COMMENT

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MR. BOURNE ON TRAPS

R. RANDOLPH BOURNE, in a recent issue of The Dial, utters a solemn warning about Traps for the Unwary. At first, in passing, he shows the unwary artist the open and obvious traps set by such intemperates as the "philistine" W. C. Brownell and Stuart P. Sherman on one side of the road, and the "blustering" H. L. Mencken on the other. Both extremes, he says, are products of the smothering "genteel tradition," for both represent a "moralism imperfectly transcended." By a process of cancellation, he gently persuades them "to kill each other off."

Their traps, being quite conspicuous with teeth and springs on edge, have ceased, he thinks, to be a menaceeven the halt and the blind can avoid them. The real danger is a less evident trap in the dusty middle of the road, a trap set once more, but more beguilingly, by that same "genteel tradition":

Let us look for the enemy of the literary artist in America today not among the philistines or the puritans, among the animal-obsessed novelists or the dainty professors who make Mr. Mencken profane. For the deadly virus of gentility is carried along by an up-to-date cultivated public-small perhaps, but growing-who are all the more dangerous because they are so hospitable. The wouldbe literary artist needs to be protected not so much from his enemies as from his friends. Puritan and professor may agree in their disgust at the creative imagination at work in America, but it is not their hostility which keeps it from being freer and more expressive. The confusing force is rather an undiscriminating approval on the part of a public who want the new without the unsettling. The current popularity of verse, the vogue of the little theatres and the little

magazines, reveal a public that is almost pathetically receptive to anything which has the flavor or the pretension of literary art. The striving literary artist is faced by no stony and uncomprehending world. Almost anyone can win recognition and admiration. But where is the criticism that will discriminate between what is fresh, sincere, and creative and what is merely stagy and blatantly rebellious?

There we have it-the "literary artist in America" can escape traps only by putting himself under guidance--the wary guidance of the sound and superior critic: "A new criticism has to be created," etc.

Far be it from us to deny the value of sound criticism. Mr. Bourne, though somewhat over-weighted with glittering generalities, is strictly in order in keeping a watchful eye out for traps, and Miss Lowell's book on Tendencies, which he praises, is valuable, whether we agree with her conclusions or not, as an effort to clear the road and set American poetry in its proper array. The only trouble with Mr. Bourne is a natural over-emphasis of the critic's importance. The critic is important, perhaps over-important, to the public-Mr. Bourne's pathetically hospitable or pathetically contemptuous public which likes to be told what it should think; but he is not very important to the artist, that "desperate spiritual outlaw with the lust to create" whom Mr. Bourne almost intemperately longs for, withto use his own phrase "a sort of joyful perversity."

To the artist, I repeat, the critic is not very important, especially the professional critic who would soundly and sanely guide him past all manner of traps. What is important to the artist is his chance to be seen or heard, his chance

of a frugal living while he is doing his work, his chance of admission to the society of his peers, whoever these may prove to be among the dead or living. These three things the artist must have if he is not to starve physically, mentally or spiritually; and the most well-meaning and highly intellectualized criticism, though proceeding from the Delphic seat of the oracle, cannot give him one of them.

With all due deference to Mr. Bourne, are not "the little theaters and the little magazines," which he so gently deprecates, doing more to supply the essential needs of the poet and the playwright than any amount of "the new criticism" could? We have heard, during the last five years, a chorus of voices uttering criticism new and old, trained voices with every right to competence; but we have yet to hear that any of this clamor has either influenced, or especially served or hindered, any poet or playwright in doing his work. The "little theaters and little magazines," on the contrary, have greatly served him by presenting his art to his world, as they have quite incidentally-greatly served the critic by enabling him to function. Through these exhibition places the literary artist has been enabled to try out his experiments—the only process whereby he can learn. They have done a little also a very little, alas!—to help him earn his living. And they have done a good deal to introduce him to his contemporary peers, and to help him place himself among them and get from them that random violence of praise or blame which inspires him more than the most reasoned criticism of self-elected minds.

There is much truth in what Mr. Bourne says of the danger for the artist which lurks in pink-tea adulation and "the impeccable social tone" of certain quasi-literary groups. No one can deny that our good-natured American hospitality sets "an insidious trap-the terrible glamor of social patronage which so easily blunts idealism in the young prophet." Perhaps, however, it is a weak grade of idealism. that is so easily blunted, and the true prophet will survive tea and toast as of yore he survived cakes and ale, or sesame seed and Falernian.

In Mr. Bourne's terrors there may be just a hint of that ancient, deep-seated prejudice in favor of penury for a poet. With a few exceptions, the precedents would seem to be against its being an advantage. Few of the great poets of all nations had the bad luck to starve, and most of them endured without quailing "the terrible glamor of social patronage" from kings and courts, millionaires and great ladies. In fact, it is doubtful if the modern American poet or artist runs any more danger from intemperate social influences than Chaucer did, or Holbein, Shakespeare or Sophocles, Phidias or Li Po or Leonardo da Vinci.

Mr. Bourne ends his article with a definition of the kind of man who is to give us "a literary art which will combine a classical and puritan tradition with the most modern ideas." Maybe his rather formidable array of qualities hits off the prodigy-I wouldn't venture to say, because a fiveyears' intimacy with poets makes me hesitate to affirm or deny anything about them. But I feel quite sure that the

prodigy, once achieved, will not worry his mind about getting "intelligent, pertinent, absolutely contemporaneous criticism which shall be both severe and encouraging." That, in spite of Mr. Bourne, is not "the problem of the literary artist," nor will his problem be solved "when the artist himself has turned critic and set to work to discover and interpret in others the motives and values and efforts he feels in himself." He will have more important things than this to do. His problem will be, as it always has been, to get himself expressed in his art, and to get his art before

his public. And the only aid which he will recognize jet

that which forwards these ends.

"OUR CONTRIBUTORS"

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H. Mourve

Have you ever, gentle reader, been asked to squeeze yourself into about three lines of biography? If not, just try it. You will realize then how far from descriptive are the few identifying facts which are all that you can summon to mind in regard to your past history and career, or your present occupation; how little of the color and flavor of your actually rich personality these give. You might just as well write, "I have a birth-mark on my left heel," or send in a Bertillon print of your thumb.

"Will you be kind enough to tell us something about yourself to go into our contributors' column?"

Of course it is only the young, poor or obscure who have such requests forwarded to them. Thomas Hardy or Ella Wheeler Wilcox or Rudyard Kipling would never be asked