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....