Book Discussion

The Younger Generation, by Ellen Key.[G. P. Putnam’s, New York.]

Inthe present amusing reign of boisterous propagandic voices, it is good to find a thinker who describes the exciting truth in simple terms. The many are able to catch glimpses of the truth; between glimpses, they shout and wave their inefficient arms for the enlightenment of their brothers, and for their own joy. The few see the truth steadily and, because they see steadily, become so passionately enthusiastic that they are driven to express themselves in quiet, mighty phrases. Such phrases imprint vital ideas upon the mind of the seeker, while pitiable confusion alone results from the shouts and wavings. InThe Younger Generation, Ellen Key tells simply and surely her conclusions about vital things.

Conservative judgment is at once a splendid balance and a terrific barrier in the world of ideas. Intense enthusiasm, when it displays itself, often combines blindness with sight. It has always seemed to be asking too much to expect in one person a finely balanced enthusiasm in which the conservative element does not hamper the divine qualities of youth—courage, impetuosity, and an ever-fresh perception. Not to be extravagant, but to characterize her fairly, one may say that this Swedish woman writes as if she possessed the virtues commonly attributed to both age and youth. She is vigorous, free-hearted, and calm—enthusiastic, fiery, and sane—a champion of revolution when and wherever it breaks the path for evolution.

Reaching deftly into anarchism, christianity, feminism, individualism, socialism, and other good glimpses of the truth, she secures the elements for a strangely consistent wisdom.

Parents of the new generation will feel it to be a blasphemy against life—another name for God—that the beings their love has called into existence, the beings who bear the heritage of all past generations and the potentialities of all those to come, should be prematurely torn from the chain of development. Every such link that is wrenched away from unborn experiences, from unfinished work, was a beginning which might have had the most far-reaching effects within the race.... It is not death that the men of the new age are afraid of, but only premature and meaningless death.

“Women ought not to be content until governments have been deprived of the power of plunging nations into war.”—Ellen Key doesn’t ask the ladies to fidget and whimper at afternoon teas, nor to operate upon male-kind with their verbal lancets, nor to adopt circuitous resolutions about affairs of which they know nothing; but her suggestion, here as elsewhere, is simple and practical—so very simple that the ladies will smile down upon it assomething delightfully girlish and unsophisticated. It is safe to speculate that not one of the smilers could, in her comfortable condescension, live up to this humble and powerful procedure:—“Women can always and everywhere ennoble the feelings, refine an idea of justice, and sharpen the judgment of those who come under their influence. The indirect result of this influence will then be that war will become more and more insufferable to the feelings, repugnant to the sense of justice, and absurd to the intelligence. When thus the eyes of the best among the nation are opened to the true nature of war, they will be finally opened also to the way to real, not armed, peace.” And as it is the secret and boasted and forgotten desire of every woman to influence a man, or men, these profoundly plain suggestions would seem to be sown in a fertile field. There is hope in this. Then she says, on another page: “To win over men’s brains to the idea of solidarity, that is the surest way of working for peace.” And this, being a more complex remark, will probably upset everything gained by the clarity of the preceding quotations; but it is given here to repay the time otherwise wasted by the many for whom simplicity has lost its god-like charm. Solidarity is a great idea, partly because it is something to be shouted about. But the first element in solidarity, human kindness, has never seemed “strong” to a shouting age.

One of the firm demands which Ellen Key makes in her future “Charter for Children” is “the right of all children to disinheritance; in other words, their being placed in the beneficent necessity of making full use of their completely developed powers.” After reminding us of the strenuous manners of a past age in which the children of any conquered city were dashed hideously against the walls, she claims that “the judgment upon our time will be more severe. For the people of antiquity knew not what they did, when they caused the blood of children to flow like water. But our age allows millions of children to be worn out, starved, maltreated, neglected, to be tortured in school, and to become degenerate and criminal; and yet it knows the consequences, to the race and to the community, that all this involves. And why? Because we are not yet willing to reckon in life-values instead of in gold-values.”

What a frantic rage must there be in the souls of the truly social-minded when this terrific indictment is pronounced in their hearing! But the appalling nightmare will go on until the frantic element is overcome, and the rage is focused to a point of white heat—an intense simplicity.

HERMAN SCHUCHERT.

Joseph Conrad: A Study, Richard Curle.[Doubleday, Page and Company, New York.]

“The business of criticism,” says Mr. Curle, “is to surmount thisimpassebetween conviction and the power to convince.” Judged by this test, his study of Joseph Conrad is undoubtedly successful: it is hard indeed to imagine any reader reaching the end of it without believing that Conrad is a very great writer. A careful reading of the numerous and often lengthy quotations from Conrad’s books should alone convince the persons Mr. Curle is most anxious to convert—those who know nothing about them.

ButJoseph Conradhas two obvious faults. In the first place, Mr. Curle is quite too modest—almost haltingly so. His pages abound in such phrases as “I dare say”, “I cannot help”, “I think”, and the like. That’s all very honest, but Americans prefer the more lordly manner. One feels really, that while the critic may speak in such fashion to himself, he should give us only his conclusions—and no apologies for them to boot. In the second place, Mr. Curle seems to think that he is very brave in putting forth this book, that the critics haven’t appreciated Conrad at all, and that sincehedoes there must be a real quarrel between him and them. Now as a matter of fact this is not so. Probably no living writer has had a fraction of the hearty recognition from the best critics that Conrad has. True, he has (until six months ago) woefully lacked anything like popularity and the material rewards it brings—but very few of those whose opinion carries weight will hesitate to agree with most of the fine things that Mr. Curle says about the author ofChance. Mr. Curle’s attitude simply arouses unfriendly antagonism on the part of his readers who know and love their Conrad.

So much for its faults. They are not of serious importance and should not obscure the really splendid qualities of Mr. Curle’s book. It abounds in acutely perceptive remarks—often extremely well put. In the course of seven chapters on Conrad’s Psychology, Men, Women, Irony and Sardonic Humour, Prose and the Artist, he piles up an overwhelming evidence of the man’s greatness. Is there a man alive, has any English novelist ever lived about whom one could wax so easily, so madly enthusiastic? True, to some Conrad does not appeal. They have never caught the glorious glamour of his pages—the solemn grandeur of his magnificent prose. Probably the surest way to win converts would be to compile a small book of extracts from his works, carefully graded according to their difficulty.

When I was still at college I was curious about Conrad. A well-meaning bookseller sold meLord Jim. I tried to read it, but fifty pages was as far as I could go. I tried again, but with even less success. Then oneday at Interlaken I found a Tauchnitz copy ofA Set of Six. Before I had quite finished the last story I lost the book—changing trains. But Conrad has never since seemed obscure to me. A beginner in French would never try to appreciate the shimmering pages of Flaubert; nor would even the Yankee farm-hand feed his baby pie. More than any living writer has Conrad needed some one topresenthim to the public. This his American publishers have tried of late to do. Mr. Curle’s book will add to their success in so far as they manage to persuade people to read it. Except for those who have begun withLord Jim,Nostromo, orChance, I have never found anyone, who, having read one book by Conrad, was content to stop there. Mr. Curle thinksNostromoConrad’s greatest work. It is now, with Europe in the throes of a bloody conflict, that one realizes more and more how Conrad’s men and women, far removed from the problems of a Wells, a Chesterton, or a Shaw—problems whichappearsuddenly to be of very little importance after all—bulk great and ever greater. There they loom—like Rodin’sBalzacagainst the glowering sky.

ALFRED KNOPF.

A Set of Six, by Joseph Conrad.[Doubleday, Page and Company, New York.]

In this first American edition of hisSet of Six, Conrad is revealed as an artistpar excellence. You find no subjective emotionalism on the part of the author in any of his six tales, in spite of their subtitles—Romantic,Indignant,Pathetic, and the like. You see in him the wistful observer of characters and situations, which he presents with impassionate objectivity, with the impartiality of a painter who lovingly draws his object, whether it is ugly or beautiful, whether it is a villain or a saint. Conrad possesses a wonderful skill in setting up a background, which, at times, appears of more importance than the plot. He makes you feel equally at home in the atmosphere of Napoleonic France and of France of the Restoration, of revolutionary Peru and of a Neapolitan amusement garden. You enjoy the tales greatly, you admire the clever craftsmanship of the story-teller, but you close the book with an empty feeling, as if you had listened to brilliant anecdotes in a bachelors’ club.

Sword Blades and Poppy Seed, by Amy Lowell.[The Macmillan Company, New York.]

In one of his letters, Byron says: “To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.” Such a confession seems strange coming from a poet, and it is a confession of quite a different character which is written on every page of Miss Lowell’s book of poems. There one finds in every line the expression of a personality which tries to realize itself and succeeds in doing so. The unity as well as the interest of the book is in this very development of a strong personality, of which a new and original aspect is revealed in every poem.

What charms us at once in this personality, and renders the reading of the book a constant enchantment, is a most wonderful imagination—an imagination at the same time creative and representative, rich, varied, overflowing with images and themes. All that life and nature offer is the domain of this imagination; it wakes up at the most unexpected moment and seizes the unseen detail, giving us an idea of the wonderful wanderings through which it must take the person fortunate enough to possess it. Now it is a temple; now a church; now a beggar; a blue scarf; the distant notes of a flute; or the nocturnal noises of a London street, which starts it on its way. At other times we find the imagination at play with itself, so to speak, creating out of nothing a historical or legendary atmosphere, or opening a philosophical vista, as inThe Great Adventure of Max Breuck,The Basket, or the poem from which the book takes its name. Each one of these poems (and several others also) has its own special atmosphere, precise in its complexity and different from all the others.

In the style itself, in the development of the subjects, one finds the same quality. It seems as if the pen were too slow to note the multiple images which offer themselves to the mind of the poet. They accumulate themselves, sometimes, in a manner not unlike that of Victor Hugo, forming long periods in which the idea is turned in all possible ways, presented from all angles and in every natural or artificial light.

It is not only the richness of the images, but their quality, which reveals the power of Miss Lowell’s imagination. We all experience at every minute of our lives an infinity of sensations of which we are more or less conscious. It might almost be said that we are poets in exactly the measure that we realize and enjoy our sensations. The real poet not only registers his sensations, but is able to awaken in the mind of his readers the sudden recollection of those visual or auditive impressions which have never before reached his consciousness. This is what often delights us inSword Blades and Poppy Seed. It gratifies us to feel that we are able to understand thesesubtle comparisons, these curious and unexpected alliances of words, such as those in the first poem of the book, where, to define certain shades of porcelains the poet speaks

Of lustres with so evanescent a sheenTheir colours are felt, but never seen.

Of lustres with so evanescent a sheen

Their colours are felt, but never seen.

Also in the first poem entitledMiscast, where she speaks of her mind as

So keen, that it nicks off the floating fringes of passers-by,So sharp, that the air would turn its edgeWere it to be twisted in flight.

So keen, that it nicks off the floating fringes of passers-by,

So sharp, that the air would turn its edge

Were it to be twisted in flight.

To help her imagination, Miss Lowell possesses a faculty which belongs only to the happy few: the gift of words. The astonishing description of arms and vases in the first poem is but one example, if one of the best, of this rare gift.

It is necessary also, in order to study thoroughly this interesting and complex personality, to mention the great dramatic quality of some of the long poems in the book. From that point of view,The Great Adventure of Max Breuckseems to me the most interesting. And there is much to be said of the sincerity and depth of sentiment in such poems asA Gift,Stupidity,Patience,Absence. All these short poems have something unique about them and constitute one of the greatest charms, and an important part of the value, of the book. It is almost incredible that a little poem likeObligation, for example, should contain such a world of thought and restrained sentiment in its ten short lines. I have chosen this poem as the type of this genre, because it characterizes perhaps better than any other this very special trait of Miss Lowell’s talent:

Hold your apron wideThat I may pour my gifts into it,So that scarcely shall your two arms hinder themFrom falling to the ground.I would pour them upon youAnd cover you,For greatly do I feel this needOf giving you something,Even these poor things.Dearest of my heart.

Hold your apron wideThat I may pour my gifts into it,So that scarcely shall your two arms hinder themFrom falling to the ground.

Hold your apron wide

That I may pour my gifts into it,

So that scarcely shall your two arms hinder them

From falling to the ground.

I would pour them upon youAnd cover you,For greatly do I feel this needOf giving you something,Even these poor things.

I would pour them upon you

And cover you,

For greatly do I feel this need

Of giving you something,

Even these poor things.

Dearest of my heart.

There is, in these few lines, a simplicity so naive, a sincerity so complete, and at the same time such an intensity of feeling, that we almost feel while reading it as if we were composing it ourselves. And everybody knows that this is the mark of genius. It is rare to attain such perfection in thought and in form as we find in these short poems, which stand on their stems, straight and pure, like wild flowers opening their hearts to the sun.

I should like, in conclusion, to speak of the very new and effectiveattempts of the author in the free use of all possible rhythms. The preface presents the author’s point of view, but I may add that she has been especially skilful in the adaptation of the rhythms to the subjects, a thing which requires great poetic tact and musical sense. To study this side of the book would carry us too far, for to do it properly a long article written especially on the subject would be necessary.

To those who love poetry, and who are at the same time interested in the progress of new schools, this book must be of the greatest value.

MAGDELAINE CARRET.

Achievement, by E. Temple Thurston.[D. Appleton and Company, New York.]

“Every man knows himself; but there are few women with all their experience of men who act as if they knew anything about them.” “For it is only in moments that men are dispassionate about women, while half their lives through women are being dispassionate about men.” Why is it that such glistening generalities prove invariably attractive to the “general reader”? Perhaps the poor maligned g. r. fancies he is getting “tips” on the values of his neighbors’ lives, or interminable “good leads” as to his own adventures. Perhaps the fatuous distinctions merely tickle the sex-vanity. Undoubtedly the same word-wisdom, offered in regard to mankind and without the alluring distinction between man and woman, would secure but half the attention. This attention seems no whit slackened if the generalities are manifestly unfair by reason of their fealty to traditionalism, as Mr. Thurston’s statements of this ilk are apt to be.

The foregoing generality is not unfair to Mr. Thurston, since this attractive bait is offered without stint in his latest novelAchievement. In fact, the theme of the book is that ancient perennial among popular themes: the conflict between a man and his loves; in this case finding its redemption from the usual in that the protagonist is the man’s work rather than the man.

Yet, in spite of these sops to Cerberus, the book does not hold. It is but another of the multiplying outputs of today which are interesting to the critic alone, and to him only as a study in the pathology of the creative instinct. The lay-reader will find himself nodding over the crucial scenes or will lose his place time and again, if he persist in reading to the end. If a sense of justice will not permit him to judge the whole by a part, his persistence is tribute only to the undeniable sincerity of aim felt throughout the work. A stronger tribute, of course, is the mere length of this review; the fact, that is, that whatever of critic be in the reading mind is drawn to reiterate questions and puzzle over their answer, as to the reason for thefalling short of this novel from the better standards, manifestly striven after.

The reader who does concern himself, then, withAchievementwill be puzzled, perhaps irritated, by the insistent question: “But what is the matter?” There is a certain mastery of words; there is honesty and sensitiveness of treatment, to a degree beyond the usual; moreover, side by side with the theme proper, is carried a sympathetic and reverent revelation of the mind of a creative artist, in this case, a painter; a study alone sufficient to redeem the work from the stigma of triteness. These qualities should carry any novel into favor at least; might be expected to overshadow the noticeable unevenness of work, astonishing in an author of E. Temple Thurston’s apprenticeship. But the book fails to convince. The only lasting impression it leaves is the question, “Why inadequate?”

Perhaps the answer lies in the inadequacy of the theme itself. This may be voiced, in both its major and minor keys, through Mr. Thurston’s own words, “For as it is the tragedy of women when the romance of love is gone from them, so it is the tragedy of men, when their work is done.” Had the author juggled the words of that sentence a bit—had it read so: “The realization that the romance of love has gone out from one’s life is no more a tragedy than the instant when one knows that his work is done”; could the author have conceived this theme, the subject of achievement would have compelled a more worthy treatment. Had he been able to think of women and men as alike potent, whether creators or lovers, then his picture of the creator in Richard Furlong fertilized by the lover in him might have been adequate.

The greatest need of today is a pronoun of the common gender. It is beginning to be recognized that the generation now growing up to face the ultimate issues of living is one which will declare that spiritual experience is basically an unsexed phenomenon. Woman of today has been heard to declare that whatever charge can be made about man’s potentialities, even his propensities, can be charged alike to the woman. This is no meaningless attitude. Neither is it naive nor amusingly unscientific, when the young girl of the future lifts her voice and sings out, “Before she is woman or he is a man, man and woman are alike persons.” In this theorem, difficult to word, lies the fertile germ of suffrage, feminism, suffragettism, militantism, and all the other lifted voices of woman.

No one of the women of Mr. Thurston’s portrayal is of value to herself or to the lives about her, except as a woman, a slave or queen of man, his toy or his inspiration, life’s parasite. The author would answer that he is not attempting a study of woman, but of an artist achieving by means of woman. None the less, if all the women who influence his artist were drawn in as hunchbacks, we would resent the distorted picture, the hypothesis that woman is essentially hunchbacked. Thus, since all the women inAchievementare traditionally paralyzed women, we resent the generic theme ofart under influence of womanhood. In order to receive serious audience today, any portrayal of woman, indirectly or directly, must recognize that there are genuine women as there are men, who live in terms of selfhood rather than in terms of sex.

The denouement is the usual stock company curtain. However, if so many pistol shots per volume is a stipulation in the novelist’s contract, it must be conceded him that his telling of the murder is admirably simple. A more admirable simplicity is attained in the trenchant description of the murderer’s psychology after the deed. The author is to be congratulated for missing that “opportunity” for analysis, of which the usual fiction writer spins chapter after chapter, morbid, a snare to catch cheap horror and pity, a spider-web for flies.

That the scene of the last two pages should have been written once is regrettable. That these pages were not cut out hastily as soon as written is unforgivable in an author who desires so profoundly to be in sympathy with the artist who has achieved.

[Small, Maynard and Company, Boston.]

I cannot let another issue ofThe Little Reviewgo to press without some mention of Ethel Sidgwick. Last year, with a sense of worship, I readSuccession, the second volume of a trilogy devoted to the story of a boy-wonder violinist. To find such subtlety, such radiance, such art—to find such music!—in a piece of fiction was an unforgettable experience. Music has never been so richly treated in fiction—except inJean Christophe, which of course is the master work of the last years. I felt that I had never comprehended any character so fully as I did little Antoine, and I still feel that way. This year on Christmas day, as a sort of special celebration, I read the first volume,Promise. It is just as interesting, though there is not such a brilliant concentration of art in it. But isn’t there some way to make these books known? They will never be popular; but it is tragic to think of their not getting to the people who would value them. Their publishers would far rather advertise their cheap fiction than to try to force Ethel Sidgwick on a nation that does not demand good work of novelists.

Sinister Street, by Compton Mackenzie.[D. Appleton and Company, New York.]

E. Temple Thurston attracted attention here before Compton Mackenzie did, but the latter is as far ahead of him now as is Gilbert Canaan, whosePeter Homunculuscame out about the time of Thurston’sCity of Beautiful Nonsense. These three young Englishmen know how to write English prose; Mackenzie and Canaan know how to tell big stories.Sinister Streetis much too important a book to be reviewed in less than three or four pages at least. The first part of it tells of the modern man at Oxford—“a more complete account of the mind of a young man of our day than has been written previously in English, an account which presents some of the things that Thackeray meant when he complained that his public would not permit him to tell all he wished about Pendennis, and a good many more besides,” as Lucien Cary has said. It is so extremely well done that the second part of the volume—the hero’s reactions to life after Oxford—comes with a sense of forced writing. Perhaps the war had something to do with it. We shall try to review this book more at length later.

The War and Culture, by John Cowper Powys.[G. Arnold Shaw, New York.]

Among all the patriotic rubbish that has been heaped upon the book market since the outbreak of the European war, Mr. Powys’s pamphlet presents at least not dull reading. The brilliant lecturer unmasques the underlying motives of German statesmen who have accepted Machiavellian principles, “without acquiring Machiavellian subtlety.” He successfully attacks Münsterberg and other apologists for the Fatherland, who endeavor to present their country in the image of an innocent lamb dragged into the bloody struggle by greedy barbarians. Mr. Powys’ mission is a negative one, and there it ends. He falls flat as soon as he attempts to idealize and to glorify the Allies. His speculation that the present waris a struggle of ideas, of individualism versus state, of soul versus machine, is far fetched.

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