There is coming soon, to the Fine Arts Theatre—that charming Chicago home of the Irish Players and of “the new note” in drama—a play with an interesting title. It is called Change. It is to be given by the Welsh Players—which fact alone has a thrill in it. But the theme is even more compelling.
Two old God-fearing Welsh people have denied themselves of comforts and pleasures to give their sons an education. Then, when they expect to reap the benefits of the sacrifice, three unexpected and awful things happen: the student son has so fallen under the influence of modern skepticism as to be forced to abandon his father’s Calvinistic creed. The second one has become soaked with socialism and syndicalism. The third, a chronic invalid, is a Christian and a comfort; but he is killed, quite unnecessarily, in a labor conflict instigated by his brother. Then—the two old people again, alone. What can a playwright do with such a situation? Nothing, certainly, to attract a “capacity house.” But we shall be among the first of that small minority who likes thinking in the theatre to hear what Mr. Francis has to say. His theme is tremendous.
The Poetry of Alice Meynell
Llewellyn Jones
Not least among the stirring events of our present poetical renaissance are the publication of the collected editions of the works of Alice Meynell and Francis Thompson (Scribner). Spiritually akin, mutually influencing one another in material as in more subtle ways, their poetry stands in vivid contrast to the muse of our younger singers, the makers of what English critics hail as a new Georgian Age. That this difference gives them an added significance, and not as some critics have said, a lessened one, is the burden of the present appreciation of the poems of Alice Meynell. For there is a tendency for the reader who is intoxicated with poetic modernity to reason somewhat after this fashion. Here, he will say,—as indeed Mr. Austin Harrison has said of Francis Thompson—is a “reed pipe of neo-mediaevalism ... a poet of the gargoyle,” not of this modern world, and so neither in sympathy of thought or melody with us of the twentieth century, its free life and vers libre. All this, of course, because, Francis Thompson was—as is Mrs. Meynell—a child of the Catholic Church. Our supposititious reader will continue to the effect that there is no spiritual profit to be had in reading these poets when the modern attitude is to be found in such writers as W. W. Gibson, Masefield, and Hardy. But in so arguing, our reader will be entirely wrong as to the facts, and mistaken in his whole manner of approach to the realm of poetic values.
Mr. Max Eastman, in his charming book, The Enjoyment of Poetry, lays stress on the fact that poetry is not primarily the registering of emotions but the expression of keen realizations. A mathematical concept may arouse an emotion, but the poet makes the actual emotion transmissible by his selective power in picking out the focal point of the experience by which it is aroused. If poetry is essentially realization of life, then we have no longer any excuse for asking our poets to share our doctrinal views before we consent to read them. On the contrary, we should be more anxious to read Mrs. Meynell than Mr. Gibson, if we are modernists, for Mr. Gibson may, conceivably, not be able to tell us anything we have not already felt. Mrs. Meynell, on the other hand, can inform our feelings with fresh aspects of experience, and she does so abundantly. Her Catholicism is not mediaevalism, but, in so far as it is translatable into her poetry it is simply a vocabulary for the expression of certain emotional realizations of life which we modernists find it very hard to express because we do not have the necessary vocabulary. What can be more modern than the doctrine of the immanence of God and his abode in man, that much-discussed “social gospel?” Yet the following poem, not in spite of but through its Catholic terminology, heightens our realization of brotherhood and dependence one upon another. It is entitled The Unknown God:
One of the crowd went up,
And knelt before the Paten and the Cup,
Received the Lord, returned in peace, and prayed
Close to my side; then in my heart I said: