A garden like a dull green cloud descended to earth, twilight skies with supple moving figures, gardens kaleidoscopic, hills covered with woods, odors of leaves and grasses, a dark abandoned slimy wolf cavern of counterfeiters, dew-laden grass, shadows, dusk, whispers, eyes in the gloom, skies pale green with faint silver stars and dark birds, night fluttering bats, gardens filled with the melody of nightingales, a little dying frog, lush river banks with wet reeds bending, mysterious wood nymph smiles, mystic rays of sunlight illuminating frail flowers, crimson morning-starred heavens, woods and streams with lithe shining bodies of humans transformed into nymphs and satyrs—a storm that almost breathes of the one in the Pastoral Symphony and Sanine in a flash of lightning is revealed apostrophizing it.
It hurts and one shrinks into one’s skeleton to think that perhaps a setting is obviously made in order to be to the spirit of voluptuous indulgence. But that feeling goes, because it is the objective thing after all—the colors and odors and atmosphere remain.
Three Women
F. Guy Davis, Chicago:
There is one kind of worker active in the life of today whose work is not often regarded in the light of art. There is a good reason for this in the fact that the work they are attempting is so vast and vague in character that many people do not even know it is being undertaken. They cannot understand effort on such a scale that the final completed work, if it is ever to be completed, will be nothing less than a new social order, a new conception of social values, actualizing itself in the shape of finer cities and grander and braver citizens on a world scale.
There are various groups of men and women in this work of reconstruction, some compactly organized, others not, some more militant in their attitude and some less so, but all tending in the same direction toward a better, freer, and fuller social life. This movement is confused and uncertain as far as a definite structural goal is concerned because of the contradictory and sometimes seemingly antagonistic elements that go to make it up. Some of the groups have specific architectural plans which they defend with the artist’s passion against all other plans, or against no plan; but the movement as a whole is pragmatic and makes its plans as it goes along, and whatever may be the outcome the aim is at a better world, a world of beauty and goodness in the deepest meaning of those terms.
If the modern feminists understood great women, which they do not often do, they would contend that there is a great significance in the fact that three women stand out prominently in this movement and in a measure at least are representative of three groups which more or less dominate the whole. Listing them according to age,—for on any other basis comparisons are difficult, each being effective in her own sphere,—Mother Jones, Emma Goldman, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn are social artists, working in different directions, yet in the same direction, now seeming to exclude each other entirely, and now, no doubt, sustaining each other in spirit across the separating gaps in the common purpose, just as old age, middle age, and youth do sometimes in life, or just as three mountains may have separate and distinct characters and yet be a part of the same range.
Old Mother Jones is a “character.” In her eighty-two years she has seen life’s storm, has lived its hope, fear, love, and hate, and has mastered it. She will die happy with the knowledge that she did her part in the fight for better things, which she may not see but which she believes are coming.
Emma Goldman is at the height of her creative effort, breaking down the stone walls of prejudice and superstition, freeing minds from the grip of the past, preparing the soil for new harvests of life and beauty. She sees mankind on the rack in the agony of a herculean struggle. Giant social forces jostle each other in their efforts for recognition in her consciousness. Her attitude toward the revolutionary movement reminds one of the picture of the Earth in Meredith’s poem Earth and Man—“Her fingers dint the breast which is his well of strength, his home of rest.” She senses the stirring of new life in the race’s womb and she fears a bit, for she sees clearly the possibilities of a tragic miscarriage or a premature birth.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn is the young Diana of the labor movement. Strong, full of hope, past the fear which accompanies all beginnings, facing the future with the courage and confidence of a youth fully launched on its career and enjoying the sense of growing understanding and power.