II.
“But you don’t know life itself,” I am always saying.
I wonder what it is I mean.
I think it is something wonderful like color and sound, and something mystical like fragrance and flowers.
And something incredible like air and wind,
And something of grey magic like rain;
It is faded deserts and the unceasing sea;
It is the moving stars;
It is the orange sun stepping through blue curtains of sky,
And the rose sun dropping through black trees;
It is green storms running across greenness,
And gold rose petals spilled by the moon on dark water;
It is snow and mist and clouds of color,
It is tree gardens and painted birds;
It is leaves of autumn and grasses of spring;
It is flower forests and the petals of stars;
It is morning—yellow mornings, green mornings, red mornings, gold mornings, silver mornings, sun mornings, mist mornings, mornings of dew;
It is night—white nights, green nights, grey nights, purple nights, blue nights, moon nights, rain nights, nights that burn;
It is waking in the first of the morning,
It is the deep adventure of sleep;
It is lights on rivers and lights on pavements;
It is boulevards bordered with flowers of stone;
It is poetry and Japanese prints and the actor on a stage;
It is music;
It is dreams that could not happen;
It is emotion for the sake of emotion;
It is life for the sake of living;
It is silence;
It is the unknowable;
It is eternity;
It is death.
And only artists know these things.
The Zeppelins Over London
Richard Aldington
... The war saps all one’s energy. It seems impossible to do any creative work in the midst of all this turmoil and carnage. Of course you know that we had the Zeppelins over London? Let me give you my version of the affair.
It was just after eleven. We were sitting in our little flat, which is on the top floor of a building on the slope of Hampstead Hill. We were reading—I was savouring, like a true decadent, that over-sweet honied Latin of the early Renaissance in an edition of 1513! Could anything be more peaceful? Our window was shut—so the silence was absolute. Suddenly there was a Bang! and a shrill wail. “That was pretty close,” said I. Bang—whizz! Bang—whizz! Shrapnel from the anti-aircraft guns which are not five hundred yards from our house! (Of course, like boobies, we thought they were bombs.) I jumped up and got my coat, and grabbed the door-key. It took hours to put out the light! (All the time Bang—whizz!) It seemed interminable, that descent of those four flights of stairs, all the time with the knowledge that any second might see the whole damn place blown to hell. We could see the flashes of the guns and the searchlights as we passed the windows—they were pointed straight at us! That meant that the Zeppelin was either right overhead or coming there! Some excitement, I tell you. I shiver with excitement when I think of it. We stood at the porch for a few seconds—very long seconds—wondering what to do. You are supposed to get into the cellars, but we haven’t got cellars; and it’s very risky in the streets from the flying shrapnel. We could see the long searchlights pointing to a spot almost overhead and the little red pinpricks of bursting shells. A man came down from one of the flats—very calm, with field glasses, to have a look at the animal! Suddenly we saw it, clear over head, with shells from three or four guns making little rose-coloured punctures in the air underneath it. One shell went near, very near, the Zeppelin swerved, tilted—“They’ve got it! It’s coming down!” we all exclaimed. In the distance we could hear faint cheering. But the Zeppelin righted itself, waggled a little, and scenting danger made for the nearest cloud! Apparently a piece of shell had hit the pilot, for there was no apparent damage to be seen through the glasses. There were a few more bangs from the guns, followed by the cat squeals of the shells and the little explosions in the air. Then silence as the Zeppelin got into a cloud; the searchlights looked wildly for it, for ten minutes. Then they all went out and in the resulting darkness we could see the glow of the fires in London.
What rather detracts from our heroism is the fact that the Zeppelin had already dropped all its bombs in the middle of London, but we didn’t know it till afterwards.
I deduce these reflections. 1. That as an engine of frightfulness the Zeppelin is over-rated. And the damage it does is comparatively unimportant. 2. That it is uncultured of the Germans to risk murdering the English Imagists and ruining the only poetic movement in England, for the sake of getting their names into the papers. 3. That I notice I never go to bed now earlier than twelve, and frequently go for a walk about eleven o’clock.
I can’t of course tell you where the bombs fell, as it is strictly forbidden. Still I can say this: that no public building of any kind was touched; that it looks jolly well as if our Teutonic friends made a dead set at St. Paul’s and the British Museum; that, without exception, the bombs fell on the houses of the poor and the very poor—except for a warehouse or so and some offices; that one bomb fell near a block of hospitals, containing paralytics and other cripples and diseased persons, smashed all the hospital windows, and terrified the unhappy patients into hysterics; that, lastly, it is a damned lie to say there are guns on St. Paul’s and the British Museum—the buildings are too old to stand the shock of the recoil. Voilà!
... Remy de Gourmont is dead.... Camille de Saint-Croix also. It is hard to write of friends recently dead....
The experienced artist knows that inspiration is rare and that intelligence is left to complete the work of intuition; he puts his ideas under the press and squeezes out of them the last drop of the divine juices that are in them—(and if need be sometimes he does not shrink from diluting them with clear water).—Romain Rolland.
Portrait of Theodore Dreiser
Arthur Davison Ficke
There were gilded Chinese dragons
And tinkling danglers of glass
And dirty marble-topped tables
Around us, that late night-hour.
You ate steadily and silently
From a huge bowl of chop-suey
Of repellant aspect;
While I,—I, and another,—
Told you that you had the style neither of William Morris
Nor of Walter Pater.
And it was perfectly true ....
But you continued to occupy yourself
With your quarts of chop-suey.
And somehow you reminded me
Of nothing so much as of the knitting women
Who implacably counted stitches while the pride of France
Went up to death.
Tonight I am alone,
A long way from that Chinese restaurant,
A long way from wherever you are.
And I find it difficult to recall to my memory
The image of your large laboring inexpressive face.
For I have just turned the last page
Of a book of yours—
A book large and superficially inexpressive,—like yourself.
It has not, any more than the old ones,
The style of Pater.
But now there are passing before me
Interminable figures in tangled procession—
Proud or cringing, starved with desire or icy,
Hastening toward a dream of triumph or fleeing from a dream of doom,—
Passing—passing—passing
Through a world of shadows,
Through a chaotic and meaningless anarchy,
Under heavy clouds of terrific gloom
Or through ravishing flashes of knife-edged sunlight—
Passing—passing—passing—
Their heads haloed with immortal illusion,—
The terrible and beautiful, cruel and wonder-laden illusion of life.