Book Discussion

Poems, by George Cronyn. [The Glebe. Albert and Charles Boni, New York.]

Iam very sorry indeed that this book arrived when most of our space was pre-empted. I need room for the sort of appreciation that I feel for these poems.

That extraordinary, delightful, and Quixotic institution,The Glebe, which insists on publishing stuff on its merits, apart from considerations of popularity, has had divine luck in finding Cronyn,—whoever he is.

For Cronyn is a poet. Not just a versifier, but a poet. His verse has a facility which does not detract from its beauty. I have encountered sheer beauty more often in his book than in any volume of modern poetry that I have read for some time.

Here is a sample:

CloudsWhence do you come, oh silken shapes,Across the silver sky?We come from where the wind blowsAnd the young stars die.Why do you move so fast, so fastAcross the white moon’s breast?The cruel wind is at our heelsAnd we may not rest.Are you not weary, fleeing shapes,That never cease to flee?The forkéd tree’s chained shadows areLess weary than we.Whither do you go, O shadow-shapes,Across the ghastly sky?We go to where the wind blowsAnd the old stars die.

Whence do you come, oh silken shapes,Across the silver sky?We come from where the wind blowsAnd the young stars die.Why do you move so fast, so fastAcross the white moon’s breast?The cruel wind is at our heelsAnd we may not rest.Are you not weary, fleeing shapes,That never cease to flee?The forkéd tree’s chained shadows areLess weary than we.Whither do you go, O shadow-shapes,Across the ghastly sky?We go to where the wind blowsAnd the old stars die.

Whence do you come, oh silken shapes,Across the silver sky?We come from where the wind blowsAnd the young stars die.

Whence do you come, oh silken shapes,

Across the silver sky?

We come from where the wind blows

And the young stars die.

Why do you move so fast, so fastAcross the white moon’s breast?The cruel wind is at our heelsAnd we may not rest.

Why do you move so fast, so fast

Across the white moon’s breast?

The cruel wind is at our heels

And we may not rest.

Are you not weary, fleeing shapes,That never cease to flee?The forkéd tree’s chained shadows areLess weary than we.

Are you not weary, fleeing shapes,

That never cease to flee?

The forkéd tree’s chained shadows are

Less weary than we.

Whither do you go, O shadow-shapes,Across the ghastly sky?We go to where the wind blowsAnd the old stars die.

Whither do you go, O shadow-shapes,

Across the ghastly sky?

We go to where the wind blows

And the old stars die.

This is just a short and rather exuberant message toLittle Reviewreaders, because I think they really deserve the pleasure of discovering Cronyn for themselves.

Songs for the New Age, by James Oppenheim. [The Century Company, New York.]

One of the phenomena of the evolution of man is the constant broadening of consciousness. We become accustomed to the sharing of our feelings with larger and larger numbers of people; our identity with the race,—and even with inanimate things,—becomes increasingly plain to us through both the findings of science and heightened emotional receptivity.

And yet this wider consciousness by no means lessens the value or quality of personality. By a splendid paradox, the more we realize our inseparability with all life the more does our selfhood become accentuated. Thus is achieved the marriage of Democracy and Individualism. We find that, in the end, the cultivation of one is the nourishing of the other. I need hardly mention that I am not alluding to that similacrum of equality: political democracy.

This must be known to appreciate the message of James Oppenheim. For it is pre-eminently as a message that these poems should be treated. They are of essential value as one of the most articulate efforts to translate that which in most people is mute.

There is an unmistakable kinship with Whitman in this work; not merely in the form,—which is here termed “polyrhythmic,”—but in the spirit, without hint of plagiarism or of abject imitation. Also we have the same breezy contempt for the petty trappings of civilization.

Here is an extract from the poem,Tasting the Earth, which has beauty as well as truth:

O dark great mother-globe so close beneath me....It was she with her inexhaustible grief,Ages of blood-drenched jungles, and the smoking of craters, and the roar of tempests,And moan of the forsaken seas,It was she with the hills beginning to walk in the shapes of the dark-hearted animals,It was she risen, dashing away tears and praying to dumb skies, in the pomp-crumbling tragedy of man....It was she, container of all griefs, and the buried dust of broken hearts,Cry of the christs and the lovers and the child-stripped mothers,And ambition gone down to defeat, and the battle overborne,And the dreams that have no waking.My heart became her ancient heart:On the food of the strong I fed, on dark strange life itself:Wisdom-giving and somber with the unremitting love of ages....There was dank soil in my mouth,And bitter sea on my lips,In a dark hour, tasting the Earth.

O dark great mother-globe so close beneath me....

It was she with her inexhaustible grief,

Ages of blood-drenched jungles, and the smoking of craters, and the roar of tempests,

And moan of the forsaken seas,

It was she with the hills beginning to walk in the shapes of the dark-hearted animals,

It was she risen, dashing away tears and praying to dumb skies, in the pomp-crumbling tragedy of man....

It was she, container of all griefs, and the buried dust of broken hearts,

Cry of the christs and the lovers and the child-stripped mothers,

And ambition gone down to defeat, and the battle overborne,

And the dreams that have no waking.

My heart became her ancient heart:On the food of the strong I fed, on dark strange life itself:Wisdom-giving and somber with the unremitting love of ages....

My heart became her ancient heart:

On the food of the strong I fed, on dark strange life itself:

Wisdom-giving and somber with the unremitting love of ages....

There was dank soil in my mouth,And bitter sea on my lips,In a dark hour, tasting the Earth.

There was dank soil in my mouth,

And bitter sea on my lips,

In a dark hour, tasting the Earth.

This is enough to make one grateful to Mr. Oppenheim. But not always plays the cosmic symphony; sometimes the spheric strains relax for a few slender lyrics to a moving-picture lady or for the tender song to Annie, the working-girl. We leave the book with the conception of a manly and impressionable personality with a healthy lust for life, a deep insight into the world-soul and his own soul (which, after all, are the same), and great power to communicate his findings to us through a plastic and peculiarly individual medium.

Charles Ashleigh.

Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre.[Mother Earth Publishing Association, New York.]

Into every generation are born certain personalities that have the gift of attracting vast multitudes within their orbit, dominating them, animating them with a single purpose, directing them to a common goal. There are other personalities more richly gifted, of more extended vision, who nevertheless live and die unknown to the greater number of their contemporaries. Aristocrats of the mind, these latter disdain to practice the arts by which popularity is gained and held. They attract, but do not seek to dominate. They persuade, but never command. Their passion is without hysteria; their moral indignation is without personal rancor. They cherish ideals, but harbor no illusions. They will gladly surrender life itself for an idea, but they will not shriek for it. Our popular leaders are not seldom led by those who seem to follow. These others advance alone. If they are followed it is without their solicitation. To say that the individualist writer and lecturer whose collected writings are now before us was such a personality may seem exaggerated praise. If so, I have no apology to offer. I only ask that, until you have read the lectures, poems, stories, and sketches which this book contains you will suspend judgment.

Voltairine de Cleyre belonged to the school of thinkers that has suffered most from the misrepresentations and misunderstanding of the unthinking crowd; the school which numbers among its adherents men like Stirner, Ibsen, and, in some aspects of his teaching, Nietzsche; the schoolthat sees hope of social regeneration only in the sovereignty of the individual and the total abolition of the state. She belonged to it because she was at once logician and poet, with a temperament abnormally rebellious against tyranny and an imagination abnormally responsive to every form of suffering.

It has often been remarked that anarchism takes root most readily in those minds that have endured most oppression. Thus Russia, the home of absolute political despotism, is also the birthplace of Bakunin, Hertzen, Kropotkin, and Tolstoy. In America, where what Mencken calls “the new puritanism” operates more oppressively than political government, it is in behalf of sex freedom that most frequent and vehement protest is heard.

In the case of Voltairine de Cleyre this reaction declared itself neither because of political nor of sexual restraint. It came about in the realm of religion. It began from the moment when, at the age of twelve, the sensitive gifted girl was placed in the hands of a Roman Catholic sisterhood, presumably that her education might be safe. For four years the young Voltairine lived at the convent of Our Lady of Lake Huron at Sarnia, Ontario, heartsick with loneliness, writhing under the padded yoke of conventual discipline, gathering within her soul that flame which was never destined to be quenched save in death. Out of that experience she came with a mind wholly emancipated from the dogmas of religion. Not long afterward she entered upon what promised to be a brilliant career as a secularist lecturer.

That a nature like hers would long confine itself to labor in the barren field of theological controversy was not to have been expected. She was too vital, too human. It is possible that the delicacy of her own health intensified her sense of the world pain. Her sympathies are not alone of the intellect but of the nerves. One feels the nerve torture of an imaginative and poetic invalid in her confession of the reasons which had drawn her to adopt the anarchist propaganda. She pictures herself as standing upon a mighty hill from which she writes:

I saw the roofs of the workshops of the little world. I saw the machines, the things that men had made to ease their burden, the wonderful things, the iron genii, I saw them set their iron teeth in the living flesh of the men who made them; I saw the maimed and crumpled stumps of men go limping away into the night that engulfs the poor, perhaps to be thrown up in the flotsam and jetsam of beggary for a time, perhaps to suicide in some dim corner where the black surge throws its slime. I saw the rose fire of the furnace shining on the blanched face of the man who tended it, and knew surely, as I knew anything in life, that never would a free man feed his blood to the fire like that.I saw swart bodies, all mangled and crushed, borne from the mouths of the mines to be stowed away in a grave hardly less narrow and dark than that in which the living form had crouched ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day; and I knew that in order that I might be warm—I and you, and those others who never do any dirty work—those men had slaved away in those black graves and been crushed to death at last.I saw beside city streets great heaps of horrible colored earth, and down at the bottom of the trench from which it was thrown, so far down that nothing else was visible, bright gleaming eyes, like a wild animal hunted into its hole. And I knew that free men never chose to labor there, with pick and shovel, in that foul, sewage-soaked earth, in that narrow trench, in that deadly sewer gas ten, eight, even six hours a day. Only slaves would do it.I saw deep down in the hull of the ocean liner the men who shoveled the coal—burned and seared like paper before the grate; and I knew that “the record” of the beautiful monster, and the pleasure of the ladies who laughed on the deck, were paid for with those withered bodies and souls. I saw the scavenger carts go up and down, drawn by sad brutes and driven by sadder ones; for never a man, a man in full possession of his selfhood, would freely choose to spend all his days in the nauseating stench that forces him to swill alcohol to neutralize it. And I saw in the lead works how men were poisoned, and in the sugar refineries how they went insane; and in the factories how they lost their decency; and in the stores how they learned to lie; and I knew it was slavery made them do all this.

I saw swart bodies, all mangled and crushed, borne from the mouths of the mines to be stowed away in a grave hardly less narrow and dark than that in which the living form had crouched ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day; and I knew that in order that I might be warm—I and you, and those others who never do any dirty work—those men had slaved away in those black graves and been crushed to death at last.I saw beside city streets great heaps of horrible colored earth, and down at the bottom of the trench from which it was thrown, so far down that nothing else was visible, bright gleaming eyes, like a wild animal hunted into its hole. And I knew that free men never chose to labor there, with pick and shovel, in that foul, sewage-soaked earth, in that narrow trench, in that deadly sewer gas ten, eight, even six hours a day. Only slaves would do it.

I saw deep down in the hull of the ocean liner the men who shoveled the coal—burned and seared like paper before the grate; and I knew that “the record” of the beautiful monster, and the pleasure of the ladies who laughed on the deck, were paid for with those withered bodies and souls. I saw the scavenger carts go up and down, drawn by sad brutes and driven by sadder ones; for never a man, a man in full possession of his selfhood, would freely choose to spend all his days in the nauseating stench that forces him to swill alcohol to neutralize it. And I saw in the lead works how men were poisoned, and in the sugar refineries how they went insane; and in the factories how they lost their decency; and in the stores how they learned to lie; and I knew it was slavery made them do all this.

And against such slavery this young Amazon of the spirit (for at this time, 1887, she was only twenty-one) declared a life-long warfare. In so doing she separated herself from those who would otherwise have been her natural allies and cut off those opportunities for worldly success which must in the ordinary course of things have come to her.

Finding the cause of economic slavery not in capitalism, as do the socialists, but in the government of man by man through which capitalism is made possible, she was isolated still further from her contemporaries. Hence the obscurity in which her life was passed. Hence the fact that until her death in 1912 she lived quietly, teaching English to the newly-arrived immigrant, scattering about her the treasure of a richly-stored mind as freely as the south wind scatters the perfume it has gathered from the garden in its path. If she had lived nearer to the plane of the generally-accepted culture Voltairine de Cleyre might have gained a recognized place among the foremost women of her time.

As it was she gave us in her lectures, now for the first time offered to the public, the most comprehensive exposition of philosophical anarchism that has appeared since the days of Proudhon and Stirner.

Lilian Hiller Udell.

Evolution Old and New, by Samuel Butler. [E. P. Dutton and Company, New York.]

WhenThe Origin of Specieswas published the world grouped itself into two main camps. By far the larger of these took the attitude that Darwin was an impious propounder of disgusting and dangerous heresy. The smaller group hailed him as the bringer in of a new era.

Samuel Butler allied himself with neither group, but took the attitude of a constructive critic. In these pages he attacks contemporary Darwinism—using the term in the narrow sense—on two grounds. That it is not the novelty it is generally supposed to be, on the one hand, and that the mechanism implied by its theory is not true, on the other hand, are his main points.

In so far as Butler treats the first contention, his book is even today of value. He describes the pre-Darwinian theories of evolution, especially those of Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, and he strives to show that their explanations or provisional explanations were sometimes more near the truth than was Darwin’s over-emphasis upon the struggle for existence as the controlling factor in the evolution of species.

Butler’s own point of view is that evolution takes place in accordance with a design, and it is this part of his book that will be of least importance at the present day. He quotes Paley, the celebrated English theologian and advocate of the deified architect idea of God, to show that animal organisms do show evidences of what is, strictly speaking, design, and which cannot be referred to the ordinary Darwinian explanations.

Butler differs from Paley, however, in placing the designer not outside the cosmic flux of his working materials, but within the organism. Not God, he says, but the ancestral memory of man is the designer. The individual perishes, but his memory endures in his offspring and alters them in accordance with the lessons of ancestral experience.

We have said that this is the least valuable part of the book, and it is so for the reason that later biologists and philosophers with the biological approach have considerably enlarged the field of speculation in this particular realm. The theory of “entelechies” of Hans Driesch practically does for organisms what Butler does in his idea of unconscious memory. On the other hand, the new “imminent teleology” of Bergson gives us a new angle on the whole question of design in nature.

At the same time, however, the majority of biologists are harking back to a conception of evolution as a kind of mathematical proposition in which all is given to start with, and in which the new is neither a new design nor a spontaneous creation, but is simply a liberation from inhibition of what was always implicit in the old. And the men of this school would never consent to write a book like this of Butler’s. “To the seed pan and the incubator” is their cry. The time is not here when synthesis is either advisable or even possible, they tell us. And until we hear further from these modern experimenters the wise man will read Butler for his history and prospective,—and for his humor,—but will not be guided by his theories, which are the work, indeed, of a brilliant intellect, but one working without our new data, and without experimental backing.

Of course, the style of the book is delightful, and all who enjoy controversyand the play of dialectic should read it. Another class to whom it can be recommended is that large class of people who accept their view of evolution in the same spirit that an old lady accepts the Episcopalian creed and are twice as dogmatic over it.

Illiam Dhone.

The Social Significance of the Modern Drama, by Emma Goldman. [Richard G. Badger, Boston.]

[The points in which we disagree with the reviewer will be discussed in a coming issue.—The Editor.]

There is an element of the keenest adventure in one’s first meeting with a great personality, whether that encounter be in body or through the medium of the written word. In the case of Emma Goldman I should judge the latter to be the severer test, for on the printed page she must stand and fall by the content of her message, unaided by the glamor of personal magnetism and eloquence of the lecture platform. For my own part, I should have preferred to have met her as the fiery orator than as the purveyor of academic wares. And yet in this present performance she comes forward not in the guise of the accustomed critic—on the contrary she is very often quite uncritical—but rather as the social interpreter. In other words, Emma Goldman is here what she has always been: the propagandist, with the modern drama as her latest text.

And she has a mighty text! Because “any mode of creative work, which with true perception portrays social wrongs earnestly and boldly, may be a greater menace to our social fabric and a more powerful inspiration than the wildest harangue of the soapbox orator,” she has chosen the drama as the fittest medium “to arouse the intellectuals of this country, to make them realize their relation to the people, to the social unrest permeating the atmosphere.” The great iconoclasts of our time who have spoken through the drama—Ibsen, Strindberg, Sudermann, Hauptmann, Wedekind, Brieux, Shaw, Galsworthy, Tolstoi, Tchekhof, Gorki—she has gathered together within one pair of covers to show us that their message is her message:—Change not Compromise.

As she puts it in her foreword:

They know that society has gone beyond the stage of patching up, and that man must throw off the dead weight of the past, with all its ghosts and spooks, if he is to go foot free to meet the future.

Again and again she returns to her theme. In summarizing Ibsen’s stand:

Already inBrand, Henrick Ibsen demanded all or nothing,—no weak-kneed moderation, no compromise of any sort in the struggle for the ideal.

In praise of the author ofDamaged Goods:

Brieux is among the very few modern dramatists who go to the bottom of this question by insisting on a complete social and economic change, which alone can free us from the scourge of syphilis and other social plagues.

In connection with Yeats’sWhere There is Nothing:

It embodies the spirit of revolt itself, of that most constructive revolt which begins with the destruction of every obstacle in the path of the new life that is to grow on the débris of the old, when the paralyzing yoke of institutionalism shall have been broken, and man left free to enjoy Life and Laughter.

Those who are a bit dubious of the “Life and Laughter” that will follow the wholesale destruction of the past will have no difficulty in discovering the shortcomings of Miss Goldman’s method. They are the obvious ones which of necessity befall the single-minded propagandist:—the intrusion of dogma and platitude into the discussion, the wearying insistence upon “the moral” of each play, the uncritical attitude of too-ready acquiescence in the veracity of each dramatic picture of life, etc. Such critics might point out that the artist, in spite of Strindberg’s dictum, cannot be a mere “lay preacher popularizing the pressing questions of his time”; that insofar as he approaches art, he does not preach; that it is by virtue of this power that Hervieux, for example, is a greater artist than his better-known contemporary, Brieux. (By the way, why did Miss Goldman omit the greatest of the French social dramatists?) These critics might even throw in a word for the institutions of the past which Miss Goldman believes can be as easily shed as an outworn cloak.

But one must not be an orthodox Anarchist to recognize the superficiality of these shortcomings which are the inevitable luggage of the preacher. For Miss Goldman is a preacher. Any interpreter works in accordance with his creed. Having taken to heart the fate of Lot’s wife, Miss Goldman has turned her back fiercely upon the past. Grant her this hypothesis and she is always logical and coherent and never irrelevant. And why shouldn’t we encourage her to forge boldly ahead, disdainful of the old bondage? We need her courage, her single-mindedness, and the aim to which she has vowed them. She is not alone, for many who know her not chant the same litany. As for the danger to society that lurks in her philosophy, we must not forget that the great conservative mass is leavened slowly. And in the end it is time alone who can give the verdict—whether we shall patch up the old fabric, or destroy and begin our weaving anew.

Marguerite Swawite.

Oscar Wilde and Myself, by Lord Alfred Douglas. [Duffield and Company, New York.]

Emma Goldman gave this laconic epithet to this latest pearl of scandal-literature. Mylord is very much in earnest, hence his pitiful failure to see the humorous side of his pathetic self-spanking. The modest title of the book obviously suggests the two-fold purpose of the titular harlequin—his own aggrandizement and the dethronement of the Prince of Paradoxes. He excellently succeeds in obtaining the reverse result of his first endeavor; not even his pugilistic father, the Marquis of Queensbury, could have given him a more thorough boxing than the one he so earnestly performs over his own ears. As to his other ambition, that of vying with the laurels of Herostrates in his attempt to belittle the dead lion, we must admit his success in one point, in proving the morbid vanity of Wilde. What but the passion for titular acquaintances could have induced the author ofSalometo chum with Bosie Douglas, this burlesque snob, so utterly shallow, petty, so hopelessly stupid and arrogant?

I don’t know what to admire more: the “ethics” of the publisher or the sense of humor of the author.

Life Is a Dream, by Richard Curle. [Doubleday, Page and Company, New York.]

It is to be hoped that Richard Curle will not long remain a name unfamiliar to American readers, for he is a writer of marked and unusual talent.Life Is a Dreamis the first of his books to be published in this country, and, consisting as it does of short stories, it can scarcely find as large an audience as it deserves. For there can be no doubt that volumes of short stories have only a modest sale—Kipling and O. Henry to the contrary notwithstanding.

In Curle’s case this is a great pity, for the stories inLife Is a Dreamare every one of them remarkable and they have not been printed elsewhere. They are not what we are accustomed to; almost any magazine editor would reject them, if only because they have none of that “punch” which so largely characterizes the work of Kipling and O. Henry, not to mention the other and far smaller people. It is difficult for the man whowrites stories without “punch” to procure a hearing; the great popular magazines will have none of him; style, craftsmanship, subtle psychology, exquisite color—none of these (and Curle is a master of them all) can quite atone for lack of that predominant American quality. And that is why Richard Curle, working as he has thus far in a genre that appeals, however strongly, still to only a few, may be long in securing the recognition that is already quite his due.

There are nine stories of varying length in the present volume. They take you to the corners of the earth—London, Damascus, Spain, the West Indies, the high seas, Central America—and their spirit is well suggested in the title of the collection—La Vida Es Sueno. Truly they are such stuff as dreams are made of. Curle’s feeling for the colorful word, the precise phrase is remarkable; in a moment one feels almost bodily transported to a strange and fascinating land. And then the story is unfolded—for these are real stories and never mere impressionistic sketches. They may not be about the sort of people you are likely to number among your friends, but they are about very human folk just the same. They have a subtlety that is never too involved and an engaging frankness which is one of Curle’s greatest charms.

Old Hoskyns, almost homely in its simplicity, is a very touching tale.Going Homeis an exquisite bit of irony.The Look Out Man—slight though it is—is profoundly tragic. InA Remittance Man, little by little, like a mosaic, a shrewd, penetrating, and very convincing picture is built up of a man who has lost his grip on life. And so they go—Curle knows the people of his tales so well! He is careful never to tell you too much about them—there is ample opportunity after each narrative for pleasant speculation—but one never feels that the real story he set out to tell has not been fully told.

It is equally important that Curle knows intimately the places he chooses as settings for his stories. Most of this knowledge he has gained in his amazingly extensive travels. Aside from North America he has visited almost every corner of the earth. And yet it is none the less very remarkable—this curious ability to paint atmosphere—a talent not too often associated with those who write in English. Conrad has it, and the greater continental writers—and Curle has studied them to advantage. I should have myself to possess this same ability to make you realize the peculiar fascination of such a story asThe Emerald Seeker. It is a fine and thrilling yarn; no matter that—there are many who can tell a rattling tale. But I doubt if any could approach Curle’s masterly sketching of his milieu—a page or two, and in a very real sense you feel yourself in the heart of tropical Central America. Finally and best of all, you know that the color is never there merely for its own sake; there is always a real story to be told and to its telling the background merely adds distinction. It is difficult—tryingto show the peculiar charm and interest of Curle’s work. But once you read him, it becomes very apparent.

Richard Curle is only thirty years old. If the promise ofLife Is a Dreamis fulfilled, he should be one of the really significant writers of his day. He has traveled widely and is widely read; he knows not only men and places, but books as well—particularly the works of the great Russian and Frenchmen. Among living writers he admires especially Joseph Conrad, with whose work his own has a certain kinship. Curiously enough he has written the first adequate book on Conrad and it is shortly to be published in America. It will reveal Curle as a critic of sympathy, insight and independence. Meanwhile every lover of good fiction, everyone who cares for skillful craftsmanship in literature, and all those adventurous persons who would see strange lands and people should readLife Is a Dream.

Alfred A. Knopf.

William Morris, by A. Clutton-Brock. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]

I dislike that method which many historians pursue, treating the past as a matter of death instead of life. For a baggage of rags and a jumble of bleached bones I have no concern. Yesterday is a thing I will not consider. History is a proof of one thing only:—that circumstance is a fraud, and that personality is a durability with eternity. The soul writes its autobiography, and those used for the syllables survive the seasons and the years. Rule and custom and people who are no more than these are for the scrap heap. Night comes and swallows the dead. History is nothing except for its exceptions. Nature’s royal men we discover despite their uniforms. We note not their habiliments; they have a natural tongue and true approach and are masters of the seconds. They breathe life lustily still. These are the verities. They are descriptive not of antiquity but of the mind which is now. They show us who we are. We love them because of this. Every time we read them we embark on a new voyage, and discover to ourselves a treasure island of which hitherto we had not the slightest knowledge. Trojans of truth, they lift their spears to the central sun, to proclaim the splendor of the individual, the great reality of the Now. Through them we are made aware how rich we are, we begin to realize somewhat of our depths;they provide a new courage, give a new hope, and inspire us for the struggle ahead with the quality of an unwonted self-reliance.

I have probably gone beyond my office in making these remarks, but the temptation provided by the biography of William Morris proved so strong that I could not forego them. Here is a man of whom we cannot know too much. An artist who gave his life for art—what shall we say of him?

Mr. Brock has told a little of the man, sometimes in an interesting way, but he does not make us intimate with him. However, as he tells us in his preface, he had no pretensions. He is lucid and thoughtful, he is excellent in his criticism of Morris’s poetry, and on the whole gives us a book well worthy of an hour’s quietude. The facts given are good by way of an introduction—sufficient to send one in quest for greater knowledge of the man.

One of Nature’s henchmen, fresh, bold, Viking in the marrow, with a spirit of steel, a man for whom the sea would smile, poet, painter, stainer of glass, weaver of carpets, spinning a world with the strains of his song, socialist and revolutionist, Morris comes as a teasing wind through the dank atmosphere of nineteenth-century commercialism, daring conventions and going his way a body all soul, a majesty supreme to the last.

We get a little of the air of the man when we read these lines from theSigurd. I quote from the biography:

There was a dwelling of Kings ere the world was waxen old,Dukes were the door wards there, and the roofs were thatched with gold;Earls were the wrights that wrought it, and silver nailed the doors;Earls’ wives were the weaving women, queens’ daughters strewed the floor.And the masters of its song craft were the mightiest men that castThe sails of the storm of battle adown the bickering blast.

There was a dwelling of Kings ere the world was waxen old,

Dukes were the door wards there, and the roofs were thatched with gold;

Earls were the wrights that wrought it, and silver nailed the doors;

Earls’ wives were the weaving women, queens’ daughters strewed the floor.

And the masters of its song craft were the mightiest men that cast

The sails of the storm of battle adown the bickering blast.

One cannot but remark the manhood and courage of this. A Luxury of Life. A freedom here that would fill the winds. It is not to be wondered that such a man should chafe under the tyranny of skin-girt stupidity, and feel a loathing toward the flannel-souled people who in his time were already making machines of men and building a world around them of ugliness,—cities without bearing, without character, without mirth, without life. Cities of the dead, where ghosts might abide.

It is in the realm of art, however, that we must look for Morris would we view him in the light. Art gave the world a child who would lead it by the hand to the Princess Beautiful that the maiden should have a lover to woo. A child—yes; and a warrior too, who would do battle with any of her enemies. I would not say that he knew more of art in its relation to life than did Ruskin, Wilde, and Whistler; he was, however, far more active of the purpose. He saw that art was not a mere thing for the galleries, where Mediocrity can sniff and vaunt its conceits; for him it was serious of all nature, of the whole circle and the endless series of circles.

That which gives ear to the tongues of stones and from marble delivers its soul, he wanted Life to seek. There was a spice in art for Morris which made it dangerous for milk-sops. Art for him was a Reality; the existence around him a fraud, and Life a cowardice. He had Truth on his side; he hated shams and he joined the socialist movement because he saw here a means for their overturning. In a very interesting chapter Mr. Brock tells how Morris, after breakfasting with Burne-Jones, would go out to some street corner and lecture on socialism to a throng of workingmen, some dirty and in rags. He had his courage—this man.

There dwells in each of us a heroism of which the last has not been spoken. Carlyle was drunk with it, Emerson wrote it, Morris lived it. A great artist, but a greater man. Life for him was a cavalier extravagance—thus would he have all men live. To make the world live, we must give of our living. Breathe life into all things that they too will have manners and extend a friendship’s greetings.

For practical people Morris is still anathema; for human beings, however, he is yet a comrade in the struggle. Mr. Brock’s study of him is therefore welcome, coming as it does with fresh intelligence of his nature. His book most certainly is a thing to be read.

G. F.

Minions of the Moon, by Madison Cawein. [Stewart and Kidd, Cincinnati.]

At a glance the book seems merely a collection of unusual nursery-rhymes, but after a careful reading one finds little glimmers of poetry, likefaded flowers touched with sulphur and pressed between the leaves of a very inane volume. If you have the sublime suggestion of patience necessary to turn the leaves of the book you will rather delight in fingering the flowers. They are moon-light flowers. Mr. Cawein is at his best when he goes into his usual tremulous raptures over moon-light. His moon-light poems actually drip with slim, wistful (to use a much-abused word) color. If he could forget elfs, fairies, and mushrooms for more than a moment, Madison Cawein would reach the plateaus, if not the mountain-tips of poetry. But he can only cast out the trite child which has taken possession of him, now and then. Strange to say, though three or four of the poems in the volume are good, they do not contain a line worth quoting. Their halfbeauty lies in the ensemble. As for the rest of the book, I can best describe it by saying that one feels inclined to turn over the page.

M. B.

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