Mr. Powys on Dostoevsky

(A reader sends us these jottings from one of Mr. Powys’s lectures.)

Shudders of life....

I have only one thing to do—to bring you into a strange mass of palpable darkness with something moving in it. Dostoevsky is really a great mass, a volume, not a cloud nor a pillar of fire nor a puff of smoke, but a vast, formless, shapeless mass of darkness, palpable and drawing you towards itself.

Reading him is dangerous because of the inherent sense of fear likely to be accentuated in those who are a little mad and whose madness takes on the form of fear. We go on a visit to a mad house, to hospitals with Dostoevsky. But with him this whole world suddenly changes into a mad house. It is all haunting mad houses and hospitals filled with us maniacs of the particular fear we are subject to.

(Life is all a running away—a distraction. We are running away when we are talking, when we are making love—then more than ever, perhaps.)

In Dostoevsky we suddenly realize that these Russians are ourselves. If the religion, mysticism, liberalism, despotism they possess were only Russian there are excellent books written by travellers in Russia for us to read. But Dostoevsky is different. If I could but mesmerize you.... It is like reading the gospels in childhood, being overrun and overthrown by fate and then after one has lived meeting the words of the childhood situations and making associations.

I do not think of him as an artist, though he is a great one. You do not think of him.... In ordinary life we suppress half the things and more we might say. Vanity and fear are the ultimate things. In Dostoevsky the people tug and scrape at one anothers’ vain nerves with adder’s poison. He gives one the sensation of discovering one’s self and betraying one’s self. He reveals as friends talking and discussing in the small hours of the morning reveal themselves to one another. The talk may be a describing of the animal functions of the human body. But in reality it is the psychic tingling, electric vibrations which the physiological structure exerts upon mind! Mind! Mind! Dostoevsky is interested in what people actually feel. He is more with people who have written diaries than with so-called realistic novelists. One gets from him a sense of perversion of human imagination.... He is the most important of novelists; full of ripples and vibrations of imagination. Everybody has imagination. The things we do are nothing. Imagination is the only thing over which Will has no power.

Nietzsche says that he got all his contemporary philosophy from Dostoevsky. He got from him even his idea of the inner circle of aristocratic souls who really rule the world, are themselves unhappy, and take with others to places which they (these others) cannot enter. Dostoevsky thinks that the secret of the world is in abandonment, perversion; Nietzsche in harness, stiffness, the gay, the strong, the beautiful, aristocratic, dominant.... Nietzsche with all his reality does not describe life as it is. Zarathustra is a dream—impossible perhaps. But Dostoevsky does describe life. Nietzsche’s man is absolutely alone—has his own hell. Dostoevsky’s has that too, but in a different way. He gives the feeling of a third person where two are alone. Do not think that Dostoevsky is a mystic. The essential thing is that you have this sense of a third person to which genius appeals. Dostoevsky is a stronger as well as a truer one than even Nietzsche himself.

Nietzsche is as a skater upon the ice, a dancer upon a tight rope who remains a white, balanced figure on the surface. Dostoevsky plunges—into a darkness full of voices. You must get there by a form of perversion. Every one of his characters is incurably hurt. Nietzscheans harden their hearts and live on the surface. All Dostoevsky people are weak. He thinks that only out of weakness will redemption come; abandonment to every emotion. In that he is Dionysian.... Dostoevsky I cannot put into words. Perversion; Disease; God is Disease; God is Pain; Dostoevsky depicts how Disease gives one illumination. We have an idea that we must be well. Even Nietzsche says that. The Greeks said it ages ago. Dostoevsky says “No; I offer you a new value.” He has a lust for fools—understands the mania that people have of making fools of themselves. God is Folly; God is Cruelty—perhaps an epicene God.

Dostoevsky is a cerebralist. His specialty is imaginative reactions. All the lusts that have stretched their wailing arms, all the hopes, all the goblins.... In sex as in everything else people are not what they are doing; they are in that vortex of what they imagine themselves. Dostoevsky understands all that. Those frank-spoken people who think they know sex are puritans on the other side. They have no imagination.

We can overestimate what Dostoevsky has from Russia and not attribute what he is to himself. Other Russians are Russians—Turgeniev, Tolstoy, Andreyev, Chekhov, Gorky—but they are not as big as he is; perhaps they are more of the broader stamp.

... Constance Garnett’s translations are masterpieces. The French are too artistic to translate Dostoevsky.... No one can approach Dostoevsky in creating a saint. Russia as the spiritual bringer-back of the world to Christianity—this runs through his works. He is the Christian. His books are full of translations from Scripture. He understands the underlying psychology of the gospels. Nietzsche said that putting the gospels with the art of the Old Testament was a crime in the name of Art. The Old Testament is undoubtedly finer art, but the New is psychology—masterly.

VERS LIBRE AND COMMON SENSE

Clinton Masseck, St. Louis:

Vers Libre has no inconsiderable tradition in English verse, as Mr. Arthur Ficke has recently pointed out in THE LITTLE REVIEW. Its progress in French poetry, particularly among modern writers, is familiar to all students. And if we were inclined to forget or to forgive Whitman (meaning in politer terms to accept him and his followers), the recent verse of the Imagiste group and such writers as Miss Amy Lowell and Mr. Max Bodenheim in our own midst would be likely to force our attention to this interesting form—if I may employ this word in no paradoxical sense.

But vers libre is of the moment—new, if you will, in its present appeal. Its modern themes, its unique figures of speech, its wide practice, both in this country and in England, mark it as a new movement, or at least a new recrudescence.

Anything new invites attack; anything new in literature perhaps warrants attack. If it can stand the test, by just such a token, it is worth consideration. But there are those to whom the new is always a thing to be attacked—because it is new, because it is inexplicable according to their own canons of emotion and intellect. Francis Jeffrey, with his famous caption on Wordsworth, “This will never do,” has his echo, futile and otherwise, in every generation of critics. And so we have Mr. Llewellyn Jones, in the January issue of THE LITTLE REVIEW, sending up his protest against vers libre in general and Mr. Bodenheim in particular.

Mr. Jones is markedly distressed. If he were not so much in earnest and so decently—or indecently—polite, so “suedy,” so suave, even scholastic in his handling, he might be amusing. He is also distinctly pugnacious and, as most pugnacious people are inclined to be, he is curiously inconsistent.

In fact, it is a little difficult to determine why Mr. Jones cannot accept Bodenheim. (He is guilty of reading Meredith, “popularly supposed to be obscure.”) Because our poet writes of “a world of growing sieves, slim squares, powdered souls, cool, colorless struggles, the obstetrical adventures of white throats, and green and yellow dins,” and because Mr. Jones, in the smallness of his soul or environment, has never been able to concoct or to conceive of poetry couched in this garb—let us grant the idea behind it—he straightway announces “This will never do.” Wordsworth, after being so thoroughly “sieved” by the critics, still lives; the divine essence of romanticism was not killed by Jeffrey and his thunder-pellet phrase. Courage, Mr. Bodenheim!

Yet in a really admirable paragraph of summary as to the function of poetry and the relation of a poet to his audience, Mr. Jones lays down the dictum that “the poet sees the world as we do not see it. Consequently, he can put a new complexion on it for us. The world is pluralistic, and so are we. Intellectually we may be of the twentieth century, but emotionally we may be born out of our due season. Then let the poet of that due season mediate to us the emotional life that we need.... By his aid alone we may get outside of our own skins and into the very heart of the world.”

The last words of this statement are peculiarly significant in this connection. “By his aid alone we may get outside of our skins into the very heart of the world.” What is the heart of the world? I do not know it all, emotionally or intellectually, although if I were to trust one of these endowments in order to render judgment upon poetry, I should choose the first. On the other hand, Mr. Jones does not know the entire heart of the world; nor does Mr. Bodenheim. But we may each of us know some little corner of this heart that the other does not or cannot ever know. For some of us poetry remains but the supreme expression of mere external beauty, for others the expression in consummate form of a purely intellectual process; to others poetry is a weapon wherewith to pierce the veil of externality and to expose the hidden but the real reality. The late William James once declared that we were standing on the verge of new discoveries in feeling and knowledge; that just beyond us lies a world of new adjustments and new experiences. Of course, in this instance, James had reference to our new appreciation and estimate of the value of mysticism in the judgment of certain phases of religious experiences. But the thing holds true even in poetry; the line between the poet and the mystic has yet to be drawn. I, for one, should not want to think myself incapable of enlarging either my soul or my appreciation. If anybody can show me whether in new terms or not a hitherto unsuspected and unknown aspect of beauty, I shall be content to accept that person. I would go further; I should be very thankful that I had obtained a new point of view with which to regulate both my emotions and my intellect.

I, for one, saw and felt and appreciated the appeal of the much-discussed “sieve” poem. To be sure, along with Mr. Jones, I had previously thought of a sieve only in relation to ashes and garden earth—and even of that “little triangular sieve that fits into kitchen sinks.” But if some one can come along and convince me that this hitherto vulgar and despised implement has inherent in it the possibilities of metaphysical development, and that a certain person can be likened to a sieve, why, then I have learned a new aspect of beauty.

And hence, it would seem to me that Mr. Bodenheim has fulfilled every single requirement that Mr. Jones has put upon the poet. And the only reason Mr. Jones cannot appreciate these little poems is because, intellectually and emotionally, he is “born out of due season.”

After all, “All art is convention.” The Alaskan Indian, with his grotesque—to us—totem poles, cannot understand the smooth and plastic strength of much of classic sculpture. The African Negro, with his Campbell-soup-can earrings and his Connecticut-made curtain ring bracelets, cannot appreciate the effect of simple unadornment. Yet in any case the point of view, the impelling instinct that leads toward beauty, is the same for any person, any race, any civilization. Let us be honest and admit this. Let us sincerely seek and discover the philosophy that guides every new movement, whether in fashion or food or poetry.

Yet it seems to me that we are too prone to accept poetry and to judge it from a too utilitarian point of view. We would make it stand the same test that we apply to religion, to household furnaces, and other things that have been long tried. We ask ourselves when some new manifestation of it arises: “Will it do the trick? Will it comfort and warm and sustain us in the way that we have been accustomed to being comforted, warmed, and sustained by that which has already been accepted?” Yet if a new form discovers a new idea, if it tears away the covering with rough and clumsy hands in order to show the emotions, a fresh significance or a bold interpretation, we jump back in terror and horror.

So it is with vers libre at the present moment. Because it shows us new things, and a new and perhaps at times an awkward manner, critics fed on the diluted sentimentality of Longfellow—or even the classic and obscure Meredith—revolt. Eventually they will accept it; they must. Those that are not fools must remember that history repeats itself; that to cite but a recent instance, Manet and Monet and Sisley, in painting, are accepted where forty-five years ago they were characterized as fools and madmen. After time has crystalized the unusual into the conventional, and the crystals are as common and as pretty as only time and much practice can make them, the critic, along with the man in the street, will be content to partake and to appreciate. It will be then too late; what was once unique and rare will be common and banally uninteresting; a new awakening will then take place, and once more the world will witness the same absurd attack of the critics.

In this connection, in our future judgment of vers libre, let us recall the wise and simple words of R. A. M. Stevenson: “The test of a new thing is not utility, which may appear at any moment like a shoot with the first favouring breath of spring. The test is the kind and amount of human feeling and intellect put into the work. Could any fool do it? Now, in this matter of depicting truth, there are eyesights of all grades and breadth, of grandeur, of subtlety, and art has more than the delicacy of a tripos examination in tailing out as in a footrace all the talents and capabilities of the competitors.”

Go to it, Mr. Bodenheim!

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$1.25

MITCHELL KENNERLEY’S RAILROAD NOVELS

Most people when they are traveling like to read—nothing heavy or too serious—but a good yarn that will amuse and interest them. To supply just this want I have started my series of “Railroad Novels.” Each volume is a rattling tale, well told, and the books are printed in large type on light paper, and bound in limp cloth. They will fit most pockets, and weigh very little. They are uniform in appearance and price.

Can a Man Be True?

By WINIFRED GRAHAM

A good old-fashioned tale of adventure and intrigue, which in some ways recalls “The Prisoner of Zenda,” and the romances of the great Dumas. The sort of story that is passing now, but which every one enjoys once in a while. No sex, no problem, but lots of plot and counterplot and excitement. A book that may be read and enjoyed by every member of the family.

$1.00

MITCHELL KENNERLEY PUBLISHER NEW YORK

Books By Havelock Ellis

Mr. Ellis is one of the most distinguished psychologists, and men of letters in the world today. He is a scientist with a vision and a sense of humor, a traveler who sees below the surface, and a scholar who has read and digested a great part of the world’s literature without becoming a pedant. To readers of The Little Review who are not familiar with his work we confidently recommend any of the four books below.

IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS

“A book of random observations, thoughts, and half-thoughts, crotchets, hobbies, guesses, and whims. One day Mr. Ellis muses over a drunken woman and on another he descants on the evolution of furniture, having in the meanwhile declared his taste in architecture, the women of Normandy, the ugliness of modern civilization, and the music of Franck and Elgar, and his opinion of the devil, Cornishmen, George Meredith, Raphael, Gaby Deslys, war, and nakedness.”

F. M. Colby in The North American Review.

$1.50 net.

THE TASK OF SOCIAL HYGIENE

A discussion of the changing status of woman, the emancipation of woman in relation to romantic love, the significance of the falling birth-rate, and other aspects of sex and society. “It is an inspiring and reassuring volume, which deserves not one but several readings from everyone who takes anything more than a predatory interest in the social organism.”

Waldo R. Browne in the Chicago Dial.

$2.50 net.

THE WORLD OF DREAMS

A scholarly, yet entertaining study of just the peculiarities and curiosities of the world of dreams which everybody has wondered at. It describes them with the vividness and fantastic imagery which combine so charmingly in Kipling’s “The Brushwood Boy,” and at the same time interprets them in the light of a psychologist’s special knowledge.

$2.00 net.

THE SOUL OF SPAIN

This brilliant volume on the romance, the woman, the art, the dancing, and the gardens of Spain, and especially on the Spanish character, is probably the most illuminating as well as the most readable interpretation of this inscrutable people in literature.

With photogravure frontispiece, $2.00 net.

Order at your bookstore or direct from the publishers

4 Park Street HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY Boston

Transcriber’s Notes

Advertisements were collected at the end of the text.

The table of contents on the title page was adjusted in order to reflect correctly the headings in this issue of The Little Review.

The original spelling was mostly preserved. A few obvious typographical errors were silently corrected. All other changes are shown here (before/after):