Editorials and Announcements
The Murder of a Poet
It is reported that Rupert Brooke died of sun-stroke last month in the Dardanelles. There is nothing to be said in the face of such monster horrors.... And it is also reported that Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson has burned up his production of Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, not being able to bear the strain of acting in a play written by his unpatriotic countryman who protested against such horrors.
Emma Goldman’s Lectures in May
At a recent meeting of the Chicago Woman’s Club, when all the editors of Chicago magazines explained the virtues of their respective journals, Lucien Cary said, politely but in effect, that The Little Review was no good. “The only striking thing it has done (beside coming out at all) is to discover Emma Goldman, a nice woman with views less radical than Emerson’s and certainly far less well expressed.” I quote this because it is so exhilarating to catch Mr. Cary in a half-truth—the kind of thing that makes for the confused thinking he is so valiantly in arms against. If The Little Review had been alive about twenty-five years ago I hope we would have had the sense to discover that a great woman was beginning to work in this country. As it is, we could only try to point out how difficult and how fine has been Emma Goldman’s living of the things Emerson thought it would be good to live. It was not for the people who know their Emerson that we tried it, but for those who have forgotten him, like Mr. Cary.... Since we failed so miserably we shall have to try again. But in the meantime you may hear Emma Goldman herself and discover just how she is helping to make Emerson’s essays livable. She is to lecture for a week in Chicago, in the most delightful lecture room in the city—the Assembly Room in the Fine Arts Building. Her subjects are as follows, at 8:15 in the evening:
Sunday, May 9:
“Friedrich Nietzsche, the Intellectual Storm Centre of the European War.”
Monday, May 10:
“Is Man a Varietist or Monogamist”?
Tuesday, May 11:
“Jealousy” (Its Cause and Possible Cure).
Wednesday, May 12:
“Social Revolution vs. Social Reform.”
Thursday, May 13:
“Feminism” (A Critique of the Modern Woman’s Movements).
Saturday, May 15:
“The Intermediate Sex” (A Study of Homosexuality).
Sunday, May 16:
“The Limitation of Offspring” (A Discussion of How and Why Small Families Are Desirable).
“Dionysion”
One of the most stirring things that has come to this office lately is a small journal with the word “Dionysion” on its cover. It is the first volume of a magazine for the furtherance of Isadora Duncan’s work in America, and the committee that has helped make this rather amazing thing possible includes such names as John W. Alexander, Percy MacKaye, Theodore Dreiser, Will Levington Comfort, Max Eastman, Robert Henri, Edith Wynne Mathison, Julia Culp, Witter Bynner, John Drew, Walter Damrosch, and many others. On the first page is Whitman, then Nietzsche on Dionysian Art, and then Robert Henri with a little article on the new education in which he says: “I was tremendously impressed one day in Isadora Duncan’s studio, by the look in the faces of the children. As they passed by me in the dance I saw great dignity, balance, ease. I was impressed, too, throughout the entire time by the fact that they seemed absolutely secure in their happiness. They appeared to know unconsciously that they would receive a full measure of praise and that in no case would there be blame or punishment. In each little upturned face was a rare look of freedom—the look of people on a higher plane of self-consciousness, an aloofness from the common thought. I saw in their expression the impress of the measures of great music.” And he goes on that “to inspire courage in children, to stimulate them with the work of those who have the courage to create, to make of them frank facers of the emotional problems of life, to start them on the way toward a great constructive life, we must take care not to impose our wisdom and our ignorance on them, but to give them the benefit of the best we have through a frank response to their natural interrogation.” Isadora Duncan’s idea is that “the expression of the modern school of ballet wherein each action is an end, and no movement, pose, or rhythm is successive or can be made to evolve succeeding action, is an expression of degeneration, of living death. All the movements of our modern ballet school are sterile movements because they are unnatural; their purpose is to create the delusion that the law of gravitation does not exist for them.” I know a man from Russia who came to this country knowing only two words of English: “Isadora Duncan.” He had seen Miss Duncan dance once in St. Petersburg and from that moment he looked forward to America as the country of “highest intelligences in the freest bodies.” We may sometime become worthy of this remarkable woman. Dionysion ought to help....
Isaac Loeb Peretz
Last month, under the strain of relief work for the Jewish families driven from the war zone, there died in Warsaw a great poet, Isaac Loeb Peretz, almost unknown to the English reader, if we do not count one volume of his Tales, issued by the Jewish Publication Society. His poetry, written in Hebrew and in Yiddish, may be compared to that of Heine in its gracefulness, but it bears in addition the melancholy of Polish skies. His sketches in prose and his dramas are too subtle in their profound symbolism to be appreciated by the Jewish masses, who nevertheless, worship him as one of the few great artists who had not gone over to till strange fields, richer and more remunerative. The Jewish stage in America flourishes on Gordin’s melodramas and on cheap farces; the theatrical managers are too business-like to produce such a high play as Peretz’s Golden Chain.
The St. Patrick’s Affair
Emma Goldman sent me this letter about the two Italian boys, Abarno and Carbone, who have been found guilty of trying to blow up St. Patrick’s Cathedral: “Our efforts for the Italian victims were in vain. They were found guilty, although every bit of evidence brought out how the provocateur induced, urged the act, bought the material, made the bombs, and placed them in the cathedral. But the judge said that an officer has the right to do all this since he does it not out of criminal intent but ‘out of duty.’ Imagine what sort of sentence the boys will get from this cruel machine! I was in court all day until ten that night. I was near a collapse, so terribly had the day impressed me. At midnight they telephoned to tell me of the verdict. The horror of it all to me is the material which Polgnani chose—two typical proletarian slaves, one a boot black, the other a cobbler, both underdeveloped from malnutrition, irresponsible in their youthful inexperience, like two frightened deer driven at bay. To hear the lawyers refer to them as ‘fools,’ ‘degenerates,’ ‘ignoramuses,’ without a sign of protest on their part, almost drove me crazy. I had to restrain myself from pulling them to their feet to cry out against the cruelty and humiliation of it all. Life is terrible....”
More Censorship
A book called Fewer and Better Babies: The Limitation of Offspring by the Prevention of Conception, by William J. Robinson, has just been published by the Critic and Guide Company of New York. In looking through it I came upon several mysterious blank pages, and then found a foot-note explanation to the effect that the chapters on preventives had been completely eliminated by the censorship: “Not only are we not permitted to mention the safe and harmless methods,” says the poor author; “we cannot even discuss the unsafe and injurious methods.” But it probably won’t be long before Mr. Comstock is suppressed....
The Sermon in the Depths
(Phosphorescent Gleams of Spiritual Putrefactions)
Ben Hecht
Since reading the recent translation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s book which is called The House of the Dead[1] I have suffered from a distressing ambition. I would like to go to Russia and there commit some naive atrocity and be sent to a Siberian prison for at least ten years. I have an unpatriotic prejudice and a lack of illusion concerning American criminals or I would commit my atrocity on American soil. They, American criminals, are as a rule a petty lot given to sentimental regrets and griefs and reforms and periodicals. There is nothing which reflects the smugness of a people so much as the manner and temperament of its vice. And the temperament of American vice is more distinctly and monotonously bourgeois than any of its virtues. The American citizen even when about to be hanged is unable to rise above the commonplace reactions “imagined” for his predicament by such authors as belong to the Indiana Society.
I have hunted the American criminal with the police, been present at his confession, watched him at his trial, sat with him in his death cell and listened to him recite psalms and sermonize as the nervous sheriff adjusted the noose around his neck. He is an artificial and uninteresting disappointment. It would be as extreme a punishment to spend ten years in his society behind the bars as to live in a State Street Studio Building or join the Y. M. C. A. for a similar period.
But the “prison that stood at the edge of the fortress grounds close to the fortress wall” and the primitive, debauched children who inhabited it! The swaggering monstrosities that swilled on vodka and wept at the stars. The bestial grotesques who delighted in the murder of infants for the sake of the warm blood that bathed their hands. The filthy saints and nonchalant parricides. The Herculean villains, the irritable gargoyles innocently steeped in insatiable perversion and dripping with infamy. The arrogant, sadistic artists of torture, human as children, with their pitifully crippled souls; praying before the prison ikons, stealing their comrade’s clothes and washing his feet; hating and loving with the simplicity of Pagan gods and the ramified cunning of continental diplomats. The nerveless flagellants, the heartbreaking humorists, the fierce, fanciful executioners. There’s a company for you! A purifying company in the very dregs of its depravities.
They stand alone in literature. Only Christ could have written of them as well as Dostoevsky. Was Dostoevsky dreaming of a new religion when he filled the pages with his human crucifixions? Probably not. But his artistry and his painstaking, searching minute psychology have illumined The House of the Dead so that for him who is not afraid it is as holy and human a source of inspiration as the loving sacrifices of the Nazarene Thaumaturgist.
And yet it is a simple book. There are very few writings so direct and simple, so easy to read and to understand. The terrifying lusts and passions and distorted rages make the mind quiver, but they never mystify. The harrowing morbidities pierce the intelligence like hot lances, but they never blunt or deprave the moral senses. The fierce pathos so exquisitely written, the blood-soaked restraints, the consumptive dying in his iron fetters too weak to support the weight of the little cross on his chest, the wild, inhuman humanness—they sizzle away the nerve cuticles and burn the emotions with a strange fire.
It is the peculiar paradox of reaction. I visited once a Home for Crippled Children and came away happier and cleaner. There the little misshapen bodies and the unconscious holiness of their suffering suddenly revealed to me things I had scoffingly overlooked in the popular words of accepted divines. And it is the same way with the company that writhes through the pages of Dostoevsky’s book. A more material illustration of this paradox is the very rhapsodics I have indulged in to convey what I have read. There are no rhapsodies in the book. There is no “dramatic action” at all in the book. It is the most inactive book I ever have read, barring not certain memoirs and diaries. Nothing happens in the book, yet from its start a demoralized pageant marches thunderingly across the pages, and somehow, by a psychological process it would take Dostoevsky again to reveal, lifts the spirit to heights as lofty as its itinerary is low. As for the style of its writing, there are no secrets in the art for the great Russian. And here he chooses the grim, gripping reiteration, the tragic calm and human poesy of simple words to build up his staggering effects.
What will Americans think of the book providing it becomes popular?—and it may. (The idolatrous regard born in this country for Russian art instances the possibilities of American hysteria directed in the proper channels.) The great majority of them, however—particularly those with whom I have mentioned my horror of spending ten years—will feel it incumbent upon them to be outraged, none more so than the criminal fraternity. It is perhaps stretching a point to say that even so were the highly and lowly estimable backbones of an earlier period of less comparative moribund piety outraged by the Sermon on the Mount. But there is a promising likelihood that their ectypes will never read the volume and will thus be saved or lost or whatever you will. And those who see the light from this Sermon in the Depths can effect an exclusiveness which will merit them the flattering curses and derisions of their fellow men for many sweet years to come.
The translation is by Constance Garnett and is excellently done. Mrs. Garnett, more than any linguist, has in her work conveyed the atmosphere and idiom and temperament of the Russian into English. She is responsible for the remarkable translations of Turgeniev which have carried his art unchanged into another tongue, as well as for the Dostoevsky novels. For the benefit of readers who will be puzzled by her footnote on page 11, the “Green Street” which she is unable to define is the avenue formed between two ranks of prison soldiers through which the condemned convict is wheeled and beaten. The soldiers stand armed with fresh, green sticks which flash brightly in the sun as they swish down on the naked back—hence the jocular name.
[1] The Macmillan Company, New York.