Book Discussion

Young Earnest, by Gilbert Cannan.[D. Appleton and Company, New York]

Aman “who is submissive to his emotions is not in power over himself”—so wrote Spinoza; and such a man is René Fourmy, the Peter Pan lover of Gilbert Cannan’s latest novel, who never grew up into the fact that he should not have everything he wanted. After a boyhood and youth of almost unconscious surrender to environment, he suddenly rebelled against the pretense that surrounded him and gave himself up as completely to his emotions as he had hitherto yielded himself to external circumstances. He had been educated to be a professor and had married an ambitious girl without having awakened to the meaning of life, love, or passion. His first great disillusionment came with his honeymoon, when instead of finding in his bride “the new wonders and sweet joy” of fulfilled love, they together “attained nothing but heat, hunger, and distress.”

When he could bear this relationship no longer he fled to London, cast in his lot with Ann, a girl of the slums, and became a taxi driver. Here he was happy for a time because of his savage hunger for real things, no matter if they were degrading. The crude, harsh reality of this life fascinated him until he discovered that Ann’s love was no more the fulfillment of his dreams than his wife’s had been; only its honesty had made it endurable. When he discovers that Ann is to have a child—an unwanted, unexpected child that will be like a chain binding their two lives—he is driven to a second rebellion and the ultimate rediscovery of his first sweetheart. Ann shows her anger in the vulgar, uncontrolled outbursts natural to such a woman, and finallydisappears to Canada, leaving René free to go to Cathleen. We are given to understand that at last René has attained to the happiness of his love dream, but nothing Mr. Cannan has told us warrants the belief that he might not suddenly discover that Cathleen too falls short of his vision of what real love should be and start out madly once more in pursuit of he knows not what. If he and Cathleen do finish their lives together it is safe to gamble that it will not be because René has learned to adjust himself to life but because he has met his Waterloo in Cathleen, a clever woman who wanted him and understood how to keep him.

René was a rebel against the conventions which interfered with his happiness, a dreamer, and a seeker after the Holy Grail of love. His attempts to find happiness were utterly selfish, yet honest, so that our quarrel is not with his morals but with his egotism. He never awoke to the responsibilities of life, never felt remorse for the sufferings that he caused others, never grew up to the consciousness that life was intended for something higher than the fulfillment of his enthusiastic visions, but blundered into more or less freedom where another man, perhaps equally rebellious but more scrupulous, would quietly maintain his outward equanimity and let conventional spiders weave their webs all about him.

Quarrels there will be and condemnation arising fromYoung Earnest, but will they be because readers think Mr. Cannan does not understand whereof he writes or because he is audacious enough to describe a man who would not accept shams? We may not like the subject any better than we would a painting of a maimed or ugly person, yet that objection does not destroy its art, and art it has, in an unusual degree. Only a skilled writer could depict a man doing sensual things without being a sensualist, and René was just the opposite of that. All his sins were of the spirit rather than of the flesh. His ambition in life was to find happiness at any cost. He desired love as many desire money and with as little consideration for others, and although hopelessly at odds with conventional standards and prudish morals it seems to me that the study of Young Earnest’s efforts to understand life and his own self is rather a glorious attempt, and that Gilbert Cannan has been decidedly courageous to try to reduce to printed terms the emotions, aspirations, cravings, and blunders of a young man too honest to accept deceits, yet too cowardly (or perhaps too brave) to stand by his blunders. Not a pretty story, of course, but life is seldom pretty when it is frank, and his stumbling “from one love to another” is not the expression of sensuality but rather a spiritual attempt to live out the best that was in him.

The book has many passages of beauty, many expressions of keen philosophy which seem to indicate that the author’s soul belongs to the divine side of life—not to its sordidness. So wonderfully does he reproduce mediocrity, middle-class respectability, and the vital if less commendable phases of Mitcham Mews that one is led to believe that all of life—from visions to slums—is unfolding to him, and that no matter what his subject, his penwill paint a picture that rings true. One could hardly find a more subtle task than has been accomplished inYoung Earnest—that of painting a man who was not a sensualist doing sensual things. That Mr. Cannan knew precisely what he was doing is revealed in the words that he puts into the mouth of one of his characters who describes René as being a man “simply inappropriate in a community of creatures who live by cunning.”

M. A. S.

The Encounter, by Anne Douglas Sedgewick.[The Century Company, New York]

Nietzsche—jealous, dyspeptic, wonderful—lives in these pages so vividly that the illusion of biography is attained. His dreams, his faults, his fears stand forth. Light is focussed upon the great thinker. Ludwig Wehlitz, as he is called in the novel, loves a young and beautiful girl from America—Persis Fenamy. He is rivalled in his love by two other Germans, disciples of his, but very different personally. Persis, who is a combination of loveliness and good sense, proves to be a difficult, even impossible, problem for the three philosophers. Their wooing is the basis of the work.

Such a story achieves originality at one stroke; and it is fair to say that the author’s development of this dangerous theme is fully equal to her daring. She catches the high-lights upon the soul of this curious Titan; she constructs the man as he must actually have been, and places him in circumstances of her own arrangement. His imperative genius and his characteristic childishness work out consistently together. Pedants and long-winded scholars, who know not the poet in their god, will argue that the real Nietzsche neither could nor would have waxed passionate over a lovely woman ... the book is not for them. Anne Douglas Sedgewick sees deep and imagines clearly, and her findings are authentic. Her lesser people, notably Wehlitz’s untidy Italian friend, Eleanora, and the inscrutable Mrs. Fenamy, are created with the same splendid skill and vision. This writer’s realism is not the vaunted “crude and ruthless” variety; for, although it displays life in a plain and natural manner, there is in it an intense emotional quality which always evades the camera or the microscope.The Encounteris altogether worthy.

Herman Schuchert.

Irishry, by Joseph Campbell.[Maunsel and Company, London]

Joseph Campbell holds an enviable position among the present-day Irish bards. His poems are big, vital themes, readable by every intelligent person. In his volume of lyrics—for he possesses to a remarkable degree the enchanted tongue—he takes you into every walk of life in Ireland. And what goes in regard to life and occupations in England and Ireland holds good in this country and elsewhere. He does not shun the pig-killer, the quarry-man, the mid-wife, the unfrocked, or disgraced priest, the blind man, the osier seller, or even the ragman. The characters are not put before you as repugnance personified; he makes you sympathize, admire, and even love them. You could call it a drama of characters; each one unfolded being a separate act.

How beautiful isThe Shepherd. You can see the stars, and clearly comprehend the beauty of the simile in which he compares the shepherd to the man of Chaldea. The picture of the pasture of eld looms forth like a marvelous mosaic or mural painting:

THE SHEPHERDDark against the starsHe stands: the cloudy barsOf nebulae, the constellations ringHis forehead like a king.The ewes are in the fold:His consciousness is oldAs his, who in Chaldea long agoPenned his flock, and brooded so.

Dark against the starsHe stands: the cloudy barsOf nebulae, the constellations ringHis forehead like a king.The ewes are in the fold:His consciousness is oldAs his, who in Chaldea long agoPenned his flock, and brooded so.

Dark against the starsHe stands: the cloudy barsOf nebulae, the constellations ringHis forehead like a king.

Dark against the stars

He stands: the cloudy bars

Of nebulae, the constellations ring

His forehead like a king.

The ewes are in the fold:His consciousness is oldAs his, who in Chaldea long agoPenned his flock, and brooded so.

The ewes are in the fold:

His consciousness is old

As his, who in Chaldea long ago

Penned his flock, and brooded so.

The Shepherdcan justly be compared to Sir Richard Lovelace’sTo Lucretia on Going to War. They have in common the same metallic sweetness. A companion piece in both strength of beauty and lyrical qualities isThe Mother:

Thehearthstone broods in shadow,And the dark hills are old,But the child clings to the mother,And the corn springs in the mould.And Dana moves onLuachra,And makes the world anew:The cuckoo’s cry in the meadow,The moon, and the earthly dew.

Thehearthstone broods in shadow,And the dark hills are old,But the child clings to the mother,And the corn springs in the mould.

Thehearthstone broods in shadow,

And the dark hills are old,

But the child clings to the mother,

And the corn springs in the mould.

And Dana moves onLuachra,And makes the world anew:The cuckoo’s cry in the meadow,The moon, and the earthly dew.

And Dana moves onLuachra,

And makes the world anew:

The cuckoo’s cry in the meadow,

The moon, and the earthly dew.

InThe Blind Man at the Fairthere is a truly masterly imagining of the blind one’s agony.

O to be blind!To know the darkness that I know.The stir I hear is the empty wind,The people idly come and go.. . . . . . . . . .Last night the moon of Lammas shined,Rising high and setting low;But light is nothing to the blind—All, all is darkness where they go.

O to be blind!To know the darkness that I know.The stir I hear is the empty wind,The people idly come and go.

O to be blind!

To know the darkness that I know.

The stir I hear is the empty wind,

The people idly come and go.

. . . . . . . . . .

Last night the moon of Lammas shined,Rising high and setting low;But light is nothing to the blind—All, all is darkness where they go.

Last night the moon of Lammas shined,

Rising high and setting low;

But light is nothing to the blind—

All, all is darkness where they go.

InThe Laborerhe reminds one of Whitman in lyrics. Here he speaks of the open roads, the blue hills, the tranquil skies, and the serene heavens. A beautiful passage fromThe Whelk-Gathererreads:

Where the dim sea-lineIs a wheel unbroken;Where day dawns on water,And night falls on wind,And the fluid elementsQuarrel forever.

Where the dim sea-line

Is a wheel unbroken;

Where day dawns on water,

And night falls on wind,

And the fluid elements

Quarrel forever.

What satire, profusely laden with bitter irony is contained inThe Orangeman:

His faith, ’Sixteen-Ninety;His love, none; his hope,That hell may one dayGet the soul of the Pope.. . . . . . . . . .Lives in beauty, with VenusAnd Psyche in white,And the TrojanLaocoönFor his spirit’s delight.

His faith, ’Sixteen-Ninety;His love, none; his hope,That hell may one dayGet the soul of the Pope.

His faith, ’Sixteen-Ninety;

His love, none; his hope,

That hell may one day

Get the soul of the Pope.

. . . . . . . . . .

Lives in beauty, with VenusAnd Psyche in white,And the TrojanLaocoönFor his spirit’s delight.

Lives in beauty, with Venus

And Psyche in white,

And the TrojanLaocoön

For his spirit’s delight.

Last, but not least, isThe Old Woman:

As a white candleIn a holy place,So is the beautyOf an aged face.As the spent radianceOf the winter sun,So is the womanWith her travail done.Her brood gone from her,And her thought as stillAs the watersUnder the ruined mill.

As a white candleIn a holy place,So is the beautyOf an aged face.

As a white candle

In a holy place,

So is the beauty

Of an aged face.

As the spent radianceOf the winter sun,So is the womanWith her travail done.

As the spent radiance

Of the winter sun,

So is the woman

With her travail done.

Her brood gone from her,And her thought as stillAs the watersUnder the ruined mill.

Her brood gone from her,

And her thought as still

As the waters

Under the ruined mill.

The Reader CriticWill Levington Comfort, Kingsville, Ontario:I have just had the January number.I feel as if I had found my companions. You who rejoiced in Caroline Branson and Margaret Swawite will know what one means by finding his companions.And when I came to the line of George Soule’s—“I am the greatest anarchist of you all—” the fact is I had settled for a nap by the fire, and here I am by the machine instead.I am proud of you and glad to be in the world with you all. I am sure you must feel the same about each other—for you must have been very lonely in a world that has lost the art of playing—you who play so well.I have looked long for the new voices; of late I have put every faith in the conviction that they were just behind. You will have everything in ten years. No voice from Germany, England, or France—all must come from you. The only thing that can possibly hurt you is Beauduin and his kind. They are poison and vision is not with them. I think you must belong to that generation now of the twenties—that I have felt behind me so long and so wonderfully. Again and again I have written about this new race of Americans—there is a touch of it in theJanuary Craftsmanwhich I wish you would read.You are singing it. You are of it. You ask nothing—you sing, you play. There are moments in which I caught you (you of the little book) in that wondrous naivete which is the loss of the love of self—that cosmic simplicity of the workmen of to-morrow.How dreadful is the old—“And then O night, deliberate, unlovely—”But the new which you voice, and must always voice—“In the inspired improvisation of love—”I have read your January poems to all who come to the study. I have looked with even more delight at old Walt—who opened the door for (y)our generation—the dear old pioneer. He helped to make possible, too, our acceptance of the Zarathustra man—the pillar of fire of our transition, but Walt is the pillar of cloud by day.I’m sure you’ll see my zeal for you. I have plugged through fifteen years in which every ideal of workmanship has sunk visibly in America until it can sink no lower. The great crowd is forgetting even how to read. It has lost the cohering line of expression—a series of broken pictures is enough to hold its eye. But the end is reached with the war—and the new generation which will witness the tragedy of greater human waste perhaps than the one before it, also contains the superb individuals—the few—such individuals aswenever dreamed of in our twenties. I want some time to do for you a bit on this generation of mine (the bleakest in the world). The age of advertising.... Imagine a racethat can only point to Herrick and London and Atherton and Dreiser and Watts—weakened solutions of Zola and Thackeray—except London who was great and open-souled—but lost his way. So I laugh and think of myself as born out of due time, and though just past midstream, I want to belong to the twenties again. I believe that you can become the heart of our new age of letters—if you are true; and I know you will not encounter the bleakness and the killing terrorthat we met, for the way is preparing momentarily. The glory of it all will come from your being yourselves—as you are so splendidly now. But the prison-house will close on some, and others will hear the call of the markets and others the decadence of Europe’s withered loins—and that is why I venture to ask you to hold fast to the dream—not to listen to anyone—for you haveemergedtruly.... Remember there are no others but you in the world—you alone have touched the new harmony—and it had to come from America. The New Republic is not doing it, norThe Masses, norThe Unpopular. Though they are great—they are of the old. Just to be true to your vision is all Heaven asks, and believe me one with you. I am just beginning, too. I want to belong—although I have ten years start. Great good to you—all.P. S. We have all loved the little milliner’s hat, and some of us have wept over it.ANOTHER NOTE ON PAROXYSM IN POETRYRex Lampman, Portland, Oregon:Quoting Mr. Edward J. O’Brien’s instructive article inThe Little Reviewfor January: “Paroxysm is the poetic expression of that modern spirit which finds its most notable expression in the sculpture of Meunier, the polyphonic music of Strauss, the philosophy of Bergson, and the American skyscraper.... It aims to attain and express, with the quick, keen vigor and strength of steel, the whirling, audacious, burning life of our epoch in all the paroxysm of the New Beauty.”Quoting the dictionary, a paroxysm is “any sudden, violent and uncontrollable action or emotion; a convulsion or fit.”The dictionary definition seems more nearly to apply to inspirational poetic effort, such as Poe had in mind when he advanced his theory that a long poem is an artistic impossibility; such an effort is as necessary to any truly poetic performance. Mr. O’Brien’s definition refers to a particular kind of poetic effort, which, to achieve its aims, also must be inspirational, and finds its inspiration in “modern industrial and mechanical effort,” rather than in all creation, free field for the poet of no prescribed and particular province.I am totally unacquainted with the sculpture of Meunier, almost as innocent of knowledge of Strauss’s music, and of Bergson I know but a little, but I have seen the American skyscraper clutching its black steel fingers toward the blue, amid the rat-tat-tat-tat-tat of the pneumatic riveting hammers. Here in Portland the skyscraper is pre-empting one by one our views of the evergreen hills and the snowy mountains. Perhaps the other things Mr. O’Brien enumerates as paroxyst manifestations are shutting off our views of the eternal verities of life and the silent splendors of the soul—or rather, perhaps they symbolize the materialistic ideals that are walling us away from the things of the spirit.If we accept these paroxyst manifestations as art, and keep our eyes fixed on them, surely the infinite horizon, with its never-conquered boundaries always beckoning out and on, is lost to us.But do we accept them? Beyond the skyscrapers are the quiet hills, and however we throw ourselves into the vortices of cities, however often we go down among the red-mouthed, roaring furnaces, however we may acquiesce in, and even exult in and exalt, the materialistic horrors that multiply around us like monsters in a steamy primal fen, deep in ourselves we know that all these things are vain and vanishing, and that the actual and enduring lie outside and beyond, or within ourselves. The skyscraper is a monument to the Moloch of Rent. The furnaces are those of Baal, in which we give our souls as well as those of our children for sacrifice.“The evolution of poetry is to be as rapid and terrible henceforth as material evolution,” says M. Nicholas Beauduin, as quoted by Mr. O’Brien. No, the gods will not forbid it, for it is their way to let things run their courses.Doubtless there were singers, when Babylon was building, who insisted that a new poetry was necessary to celebrate the city, with its walls and towers and the efficient wonder of its sewer system, if it had one. Perhaps these poets, blinking in the glare of the furnaces and confused by the thunder of the shops whence issued the swords and spears and war-chariots, said to each other, “These are the supremest things, the worth-while things, and we must sing of them or be out of date.” And a paroxyst school was born.But always the heart of man has yearned toward things other than the works of his hands. When the walls and towers and spears and chariots have returned to the earth from which they were fashioned, there still endured the love for those other things, and the joy in their artistic expression.The springtime, banal as it is as a poetic subject, will remain forever more pleasing to the singer and his audience than can any paroxysm, of however “scientific technique,” proclaiming in “swift, hurtling, dynamic rhythms” the clamor and clangor of an armor-plate factory or the din and danger of a textile-mill. The earth is our mother, and hers are our deepest yearnings, first and last. “She waits for each and all.”And if the paroxysts seek for power—for power that overcomes and subdues, that smites suddenly or conquers slowly, and recreates again the same—let them look aside from their banging machinery, from all materialistic illusion—from “the poetry contained in modern cities, locomotives, aeroplanes, dreadnoughts and submarines; in a stock exchange, a Wall street or a wheat pit—and behold the power and the marvel, beyond all “scientific marvels,” of Nature, singing slow or fast as suits her business, chanting her inevitable rhythms through the ages, taking back into her patient bosom all the marring excrescence that man for a little while has reared thereon. What is New York or Pittsburg but an itching pimple on the face of the earth? There is much outside incorporate limits, and beyond the sound of mill-whistles and the scream of trains. The earth is scarce disturbed as yet.“My love is like a red, red rose”—the same song that sang the enraptured Solomon, or whoever it was that indited the Canticle—will, I believe, outlast any paroxysm which records a “cinematographic vision of modern life.” This is possibly the idea of the paroxysts themselves, they to sing anew as the occasion demands, and keep their product, like that of the movies, down-to-now. But though the words of the love-song perish, some man will sing it again, for joy at sight of his beloved, when springtime urges on the rose. Sappho sang of love, and men search the sea-floor for her fragments.However, if the paroxysts wish to see their notions expressed in proper relation to all things else, let them read Walt Whitman, who had room for everything, as he lustily proclaimed, in his sturdy chants.The New Beauty: is there any such thing? Why the adjective?

The Reader Critic

Will Levington Comfort, Kingsville, Ontario:

I have just had the January number.

I feel as if I had found my companions. You who rejoiced in Caroline Branson and Margaret Swawite will know what one means by finding his companions.

And when I came to the line of George Soule’s—“I am the greatest anarchist of you all—” the fact is I had settled for a nap by the fire, and here I am by the machine instead.

I am proud of you and glad to be in the world with you all. I am sure you must feel the same about each other—for you must have been very lonely in a world that has lost the art of playing—you who play so well.

I have looked long for the new voices; of late I have put every faith in the conviction that they were just behind. You will have everything in ten years. No voice from Germany, England, or France—all must come from you. The only thing that can possibly hurt you is Beauduin and his kind. They are poison and vision is not with them. I think you must belong to that generation now of the twenties—that I have felt behind me so long and so wonderfully. Again and again I have written about this new race of Americans—there is a touch of it in theJanuary Craftsmanwhich I wish you would read.

You are singing it. You are of it. You ask nothing—you sing, you play. There are moments in which I caught you (you of the little book) in that wondrous naivete which is the loss of the love of self—that cosmic simplicity of the workmen of to-morrow.

How dreadful is the old—

“And then O night, deliberate, unlovely—”

But the new which you voice, and must always voice—

“In the inspired improvisation of love—”

I have read your January poems to all who come to the study. I have looked with even more delight at old Walt—who opened the door for (y)our generation—the dear old pioneer. He helped to make possible, too, our acceptance of the Zarathustra man—the pillar of fire of our transition, but Walt is the pillar of cloud by day.

I’m sure you’ll see my zeal for you. I have plugged through fifteen years in which every ideal of workmanship has sunk visibly in America until it can sink no lower. The great crowd is forgetting even how to read. It has lost the cohering line of expression—a series of broken pictures is enough to hold its eye. But the end is reached with the war—and the new generation which will witness the tragedy of greater human waste perhaps than the one before it, also contains the superb individuals—the few—such individuals aswenever dreamed of in our twenties. I want some time to do for you a bit on this generation of mine (the bleakest in the world). The age of advertising.... Imagine a racethat can only point to Herrick and London and Atherton and Dreiser and Watts—weakened solutions of Zola and Thackeray—except London who was great and open-souled—but lost his way. So I laugh and think of myself as born out of due time, and though just past midstream, I want to belong to the twenties again. I believe that you can become the heart of our new age of letters—if you are true; and I know you will not encounter the bleakness and the killing terrorthat we met, for the way is preparing momentarily. The glory of it all will come from your being yourselves—as you are so splendidly now. But the prison-house will close on some, and others will hear the call of the markets and others the decadence of Europe’s withered loins—and that is why I venture to ask you to hold fast to the dream—not to listen to anyone—for you haveemergedtruly.... Remember there are no others but you in the world—you alone have touched the new harmony—and it had to come from America. The New Republic is not doing it, norThe Masses, norThe Unpopular. Though they are great—they are of the old. Just to be true to your vision is all Heaven asks, and believe me one with you. I am just beginning, too. I want to belong—although I have ten years start. Great good to you—all.

P. S. We have all loved the little milliner’s hat, and some of us have wept over it.

Rex Lampman, Portland, Oregon:

Quoting Mr. Edward J. O’Brien’s instructive article inThe Little Reviewfor January: “Paroxysm is the poetic expression of that modern spirit which finds its most notable expression in the sculpture of Meunier, the polyphonic music of Strauss, the philosophy of Bergson, and the American skyscraper.... It aims to attain and express, with the quick, keen vigor and strength of steel, the whirling, audacious, burning life of our epoch in all the paroxysm of the New Beauty.”

Quoting the dictionary, a paroxysm is “any sudden, violent and uncontrollable action or emotion; a convulsion or fit.”

The dictionary definition seems more nearly to apply to inspirational poetic effort, such as Poe had in mind when he advanced his theory that a long poem is an artistic impossibility; such an effort is as necessary to any truly poetic performance. Mr. O’Brien’s definition refers to a particular kind of poetic effort, which, to achieve its aims, also must be inspirational, and finds its inspiration in “modern industrial and mechanical effort,” rather than in all creation, free field for the poet of no prescribed and particular province.

I am totally unacquainted with the sculpture of Meunier, almost as innocent of knowledge of Strauss’s music, and of Bergson I know but a little, but I have seen the American skyscraper clutching its black steel fingers toward the blue, amid the rat-tat-tat-tat-tat of the pneumatic riveting hammers. Here in Portland the skyscraper is pre-empting one by one our views of the evergreen hills and the snowy mountains. Perhaps the other things Mr. O’Brien enumerates as paroxyst manifestations are shutting off our views of the eternal verities of life and the silent splendors of the soul—or rather, perhaps they symbolize the materialistic ideals that are walling us away from the things of the spirit.

If we accept these paroxyst manifestations as art, and keep our eyes fixed on them, surely the infinite horizon, with its never-conquered boundaries always beckoning out and on, is lost to us.

But do we accept them? Beyond the skyscrapers are the quiet hills, and however we throw ourselves into the vortices of cities, however often we go down among the red-mouthed, roaring furnaces, however we may acquiesce in, and even exult in and exalt, the materialistic horrors that multiply around us like monsters in a steamy primal fen, deep in ourselves we know that all these things are vain and vanishing, and that the actual and enduring lie outside and beyond, or within ourselves. The skyscraper is a monument to the Moloch of Rent. The furnaces are those of Baal, in which we give our souls as well as those of our children for sacrifice.

“The evolution of poetry is to be as rapid and terrible henceforth as material evolution,” says M. Nicholas Beauduin, as quoted by Mr. O’Brien. No, the gods will not forbid it, for it is their way to let things run their courses.

Doubtless there were singers, when Babylon was building, who insisted that a new poetry was necessary to celebrate the city, with its walls and towers and the efficient wonder of its sewer system, if it had one. Perhaps these poets, blinking in the glare of the furnaces and confused by the thunder of the shops whence issued the swords and spears and war-chariots, said to each other, “These are the supremest things, the worth-while things, and we must sing of them or be out of date.” And a paroxyst school was born.

But always the heart of man has yearned toward things other than the works of his hands. When the walls and towers and spears and chariots have returned to the earth from which they were fashioned, there still endured the love for those other things, and the joy in their artistic expression.

The springtime, banal as it is as a poetic subject, will remain forever more pleasing to the singer and his audience than can any paroxysm, of however “scientific technique,” proclaiming in “swift, hurtling, dynamic rhythms” the clamor and clangor of an armor-plate factory or the din and danger of a textile-mill. The earth is our mother, and hers are our deepest yearnings, first and last. “She waits for each and all.”

And if the paroxysts seek for power—for power that overcomes and subdues, that smites suddenly or conquers slowly, and recreates again the same—let them look aside from their banging machinery, from all materialistic illusion—from “the poetry contained in modern cities, locomotives, aeroplanes, dreadnoughts and submarines; in a stock exchange, a Wall street or a wheat pit—and behold the power and the marvel, beyond all “scientific marvels,” of Nature, singing slow or fast as suits her business, chanting her inevitable rhythms through the ages, taking back into her patient bosom all the marring excrescence that man for a little while has reared thereon. What is New York or Pittsburg but an itching pimple on the face of the earth? There is much outside incorporate limits, and beyond the sound of mill-whistles and the scream of trains. The earth is scarce disturbed as yet.

“My love is like a red, red rose”—the same song that sang the enraptured Solomon, or whoever it was that indited the Canticle—will, I believe, outlast any paroxysm which records a “cinematographic vision of modern life.” This is possibly the idea of the paroxysts themselves, they to sing anew as the occasion demands, and keep their product, like that of the movies, down-to-now. But though the words of the love-song perish, some man will sing it again, for joy at sight of his beloved, when springtime urges on the rose. Sappho sang of love, and men search the sea-floor for her fragments.

However, if the paroxysts wish to see their notions expressed in proper relation to all things else, let them read Walt Whitman, who had room for everything, as he lustily proclaimed, in his sturdy chants.

The New Beauty: is there any such thing? Why the adjective?

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