And—

jh.

The War, Madmen!

Honor:

Speculations in misery, forced famines, sweat shops, child labor, suppression of free speech, leaks, lynchings, frame-ups, prisons....

Protection:

Millions for munitions: Starvation for millions....

Justice:

The death sentence for no crime and without trial: Conscription.....

Freedom:

The right to be free: Prison....

Glory:

Parades, cheers, flags: Wooden limbs, blindness, widows, orphans, poverty, soldiers’ homes, asylums....

“Daybreak”

It would be easy enough to be disappointed in the last volume of Pelle the Conqueror if you did not go any deeper than the story.

It is so silent. All the people seem to be gone—all the people who passed through the other books like a dark secret procession, each carrying his story in his hands. You miss the sounds of the many, many footsteps,—the heavy footsteps of the workers, the fagged footsteps of the women, the searching footsteps of the children, and the wandering footsteps of the godforsaken, which made a dull pattern of sound behind the story of Pelle. In this book the strong confident footfall of Pelle strikes out clear against the faint fall of those who walk beside him or those who walk far off.

It is only when you have finished the book that the design of the whole story becomes clear and perfect: the design back of the life of man. In his childhood he walked with animals; in his youth he gathered to himself knowledge and those after his own heart; in his manhood he became a leader of multitudes; and then, forsaken by all, in solitude he found his own soul.

For those who wish to read it that way Pelle the Conqueror may be a labor novel. But it seems to me that through all the story Nexö has gone the stronge way of the artist and not the strict way of the reformer. Here in the last volume he leaves the labor question,—leaves the question as to whether Pelle’s cooperative workshop is the solution or whether his working-men’s homes are a success—as part of something that will work out its own fate or be worked out by the Pelles of the world. It is not something he has been teaching or solving. It is something he has been creating. Out of the drama of material poverty he has created the more profound tragedy of the poor-in-heart. And as if he could never forget them he turns to them again. With a few reluctant stories of prison life told by Pelle he makes the prison loom against our lives like “that dark mill over hell, grinding misery into crime.”

And then, so that you may never forget, he chooses—not with that mere truth which is life but with that absolute truth which is Art—the child of the lovely dreaming Hanne, whom life so ironically sacrificed, to be again a sacrifice. The story of the death of this petulant child of little airs and sudden angers, of her pathetic and furious wrestle with the ghastly memories of her life, bites into your heart and you are maddened by the brutality of the life that takes away everything before it has given anything.

I should like to tell all over again why I think this book is the novel—greater than Jean-Christophe, Jacob Stahl, or any of them.

A Blow!

Imagine what it did to us to have Harriet Monroe say in Poetry that there is too much art in Amy Lowell’s Men, Women and Ghosts? Too much art! And she is an editor and we know what kind of poems she has to read!

I can imagine a book having all sorts of too much, but art means not too much or too little of anything. How does Miss Monroe expect Amy Lowell to write, if not like Amy Lowell? She has not come the way of Masters or of Dreiser. She is really the first poet in America to express in her writing something of that leisure from which they tell us Art flowers best.

Men, Women and Ghosts is a beautiful book, full of stately measures.

James Joyce:

There isn’t time for me to write about James Joyce’s The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in this issue. It came too late from the publisher. So far as I have seen the whole comment of the reviewers has been on the background for the portrait: “the social, political, and religious life of Ireland today”, etc. But there is the portrait itself—bearing a slight resemblance to the Playboy, a strong sensitive romancer; and the painting of the portrait—spontaneous, masterly, free: the color like this: “The spell of arms and voices: the white arms of roads, their promise of close embraces and the black arms of tall ships that stand against the moon, their tale of distant nations.”

Next time I shall have something more to tell of Joyce,—something thrilling and personal.

The Price of Empire

Richard Aldington’s two poems, with their frail reticent sadness, were sent to us from the trenches. Why do poets keep on singing in a world which doesn’t value them? Why does the moon keep on shining? Surely it isn’t obligation!

Harold Bauer’s Hands

Have you ever noticed how Bauer brings his hands in when he comes out to play? He carries them as if he didn’t want to brush them against anything, for fear they would strike out music from whatever they touched. Or as if they were precious violins that might be broken.

Zuloaga

There is an exhibition of Zuloaga touring the galleries of America. If you have a chance don’t fail to see how he carries on the tradition of Spain as a place where great painters grow.