Ellen Key’s Steady Vision
The Younger Generation, by Ellen Key. [G. P. Putnam’s, New York.]
In the present amusing reign of boisterous propagandic voices, it is good to find a thinker who describes the exciting truth in simple terms. The many are able to catch glimpses of the truth; between glimpses, they shout and wave their inefficient arms for the enlightenment of their brothers, and for their own joy. The few see the truth steadily and, because they see steadily, become so passionately enthusiastic that they are driven to express themselves in quiet, mighty phrases. Such phrases imprint vital ideas upon the mind of the seeker, while pitiable confusion alone results from the shouts and wavings. In The Younger Generation, Ellen Key tells simply and surely her conclusions about vital things.
Conservative judgment is at once a splendid balance and a terrific barrier in the world of ideas. Intense enthusiasm, when it displays itself, often combines blindness with sight. It has always seemed to be asking too much to expect in one person a finely balanced enthusiasm in which the conservative element does not hamper the divine qualities of youth—courage, impetuosity, and an ever-fresh perception. Not to be extravagant, but to characterize her fairly, one may say that this Swedish woman writes as if she possessed the virtues commonly attributed to both age and youth. She is vigorous, free-hearted, and calm—enthusiastic, fiery, and sane—a champion of revolution when and wherever it breaks the path for evolution.
Reaching deftly into anarchism, christianity, feminism, individualism, socialism, and other good glimpses of the truth, she secures the elements for a strangely consistent wisdom.
Parents of the new generation will feel it to be a blasphemy against life—another name for God—that the beings their love has called into existence, the beings who bear the heritage of all past generations and the potentialities of all those to come, should be prematurely torn from the chain of development. Every such link that is wrenched away from unborn experiences, from unfinished work, was a beginning which might have had the most far-reaching effects within the race.... It is not death that the men of the new age are afraid of, but only premature and meaningless death.
“Women ought not to be content until governments have been deprived of the power of plunging nations into war.”—Ellen Key doesn’t ask the ladies to fidget and whimper at afternoon teas, nor to operate upon male-kind with their verbal lancets, nor to adopt circuitous resolutions about affairs of which they know nothing; but her suggestion, here as elsewhere, is simple and practical—so very simple that the ladies will smile down upon it as something delightfully girlish and unsophisticated. It is safe to speculate that not one of the smilers could, in her comfortable condescension, live up to this humble and powerful procedure:—“Women can always and everywhere ennoble the feelings, refine an idea of justice, and sharpen the judgment of those who come under their influence. The indirect result of this influence will then be that war will become more and more insufferable to the feelings, repugnant to the sense of justice, and absurd to the intelligence. When thus the eyes of the best among the nation are opened to the true nature of war, they will be finally opened also to the way to real, not armed, peace.” And as it is the secret and boasted and forgotten desire of every woman to influence a man, or men, these profoundly plain suggestions would seem to be sown in a fertile field. There is hope in this. Then she says, on another page: “To win over men’s brains to the idea of solidarity, that is the surest way of working for peace.” And this, being a more complex remark, will probably upset everything gained by the clarity of the preceding quotations; but it is given here to repay the time otherwise wasted by the many for whom simplicity has lost its god-like charm. Solidarity is a great idea, partly because it is something to be shouted about. But the first element in solidarity, human kindness, has never seemed “strong” to a shouting age.
One of the firm demands which Ellen Key makes in her future “Charter for Children” is “the right of all children to disinheritance; in other words, their being placed in the beneficent necessity of making full use of their completely developed powers.” After reminding us of the strenuous manners of a past age in which the children of any conquered city were dashed hideously against the walls, she claims that “the judgment upon our time will be more severe. For the people of antiquity knew not what they did, when they caused the blood of children to flow like water. But our age allows millions of children to be worn out, starved, maltreated, neglected, to be tortured in school, and to become degenerate and criminal; and yet it knows the consequences, to the race and to the community, that all this involves. And why? Because we are not yet willing to reckon in life-values instead of in gold-values.”
What a frantic rage must there be in the souls of the truly social-minded when this terrific indictment is pronounced in their hearing! But the appalling nightmare will go on until the frantic element is overcome, and the rage is focused to a point of white heat—an intense simplicity.
HERMAN SCHUCHERT.
Two Conrad Reviews
Joseph Conrad: A Study, Richard Curle. [Doubleday, Page and Company, New York.]
“The business of criticism,” says Mr. Curle, “is to surmount this impasse between conviction and the power to convince.” Judged by this test, his study of Joseph Conrad is undoubtedly successful: it is hard indeed to imagine any reader reaching the end of it without believing that Conrad is a very great writer. A careful reading of the numerous and often lengthy quotations from Conrad’s books should alone convince the persons Mr. Curle is most anxious to convert—those who know nothing about them.
But Joseph Conrad has two obvious faults. In the first place, Mr. Curle is quite too modest—almost haltingly so. His pages abound in such phrases as “I dare say”, “I cannot help”, “I think”, and the like. That’s all very honest, but Americans prefer the more lordly manner. One feels really, that while the critic may speak in such fashion to himself, he should give us only his conclusions—and no apologies for them to boot. In the second place, Mr. Curle seems to think that he is very brave in putting forth this book, that the critics haven’t appreciated Conrad at all, and that since he does there must be a real quarrel between him and them. Now as a matter of fact this is not so. Probably no living writer has had a fraction of the hearty recognition from the best critics that Conrad has. True, he has (until six months ago) woefully lacked anything like popularity and the material rewards it brings—but very few of those whose opinion carries weight will hesitate to agree with most of the fine things that Mr. Curle says about the author of Chance. Mr. Curle’s attitude simply arouses unfriendly antagonism on the part of his readers who know and love their Conrad.
So much for its faults. They are not of serious importance and should not obscure the really splendid qualities of Mr. Curle’s book. It abounds in acutely perceptive remarks—often extremely well put. In the course of seven chapters on Conrad’s Psychology, Men, Women, Irony and Sardonic Humour, Prose and the Artist, he piles up an overwhelming evidence of the man’s greatness. Is there a man alive, has any English novelist ever lived about whom one could wax so easily, so madly enthusiastic? True, to some Conrad does not appeal. They have never caught the glorious glamour of his pages—the solemn grandeur of his magnificent prose. Probably the surest way to win converts would be to compile a small book of extracts from his works, carefully graded according to their difficulty.
When I was still at college I was curious about Conrad. A well-meaning bookseller sold me Lord Jim. I tried to read it, but fifty pages was as far as I could go. I tried again, but with even less success. Then one day at Interlaken I found a Tauchnitz copy of A Set of Six. Before I had quite finished the last story I lost the book—changing trains. But Conrad has never since seemed obscure to me. A beginner in French would never try to appreciate the shimmering pages of Flaubert; nor would even the Yankee farm-hand feed his baby pie. More than any living writer has Conrad needed some one to present him to the public. This his American publishers have tried of late to do. Mr. Curle’s book will add to their success in so far as they manage to persuade people to read it. Except for those who have begun with Lord Jim, Nostromo, or Chance, I have never found anyone, who, having read one book by Conrad, was content to stop there. Mr. Curle thinks Nostromo Conrad’s greatest work. It is now, with Europe in the throes of a bloody conflict, that one realizes more and more how Conrad’s men and women, far removed from the problems of a Wells, a Chesterton, or a Shaw—problems which appear suddenly to be of very little importance after all—bulk great and ever greater. There they loom—like Rodin’s Balzac against the glowering sky.
ALFRED KNOPF.
A Set of Six, by Joseph Conrad. [Doubleday, Page and Company, New York.]
In this first American edition of his Set of Six, Conrad is revealed as an artist par excellence. You find no subjective emotionalism on the part of the author in any of his six tales, in spite of their subtitles—Romantic, Indignant, Pathetic, and the like. You see in him the wistful observer of characters and situations, which he presents with impassionate objectivity, with the impartiality of a painter who lovingly draws his object, whether it is ugly or beautiful, whether it is a villain or a saint. Conrad possesses a wonderful skill in setting up a background, which, at times, appears of more importance than the plot. He makes you feel equally at home in the atmosphere of Napoleonic France and of France of the Restoration, of revolutionary Peru and of a Neapolitan amusement garden. You enjoy the tales greatly, you admire the clever craftsmanship of the story-teller, but you close the book with an empty feeling, as if you had listened to brilliant anecdotes in a bachelors’ club.
K.
Amy Lowell’s Poetry
Sword Blades and Poppy Seed, by Amy Lowell. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]
In one of his letters, Byron says: “To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.” Such a confession seems strange coming from a poet, and it is a confession of quite a different character which is written on every page of Miss Lowell’s book of poems. There one finds in every line the expression of a personality which tries to realize itself and succeeds in doing so. The unity as well as the interest of the book is in this very development of a strong personality, of which a new and original aspect is revealed in every poem.
What charms us at once in this personality, and renders the reading of the book a constant enchantment, is a most wonderful imagination—an imagination at the same time creative and representative, rich, varied, overflowing with images and themes. All that life and nature offer is the domain of this imagination; it wakes up at the most unexpected moment and seizes the unseen detail, giving us an idea of the wonderful wanderings through which it must take the person fortunate enough to possess it. Now it is a temple; now a church; now a beggar; a blue scarf; the distant notes of a flute; or the nocturnal noises of a London street, which starts it on its way. At other times we find the imagination at play with itself, so to speak, creating out of nothing a historical or legendary atmosphere, or opening a philosophical vista, as in The Great Adventure of Max Breuck, The Basket, or the poem from which the book takes its name. Each one of these poems (and several others also) has its own special atmosphere, precise in its complexity and different from all the others.
In the style itself, in the development of the subjects, one finds the same quality. It seems as if the pen were too slow to note the multiple images which offer themselves to the mind of the poet. They accumulate themselves, sometimes, in a manner not unlike that of Victor Hugo, forming long periods in which the idea is turned in all possible ways, presented from all angles and in every natural or artificial light.
It is not only the richness of the images, but their quality, which reveals the power of Miss Lowell’s imagination. We all experience at every minute of our lives an infinity of sensations of which we are more or less conscious. It might almost be said that we are poets in exactly the measure that we realize and enjoy our sensations. The real poet not only registers his sensations, but is able to awaken in the mind of his readers the sudden recollection of those visual or auditive impressions which have never before reached his consciousness. This is what often delights us in Sword Blades and Poppy Seed. It gratifies us to feel that we are able to understand these subtle comparisons, these curious and unexpected alliances of words, such as those in the first poem of the book, where, to define certain shades of porcelains the poet speaks
Of lustres with so evanescent a sheen
Their colours are felt, but never seen.
Also in the first poem entitled Miscast, where she speaks of her mind as
So keen, that it nicks off the floating fringes of passers-by,
So sharp, that the air would turn its edge
Were it to be twisted in flight.
To help her imagination, Miss Lowell possesses a faculty which belongs only to the happy few: the gift of words. The astonishing description of arms and vases in the first poem is but one example, if one of the best, of this rare gift.
It is necessary also, in order to study thoroughly this interesting and complex personality, to mention the great dramatic quality of some of the long poems in the book. From that point of view, The Great Adventure of Max Breuck seems to me the most interesting. And there is much to be said of the sincerity and depth of sentiment in such poems as A Gift, Stupidity, Patience, Absence. All these short poems have something unique about them and constitute one of the greatest charms, and an important part of the value, of the book. It is almost incredible that a little poem like Obligation, for example, should contain such a world of thought and restrained sentiment in its ten short lines. I have chosen this poem as the type of this genre, because it characterizes perhaps better than any other this very special trait of Miss Lowell’s talent:
Hold your apron wide
That I may pour my gifts into it,
So that scarcely shall your two arms hinder them
From falling to the ground.
I would pour them upon you
And cover you,
For greatly do I feel this need
Of giving you something,
Even these poor things.
Dearest of my heart.
There is, in these few lines, a simplicity so naive, a sincerity so complete, and at the same time such an intensity of feeling, that we almost feel while reading it as if we were composing it ourselves. And everybody knows that this is the mark of genius. It is rare to attain such perfection in thought and in form as we find in these short poems, which stand on their stems, straight and pure, like wild flowers opening their hearts to the sun.
I should like, in conclusion, to speak of the very new and effective attempts of the author in the free use of all possible rhythms. The preface presents the author’s point of view, but I may add that she has been especially skilful in the adaptation of the rhythms to the subjects, a thing which requires great poetic tact and musical sense. To study this side of the book would carry us too far, for to do it properly a long article written especially on the subject would be necessary.
To those who love poetry, and who are at the same time interested in the progress of new schools, this book must be of the greatest value.
MAGDELAINE CARRET.