The $10,000 Play
Children of Earth: A Play of New England, by Alice Brown. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]
Frankly, I do not like the spectacle of a collection of New Englanders, well past middle age, splashing about in a puddle of sex. And that is what Children of Earth is. Of course sex is interesting—most of the time; New Englanders are interesting sometimes (especially when as skilfully drawn as Miss Brown draws them); but the combination is rather too much.
In the first place what happens to these people of Miss Brown’s play never seems of any real importance—it isn’t simply that they are unsympathetic. Nor need one believe for a moment in the old idea that in true tragedy the great must suffer. But at least either the great or the typical must, and I cannot feel that these children of earth are either. The play is well enough done; it may be compounded of fact; but I doubt if it exhibits that finer thing by far—truth. How much better work might Winthrop Ames’ money have purchased.
Alfred A. Knopf.
American Thought, by Woodbridge Riley. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]
A historical analysis of American philosophical theories, from Puritanism to New Realism, through the stages of Idealism, Deism, Materialism, Realism, Transcendentalism, Evolutionism, and Pragmatism. The work lacks the strict impartiality of a text-book, which it evidently intends to be. The author reveals a tendency to prove that American thought has developed independently of European influences; this appears to be true to a certain extent in regard to Pragmatism, as the philosophy of practicality.
The Poetry of A. E.
Collected Poems, by A. E. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]
A friend of mine once expressed pained surprise on hearing that A. E. was among the poets I delighted to read. Having just heard me dissent from occultism, he could not understand how one who did not believe in theosophy, esoteric Buddhism, or any of the many modern forms of Mumbo-jumboism could possibly take delight in a poet who, according to him, was a theosophist, or revere poems which had first appeared in a theosophical journal.
Poetry, however, is not a record of one’s beliefs; it is a record of one’s experiences; and while the existence of God may be asserted and just as easily disproved, in the medium of rhyming language, there is no question of poetry involved. But it is equally true that when a poet describes a spiritual experience, though he may draw his images from Neo-Platonic philosophy, Christian tradition or even the animatism of the primitive poets, there is no question of theological belief implied.
When, therefore, we open Mr. Russell’s book at random, as I actually did when this volume reached me, and come across the following lines, we must be blind to a wide-spread experience of mankind if we cannot see that it expresses poetic truth as well as poetic beauty:
Unconscious
The winds, the stars, and the skies, though wrought
By the heavenly King, yet know it not;
And the man who moves in the twilight dim
Feels not the love that encircles him,
Though in heart, on bosom, and eyelids press
Lips of an infinite tenderness,
He turns away through the dark to roam
Nor heeds the fire in his hearth and home.
But Mr. Russell’s mysticism—and mysticism, being an attitude rather than an intellectual belief, is something that is legitimately expressible in poetry, and is moreover something that Mr. Russell constantly and beautifully expresses—is no mere world-flight. Even the Beatific Vision he would only accept on terms becoming a man whose life is implicated in humanity. Hence, under the title of Love we find him singing:
Ere I lose myself in the vastness and drowse myself with the peace,
While I gaze on the light and beauty afar from the dim homes of men,
May I still feel the heart-pang and pity, love-ties that I would not release;
May the voices of sorrow appealing call me back to their succor again.
Ere I storm with the tempest of power the thrones and dominions of old,
Ere the ancient enchantment allure me to roam through the star-misty skies,
I would go forth as one who has reaped well what harvest the earth may unfold;
May my heart be o’erbrimmed with compassion; on my brow be the crown of the wise.
I would go as the dove from the ark, sent forth with wishes and prayers,
To return with the paradise blossoms that bloom in the Eden of light:
When the deep star-chant of the seraphs I hear in the mystical airs,
May I capture one tone of their joy for the sad ones discrowned in the night.
Not alone, not alone would I go to my rest in the heart of the love:
Were I tranced in the innermost beauty, the flame of its tenderest breath,
I would still hear the cry of the fallen recalling me back from above,
To go down to the side of the people who weep in the shadow of death.
One of Mr. Russell’s poems suggests in its very first line a lyric from Shelley’s Hellas, and the two poems form an interesting contrast between the temperaments of the poet of sentimental Platonism and this later singer who adds to Shelley’s lyric vision a firmer stationing on the substance of earth. While Shelley began on a high note of joy that
The world’s great age begins anew,
The golden years return, ...
but ends on the note of disenchantment:
O, cease! must hate and death return?
Cease! must men kill and die?
Cease! Drain not to its dregs the urn
Of bitter prophecy.
The world is weary of the past;
Oh, might it die or rest at last!
—while Shelley thus descends, Mr. Russell in The Twilight of Earth begins more or less where Shelley left off with:
The wonder of the world is o’er,
The magic from the sea is gone;
There is no unimagined shore,
No islet yet to venture on.
The Sacred Hazel’s blooms are shed,
The Nuts of Knowledge harvested.
Oh, what is worth this lore of age
If time shall never bring us back
Our battle with the gods to wage,
Reeling along the starry track.
The battle rapture here goes by
In warring upon things that die.
Let be the tale of him whose love
Was sighed between white Deidre’s breasts;
It will not lift the heart above
The sodden clay on which it rests.
Love once had power the gods to bring
All rapt on its wild wandering.
But while
The Paradise of memories
Grows fainter day by day ...
there is no need to cease from life or from aspiration on that account:
The power is ours to make or mar
Our fate as on the earliest morn,
The Darkness and the Radiance are
Creatures within the spirit born.
Yet, bathed in gloom too long, we might
Forget how we imagined light.
Not yet are fixed the prison bars;
The hidden light the spirit owns
If blown to flame would dim the stars
And they who rule them from their thrones:
And the proud sceptred spirits thence
Would bow to pay us reverence.
Oh, while the glory sinks within
Let us not wait on earth behind,
But follow where it flies, and win
The glow again, and we may find
Beyond the Gateways of the Day
Dominion and ancestral sway.
While in few or none of these poems is mystic thought absent it is never present at the expense of poetry, and many of the poems find in nature both their occasion and their material. A. E.’s vision is preeminently for the evanescent aspect of things, especially for the colors of the changes that come over earth and firmament. The poem beginning
When the breath of twilight blows to flame the misty skies,
All its vaporous sapphire, violet glow and silver gleam,
With their magic flood me through the gateway of the eyes;
I am one with the twilight’s dream.
is typical of his response to the vision of the outer world.
The same sturdy sense of actual values that leads Mr. Russell to write prose works on co-operation and nationality, seeing in these matters no less than in religious ecstasy the ground for the free life of man, is evident in the poem On Behalf of Some Irishmen not Followers of Tradition. But lest sturdy commonsense be thought a grotesque piece of praise for a poem, let me add that it is a commonsense illuminated by the purest idealism. How close to earth this idealism moves is shown in the little sketch In Connemara describing the peasant girl:
With eyes all untroubled she laughs as she passes,
Bending beneath the creel with the seaweed brown ...
and enmeshing her in the nature mysticism of her race and country.
William Morris somewhere speaks of the cultured man as one who is in sympathy with past and present and future—a contrast indeed to much latter-day doctrine—and one is reminded of the phrase by this poet who with such lyrical skill not only embodies all three for us, but knits them together in that unity which alone can bestow on man the values of life which are timeless.
Llewellyn Jones.