Read Ebook: The Emma Gees by McBride Herbert W

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 404 lines and 46682 words, and 9 pages

Editor: Margaret C. Anderson

THE LITTLE REVIEW

MARGARET C. ANDERSON EDITOR

AUGUST, 1915

The American Family Ben Hecht Patterns Amy Lowell The Piano and Imagism Margaret C. Anderson War Impressions Florence Kiper Frank Lawson, Caplan, Schmidt Alexander Berkman Father and Daughter Edgar Lee Masters Poems from the Greek Richard Aldington Nudity and the Ideal Will Levington Comfort "Rooming" Helen Hoyt The Ugliest Man George Burman Foster A Photograph of Edgar Lee Masters by Eugene Hutchinson Emasculating Ibsen; Death "The Scavenger" { Alice Oliver Henderson Children's Poems { Arvia Mackaye { Robin Mackaye Book Discussion The Reader Critic

Published Monthly

MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Publisher Fine Arts Building CHICAGO

.50 a year

Entered as second-class matter at Postoffice, Chicago

THE LITTLE REVIEW

Vol. II

AUGUST, 1915

No. 5

The American Family

BEN HECHT

The dead fingers of spent passions, spent dreams, spent youth clutch at the throat of the rising generation and preserve the integrity of the American family. Not that there is a typical American family. There is only the typical struggle between the dead and the living, between the inert and hideous virtue of decayed souls and the rebellious desires of their doomed progeny.

The ambitious and educated American mother is a forceful creature, a strong, powerful woman. As an individual she is dead. Once she knew and had the desire for beauty. Dead fingers reached into her heart and killed it. The force of which she was doomed to become a part crushed her. The conventions of the world are stronger than its natural destinies. Those conventions--the conventions of the family--are not of the man's making. Woman attends to her own subjugation. She preserves the spirit of the family, struggles and labors to keep it a unit, to keep its members alike. Moaning with the tyrannical lust for possession she enfolds her daughter in her arms. There are certain things in her daughter which must be killed. There is a dawning of love for "impossible" things in her daughter's heart. There is an awakened mental curiosity, a perceptible inclination to break from the oppressiveness of the surrounding dead. In the night the daughter wonders and doubts. She would like "to get away"--to go forth free of certain fiercely applied restrictions and meet a different kind of folk, a different kind of thought. She would like to be--to feel the things she is capable of. It is all vague. Always revolt is vague and intangible for the daughters of women. Revolt is for souls still living, and the living are weaker than the dead. The living soul is a lone, individual force, its yearnings are ephemeral and undefined. The mother knows what they are. The dead always know what it is they have lost. And in this knowledge the mother is strong. But the living cannot say to itself what it wishes to gain, what it reaches to attain. Only in the stray geniuses of time has the individual soul fought desperately and triumphantly for its preservation. And there is no genius in the daughter. There is merely the divine and natural instinct for self-realization. Once the mother felt it and it was killed. Now the daughter has caught the dread disease--the contamination which starts a cold sweat under the corset stays of society; the thing which brings down upon it for its destruction the phalanxes of fierce fatuities--the moribund mercenaries employed by the home for its defense and preservation.

Something happens to crystallize the revolt. It is a man outside the pale, a good man, a bad man. It is a book. It is a friend. Often the struggle is fought through little things too numerous to mention and the struggle itself too casual to classify. Sometimes it wages without a word; at other times there are blows. And at such times the enshrouding veils are torn aside. One can see the dead rise up, their pasty limbs dragging with the mould and slime of their couch. One can see them reaching their dead arms out, with the bloodless flesh hanging from them in shreds. One can watch them crawl on their bony feet and as they come close--these dead--the foul odor that issues from their sightless, twisted, rotted faces hangs like a grey smeared canopy above them.

They come. They take their stand at the mother's back. And the pitiful struggle is on.

It is the mother who strikes the blows. Her first weapon is her love. She calls it that. "You are my only happiness," she cries. "I have given you everything, a part of me, all you have needed. I have sacrificed everything for you. All my dreams have been for you. O, how can you permit anything to come between us?"

The daughter listens. There is a selfish ring to it. But love must be forgiven for selfishness. In the schools and the churches the preliminaries of the struggle have been insidiously fought. Children owe duties to their parents and not to themselves. It was what the daughter learned at school. It is what she read between the lines of her books and heard from the lips of all around her. And now it is the murmur that rolls into her ears. It is the odor of the dead.

Day after day the mother strikes with this weapon. Her red, furious eyes dripping tears, she moans it out. Her voice is like the yelp of a frantic animal. Her voice is like the whine of a woebegone fice. Her voice is cold and hard and hollow like the echo in a tomb.

The beauty that has come to her daughter is a fragile thing. The lovliness she visioned is the most delicately mortal of life's treasures. Fiercely the mother hurls herself against it, hurls the reproaches of her dead soul, the recriminations of her entombed spirit--the odors of the dead.... And her weapons are tangible things. They are sentences. They are the moral perversions with which the family unit always has fought for its preservation. They are tried things, prophetic precedents. And the beauty in the normal being is an indefinite force--a vagueness. It has no weapons with which to strike. Triumphant revolt is only for martyrs and artists. It is the losing force in normal existence.

Gradually it becomes clouded in the daughter's soul. She feels unclean. She imagines it is the beauty which is unclean. She does not know that it is the uncleanliness of the dead--the uncleanliness of her mother revealed to her in her heart by the divine light that is dying within herself. An agony comes into her. The struggle narrows to pain. Cold things reach at her heart. It leaps and flutters. She stands, her face white and a look of uncanny suffering about her eyes. The dead fingers grip fast.

The mother, moaning, shuddering, her eyes gleaming, enfolds her daughter in her arms. "I dare you to take her from me," she cries out to the man, to the friend, to the book, to the world of beauty, whatever it is toward which her daughter inclined for the divine instant of awakened soul. "I dare you. I dare you."

"Nothing can ever take me from you," the daughter weeps. Death.

Tears, a form of decomposition now, roll from her cheeks. The struggle is over. The unit has been preserved and now one may look at the unit and see what it is. The rotted figures of the dead have dragged their shredded flesh back to the graves.

Introspection is an indecent as well as impossible thing to the spirit of this family. To look into her soul and see the diseased and dead things that fill it is naturally impossible and naturally indecent. Dostoevsky calls man an animal who can get used to anything. And a man's adjustment to hideous things is not so final as a woman's.

For the spirit of this family to reveal an honest reaction when it is contrary to the approved artificial demands of a situation is as heinous an exhibition of bad taste as to uncover a thigh. But luckily, this concealing of honest feeling is not often required. The spirit of this family is incapable in the main of honest feeling. That is a part of the beauty killed long ago in her, a part of the beauty she killed in the daughter, a part of the beauty the daughter will strangle in her own children. And one of the compensations for dead souls is that they naturally feel dishonest feeling and do not have to suffer with a realization of hypocrisy.

This family thinks of virtue in terms of legs. This family regards art and truth with a modulated leer. It is crudely cynical of everything outside its range. It sneers and pooh-hoos, it ostracizes and condemns. It is vulgarly contemptuous of the factors in life superior to it. The spirit of this family would have shrieked in outrage at the presence of Verlaine in its home--unless he could have reflected social distinction on it. It would have closed the doors to Ibsen,--except for the social distinction,--to every triumphant soul that had escaped the dead fingers and realized itself. And by some inexplicable trick of self-adjustment the spirit of this family looks upon thought as an undesirable affectation.

Social success means to this family a speaking acquaintance with any wealthier unit which originally considered itself "above" this family. Moral success means to this family an exemption from the prosecution of the forces it has reared for its own protection--keeping out of jail, out of scandal-mongering newspapers, out of the malicious after-dinner gossip of its friends.

One man in ten thousand inherits the beauty of the woman who bore him and he becomes an artist. It is not necessary for him to revolt. His fathers have taken care of that. There is an assured place in the world for him--not in the living room here in front of the fireplace but elsewhere, in places of which poets sing.

The family man keeps posted. He knows what is going on in the world but does not understand it. He is not capable of understanding. But sometimes understanding and reason coincide with his prejudices and he is then as liable to hold minority views as not. He is dry, sometimes clever. But always he jogs, jogs, jogs along. He can even sleep night after night in the same bed with his wife without feeling annoyance. His bluntedness is complete. Dostoevsky is right.

His wife and the mother of his children is a part of the furniture of existence for him. In his own way he is quite dead, but it was not necessary to kill him. If his son revolts the instinct of his mother is communicated to him and he fights. He borrows the mother's weapons and he blasphemes in a half-hearted way about the duty to parents. But the beauty which the mother found easy to kill in the daughter usually discovers a hardier citadel in the son and usually he carries it safely into the world.

The room--this living room--is dimly and "artistically" lighted. The fire in the grate glows. The daughter sits in a corner speaking to a friend. At the other side sits the father--reading blankly. The wife enters. She surveys the scene from the doorway with a feeling of warm satisfaction. She comes in and sits down. They talk about nothing, they think about nothing. The daughter and the young man, beneath the smooth surface of the artificial moments, are playing at the eternal indecency. The mother leads the conversation. Neighbors are discussed. Friends are derided. Social inferiors are laughed to scorn. Social superiors are spoken of with adulation and veneration. At last the father climbs to his bed like an ox. He is tired, poor fellow. The mother follows him into the bedroom. A victor, utterly triumphant, she hugs her dead soul to herself and smiles. The daughter retires after being desperately kissed by the physically curious young man, and she lies awake a while wishing in moments of provoked sex that she too was married and meditating in calmer spaces upon the advantages of the family unit, the fireplace, the party calls. O, this daughter! She is the one who had the vision of beauty. She is the one whose soul sang for a day with the capacity for all the world's lovliness. Honesty, purity, fineness burned in her with their divine radiance. The lights are turned out. Death reigns supreme.

Patterns

AMY LOWELL

I walk down the garden paths, And all the daffodils Are blowing, and the bright blue squills. I walk down the patterned garden paths In my stiff, brocaded gown. With my powdered hair and jewelled fan, I too am a rare Pattern. As I wander down The garden paths.

My dress is richly figured, And the train Makes a pink and silver stain On the gravel, and the thrift Of the borders. Just a plate of current fashion, Tripping by in high-heeled, ribboned shoes. Not a softness anywhere about me, Only whale-bone and brocade. And I sink on a seat in the shade Of a lime tree. For my passion Wars against the stiff brocade. The daffodils and squills Flutter in the breeze As they please. And I weep; For the lime tree is in blossom And one small flower has dropped upon my bosom.

And the splashing of waterdrops In the marble fountain Comes down the garden paths. The dripping never stops. Underneath my stiffened gown Is the softness of a woman bathing in a marble basin, A basin in the midst of hedges grown So thick, she cannot see her lover hiding, But she guesses he is near, And the sliding of the water Seems the stroking of a dear Hand upon her. What is Summer in a fine brocaded gown! I should like to see it lying in a heap upon the ground. All the pink and silver crumpled up on the ground.

I would be the pink and silver as I ran along the paths, And he would stumble after, Bewildered by my laughter. I should see the sun flashing from his sword hilt and the buckles on his shoes. I would choose To lead him in a maze along the patterned paths, A bright and laughing maze for my heavy-booted lover, Till he caught me in the shade, And the buttons of his waistcoat bruised my body as he clasped me, Aching, melting, unafraid. With the shadows of the leaves and the sundrops, And the plopping of the waterdrops, All about us in the open afternoon-- I am very like to swoon With the weight of this brocade, For the sun sifts through the shade.

In a month he would have been my husband. In a month, here, underneath this lime, We would have broke the pattern; He for me, and I for him, He as Colonel, I as Lady, On this shady seat. He had a whim That sunlight carried blessing. And I answered, "It shall be as you have said." Now he is dead.

The Piano and Imagism

MARGARET C. ANDERSON

Sea orchards, and lilac on the water, and color dragged up from the sand; drenched grasses, and early roses, and wind-harps in the cedar trees; flame-flowers, and the sliding rain; frail sea-birds, and blue still rocks, and bright winds treading the sunlight; silver hail stones, and the scattering of gold crocus petals; blackbirds in the grass, and fountains in the rain; lily shadows, and green cold waves, and the rose-fingered moon; pine cones, and yellow grasses, and a restless green rout of stars; cloud whirls, and the pace of winds; trees on the hill, and the far ecstasy of burning noons; lotus pools, and the gold petal of the moon; night-born poppies, and the silence of beauty, and the perfume of invisible roses; white winds and cold sea ripples; blossom spray, and narcissus petals on the black earth; little silver birds, and blue and gold-veined hyacinths; river pools of sky, and grains of sand as clear as wine....

It will be made of dream-colored wings, and whispers among the flowering rushes; of moonlit tree-tops, and the gaiety of flowers; brown fading hills, and the moving mist; sea rose, and the light upon the poplars; shaken dew, and the haunts of the sun, and white sea-gulls above the waves; bright butterflies in the corn, and a dust of emerald and gold; broken leaves, and the rose and white flag-stones; sea iris with petals like shells, and the scent of lilacs heavy with stillness; scarlet nasturtiums, and dry reeds that shiver in the grasses; slim colorless poppies, and the sweet salt camphor flowers; gold and blue and mauve, and a white rose of flame; pointed pines, and orange-colored rose leaves; sunshine slipping through young green, and the flaring moon through the oak leaves; wet dawns, and a blue flower of the evening; butterflies over green meadows, and deep blue seas of air, and hyacinths hidden in a far valley....

It will be of harsh rose and iris-flowers painted blue; white waters, and the winds of the upper air; green wine held up in the sun, and rigid myrrh-buds scented and stinging; the lisp of reeds, and the loose ripples of meadow grasses; mists on the mountains, and clear frost on the grass blade; frail-headed poppies, and sea-grass tangled with shore grass; the humming brightness of the air, and the sky darting through like blue rain; strewn petals on restless water, and pale green glacier-rivers; somber pools, and sun-drenched slopes; autumn's gold and spring's green; red pine-trunks, and bird cries in hollow trees; cool spaces filled with shadow, and white hammocks in the sun; green glimmer of apples in an orchard, and hawthorn odorous with blossom; lamps in a wash of rain, and the desperate sun that struggles through sea mist; lavender water, and faded stars; many-foamed ways, and the blue and buoyant air; grey-green fastnesses of the great deeps; a cream moon on bare black trees; wet leaves, and the dust that drifts over the court-yard; moon-paint on a colorless house....

It will be pagan temples and old blue Chinese gardens; old pagodas glittering across green trees, and the ivory of silence; vast dark trees that flow like blue veils of tears into the water; little almond trees that the frost has hurt, and bitter purple willows; fruit dropping through the thick air, and wine in heavy craters painted black and red; purple and gold and sable, and a gauze of misted silver; blue death-mountains, and yellow pulse-beats in the darkness; naked lightnings, and boats in the gloom; strange fish, and golden sorceries; red-purple grapes, and Assyrian wine; fruits from Arcadia, and incense to Poseidon; swallow-blue halls, and a chamber under Lycia's coast; stars swimming like goldfish, and the sword of the moonlight; torn lanterns that flutter, and an endless procession of lamps; sleepy temples, and strange skies, and pilgrims of autumn; tired shepherds with lanterns, and the fire of the great moon; the lowest pine branch drawn across the disk of the sun; Phoenecian stuffs and silks that are outspread; the gods garlanded in wisteria; white grave goddesses, and loves in Phrygia; wounds of light, and terrible rituals, and temples soothed by the sun to ruin; the valleys of AEtna, and the Doric singing....

... The moon dragging the flood tide, and an old sorrow that has put out the sun; whirling laughter, and the thunder of horses plunging; old tumults, and the gloom of dreams; strong loneliness, and the hollow where pain was; the rich laughter of the forest, and the bitter sea; the earth that receives the slanting rain; lost treasure, and the violent gloom of night; all proud things, and the light of thy beauty.... Souls of blood, and hearts aching with wonder; the kindness of people--country folk and sailors and fishermen; all the roots of the earth, and a perpetual sea....

War Impressions

FLORENCE KIPER FRANK

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet