Various Views finest poem of the decade, but he worked off a long-cherished. grudge against the imagists, hurling more adjectives at their devoted heads than one may find in all their poems. Mr. Pound especially was shown up as that son of shame, the good poet gone wrong-a dark mixer of poisons for the innocent. It might be in order to submit-if the point were not too obvious that much of Kipling, and possibly a very little of Alfred Noyes, will have the kind of permanent rank in poetry which Verdi and Massenet will doubtless hold in music, and that the Shropshire Lad must always be cherished as one of the pure singers, as exquisite in simplicity and clarity as a fine soprano voice; but that all of these, however valuable, stand outside the procession, "the movement." They are not the torch-bearers of the art, bringing a new motive and manner, passing on the flame to the future, like Tchaikovsky and Debussy and Richard Strauss in music. Probably it is too early to determine whether Masters or Sandburg, Pound or Hueffer, or any of the imagists whom Miss Lowell admires and Mr. Bynner despises, will be proved torch-bearers in this high sense. Some of us think that the wise future will accord that rank to a few of them. If not, then there are no torches aflame in the art at present, and no "movement" to talk about. But in all the talk there is something which does not quite satisfy, still less inspire. No doubt the note of partisan ardor is the proper and inevitable thing; thus have the battles of art been fought from the beginning of time, whenever and wherever art has been vital and sincere. Yet I find myself wishing for less seriousness, less dogmatism, less exactitude in the drawing of lines and definitions; and for more urbanity, more gaiety, more sense of perspective, more of that fundamental humor which recognizes that we human beings are all motes dancing in shade or sun, and that art is merely the push of certain particles toward the golden gleam of beauty. Is it not indeed, one of the true functions of art, as of religion, to keep man in his place, to rebuke his intense and absurd preoccupations with business or power, with love or war or glory, by reminding him of the infinite, revealing those vast spaces beyond the range of his marching feet, his reaching hands, his soaring spirit? Only thus, through intuition of his littleness, is he made aware of his greatness as a necessary motive in the universal scheme, and taken out of the dull and narrow range of unimaginative existence. H. M. THIS CONSTANT PREACHING TO THE MOB Time and again the old lie. There is no use talking to the ignorant about lies, for they have no criteria. Deceiving the ignorant is by some regarded as evil, but it is the demagogue's business to bolster up his position and to show that God's noblest work is the demagogue. Therefore we read again for the one-thousand-one-hundred-andeleventh time that poetry is made to entertain. As follows: "The beginnings of English poetry . . . made by a rude war-faring people for the entertainment of men-at-arms, or for men at monks' tables." This Constant Preaching to the Mob Either such statements are made to curry favor with other people sitting at fat sterile tables, or they are made in an ignorance which is charlatanry when it goes out to vend itself as sacred and impeccable knowledge. "The beginnings for entertainment"-has the writer of this sentence read The Seafarer in Anglo-Saxon? Will the author tell us for whose benefit these lines, which alone in the works of our forebears are fit to compare with Homer -for whose entertainment were they made? They were made for no man's entertainment, but because a man believing in silence found himself unable to withhold himself from speaking. And that more uneven poem, The Wanderer, is like to this, a broken man speaking: Ne maeg werigmod wryde withstondan "For the doom-eager bindeth fast his blood-bedraggled heart in his breast"-an apology for speaking at all, and speech only pardoned because his captain and all the sea-faring men and companions are dead; some slain of wolves, some torn from the cliffs by sea-birds whom they had plundered. Such poems are not made for after-dinner speakers, nor was the eleventh book of the Odyssey. Still it flatters the mob to tell them that their importance is so great that the solace of lonely men, and the lordliest of the arts, was created for their amusement. Ezra Pound 1 NOTES ON THE BOOKER WASHINGTON TRILOGY Ideas are raging through the brains of even the duskiest of the negro leaders, and one can handle for such an audience almost any large thought he thinks he understands. He can put it into negro poetry, I maintain, if he is man enough, and still have it negro poetry. But he must keep his manner bright-colored, full-throated, relaxed and tropical. By manner I do not mean dialect. There are innumerable Pullman porters who speak English in a close approach to the white man's way. But their thoughts and fancies are still straight from the jungle. I have dedicated this trilogy to the memory of Booker T. Washington. Several years ago a band of able people from Tuskegee came to the I. N. G. Arsenal of Springfield, Illinois, and sang to an audience largely black, for the benefit of their school. The leader explained in plain white-man's English, that while there were trained musicians in the company who could do the average concert thing after the manner of white people, the music department of Tuskegee was bending such skill as it had to the development of the old plantation songs and camp-meeting spirituals, as a real basis for the future music of the race. So we had the original melodies, plus brains. I have tried to assimilate their idea, in this Booker Washington memorial. Simon Legree is an Afro-American grotesque, John Brown an Afro-American hero tale, King Solomon an Afro-American jubilee song. Legree is a serious attempt to record the Notes on the Booker Washington Trilogy devil-fear that haunts the race, though it is written with a humorous close. John Brown records the race patriotism, with a flare of rebellion, King Solomon the race utopianism, with an overgrowth of the tropical. Almost any reading negro, whatever his shrewd silence during working hours, is bound to remember Uncle Tom's Cabin with gratitude, and John Brown as well. He is bound to have an infinite variety of thoughts about them, grave and gay. And negro leaders of whatever faction hope for the day when their race will be truly redeemed. They look forward to it with the same passion that moves the other idealists of the world, but with an utterly different imagina tion. Their year of jubilee is indeed distant. The King Solomon poem looks as far into the future as the Chinese Nightingale into the past, and may be considered its direct antithesis in many ways. I am conscious that Booker Washington might have looked upon the mere titles and ostensible themes of these pieces with a certain good-natured irony; and I am not attempting to commit him posthumously to any of my views of his race. He was all for common sense, and friendship with good white people. He was for self-help and the attaining of the millenium one plain step at a time. The stanza that directly applies to him is the one on King Solomon's shepherds, for Booker Washington was certainly a shepherd of the sheep. A mere incident of his shepherding was the correct art theory of his Tuskegee |