For a dream you once dreamed and forgot!”
Despite the many fine things in the present volume it is greatly inferior to the earlier Wild Earth. Every lyric in that collection was cast in the same mood and attained the same high degree of perfection. Dramatic Legends would almost make us believe that Mr. Colum has abandoned the particular type of poetry which he can write so much better than anyone else in the language.
W. T.
The Interpreters. By A. E. (Macmillan & Co.)
“The Interpreters” is a product of the present-day groping for an explanation of man’s purpose on earth as conceived by the Creator and the instrument of government—or non-government—best adapted to fulfill this purpose; as A. E. has put it, “the relation of the politics of time to the politics of eternity”. Like the rest of the world A. E. is not able to completely pierce the mist which conceals our conception of things eternal, so that this book is rather a seeking along a path illumined by the white light of a superbly analytical reasoning, and the path seems to lead somewhere.
It is A. E.’s belief that there is a spiritual law operating above all intellectual and physical laws in such a way that our affairs are linked with the vast purpose that the Creator has for His universe. This is not, however, a doctrine of fatalism, for A. E. believes we have control of our own destinies in proportion as we work in harmony with the Eternal—“I think it might be truer to say of men that they are God-animated rather than God-guided”. In this sentence he has precluded the possibility of interpreting his doctrine as a disguised fatalism.
A. E. is moving in an extremely rarified atmosphere in his discussion. To keep the book somewhere near the ground, he provides a simple mechanism. During a revolution against an autocratic world state two centuries hence a number of revolutionary leaders are brought together in a prison, where they devote the night before their death to a discussion of their ideals for the union of world politics with the spiritual Will. Each one takes a different stand as to the methods to be employed, one supporting socialism, another nationalism, a third individualism, and it is in the arguments over governmental forms that some of the finest logic comes out. The following quotation is an example, taken from Leroy’s statement for individualism: “You and I see different eternities.... It is our virtue to be infinitely varied. The worst tyranny is uniformity.”...
It is possible to call A. E. a visionary. Doubtless, “The Interpreters” was written under the press of an immense surge of inspiration, for there is much of poetical fervor in its pages. But it is for this very reason that it can hold us with the spell of its sincerity and the intensity of its philosophy. The world of the world has been inspired by visionaries, and there is a place for a vision to-day.
S. M. C.