be at the same time derived out of the complex and over-burdened modern consciousness, and made natural to a community without the ability to specialize in it? Mr. Soule and other casual complainants present the problem, but discourage efforts at solution. In fact, the tenor of their criticism suggests that there is no solution-that modern art, losing thus the immediate response, the immediate relation with life, lacks power to survive. This may possibly be true-today is too early to assert or deny it, though most of us think that certain modern achievements will prove a denial of it when the next age sits in judgment on our own. But the point I wish to make is that such a mental attitude is sterile: no modern artist with fighting blood in his veins can accept it any more than a soldier can accept the finality of the enemy's numerous and powerful guns. And the critical writer who accepts it, who does not see the invitation that difficulty offers to a powerful and adventurous mind, ranges himself with the enemy instead of against him. Among the modern efforts at art-presentation which Mr. Soule deprecates are the "little reviews" and the "numerous magazines of verse," into which he looked some years ago "for the signs of greater vitality in our own literature and art." In pronouncing them "with a few exceptions precarious and unproductive," it never occurs to him to suspect the selective authority of his own mind; and as his attitude represents fairly the suspicion and inhospitality toward modern poetry of a large and highly educated and influential class, it must not pass without a protest. What would Mr. Soule do with these desperate conditions which, in his opinion, confront our poets and artists? Would he close the current exhibitions and stop the special magazines? If not, the tone of his article belies him, for it nowhere admits that these are the artist's only means of being seen or heard, and should therefore, at all hazards, be encouraged. He never offers the modern poet a fighting chance against the formidable immensities which threaten him, but implies, on the contrary, that so slight a chance is hardly worth offering. It is a strange fact that this type of critical mind has learned to take the current exhibitions of painting and sculpture, highly endowed and beprized, as a matter of course, while it still shrugs its shoulders at their exact parallel, the magazines which exhibit current poetry, and which are of course more or less "precarious" so long as they have no permanent endowment. Why do the critics and the public give the painter and sculptor this great advantage over their brother-artist the poet, unless their minds follow naturally the institutional trend and find values only where they have been long emphatically asserted in stone and mortar and constantly re-emphasized with cash? The magazines of verse which "have sprung up in dozens" during the past five years are not yet so numerous nor so rich as the current exhibitions in our various cities, which give annual prizes of from three hundred to two thousand dollars; but their aim is identical with these-to give the poet a fair start, his chance at the public; to exhibit the best work now being produced, and thereby to lead to the production of better work. I think I speak for the other special magazines as well as for POETRY in thus stating the common object. No more than the current exhibitions can they pretend to offer numerous masterpieces; if they show one now and then they, and the public as well, are fortunate. But just as Mr. Soule may find, among hundreds of negligible pictures and statues in the current exhibitions, a few which will be permanently treasured as worthy of the great age we live in, so in the files of these "precarious and unproductive magazines of verse" he will find the first appearances of poets afterwards distinguished; and also, if he is discerning enough, poems which will be cherished by coming ages as worthy of, and representative of, our own. At any rate, I would plead for a more generous and adventurous hospitality, among critical minds and critical journals, toward the effort which we are making to win for the art and the poets more public respect and recognition-something of the attention and favor so freely granted to the other arts. Any cause, in these crowded days, needs its special place and organ-a strongly concentrated effort by those who love it; and one may almost say that every one of the few special magazines represents a sacrificial effort of this kind. There may be some better way of making room for the poet and gathering his audience in this enormous and preoccupied modern world, but as yet no one has found it, nor provided the subsidy which its discovery would entail. H. Mourol Irony, Laforgue, and Some Satire IRONY, LAFORGUE, AND SOME Satire As Lewis has written, "Matter which has not intelligence enough to permeate it grows, as you know, gangrenous and rotten"-to prevent quibble, let us say animal matter. Criticism is the fruit of maturity, flair is a faculty of the rarest. In most countries the only people who know enough of literature to appreciate-i. e. to determine the value of—new productions are professors and students, who confine their attention to the old. It is the mark of the artist that he, and he almost alone, is indifferent to oldness or newness. Staleness he will not abide; jade may be ancient, flowers should be reasonably fresh, but mutton cooked the week before last is, for the most part, unpalatable. The unripe critic is constantly falling into such pitfalls. "Originality," when it is most actual, is often sheer lineage, is often a closeness of grain. The innovator most damned for eccentricity is often most centrally in the track or orbit of tradition, and his detractors are merely ignorant. The artist is in sane equilibrium, indifferent utterly to oldness or newness, so the thing be apposite to his want. The scholar, often selfish, will as a rule have little to do with contemporary letters. He plays it safe. He confines himself to what many have already approved. The journalist is left as our jury. He is often an excellent fellow, and, in that case, a scoffer at his chosen or enforced position. He says, "It is this that makes banderlog of us all." I quote his phrase quite correctly; he was speaking of journalists. He talked intelligently on many other matters, and he did not look in the least like banderlog. He looked in fact rather like the frontispiece to my edition of Leopardi. Within three weeks as many journalists-all successful and one of them, at least, at the "top of the tree"-have all said the same thing to me in slightly varying words. The journalist and his papers exist by reason of their "protective coloring." It is their job to think as their readers think at a given moment. It is impossible that Jules Laforgue should have written his poems in America in "the eighties." He was born in 1860, died in 1887 of la misère, of consumption and abject poverty in Paris. The vaunted sensitiveness of French perception, and the fact that he knew a reasonable number of wealthy and influential people, did nothing to prevent this. He had published two small volumes, one edition of each. The seventh edition of his collected poems is dated 1913, and doubtless they have been reprinted since then with increasing celerity. He is perhaps the most sophisticated of all the French poets, so it is not to be supposed that any wide public has welcomed or will welcome him in England or America. The seven hundred people in both those countries, who have read him with exquisite pleasure, will arise to combat this estimate, but no matter. His name is as well known as Mallarmé's, his writings perhaps are as widely distributed. The anthology of Van Bever and Leataud has gone into, I suppose, its fiftieth thousand. Un couchant des Cosmogonies! |