Editorials and Announcements
Mrs. Havelock Ellis
Mrs. Ellis’s visit to Chicago has been a series of revelations. At first she was a little disappointing: in her lecture on James Hinton and his sex ethics—particularly in the discussion which followed it—Mrs. Ellis did not loom as large as some of her more “destructive” contemporaries. The thing was beautifully done, of course—a gorgeous bit of interpretative art; for Mrs. Ellis chooses words with a poet’s care and presents ideas with an economy that is invigorating and restful at the same time. But in so far as the lecture reflected her own ideas it had some of the limitations to which the eugenist point of view is always open: the failure to go quite the whole distance. Compared with the directness and honest thoroughness of the few pioneers who are advocating birth control—like Margaret Sanger, whose little pamphlet on the subject will cost her ten years imprisonment if the authorities can get hold of her—the ideas of Mrs. Ellis came with a certain inadequacy. But later she cleared herself of the charge of cultism by her laughing remark to some one who discussed eugenics with her: “Eugenics? A mere spoke in the wheel, and a very dogmatic spoke at that. Heaven knows we don’t want a race of averages.” One of her most delightful afternoons was given over to her Cornish stories. She read one called The Idealist, which ought to be studied by all those who draw their rigid distinctions between “normal” and “abnormal”. As Mrs. Ellis said, “This story is an attempt to show that those people we so piously consider the worst of us are sometimes the best of us.” And so this charming woman with her simplicity, her humor, her frankness, her idealism, and her fine boyishness is a personality one must not fail to know. She returns to Chicago on February 4, to lecture on sex and eugenics in Orchestra Hall. That lecture will be given exclusively to women and will include a discussion of sex abnormalities, as well as a paper on the subject written especially for the occasion by her husband, which Mrs. Ellis will read.
A Journal of Ideas
The New Republic is the first weekly in America which has dared to assert that ideas are interesting, even if they are new. We have had one kind of weekly whose main purpose is to pay dividends to its owners. Dividends demand advertising, advertising demands large circulation, circulation demands pleasing as many people as possible, pleasing many people has seemed to demand piffle and dishonesty. We have had another kind of weekly which confines itself to academic criticism and frankly gives up any attempt to speak to the nation. The New Republic is run neither for dividends nor for ancient prestige. It proceeds on the assumption that we can find writers who are both honest enough and intelligent enough to speak things of a value not determined either by capital or by the mob. It hopes that their product may be so interesting that the people who want to read it will be sufficiently numerous to support the paper. It hopes vastly more that the ideas and opinions so enunciated will introduce a powerful and much-needed element of disinterested intelligence into American public life. The way in which these hopes are put into print will have much to do with the success of the attempt. But it is hopeful that somebody with adequate resources and equipment is actually engaged in the attempt to relate honesty and intelligence with the democracy.
John Cowper Powys
When the Welshman, John Cowper Powys, comes to the Chicago Little Theatre for his lectures during January and February a great many people ought to fall under the spell of this man whose methods spoil one for almost all other lectures. Mr. Powys’s intellect has that emotional character which is likely to be the quality of the man of genius rather than the man of talent. He might be called the arch-appreciator: he relies upon the inspiration of the moment, and when violently enthusiastic or violently the reverse (he is usually one of the two) he never stops with less than ten superbly-chosen adjectives to express his emotion exactly. His subjects will be Dostoevsky, Wilde, Milton, Lamb, Hardy, Henry James, Dante, Rabelais, Hugo, Verlaine, Goethe, and Heine. The dates may be had at the Little Theatre.
Mrs. Havelock Ellis’s “The Love of Tomorrow”
Herman Schuchert
One’s sense of the general or the particular fitness of things is disturbed when an attempt is made to paraphrase or condense the spoken words of Mrs. Ellis. It is seldom that this sense of fitness is at all troubled, because it is a simple matter to extract from the average lecture enough coherent material for second-hand purposes. On the subject given above Mrs. Ellis compels continuous attention. It is not enough to say that she steadily advances her ideas by means of careful phrases, for every phrase seems to be an idea in itself. She is an artist. Her words are like so many focussed lights, not one of which is superfluous. And the illumination which she obtains is a grateful brightness. In listening to her one’s powers of receptivity, while never strained, are not for one moment allowed to rest. As she says, “It’s all solid meat.” Hence, the feeling of futility in an attempt to present justly her observations and schemes of social betterment.
What an absurdity might be suggested to the reader by the statement that Mrs. Ellis advocates a form of “trial marriage” or a “probation for engaged lovers”! And yet her plan of such a pre-ceremonial arrangement is as practical as it is badly needed—practical and entirely reasonable, in that she has apparently overlooked nothing, from the subtleties of human nature to the future laws of the land. And how faddish might she appear if one told of her attacks upon latter-day Puritanism, lust in the guise of love, prostitution within marriage, the evils of both repression and brutish or premature expression, the abomination of smirking elders and cowardly guardians, and so forth. Truly, these things constitute a fad of today, but—Mrs. Havelock Ellis was writing and preaching these ideas longer than twenty-five years ago. In questions of love, marriage, and the possible beauty of human relations, she is a splendid, unhurrying pioneer. It would be impossible to measure the courage, the fine perseverance, it has taken to work on patiently and forcefully in the midst of leering society, infallible misunderstanding, and a great ocean of evil-mindedness. What daring! to speak plainly of the beauty of love-passion. And how hopeless! Here, evolution endlessly proves itself a laggard process.
Until one hears Mrs. Ellis it is easy to overestimate the “building” powers of Emma Goldman, although it is always too easy to consider only Miss Goldman’s sturdy “wrecking” capacity. But the percentage of constructive element in Mrs. Ellis’s work is much more apparent than in Miss Goldman’s. Clearly, each woman is superlative in her own sphere. By virtue of its tested strength, Mrs. Ellis’s constructive machinery may be said to destroy naturally whatever gets in its way. And in addition to this she does some direct, incisive battling as well. Her humor has carbolic in it. Her sarcasm is a spiritual antiseptic.
In the realm of the child, Mrs. Ellis agrees with that grand Swedish woman—Ellen Key. These two coincide upon the supreme importance of full and proper education for the coming generation, including eugenics, hygiene, and kindred topics. It is a joy to know of so much sanity abroad in the world.
But even today, when a number of more or less important writers and speakers are taking up her ideas, when Chicago is having the truths of humanity forced down its tonsilitic throat, it was still possible—on a Sunday night in the Little Theatre—for Mrs. Ellis to have in her audience many whose deep sighs of boredom it was scarcely necessary to observe before tagging them as a lower class of mentality, while no doubt their jewels and furs were quite necessary to indicate their social standing. What curious gropings of psychology brought these people to such a lecture? Or was it fashion? In the faces of these might a dozen Saviours have found ample pity-material. Yawns and dull looks! Something between a Cross and a Bomb was wanting to awaken these unthinking ones, asleep while superb ideas—ideas of admirable vitality and development—were being put before them by the clear and earnest voice of a great woman.
What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.—Nietzsche.
London Letter
Edward Shanks
London, Dec. 1, 1914.
I have to humiliate myself at the beginning of this letter. Nietzsche did not provoke the war; he did not imagine there was ever any specifically “Teutonic” culture, worthy of being spread at any cost; and he seems to have disliked Prussia as much or more than I do. I say this not to inform the readers of The Little Review, who know it all already from the number in which my error appeared, but to unburden my soul. I sinned like a daily journalist and spoke from hearsay—for I confess I have never been able to read Nietzsche with sufficient attention to gain more than a vague notion of his ideas. Two persons set me right—Mr. Harold Monro, the editor of Poetry and Drama, with some heat and indignation, and, more gently, Mr. A. R. Orage, the editor of The New Age, who was in old days one of the first to bring Nietzsche to England. It would seem that his efforts were of little use, for my blunder was merely an incident in a carnival of misapprehension which is now engaging our pseudo-intellectual critics. I have sinned in numerous, if evil, company.
I must withdraw another statement—namely, that the war has produced no adequate and agreeable verse. Mr. Maurice Hewlett’s Sing-songs of the War (published by the Poetry Bookshop) is an admirable little volume. Wisely pitching his note neither too high nor too vulgarly, he has struck closer to the mark than he has ever in any attempt. He has achieved an excellent patriotic song, beginning
O, England is an island,
The fairest ever seen:
They say men come to England
To learn that grass is green.
That needs only supporting music to be a fine song of the pleasant boisterousness and exaggeration that it should be. Of the others, The Drowned Sailor and Soldier, Soldier, have caught a wonderful and touching note of the folk-song. Mr. Hewlett’s work here is not ambitious, he has profited enormously by not keeping in his mind the necessity of producing a fine piece of literature. He has tried honestly to produce “something that will do” and much good poetry has been written in that way.
Mr. Harold Monro’s new book, Children of Love, which he has published himself at the Poetry Bookshop, contains also four gloomy war poems as far removed from Mr. Hewlett’s as from the verse of the newspapers. They are vivid and real impressions of fighting and, as appeals for recruiting, enormously inapt. But poetry does not exist for that. The title poem is a lovely piece, Mr. Monro’s very best, the composition which settled, or should have settled, all our doubts concerning his genius. The others display that sombre misery which is the characteristic note of his writing, which is extremely uncomfortable and, after a little while, extremely impressive.
I may seem to have devoted too much space to the publications of the Poetry Bookshop. But I think that, with luck, as time goes on, it may bulk yet more largely in English letters. Mr. Monro, if he is careful, may have the position that the Mercure de France held in Paris until quite recently: that is, he may publish about ninety per cent of all the good poetry that is published.
The war—again—disturbing our lives as a great tidal wave disturbs sea and shore, has brought to the surface, as waves will, many things of beauty. Among these, one that is not regarded, is Thomas Hardy’s Dynasts, which has been abridged and produced by Mr. Granville Barker. It is printed in three volumes and nineteen acts, with innumerable choruses and semi-choruses. Mr. Barker has reduced the play to three acts and the chorus to two persons who sit enthroned, one on each side of the stage. Mr. Henry Ainley sits at a reading-desk lower down in front and declaims the descriptive stage-directions. The setting is a conventional design in grey to which slight additions are made from time to time, but which remains for the most part unchanged. Thus you see the men and women of Wessex in fear of invasion by “Boney,” the victory and death of Nelson, the death and burial of Sir John Moore, Wellington at Salamanca, Napoleon signing his abdication at Fontainebleau, Wellington and Napoleon at Waterloo. The Napoleon was bad: he laughed sardonically in the fashion of melodrama, but the play transcended him. The tragedy was profoundly moving, the comedy not less so. It is an extraordinary work, written in Mr. Hardy’s graceless style, and probably the greatest of his compositions. One thing only was wanting—an audience. That which is essentially impressive must have something to impress—the listeners have a place in a good play—and the grandeur of the occasion was sensibly diminished. When we went, we asked the box-office attendant if we might go in at half-price, on account of our uniforms, and he answered indifferently that “we might if we liked.” When we got in, we understood. There were about two rows in the stalls and two more in the pit. The boxes were empty as far as I could see. I cannot understand the English public. What more do they want now than to see Nelson on the Victory and Wellington at Waterloo? Is it a cause of offence to them that the play is by a great man?
New York Letter
George Soule
If I were a Japanese journalist looking for notoriety, I should translate sections from Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, Richmond P. Hobson, et al., and publish them under the title “America and the Next War.” There is no question that these gentlemen put together are ten times as influential in the United States as von Bernhardi was in Germany. And there is no question that their utterances are just as inciting to militarism. If to them were added editorials from the Hearst newspapers, with their millions of circulation, and the books of certain prominent army officers, no one could convince the Japanese that the United States is not a conceited, hot-headed, and militarist nation. After the outbreak of a war we should plead in vain that we are peace-loving and fight only in self-defence. “Have you not the second largest navy in the world?” the Japanese would say. “Was any nation threatening you? Did you not capture the Philippines by force and subdue them against their will, practicing against the innocent natives horrible atrocities? Would you not do the same to Japan if you had the chance? Fortunately we are forewarned, and seize a favorable occasion to free the Philippines, since you have broken your promise to give them independence.” And we should feel that the Japanese were monsters hiding their aggressive spirit under humanitarian humbug.
Most of us have forgotten the spasm of “divine mission” that swept over this country at the time of the Spanish-American war. We were appointed by God to conquer or absorb the world, and bestow upon it, willing or unwilling, our American Kultur. “Civilization” was, indeed, the precise word we used, although we sometimes varied it with “free institutions.” At the same time the beef trust was furnishing “embalmed beef” to the army, and our economic system was at its very depth of unsavoriness. The Spanish papers cartooned us, quite justly, as “the American hog,” and the cartoons were reproduced broadcast over this country to feed the fires of hate. A Spaniard became to us the very impersonation of demoniacal cruelty. The country ran high with the spy fever, while the Atlantic coast waited in some trepidation for the imagined approach of Cervera’s squadron. We were prey to all the grinning illusions of war.
European opinion was at this time largely against us. To most Europeans we seemed a combination of pious humbug and bumptious conceit. To be actively dangerous we should have needed only a powerful armament. As it was, they regarded us with only distant apprehension. But they were not for a moment deceived by our high-sounding phrases. We were the most dollar-worshipping nation in the world, had often proved ourselves so. They recalled the unpleasant experiences they had had at the hands of Americans—vulgar tourists. The thing was perfectly obvious. We had little fineness of feeling. What we were fighting for was really dollars and cents, not the freedom of subject peoples. At this time they set themselves to watch us very carefully. Canada and the rest of America shared their feelings, with more bitterness.
Since then there has been little visible and striking change. We still live under an inchoate and un-idealistic commercialism. The world can thank us for very few treasures of literature, philosophy, or art. Not a single great nation has any particular occasion to love us. To most of them we are blasphemous and hateful. Hearst has more millions and more newspapers than ever, and we are still subject to strong popular hysteria—such as the recently-shown hatred of Germany. We sit as judges on the world. We calmly assume that we could do no such terrible things as other nations; that our Kultur is the best. At any time we may again be ready to spread it by force of arms.
Now all the powerful nations of the world, except us, are weakening each other in a terrific struggle. The occasion is seized in America by the armament makers and a political party without an issue. To defend ourselves we must arm! they say. Anyone who has taken the trouble to read Bernhardi’s books will know that it is the precise argument he employed. Political parties under commercialism are unscrupulous, and we shall doubtless see the agitation raised to a national issue. Anything to get the Democrats out of office. The probability is that the hysteria will succeed. The only hope to the contrary is that it may be allayed, not by opposition, but by prompt action on the part of the administration which shall mend our present fences without committing us to any definite policy of armament.
Suppose, however, that a President should be elected on the issue of larger armament immediately after the European war. It is an insult to the intelligence to pursue the logic of events further. The “defensive” alliance against us, the “defensive” alliance for us—if, indeed we could induce anybody to enter one—the constantly-increasing tension, the casus belli, the repetition of history. But such a disastrous war would not be a tragedy if we had so deserved it. The tragedy would be that we should have no such intrinsic worth as has Germany to offer as a defence. The tragedy would be that we had been so concerned about the mote in our brother’s eye that we had failed to remove the beam in our own.
I Am Woman
Marguerite Swawite
I am woman:
Old as Lebanon cedars—and far older;
Young as the freshest green shoot
That peeps through the snow in the March time.
My face is turned to the East
Pink with the dawn of my promise;
My hands are clutched from behind
By the fettering fingers of her who was woman alone,
Molded and spurred by desire,
Knowing only the need
Of a kiss for the cup of her throat,
Of a child for the curve of her arm.
To-day I am woman,
Less—yet a little more;
For I am learning to sing
Not his, nor another’s, but mine own song,
That has lain in my heart since the first day.
A great golden song it shall be
Though not always soft with sweet cadence,
For I must travail to sing:
I am learning
To feed upon nothing, yet fill me;
To warm my chill limbs without fire;
To go on my way, without kiss, without child,
Though my lip is red, my arm willing.
Yet I know I shall never cease
Till I have sung it all—
All to the very last note.
Still I shall be woman
In all the long days to come
That beckon to me in the pink dawn;
My song shall grow sweetly familiar,
And he who was frightened shall draw near
Singing his separate song,
Ever his own and yet blending
Its virile strains with mine;
So we shall raise a great harmony
Enfolding the world in our music,
Rejoicing again in our marriage.
One day that shall be ....
But to-day
I am weary—
The East is rosy with promise of dawn.
(The following is one of the poems in Edgar Lee Master’s “Spoon River Anthology” which has been running in Reedy’s St. Louis Mirror and attracting such wide-spread attention. In our opinion it is in the first ranks of fine poetry.)