canvass of her ward. In this way she told over two-thirds of the people of the “Bathhouse’s” territory all about the gentleman, his ambitions, his desires, and his insidious motives. And while she was defeated, it must be remembered that though Coughlin received a sufficient plurality, he by no means attained his boast:—“I’ll beat that skirt by 8,000 votes.” In fact, where his plurality at the last elections was approximately eight to one, this year it was less than two-and-a-half to one, making an obvious deduction that Miss Drake’s campaign was decidedly successful even though she did not win.