The Fly Leaf has a definite aim and purpose in being, and that is, to get more latitude in literature written in English, and to make the work of the real writers of our end of the century better known to the great democracy of readers. These are the younger men and not the old, fogy carpenters, brought up to write moral tracts under Dr. J. G. Holland at the close of the fifties. The Fly Leaf looks to the younger generation to enable it to make its aims a force in our intellectual and literary life here in America.
There is a revolt and a quickening sense of changes and forces in the air. The work of any individual writer or worker can effect little or nothing. But the earnest enthusiasm of a little band of men and women, inspired with a belief in the impartiality of the good God and the perpetual renewal of imagination and thought and genius in every branch of the race, can set such an enthusiasm for better things and higher ideals in not merely the substance but the spirit of all our art endeavor as shall bring in a harvest of real, robust literature from every quarter of this country—largely from the most unsuspected quarters. It is this scattered interest in a nobler ideal than obtains in our contemporary periodical literature that the Fly Leaf will attempt to focus. At present nearly all the writers with any individual style and force and robustness and largeness of aim are shut out of American periodical literature, because such qualities in literature are deemed too shocking nowadays.
The Fly Leaf believes there are still readers who appreciate boldness, original conceptions, audacity of treatment, and the varied play of fancy over the whole and not merely a part of human existence. These are the qualities that gave us our standard English literature, and in the early days inspired our greatest writers in America. They must be the impulse and inspiration of today, if Americans are not content to be represented in literature by snobbish boys trying to write like “ladies,” and women who write without effort like the deuce knows what.
When we say we appeal to the younger people it must not be thought that we appeal to the children—although since they are so far more critical than their grandparents, we shall not dare to forget them altogether. We mean that we desire to enlist the interests and sympathies of our own generation—say those born sometime in the sixties and since. Our grandparents may be very good folk and quite smart in getting around today, but they were largely brought up on almanacs, and their literary tastes are narrow and eccentric without being picturesque. They belong to ancient times without holding the antique novelties of the really far away ancient times, which were really more in touch with the intellectual bustle and eager curiosity of our day than those gray years of smug Anglo-Saxon absorption in a civilization of mere bread and beer that lie immediately behind us, and still cast the chill shadow of their prurient morality over all our literature. Even some of the direct parents of this generation are a little threadbare in their craniums. They have read domestic literature all their lives and of course are incapable of thought. The stirring gray matter is found in the heads of those born not much further back, say, than ’49, the year of gold. Let us resolve to make this fin de siecle the golden age of American literature. And if there are, as I suspect there are, some belated grandparents still on earth, animated with the spirit and ideals of Milton and the Martyrs, young at heart in their enthusiasm for the truth, for the art that touches and ennobles life, and for freedom of thought and expression, these are of us also, and will gladly find in the Fly Leaf, in its burst of youth, the ideals that have always permeated robust and honest literature—especially in the old days when a man might swing or burn for an audacious pamphlet. With such old fogies we have no bone of contention. But the old fogies in petticoats, the gingerbread writers, we shall probably toss up in a blanket nine times as high as the moon—when we are not so pressed for space and time.
GREY EYES.
Brown eyes for passion and blue eyes for life,
Pink eyes and green eyes and black eyes for strife,
But the eyes of my love are grey.