wrote: "My deepest feeling is this: I have the impression of my class. The writers who have preceded me are all of the middle class. I am not interested in the same things that they are. All the moral crises of literature have been the moral crises of the middle class. ... I have rather to think of the workingman and of daily bread." But he was not interested in creating propaganda for the proletariat. His books were written, says M. Dunois, out of his own instincts and his own experiences. They were not the result of a program, but of human life-particularly his own. There is something in his work that will always bother the Gides and the middle-class littérateurs, says this radical critic. That is this profound class-consciousness with which his entire work is animated. "With Philippe as with Guillaumin it is the world of labor, so different from the old bourgeois world, which is creating a literature in its own image. The curiosity of the lettered and of the snobs may be momentarily excited by the work of a Philippe; but only the working-class will ever possess the power to understand it and to love it." W The Culture Cartoons of Will Dyson. ILL DYSON, whose vigorous labor cartoons were a striking feature of the now extinct London Daily Herald, has recently been exhibiting his anti-militaristic pictorial satires in the British capi- . tal. A critic in the London Athenaeum compares the art of Dyson with its trenchant force and "idea'd vitality," to that of Hogarth. H. G. Wells wrote an appreciation of these war cartoons in the catalog of the exhibition, expressing his conviction that no medium could be more graphic than Will Dyson's to express the horror and degradation of war. Dyson's pen is facile but sword-like in its cleanness and cruelty. In one of the most striking of his drawings, he depicts Militarism as a modern Circe, turning men and nations into bloodthirsty swine by the intransigence of her all-pervading logic. Unlike the work of many of the British cartoonists, Dyson's work is not merely anti-German but preeminently anti-militant. Dyson is a native of Australia, who developed his artistic idea from extremely modest beginnings by drawing Syndicalist and strike cartoons during the three years he contributed to the Daily Herald. His anti-war satires, no less fiery and inflamed than his earlier work, have so strongly appealed to the English public that Stanley Paul is publishing them in a volume prefaced by Mr. Wells, under the title of "Kultur Cartoons." CIRCE Of the vigorous anti-militaristic cartoons of Will Dyson, H. G. Wells has written this eulogy: "Mr. Dyson perceives in militaristic monarchy and national pride a threat to the world, to civilization and all that he holds dear, and straightway he sets about to slay it with his pencil." "Circe" is acclaimed as the greatest anti-war cartoon yet inspired by the great European conflict. A Improving Upon William TTEMPTS which have been made to simplify or popularize standard works of literature furnish material for an instructive study in things which are better left undone, notes the London Spectator, commenting on "Macbeth: Told by a Popular Novelist," a book recently published in London. "Paradise Lost" was im proved upon some years ago by a gentleman named Mull. "Canned" versions of Scott have been published. Chaucer has been modernized-evi dently upon the advice of one of our humorists who declared that the author of Canterbury Tales was a great poet but could not spell. Shakespeare has always been a victim of these literary criminals, but the present case, according to the Spectator, is too flagrant to pass uncondemned. Here is an "improvement" on Shakespeare's text, the musing of Lady Macbeth awaiting the arrival of Duncan: "With hasty steps she began to pace win. Ah!-to what wasted opportunition lead? Yet-were he here . . ties will such weak-kneed procrastina . were he here. . . ." Pausing, the muser leaned her arm against the bare stonework of the embrasure, from which the oval orifice looked out over the low-lying marshes. And in the white curve of her elbow she rested her throbbing temples.” This "popularization" of Shakespeare suggests startling possibilities for energetic "popular" novelists, but fortunately this book has not been published in the United States. It is to be hoped that our own popular novelists will not discover in it a new field of activity. R THE GREAT RUSSIAN NOVEL THE RENAISSANCE OF INTEREST IN RUSSIAN USSIA is to the young intellectuals of to-day what Italy was to the Victorians," notes Rebecca West in The New Republic. And practically all of the leading periodicals of England and France have admitted the debt of European literature to that of Russia. "The wonder of Russian literature is 110W as indisputable as the glory of Rome," enthusiastically exlaims the usually critical Rebecca West, and Norman Douglas, Hon. Maurice Baring, and Gustave Lanson, all call attention to its cultural supremacy over the literary products of all the European nations during the past century; Gustave Lanson, the distinguished French savant, contrasts, in the Revue de Paris, German culture and "Russian humanity." The victorious charm of Russian literature has conquered Occidental Europe, according to Lanson, because it has renounced the literary modes of the Occident, and has assumed the task simply of reflecting the Russian soul-"to reclothe with the beauty of art the aspirations of the national consciousness. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gorky, to cite but three names, wrote only in order to diminish human suffering. All their work is a crusade against evil, an invitation for all men to throw aside egoism, wickedness, hardness, greed. They pity the people, but without indulgence for its vices. They are severe toward the great and the wealthy, but without prejudiced calumny. Nothing in German literature, nor in any other literature, is comparable to this great wave of humanity with which the Russian novel has inundated Europe." "The spread of the Russian novel throughout the Occident marks an epoch in European civilization: it has transformed, for us especially, art and literature. Realism, naturalism, for French writers, used to mean pessimism, irony, cruelty. Goodness and idealism were ridiculed as the relics of the romantic virus. The Russians have revealed to us, have taught us anew, if you prefer, that one might be true, exact, and close to life, that one was even truer, more exact and closer to life in expressing pity, tenderness and, in a word, in being 'human.'" Supreme realism of Russian literature is for Maurice Baring, whose "Outline of Russian Literature" has just been published in the Home University Library (Holt), one of its most distinguishing characteristics. Russian literature begins in the nineteenth century-"there is in Russian literature no Middle Ages, no Villon, no Dante, no Chaucer, no Renaissance, no Grand Siècle. In spite of its being the LITERATURE youngest of all literatures, it seems to be spiritually the oldest." "In some respects it seems to have become overripe before it reached maturity. But herein, perhaps, lies the secret of its greatness, and this may be the value of its contribution to the soul of mankind. It is 'Old in grief and very wise in tears' and its chief gift to mankind is an expression, made with a naturalness and a sincerity that are matchless, and a love of reality which is unique,-for all Russian literature, whether in prose or verse, is rooted in reality-of that grief and that wisdom; the grief and wisdom which come from a great heart; a heart that is large enough to embrace the world and to drown all the sorrows therein with the immensity of its sympathy, its fraternity, its pity, its charity, and i love." an Norman Douglas presents interesting explanation of the prolixity which has rendered some of the greatest Russian novels, like Tolstoy's "War and Peace" and Dostoevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov," so difficult for Occidental readers. "Those whose ancestors have been accustomed to roam over endless plains may be supposed to have acquired a wider vision, a more restless mind." This is reflected, Mr. Douglas points out in the English Review, in Russian literature. "They like a wide grasp of their subject; they reach out too far and yet must perforce include it all. . . . It is not wilful prolixity; it is an irresistible hereditary straining after spaciousness and wide dimensions." "Whoever takes the trouble to delve a little into the imaginative writers of Russia will be astonished at many things: at their sense of technical justesse, for ex ample. That there are vignettes in the scenery of life which look best in the microscopic setting of a sonnet or even epigram; that fleeting emotions will befit tale, while whoever wishes to delineate the prose poem, compact entities the short the teeming markets of mankind and all the geographical complexities of continents must call for the Gargantuan canvas of Anna Karenina: these are surely very obvious rules. But how often are they violated by English writers! Take up the last ten novels published here, and you may wager that half of them are merely short stories which have been padded out by all sorts of preposterous methods so as to make up the requisite number of pages for a six-shilling book. A baroque, incongruous structure, this novel of ours. It is not only that we are a nation of shopkeepers, even in products of the imagination. We have been fed too long upon the literary beefsteak pies and batter-puddings of the Victorian epoch to savor the delicacy of the simple tale; moreover, writing as we do for a mythical young person-not from any scruples 197 of conscience, but simply with a view to a big provincial circulation-we are naturally restricted as to choice of subject. "There is a note of vigorous appetency in this literature; of experimentation and unconventionality-so novel that it sometimes gives us a shock (we hate being told what we did not know before); a full-blooded and warming element absent, for instance, in that of another young country, America; the joy of roving (Gorky: the typical nomad) in unexplored domains of the mind. Only a small percentage of these authors draw their inspiration from traditional Western themes, the rest are non-derivative in their work; only a very few are of wealthy stock or born in the capital, the rest are from obscure country places, poor in worldly goods but not in heart, their mentality clarified and intensified in the school of suffering. Literary Russia is not yet centralized, like France; not yet commercialized, like England." One of the chief values of the Rus our sian novel, according to the Edinburgh Scotsman, is that it possesses the strange power of "shaking up ideas." "It leaves the ordinary reader disagreeably disturbed and not quite sure if for his own comfort it would not have been better to have left alone such an unpleasant world." The same these disquieting authors who describe critic declares the Russian novel to be pessimistic than contemporary French more pessimistic than Ibsen, "more literature." Yet, in spite of these startling generalizations, the Scotch paper admits that behind the disturbing realism of Russian literature there glows a fair and beautiful spirit. Despite all the pain and anguish in the writings of Tolstoy, the Scotsman discovers "no more gentle and winning doctrine in the world of letters." And this spirit seems to pervade the work even of the most desperate of the Russian writers. sian novel is to be found the explanation "In the history and genesis of the Rusof this uniformly compassionate senti ment. There is no gainsaying the fact that Russian fiction is the outcome of the sufferings of the people. Only recently has it been written by men who themselves belonged to the masses. Tchekov was the son of a serf and Gorky the son of a laborer; but Tolstoy and Turgenev belonged to the higher social ranks. Notwithstanding this, it was from considering the misgovernment of Russia, now happily awakened to a new life, that the impulse to write came, and the common purpose was to contribute by the symbolism of the novel to an appreciation of social problems. "The Russian school of fiction is, in fact, the most democratic in Europe. It may seem strange that this should be the case in a country which up to the present time has been the most despotically gov THE AUTHOR OF "SANIN" the preface of his valuable outline, of "There is in England no complete trans- of all Russian writers. There is no Mikail Artzybashev is one of the younger and most revolutionary of Russia's novelists. His sinister masterpiece has just been published in this country. erned of all European States; but it is, England is concerned." One reason why the English-speaking world has only recently awakened to the beauties of Russian literature is the lack, as Maurice Baring notes in England's belated tribute to the supremacy of Russian literature is not without a phase of irony, in view of the fact that Germany was the first of the Occidental nations to welcome this literature, through a wealth of immediate translations of all the Russian masterpieces. A manifesto from "leading English men of letters" has recently been addressed to Russian authors, embodying an expression of the "inspiration which Englishmen of the last two generations have found in your literature." But among the signatories of this manifesto, the names of some of those most active in the attempt to create an interest in Russian letters and art, George Moore, Stephen Graham, Dr. W. L. Courtney, Rosa Newmarch, and a number of others, are strangely missing. Efforts to supply the missing translations of some of the more recent novels are numerous. Artzybashev's "Sanin" is published in this country by B. W. Huebsch. The short-stories of Anton Tchekov will shortly appear in new editions. Fisher Unwin (London) has announced a cheap edition of Andreyev's "The Red Laugh," which is said to contain some of the best descriptions of war which recent literature has produced. Concerning this. masterpiece of Leonid Andreyev, Wilfred Harvey notes in the London Globe: "Andreyev seems, indeed, to be most at home in a region of horrer, tho it is very much psychologized horror, a horror full of fine shades. He sets forth the anachronism of war as that anachronism is felt by a writer of genius. His tale is a story of war with the mask off, war as it is waged to-day. Andreyev makes no attempt to palliate, to refine. The title was suggested by a horrible incident when a shell carried off the head of an officer as his lips were twitching into a smile." R A NEW GLIMPSE AT THE MYSTERIOUS AUTHOR OF "CYNARA” ICHARD LE GALLIENNE But Victor Plarr, an old friend of once remarked that Ernest the unfortunate poet, is of the opinion Dowson had the distinction that the Dowson legend which has of having written in "Cynara" grown up since his death in 1900—a the finest poem of passion melancholy and lurid myth-has been which English poetry had produced in too greatly influenced and colored by half a century. In his memoir, pub- the atmosphere of that matchless lyric, lished as an introduction to "The the atmosphere of "madder music" and Poems of Ernest Dowson" (John Lane "stronger wine" of the "bought red Company), Arthur Symons declared mouth," and the riotous roses. In that in this lyric Dowson has epito- "Ernest Dowson, 1888-1897. Remimized himself and his whole life. "In niscences, Unpublished Letters, Mara lyric which is certainly one of the ginalia" (Laurence J. Gomme, New greatest lyrical poems of our time, York), Victor Plarr, who is librarian 'Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno of the Royal College of Surgeons of Cynarae,' he has for once said every- England, attempts to dispel this myth thing, and he has said it to an intoxi- and to depict the true character of his cating and perhaps immortal music. friend. Victor Plarr first met DowHere, perpetuated by some unique son when the latter was about twentyenergy of a temperament rarely so one years old; and their friendship conmuch the master of itself, is the song tinued until a few years before Dowof passion and the passions, at their son's pathetic death. Of Dowson's eternal war in the soul which they "last period," when the unhappy poet, quicken or deaden, and in the body in his death struggle with tuberculosis, which they break down between them." avoided his comrades, Victor Plarr has little information. But he is emphatic in denying that Dowson legend which shows him in the light of "an unpleasant sort of wastrel," and is not slow to accuse the American, Talcott Williams, as well as Arthur Symons and Holbrook Jackson of presenting Dowson in a derogatory light. The myth, according to Mr. Plarr, was born while Ernest Dowson was still in his youth. "In the years of the formation of the Dowson myth, which has now grown half diabolic, the pet was modest, charming, a boy. The Devil, a spirit of imperfect education, a rebel angel, who had refused to go through the mill, threw his shadow over our beloved poet's fame. And we, who are on the side of the Angels, refuse to give him up to the Demon, and shall die, some of us, still contesting the Dowson myth." Dowson is depicted in the intimate portrait of Victor Plarr as a charming boy, embodying the spirit as well as the faults of youth. We are informed that Dowson received no regular education "unless we count his one halfmythic year at college." "He had learned Latin from an Italian priest in a mountain village in Italypossibly Senta, a place beloved by him. At least this is the tradition as it came to me from him. In many ways he was surprisingly and refreshingly ignorant. Quite gravely once he averred to me that he supposed the Red Indians in the United States greatly outnumbered the white men, and that he hoped the natives in their war-paint would soon march on New York, destroy it, and thus break the back of transatlantic civilization! Yet he had many charming American acquaintances, and perhaps his truest admirers are in the States." Of Dowson's unhappy love for the daughter of an innkeeper, Victor Plarr refrains from speaking. And during Ernest Dowson's "last phase" (18971900), he met the dying poet only a few times. Mr. Plarr describes one of these meetings. "Once he passed me on the London pavement. . . . So ill and absent-minded, so pale and, to me, forbidding did he look, that I could not summon up courage to address him. Cui bono? Of course I am quite wrong, but we all know this state of feeling. It is useless to accuse me of being of the irritable genus. I am not unduly morbid, and who does not know what it is to slacken pace behind someone who has failed in cordiality towards one and has seemed bored by one's advances and reminders? I had no idea that Ernest Dowson was then in London or how long he would stay. He had received a facial injury, easily remediable, which may have partly accounted for his unwillingness to revisit old and faithful friends. He was musing as usual, and seemed to see nothing, his eyes almost bulging from his head. He was wrapped in a heavy coat and had a larger cigar than of old in his mouth. ERNEST DOWSON Plarr criticizes for his view of Ernest "Mr. Victor Plarr ing mists." The light on the mys Courtesy John Lane Co. MYTHS CLUSTER ABOUT HIM terious death of 199 This drawing of Ernest Dowson is by Will Rothenstein. Instead of being a decadent wastrel, Victor Plarr declares that Dowson incarnated the spirit of eternal boyhood. ex "To kill a desire, as you can, by satis- that nourishes not, and finding what relief "I cried for madder music and for stronger But when the feast is finished, and the lamps Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire: I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my Already myths had begun to cluster about him. Dowson visited the Plarrs only once after that. He disappeared from the Plarr home in abrupt and singular fashion. Mr. Plarr infers that it was only in his last period that Eri nest Dowson could have appeared as described by Guy Thorne in recently published memories of the author of Cynara: "a youthful ghost strayed And I am desolate and sick of an old passion, amongst the haunts of men. . . . Pale, emaciated, in clothes that were almost ragged, poor Ernest flittered about in search for some one with whom to talk. When he found a friend, his face would light up with a singular and penetrating sweetness that made one forget an untidiness-to use no other word that verged upon offence." This is not the Ernest Dowson Victor Plarr knew and loved, and he infers that it was scarcely the real Ernest Dowson, who has been described so sympathetically by Edgar Jepson. Holbrook Jackson, whom Victor In that poem we have a parable of the an unholy delight, in tasting the bittersweet of actions potent with remorse. They loved the cleanliness in unclean things, the sweetness in unsavory alliances; they did not actually kiss Cynara, they kissed her by the proxy of some 'bought red mouth.' It was as tho they had grown tired of being good, in the old accepted way; they wanted to experience the piquancy of being good after a debauch. Dowson had not all the symptoms of decadence, he had by no means the worst, but he had the stigmata of spiritual desolation, apart from the degradation to which it reduced him, and the inherited bodily degeneration which destroyed him at the age of thirty-three, after giving to literature half a dozen poems which must live because they are faultless interpretations of moods peculiar but real. "It may be urged against Dowson's fame that his muse was not robust, and there is no answer to such criticism. But that does not destroy the artistic value of his poetry. Poems of temperament must stand or fall by their truth to moods, however fitful and strange, and by the inevitability of their art. By such a test Dowson's poetry takes rank among permanent, if limited, verse." Like Aubrey Beardsley, Dowson had one supreme virtue, notes The Dial: "If they were not true to everything to which we demand allegiance they were true to the best thing in them. It is no piece of rhetoric that furnishes the refrain to Dowson's poem: 'I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion.' It is the precise truth. He was faithful to an ideal of art. And so was Beardsley. They literally died for it." A PANEL FOR A RESTAURANT One of the striking results of cooperation in mural decoration, this panel is said to have been subtly designed to awaken the spirit of gaiety and gustatory emulation. I COOPERATIVE MURAL DECORATION-AN ATTEMPT TO ESTABLISH DEMOCRACY IN ART IN THE great days of painting, the bottegha, school, or shop represented a number of assistants working under the direction and inspiration of a single master. "Art has always had the great masters and their pupils the founders of the great schools and shops," so we are reminded by Katherine Dreier, who calls attention to Cimabue, Bellini, Veronese, Titian, Tintoretto, Rubens and other masters of the past. "These men were leaders and their pupils or assistants had to carry out their ideas of art." But in the continuance of this system, in Miss Dreier's opinion, a great injury has been done to Art. "In modern times this (system) has grown to the extent that it is rarely that Art is considered. Instead there is taught the successful mannerisms of the successful painters of the day. But such training is detrimental to all progress in art." In March, 1913, a small group of decorative artists, under the leadership of Miss Dreier, decided to seek the principles of art along the lines of democracy, and to make a vigorous attempt to bring democracy into the realm of art. "In place of the older empiricalistic ideal of leadership heretofore held," these decorators decided to found a shop the work of which was to be based on cooperation. The first panels of the group have just been exhibited, and, to Charles H. Caffin, of the New York American, they are the work of real decorators. "No work so truly decorative, in principle as well as in accomplishment, has hitherto to my knowledge been produced in this country." In the catalog of the exhibition, Miss and a kitchen maid, altho decoration Dreier has explained the method of the is, he believes, actually the twin sister cooperative decorators. The plan gen- of architecture. "This would be quite erally runs thus: different if our best painters had any chance." "To band together a group of earnest painters who desired to express themselves in decorative art. "To take a problem - whether it be panels for a church, school, restaurant, private or public building, and to discuss it in its various phases. To study what form would best express the need of that special problem, whether abstract decoration or a more realistic form. "After discussing the problem thoroughly and agreeing on the form, the group disbands, to meet again with sketches for the problem under consideration. "The merits of these sketches come next under discussion. In case no one had succeeded in carrying out the idea to the satisfaction of all, they disband to meet again. "Should, however, several sketches meet the need, a discussion would arise as to the relative merit of each sketch, and one would be chosen or a composit made. "After the sketch had been decided on by vote, it would next be placed in the knowledge of the construction of a wall hands of the person who had the most panel. From there it would pass into the hands of the one with the finest color sense, until each member had contributed his best to the whole. "The sketches being complete, the final panels would be begun, everyone working on them, never losing sight of the beauty and oneness of the whole, which is the underlying principle of all good art." Frederick James Gregg, in a note on the general question of decoration in America, which is also published in the same catalog, compares mural decoration in this country to a drudge There are plenty of buildings to be decorated. But, as Mr. Gregg analyzes the situation, imagination and talent are neglected, in order that dullness and mediocrity may not be inconvenienced. "The politics of the studio is rampant. So able artists stick to easel painting, being tired of struggling against those who are entrenched in power and influence." The value of the new movement for cooperative mural decoration, this critic believes, is that it will tend to emphasize the essential and not the casual and makeshift; the opportunity is great, he notes, "and even to disturb the stupid and make them uncomfortable is no mean end in itself." Regarding the actual result of the group which is now exhibited, Charles H. Caffin writes that an absence of leadership and consequently of unity is evident in the panels. He admits the presence, as we have noted, of the This critic notes in the American: truly decorative spirit and principle. "As to the principle involved in this new departure, it is pertinent to ask whether democracy has ever yet accomplished or ever will accomplish anything great without a leader. The voice of the people is confined to registering a 'Yes' or 'No.' It is the absence of leadership, in the sense of a single mind conceiving and controlling the whole, that one is conscious of in these panels. The composition is not unified; nor do the lines and masses flow freely into one another. They suggest a compromise between slightly different motives of feeling." |