baztert WBIR ..・・ ܕ ܘ . SVE ܘ ܘ ܘ ܐܘ A Note on Walt Whitman's Prosody BY ་་་ FRED NEWTON SCOTT j 821 1. 54 [THE CONSERVATOR FOR JULY-SEPTEMBER, 1910, pp. 70-72, 85-90, 102-104] ** New A * **** 67 *** ···· i am ܐ ܘ 20 723 CONSIS : 111 ARTES LIBRARY Vod•• 1837 UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN .... VERITAS • E· PLURIBUS UNUM SE ** SCIENTIA OF THE ULUOR SQUAERIS PENINSULAM AMOENAM CIRCUMSPICE QUERIALEELTY MATATABJARJASTANAGARAMANIAMON Y'S $ ***** ور KOMA MENS r * E 820 54. The Conservator ROSE VALLEY PRESS Moral conscientiousness, crystalline, without flaw, not godlikɩ only, entirely human, awer ard enchants forever.—WHITMAN Twenty first year PHILADELPHIA, JULY, 1910 The labor movement is at the forefront of civilization. It advances morality a step farther than it has yet gone, for it declares that most of the acts which the present morality of trade encourages as virtues are sins of lying, stealing and murder. It is in advance of the churches. It preaches that men must be brothers across the wages line, as well as on each side of it, and brothers in the mills, mines and fields as well as in Fourth of July orations and church creeds. It is the most religious movement of the day, for it carries the Golden Rule into the market, and insists that the Gospel which men profess in their families they shall also profess and prac- tise in their factories. It holds the man or woman who buys cheap responsible for all that may have caused that cheapness. If it was not right in slave times to buy men because they were for sale, it is no more right now to buy criminally cheap things because they are for sale. It is the most religious movement of the day, for it alone sees that for mankind to have recognized that they stand as brothers in the face of the Power beyond and the mysteries about us is but the preliminary to recognizing that we are brothers in everything. Once a brother, always a brother; a brother anywhere, a brother everywhere, says the labor movement. It declares the infidels and heretics of today to be those who, as owners of land (which no one but God ever did own), as lords of the factory and the mine, as monopolists of money and privilege, are denying the brotherhood of their fellow men. Why dont the workingmen go to church? Because they are ahead of the church. Because the principles of the labor movement are more religious than the principles of the pulpits. Because the church steadfastly refuses to leave off repeating its glittering generalities, and lacks either the courage or the intelligence to apply the test and language of the Ten Commandments to the practices of the men who sit in the high places in the congregations. Because it contents itself with admiring Nathan for telling King David to his face: "Thou art the man," but dares not do the same to our nineteenth century robbers and murderers. "During thirty years of my life," says Ruskin, "I heard one sermon at least every Sunday, so that it is after an experience of no fewer than 1500 sermons, most of them by scholars and many of them by earnest men, that I now solemnly state that I never heard one preacher deal faithfully with the quarrel between God and Mammon.” The churches, the political economists, the colleges, the existing political parties, all stand impotent in the face of the great question of the day-the social question. HENRY DEMAREST LLOYD. matter. THE CONSERVATOR Published monthly by Horace Traubel, 1624 Walnut street, Philadelphia. Entered at the post office, Philadelphia, as second class YEARLY SUBSCRIPTION, ONE DOLLAR. SINGLE COPIES, TEN CENTS. FOREIGN SUBSCRIPTIONS, ONE DOLLAR TWENTY FIVE CENTS HORACE TRAUBEL, Editor ANNE MONTGOMERIE, Associate Editor Gertrude TRAUBEL, Associate Worker The editors may also be addressed at Camden, New Jersey CLARENCE DARROW: Your paper is the best and bravest and truest of all, and this I say without any sort of qualification. It never has a false note and is always true to the great real cause of human freedom-the only cause for which it is worth while to work and live and die. SAM WALTER FOSS: The Conservator is one of the comforts of my life. It is unique, original, rammed with native thought, with the personality of an alert and spontaneous man behind it. Number five CONTENTS Collect-H. T., 65 I'm just talking all the time about love-Horace Traubel, 68 A note on Walt Whitman's prosody, I-Fred Newton Scott, 70 Exhibitions and an exhibition-Horace Traubel, 72 Some savings of Walt Whitman recorded by Horace Traubel- Leon Bazalgette, 73 As to Books and Writers Letters of His Holiness Pope Pius X-T., 74 The enchanted island-T., 75 A poet in exile-T., 76 Karl Marx: his life and work-T., 77 Advertisements, 78, 79, 80 223074 Collect Let me be my own kind of a man. I would rather be my own kind of a man H. T. than any other kind of a man. Than any genius. Than any saint. I would rather be forgotten as my own kind of a man than be re- THE CONSERVATOR JULY f the crowd. Trusting life to that unwritten law which preserves the sacred equations of love. Love. Of the many for the one, the one for the many. Vesting our rights in each other. Each giving guarantees to each. My body says: I am my own body. Yes: my soul says: I am my own soul. Out of me emerges the crowd. Winnowed out of the crowd I appear. Near as I am to the crowd, far as the crowd is from me, we are still as far apart as the farthest stars and as near to- gether as the figure one is to itself. Yet I belong to myself. I am of no use to the crowd until I belong to myself. belong to myself. And the crowd is of no use until it belongs to me. I must make the most of myself before I can make the most of the crowd. And the crowd must make the most of itself be- fore it can make the most of me. That is why I must wear my own clothes and the crowd must wear its own clothes. Why I have no right to insist upon myself to the extinction of the crowd and why the crowd has no right to insist upon it- self to the extinction of me. That is why I would rather go round dressed like a beggar in my own rags than dressed like a king in borrowed purple. For being any kind of a man being some other kind of a man carries a sort of sorrow and shame with it. Though you shine or are worshipped, a sort of sorrow and shame. For being any kind of a man being your own kind of a man carries a sort of joy and pride with it. Though no one knows your name or you are despised, a sort of joy and pride. I membered as some one else's kind of a man. I would rather go to hell as myself than go to heaven as somebody else. I dont want to be a saint. do want to be myself. I dont want to be happy. I do want to be myself. I want all that comes to me as myself. But I want nothing that comes to me as some one else. I want my own life. I want my own love. I want to dress in my own clothes. I want to walk on my own feet. I want to fly with my own wings. Anything, the worst, that I have to suffer as myself I can cheerfully endure. Anything, the best, that I am allowed to enjoy as some one else I can only guiltily ac- cept. My life is final to me. Is the universal life. Leads all other lives. Declares the glory of the heavens and the earth. Retires for no other life. Every man belongs to himself. De- mands first of all the sovereignty of his own soul. Makes no compromises. Yet acquiesces in the crowd. Owns himself yet is owned by the crowd. Willingly defers in crowd things to the decisions of the crowd. Never confuses the one claim with the other. Yours with his. Or his with yours. Using the personal life to impersonal ends. And using the impersonal life to personal ends. Re- garding the boundaries between the two with deli- cate honor. Even with a cruel austerity. My life and other lives. Yet acknowledging again that the line drawn cant be drawn. Leaving the mat- ter unsolved. Intimating rather than insisting upon the distinction. Feeling rather than seeing the way. Eager to be left alone yet eager to be embraced and included. Testing the single life by the total life and the total life by the single life. In the crowd and outside the crowd. Lim- iting the man in the crowd. Limiting the crowd in the man. Making as much of the one as makes it consistent with the other and no more. Every day I come upon myself in novel relations. You see me new again. Opening myself to unusual influences. Using myself freely towards the di- vine end. Proud in my identity: little as that is, proud of it. Less because I want to be alone than because I want the crowd to be alone. And you who are reading these words. Nearest to me as you are. Take yourself out of the crowd in order to take the crowd into you. I go where my soul goes. And yet I go where the soul of the crowd goes. Maybe into the crowd today. Yet maybe into myself tomorrow. Out of myself when the crowd needs me. Ushering the crowd into me when I need the crowd. Resistlessly sin- gle. Half in myself. And then half in the crowd. Realizing my independence in the throng. Ven- erating the bond. Effacing myself. Sponging out Let me be my own kind of a man? Let me be any other kind of a man than my kind of a man. Let me be the mockery of a man. Let me be the shadow or the echo of a man. Let me be anything but what I was born to be. I was born for a dollar sort of a man. But I want to be a ten thousand dollar sort of a man. Not be- cause a ten thousand dollar sort of a man is more but because he owns more. Let me be anything but what I am. Let me write like somebody else. Let me talk like somebody else. Let me look like somebody else. like somebody else. I dont want to be. I want to seem. I dont want to figure as a good man in the dark unseen. I want to parade as a bad man in the midday visible to all. I want power. I want fame. I want to be looked up to. I want to re- ceive the rewards. I dont care whether I deserve or not. I want to possess. Whether money or prestige, I want to possess. No matter how, I want to possesss. No matter who must suffer, I want to possess. What do I care about being the best man in town? I dont care whether I am the best man in town or not. I want to be thought 1910 THE CONSERVATOR 67 the best man in town. I live in what you think of me not in what I am. I live in what the world gives me not in what I give the world. I want to look big. If I had to choose between being big and looking big I would choose looking to being. I dont know what God or the cosmos thinks of my virtues. But I do know what the people I live with think of my virtues. So I train for the crowd. I train to please those who can please me. I give up my heart's self and my soul's self for this world's self. If I can fool the world -why, that's all right. The world is not hurt. I am helped. The world is too big to be damaged. I am too little to be spoiled. The world can sur- vive me, I must survive the world. Why should I set myself aside? Here I am tangled and con- fused in a mystery I cant penetrate. Every im- pulse of life tempts me to an assertion of my priority and mastership. Not a mastership of shadows. Mere shadows of life. You who are satisfied with the shadows of life can have them. Hearts break in the shadows of life. Everyone knows it. And you know it. Resist as you may, you know it. There is no use trying to live be- yond the day. Such a mastership, a mastership of shadows, is empty and kills. A mastership of shadows. Yes, it kills. Spends itself uselessly for a barren result. Leaves the essential things un- touched. Offers its genius as a sacrifice. Veils its despair behind a false hope. Entertains its fading confidence with poisonous compromises. Yields the stage to a cipher. Of what use is life if life is of no use? Under what flag do you serve? Rich or poor? Hell or heaven? Ease or hardship? And what does your service come to? Reality or realty? The soul or the thing? Such is the issue. And you the one lost man in a found universe must answer. You must an- swer. Say the final right word. Leaving noth- Leaving noth- ing to guesses. Owning up. Veraciously rigor- ous. Entering the gateway unguarded. Bringing this decision along. And standing by it. Carry- ing it off proudly to the end. Kinglike, manlike, beggarlike, to the end. Taking goods for virtue. Out of hate trying to extend love. Meekly sur- rendered. Everlastingly committed. Maybe to death. I dont know. Left maybe without a way of retreat. Damned for good. Rotted. Ex- pelled from all paradises of personal joy and pub- lic goodwill. Deluded to destruction. Making light of the only light. Yoking desire with decay. Do you count that victory? Are you sure that you have got as much as you gave up? Reckoning it even by the world's values? Living a life not your own life. Is that victory? Notoriety calls M .. it victory. Greed calls it victory. Wealth, prop- erty's wealth, calls it victory. Under what sky have you set your foundations? Next what whirl- wind have you staked your bubbled housewalls? Do you call a quicksand victory? Every man is his own start and his own finish. Runs his course according to his own law. Kindles his own life- flame. Is committed to his own makeshifts. Now, is being another kind of a man victory? Do you think being a king is victory for a beggar? Do you think being a millionaire is victory for a pau- per? Do you think being famous is victory for a worshiper? Do you think setting your own kind of a man however ugly aside for another kind of a man however beautiful is victory? You have said yes. You have lived yes. You have figured it up yes. Being your own kind of a man is not worth the pay if being some other kind of a man pays better. I say: Live your own life if it leads you to perdition. You say: Live any kind of a life by which you can dodge perdition. I say: To live life honestly in hell is better than to live life dishonestly in heaven. You say: To live life pleasantly wherever you live it is better than to live life honestly wherever you live it. There is your victory. Being like somebody else is your victory. Like the world. Like luxury. Like a capacious income. Like the sensation of the hour. Like the reigning financier or the reigning belle. Like the prevailing singer or the crack painter of the salon. Like the center of the stage. Like the noisiest clamor of the hour. There you find your victory. You have given up the joy of being nothing and nobody for the sorrow of being everything and somebody. You have given up the joy of being penniless for the sorrow of having more money than you know what to do with. You have given up the joy of being an outcast and a criminal convicted and sentenced for the sorrow of being popular and a correct citizen honored and laureled. That is your victory. You gave up being yourself for being someone else. That is your victory. The star gave up being a star for being an atom. The sea gave up being a sea for being a drop of water. That is your victory. I do not say it is no vic- tory. I only say: That is your victory. Let me be my own kind of a man. Let me see with my own eyes. Let me hear with my own ears. Let me feel with my own heart. You are richer than I am. But I will not borrow from you. Let me speak with my own voice. Make me my own kind of a man. Initiate me into the secrets of my own body and spirit. Let me be my own kind of a man. Descend to my own 68 JULY THE CONSERVATOR deeps. Rise to my own heights. Enter by my own doorway to my own temple. Do you quar- rel with my resolution? You should welcome it. Over all other reasons seeing the reason. Utter- ly convinced. Measuring me according to love. Adding me up into a love's total. Keeping me for my own uses. Every man belongs to his own size and shape. My size and shape is my indi- viduality. Every man then belongs to the size and shape of the crowd. My size and shape confirming the size and shape of the crowd. You are isolated and you are not isolated. Out of you the crowd emerges. Without the crowd you could not exist. Nothing can make you finally two iden- tities. Kindle the flames, O lovers. I want to die in the crowd. Now we will melt together. Dar- ing the one venture. Offering the one tribute. Fulfilling the one purpose. Answering the one call. My heart says: Make me my own kind of And says: Keep me my own kind of a Not saying: I want to be great and virtu- Hearing the farther voice. Out of myste- rious distances hearing the farther voice. Richer than music. Asking me, demanding me, succor- ing me. Calling me to myself. Establishing me in myself Not saying: I want you to be great and virtuous. Saying: I want you to be your own kind of a man. Going as low as your own kind of a man can drop. Going as high as your own kind of a man can climb. Not ashamed of your earned rags. Not proud of your stolen silks. Going as you must go. You. Your own kind of a man. Willing to let the others keep all that does not belong to them. The goods. The honors. Influence. Palaces, offices, ownerships. My kind of a man means not to be seen and Means not to be deferred to and heard. Means not to be the best everything or anything. a man. man. ous. Means not to be the shrewdest or cleverest or most brilliant somebody or anybody. Means to lead the most of life not so much being loved as loving. Not so much shone upon as shining. Not so much known for what you are as being what you are. My kind of a man means being on the square. Means being first lost in yourself before you can be found in the crowd. Any kind of a man can be lost in a crowd. But to be found in a crowd: that demands a man of men. Yet every man is that man of men when he becomes his own kind of a man. A man may be a saint. But if he is not his own kind of a man being a a saint he had better be a sinner. A man may be a sinner. And if he is his own kind of a man be- ing a sinner he will have to guard himself well lest he become a saint. I am a praying man. I pray to myself. I dont have to ask favors of God. I ask them of myself. I am my own special provi- dence. I pray to myself. I pray: Let me be my own kind of a man. No matter for the dirt and the slime. No matter for the errors and the crookedness. No matter for the pennilessness and the contempt. Let me be my own kind of a man. Though I cant be illustrious, let me be my own kind of a man. I know I can live, being my own kind of a man. I know I am already dead, being another kind of a man. When you remind me of my imperfections you humble me. But when I remind myself that I am my own kind of a man I am proud. I go to God dragging my imperfections after me not without regret but without shame. But if I go to God panoplied in a stolen livery I shrink aghast with the folly of my own theft. Let me be my own kind of a man. When all men are their own kinds of men the current kind of men will everywhere be big enough and loving enough to produce the right kind of a man. Let me be my own kind of a man. I'm just talk- I'm just talking all the time about ing all the time about love: love I try sometimes to talk of other things but I come back to love: To my simple love for men and women, to my love for you, to my love for life: Not caring at all what may be said of me because of it, coming back to love: From whatever excursion into other fields, where other motives prevail, coming back to love: Something in my heart driving me; something in you impelling me: something: something: The casual day not satisfying me: the casual am- bitions and rewards: The being thought a lot of not satisfying me; the fame: the noise of popular approval: Rather shrinking from that: rather preferring to pass around seeing but remaining unseen: Putting in my word for love wherever I can : even when it seems out of place or unwelcome: Just saying love everywhere and everyhow so that all may hear saying love: Lowering my voice in the noise so I may be heard in the silences: Raising my voice in the silences so I may be heard in the noise: But saying the same thing wherever: saying the same thing: saying love, just love: 1910 69 THE CONSERVATOR Making people mad: appearing at the wrong time: saying love, love, whether they listen or are deaf: Just love: I bring just love: I talk of nothing else: nothing: And you joke about it: you smoke your cigars over me and drink your wines : But it seems to me that no one has ever brought anything else that the world finally cared for but just love: They ask me: What is this message you bring It seems to me that Jesus brought just love, though with such a show of purpose and joy? you hung him for it, to be sure: What can I say? I say: Love: and I say: Love: that's all I can say: It seems to me that Socrates brought just love, though you made him poison himself for it, to be sure: All I write, do, dream, look for, being love: all I work for being love: Just love just love: just love. And they look at each other and they look at me and they smile: I know what they mean: And then the priest asks: Why dont you bring religion? you bring only love? And then the statesman asks: Why dont you bring laws? you bring only love? And then the singer asks: Why dont you bring us harmonies? you bring only love? And then the poet asks: Why dont you bring us songs? you bring only love? And then they all ask: Why dont you bring some- thing else? you bring only love? And they gather about me: they jeer me: they are like an angry mob: Why dont I bring them trade and power and con- quest? Why dont 1? I bring only love: Why dont I bring them houses and ease and in- comes and luxuries? Why dont I? I bring only love: < Why should I bring heaven along with me to in- terfere with the earth? Why shouldn't I let the earth alone? Why should I stand in the way of the masters and the leaders and the elect with my sense- less call? As if anything in the universe was for anything but just love as if the trees or the seas were for anything but just love: As if anything in human life, the feeding, the labor of men, was for anything but just love in the end just love: What can I say? I say: Love: and I say: Love: As if anyone could think of anything anywhere in any time that was for anything but just love: that's all I can say: ing their indignant denial: Love? oh! love would be in place for somewhere else but not for here: Love? oh! love would be in time for some other year but not for today: And so I am laughed at and hurried out of sight for fear some of the children might see me. and be deceived: And so I am gagged and bound and put into prison for fear some of the dreamers might hear me and be misled; It seems to me that all your saints and singers in all time brought you just love, though you sacrificed most of them for it, to be s' re: And there they stand, the best citizens, interpos- As if your children born out of you or you born out of your mother, O woman, was for any- thing but just love: As if even blindness and cruelty and wrong was finally for anything but just love: I, who can bring only love: I, who bring just love: I, who have left everything else behind me and brought just love: I, who, being asked: what do you bring the need of the world? can only say: Just love. It seems to me that every man you think word: while way back and all things you think worth while brought just love, though you were at first in a great fury about it, to be sure: So it is not surprising that you feel sore on me and make it hard for me to endure life: You look up at the walls of your houses and your galleries of art and everywhere see the faces of those who just brought love, to be sure: But you do not learn from that: you go on re- jecting the lovers just the same: maiming, hating, killing the lovers: You meet me with the old antipathy: I bring just love love, you say, is just what you dont : want: As if it could be for anything but just love and be anything at all: as if it could, O my brothers: As if if it was for anything but just love the whole business would not go to pieces: As if if it was for anything but just love it could have started at all, or anyone or you or I would ever have emerged from the mysteries into life at all: As if anything could have gone on or could go on for a minute without just love. I'm just talking all the time about love: 70 JULY THE CONSERVATOR And maybe I'm nearer the meanings of things than anyone who talks about anything else: And maybe your laugh at me is out of place: maybe I should be the one to laugh: And maybe some day you will put my portrait upon your walls and speak well of it after I am dead: I who go about among you just talking all the wayward, irregular and amorphous. * time about love. Horace Traubel. A note on Students of literature who have Walt Whit- given attention to Walt Whit- man's pros- man's prosody, have in general ody < I taken an attitude toward it either of extreme hostility or extreme partisanship. They have either on the one hand held it up to ridicule as the words of a bungler and a sloven, or they have on the other hand praised it with undiscriminating ex- travagance, seeing in Whitman at once the herald and the exemplar of prosodic revolution. Ka For a typical example of the hostile sort of criti- cism, we may turn to Professor Barrett Wendell's History of Literature in America. There we learn that the spirit of Whitman's work "is that of old-world anarchy; its form has all the per- verse oddity of world-old abortive decadence". His poetry is "uncouth, inarticulate, and lacks in a grotesque degree artistic form". Of the Song of Myself and Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, Profes- sor Wendell says that the lines are "so recklessly misshapen that you cannot tell whether their au- thor was able to write with amenity". The latter poem he elsewhere characterizes as "confused, in- articulate, and surging in a mad kind of rhythm which sounds as if hexameters were trying to bub- ble through sewage" * A similar view is expressed by Edmund Gosse, when he applies to the poems the phrase "without composition, evolution, or vertebration of style", by Professor Trent, when he speaks of the poet's "inborn want of art", by Mr. Stedman when he refers to Whitman's "somewhat wandering sense of form", and by Mr. Liddell when he says of a passage in Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rock- ing that "its ragged incompleteness, its hopeless lack of definition, its confusing twists and turns and vagaries would interfere with any, even the vaguest perception, of esthetic arrangement". Some hold, as variant of this theory, that Whit- man, although he had a little artistic skill, and could use it, now and then, rather effectively, nev- ertheless took a wicked delight in not using it. Able to write in fairly regular iambics if he chose, as witness, Captain! My Captain! and Ethiopia Saluting the Colors, in the main, say these critics, he did not choose so to write; he preferred to be Reprinted, with some alterations, from the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, vol. vii, pp. 134–153. The attitude of the friendly critics is not less extreme. In rushing to Whitman's defense, his adherents have thought it necessary to arm them- selves with a new set of critical principles. Thus we are told that Whitman, instead of falling below the standards of traditional art, rose above them, dispensed with them, and actually discredited them. The conventional forms of verse he threw aside in order that he might display to the utter- most that spirit of absolute unconstraint to which he had dedicated himself. Of this view the elab- orate study of Whitman, published by Mr. John Burroughs in 1896, is perhaps the best exponent. If we may believe Mr. Burroughs, Whitman's poems are the "negation of extrinsic art". They are "the direct outgrowth of the personality of the poet; they are born directly upon the ego as it were, like the fruit of that tropical tree which grows immediately upon the trunk". They are not so much poems as nature itself. "The short- handful of sprays gathered in a walk.” The mu- er poems are like bunches of herbs or leaves, or a sic of his verse is as the music of the winds and It is to be tested by open-air standards, by comparison with clouds, trees, rivers, spaces, waves. not by comparison with works of art so called. There is no composition in such a poem as the Song of Myself, no artistic whole, no logical se- Song of Myself, quence, but just "tufts and tussocks of grass". "His thought and meaning are enveloped in his crowded, concrete and turbulent pages, as science is enveloped in nature." In fine, Whitman, ac- cording to Mr. Burroughs, is an Ueberdichter, whose lines we may admire and enjoy but must not presume to scan. Such are the rival opinions between which we are asked to choose. For my part I cannot bring myself to accept either of them. That Whitman was no artist, or that he wantonly spoiled his metier, seems to me unlikely; on the other hand, that he was above art, I deem impossible, for rea- sons which I will give presently. In the place of these explanations I mean to bring forward a third, which seems to me both more rational and closer * For Whitman's own opinion on this point, emphatically (if pro- fanely) expressed, the reader may be referred to Traubel's With Walt Whitman in Camden, vol. ii, p. 333. • 1910 THE CONSERVATOR 71 to the facts as I have read them. Before doing so, however, I will consider briefly the two views which have just been indicated, and give my rea- sons for rejecting them. Since they come to the same thing in the end, both resting upon the as- sumption that Whitman wanted art, I shall not attempt in what follows always to separate them, though first I shall pay my respects to the Ueber- dichter theory. magya The view for which Mr. Burroughs is sponsor involves considerations concerning the relations of art and nature. According to this view, if I understand it, art tends not only to approximate to nature, but to merge in it and become identical with it. Nature is the goal of art, not to say its grave. Eluding the restraints of form, art, in its highest manifestations, attains to the unbounded freedom of nature. It negates itself and passes into a kind of naturistic nirvana. At any rate it so merges itself with nature that one is no longer distinguishable from the other. With one kind of merger of nature and art everyone is familiar. Nature in its passage through the artist's mind is said to disappear as nature in order to reappear as art. Thus we speak of art as "second nature", meaning that nature's raw material is by the artist absorbed, assimilated and shaped to artistic ends. But in the theory under discussion the process is re- versed. The assimilation works backwards. Art disappears as art to reappear as crude, unbounded nature. Art, then, is best in undress. The poet is most a poet when, casting aside all restraint, breaking with all artistic law, he ramps undraped in the wide unplumbed welter of things. With an orgiastic esthetic such as this, I for one must part company, although it is not difficult for me to understand it, nor to see why it is attractive to Mr. Burroughs. It is false, I think, in two particulars-first, in that it tends to merge into one two things which can be understood only by keeping them apart, and second, that in so far as it does keep them apart, it turns upside down their true relationship. The two things are of course art and nature./ "If we had real life," said Wagner, "we should need no art." Few doctrines are more fallacious. Goethe was right: Art is art because it is not na- ture. Close as is the relation between them- closer than breathing, nearer than hands and feet -the boundary line can never be safely crossed. "Thou necessary film, continue to envelop the soul," says Whitman in one passage, and he ex- presses therein a great esthetic truth. The film must not be broken through. Art can never be- Art can never be- GRA come free, in the sense that it becomes intermina- ble or unlimited or chaotic, without ceasing to be art; and nature can never lose its fortuitousness and "splendid extravagance" without becoming in a sense artistic. The relation between art and nature is like that The two between a people and its government. are one, yet never one. In a sense the people are the government, that is, the nearer the govern- ment is to the people, and the more responsive it is to the healthy will and temper of the people, the better. But the two are after all distinct. The instant you let the government go and fall back upon the people as the only political reality, that instant you pass from democracy to anarchy. You have then neither a good government nor a free people. The people can become free and remain free, only by submission to restraint. They can preserve their coherence, their communal in- dividuality, their organic life and opportunity for unlimited expansion of that life, only as these things incessantly find expression in traditional, law-observing, law-embodying institutions. Applying the analogy to the relations of art and nature, we may say that the artist never ought to be free to express himself, as nature does, in "tufts and tussocks of grass". He indeed achieves a freedom-all the freedom he needs, all the free- dom there is for him-but he invariably achieves it by submitting himself to the restraints of artis- tic law. He may break with the law of art if he likes, but if he does, the less artist he, and indeed the greater slave, for he has thrown away the only instrument by which he can attain his freedom." "Das Gesetz nur kann uns Freiheit geben." I have said that in the second place Burroughs in his treatment of nature and art has reversed their due relationship. He would make the test of art its resemblance to nature, finding the stand- ard in nature rather than in art. This is the tra- ditional view, and it requires some courage to op- pose it. Nevertheless I will venture the opinion that the standard of art is to be found in art itself, that is, in the conditions of human intercourse. If art holds the mirror up to nature, the secret of their relationship is to be sought in the way in which the mirror is held up, not in the nature that is mirrored. The subject is a large one, too large to be de- bated here. I therefore simply file my opinion, at the same time remarking that if it is necessary to turn our backs on art, and retreat to the wild in order to find an esthetic foundation for our pros- odic system, I am ready to give the task over. Persons who write tufts and tussocks of grass 72 JULY THE CONSERVATOR may be good agriculturists; they cannot be good life. The Independents dont breeze a lot of froth poets. about their art. They are after the real game. They dont even insist on art. They only insist. on life. When the academic critics say: That is not art, the Independents say: All right then, it is not art. They dont apologize. They dont look ashamed. They dont run away. They say: Well then, it is not art. But they go on just the same. Study on. Paint on. Most of all, love on and live on. To live and love on canvas as well as in life. To live and love in art as well as in houses and in streets and in mines. But it may not be necessary either to shut the camel out or to abandon the tent if he comes in. Perhaps the animal is not so big nor so fractious as Mr. Burroughs thinks he is. Fred Newton Scott. Exhibitions Exhibitions as a rule wear me out, and an ex- They dont give me life. They take life from me. hibition They dont send me home elevated. They send me home depressed. An exhibition should get in under you and lift you up. Should add more life to your life. More hope to your hope. More courage to your courage. But exhibitions dont get in under you. They get on top of you. They load you down. They stamp you out. They stamp you out. Exhibitions dont dismiss me feeling like a man. They dismiss me feeling like a cur. They dont offer me anything to remind me of how much worth while I am. No. They offer me some- thing to remind me of how little worth while I am. They dont bring life. They bring death. What is the matter with exhibitions? The same thing that is the matter with the woman who is all clothes. The same thing that is the matter with the writer who is all words. Exhibitions are all technique. They show you how to do the thing they dont do. They look nice. But they dont wear well. They dont look better a second time. They look worse a second time. They dont at- tract you. They drive you away. Maximums of show. Minimums of substance. They strip you bare. They take your nerve. So many pretty ciphers. Infinitudes of manner. Desolations of matter. You are conscious of the means. You are not conscious of beginnings and ends. You are conscious of canvas and paint. You are con- scious of gestures and graces. You are not con- scious of foregrounds and backgrounds and psy- chologies and natural laws. So that it is true that when you go into an exhibition you go away from the world. But there was an exhibition the other day. Ex- hibitions are one thing. An exhibition is another thing. Exhibitions take you away from the world. An exhibition takes you to the world. There was an exhibition. I went to New York to see it. The Independent Artists had an exhibition. The Independents take you to the world. They dont take you from the world. They take you to life. They dont take you away from life. More than that, they give you life. They dont take your If you discover a best picture in exhibitions you feel as if you had struck an oasis in a desert. If you discover a worst picture in an exhibition you. feel as if you had struck a desert in an oasis. I find that exhibitions are graveyards. I find that an exhibition is a harvest field. When I talked with Kent about the Independents he said they thought of modifying their title-call next year. Of making an announcement that the Independents would have an exhibition. No longer calling them- selves "the Independent Artists". Letting the other fellows have the art and the artists and all that and do the most they choose to or can with their formulas and headlines. In my midship- man days with Walt Whitman I was always com- ing across people who would ask indignantly: "My God! you dont call that poetry, do you?" I did call it poetry but I did not try to force my My God friend to call it poetry. I was willing he should call it anything he chose. I always said so. I read one of my own poems to a friend of mine in my own office. He cried over something in it. Cried, for sure. But when I was through he lift- ed his voice way up in his revolt and exclaimed: "That's something, all right, but by God it's not poetry!" And then when I made no reply he repeated himself: "I say that's not poetry, by God!" I had a suspicion that it was poetry or something like it but I did not try to force my By God friend to call it poetry. I was willing he should call it anything he chose. I would always say so. I was willing to let my My God friend and my By God friend call it anything they chose. They were moved. They were hospitable. The message arrived. Who cares a cent about the word? Call it what you please. So it does the work, call it what you please. So with the pictures. If they do the work, call them what you please, The main thing is, the only thing is, to get the work done. To make the communication. Calling a dead thing poetry or a picture wont make it live. Refusing to call a live thing art wont make it die. The main thing is, to get the work done. 1910 THE CONSERVATOR 73 The work of love. The work of the crowd. The work of the social struggle. The work of inspiration and progress and comradery. To get the work done. If you help to get that done you've got your hand, your heart, your soul, on something real. Call it what you please, seme- thing real. If you dont help to get that done you've got nothing nearer reality than faded ashes of fires. Horace Traubel. Some sayings It is no empty claim that the of Walt Whit- diary of the last years of the man recorded life of Walt Whitman, kept without his knowledge by Hor- by Horace ace Traubel,† forms a monu- Traubel* ment unique in the domain of biographical literature-a monument which in the breadth of its proportions, and still more in the remarkable clearness of its construction, assures to its builder an eminent place beside Boswell and Eckermann. It is hardly necessary to em- phasize the interest of pages which restore to us the very aspect and thought of such a man, at the moment when having arrived through the multi- ple experiences of his virile years and the medita- tions of his enfeebled age at the summit of a long career (and what a career!) he expresses in direct- ing his serene look upon the world, some of the supreme truths of his life and of all life. The thing which, however, places this diary beyond compari- son, is the personal quality which he who compiled it seems to have known so well how to impart to it and maintain. There might have been before him confidential friends who penetrated as far into the soul of a great man, others who proved an af- fection as unvarying, others again who showed themselves as great masters of language; but I do not know of any one anywhere who has known how to show himself in the same degree as the author of Chants Communal, intuitive, loving and artistic, without ceasing for a moment to be truth- ful. Horace Traubel, daily visitor of the Sage of Camden-and by marvelous affinities his alter ego -introduces us into the very room in which were spent the last years of the disabled poet, and he has so graphically translated the atmosphere of it, without any descriptive effort, that we imagine our- A ܚ *Translation from La Nouvelle Revue Francaise, Paris, by Mil- dred Bain. selves there, face to face with the poet and taking part in the conversation. Among other merits he possesses the art of effacing himself even while being present, to let Walt offer himself to us without an intermediary, in his words and in the features of his face; he knows the importance of the smallest detail in the picture, but without ever losing sight of its entirety. Over and above all, he is supremely regardful of the truth, whatever it may be. One evening at the end of October, 1888, the old man had said to Traubel: "You'll be speaking for me many a time after I am dead: do not be afraid to tell the truth-any sort of truth, good or bad, for or against: only be afraid not to tell the truth." And the friend who had promised that evening "not to help send you down into his- tory wearing another man's clothes" has nobly fulfilled this vow. The paragraphs which follow, taken from the familiar conversations of Walt Whitman, noted verbatim by the author of this diary, have been chosen from those which, de- tached from the context, remain the most signifi- cant and the most indicative of the inmost and last thought of the poet of Leaves of Grass. Leon Bazalgette. As to Books and Writers So the old men in the street and the little children and the strong men and the young mothers go by and the world rolls like a sea before us. In the end when we see people in the street, we get more satisfaction out of having them eloquent than out of having them beau- tiful. We want to get the world said and we never can seem to say it ourselves, so there are faces flocking by us in the street saying it for us. When they have passed on and we go on our way, they move us vaguely, whether we will or no, like music, and make us deeper and more gentle with the world in our thoughts. We do not look at the faces merely for themselves; they are documents. It is the things they say about human life, about the world, about little children, and about summer and winter and spring and the dear earth, that we have been waiting to have said. They pass on, but the faces that say these things to us will al- ways bring to us the beauty, the release that comes to us from works of art. I think they must be works of art too. It is what they say that makes them beau- tiful, . about the hills and the rivers and the peo- ple and the trees and the winds and the flowers and the great solemn sun in the heaven. There are † Horace Traubel: With Walt Whitman in Camden. Two vol- umes have appeared: the first published by Small, Maynard and Company, Boston; the second by D. Appleton and Company, faces that call one to worship and to be glad. One goes by them in the street with all their happy secrets New York. • 74 JULY THE CONSERVATOR in them, and they stir us faintly as they go, like little himself. Has got to get rid of the institution to quiet peals of bells. GERALD STANLEY LEE. Letters to I take this Modernist at his word. His Holi- I assume that he is a priest. That his declaration of independence is ness Pope genuine. That his horror of the Pius X** Papacy, of the Catholic institution, cover. is what it pretends to be. I dont much like to read such a virile attack in the dark or under I would like to know who the priest is and whether he's fighting fair. Not because I care about the church. The church never fights fair. But because I care for myself. I like to give the devil his due. Yet I take the book at its word. Take the priest at his word. I cant take the church at its word. Its word was never worth taking. Its word was never as good as its bond. The church as a church, as an institution, has a dismal record. If I took the church at its word I would have to take it as a religion. But the church as a church is not a religion but a blas- phemy. If I took the church at its word I would have to take the church as love. But the church as a church is not love but hate. Just as with the state. If I took the state at its word I would have to take it as the people. But the state as a state is not the people but the tyrant. Just as with art. If I took art at its word I would have to take it as a servant. But art as art is not a servant but a master. This priest has kindled a big fire. It lights up the far and near of the Catholic despotism. lights up the far and near of the Catholic despotism. It sends its flashing flaming accusation into all the nooks and corners of the temple. If only a tenth of what this priest says was true the whole of the church would be false. If a merely infinitesimal per cent of his story is all right then a hundred per cent of the church is all wrong. This priest talks for religion and against dogma. For the spirit and against the body of the church. Of course the world will never go back to Jesus in the sense in which he argues it. But the world will some day go forward to Jesus in the sense in which a larger truth interprets him. But the es- sence of the priest's contention is sure and beauti- ful. He despises the huge obstacle to which the church has reduced itself. The church as a church is not a help but a hurt. It is not clean but dirty. It is not worth saving. It is only worth destroy- ing. Man has got to destroy the church to save * Letters to His Holiness Pope Pius X. By a Modernist. Chi- cago: Open Court Publishing Company. get the spirit. The priest is eloquent, hot, strong, statistical, argumentative, in his unequivocal fulmi- nation. He begs the church to revolt against it- self. Then he says the church is hopeless. That it will never revolt. He begs it to be gentle. Then he says it has to be cruel. I go with the priest as far as he goes. But there is more to be said. The priest might have said that it is con- sistent for the church which has cornered the next world to try to corner this world. For the church. which promised us a hell in the next world to try to give us a hell in this world. For the church which worships a celestial god whose joy is not in being good and gentle but in being bad and cruel to try to be a mundane god whose joy is not in being good and gentle but in being bad and cruel. For the church with heavens of poor and rich to try to perpetuate an earth of the pauper and the millionaire. The priest might have said such things. He said nothing about the social strug- gle. The economic fight. He might have told how the church was always against the people. How the church as a church was always on the side of kings with big crowns and Presidents with. big sticks. How religion as religion is always big and spacious and loving but how the church as a church has always been tiny and congested and hating. How much and everything can be ex- pected of religion as religion but how little and nothing can be expected of the church as a church. The priest did powerful well as long as he kept going. But he stopped going before his job was through. I dont propose to finish his job for him. But I have accepted his book as an invita- tion to me to add a little fuel to his virtuous fire. Nothing could be more tragically evident than the utter detachment of the Christian church in all its branches from everything that savors of a virile acceptance of Jesus. There is a good reason for that. Jesus is not available for dogmatic uses. Is not available for use on the stock exchange. Is not available for use on thrones or in parlors or in anti-democratic parliaments or among the elect of the earth in any arena of a desecrating respect- ability. Jesus belongs to the free crowd. Be- longs to the dreamers. Belongs not to despair- ers who look down but to hopers who look up. Belongs not to the saint but to the mob. Jesus bers who exclude the robbed. He is offensive does not lend himself to the purposes of the rob- to martinets who rank creeds above souls. Who would rather grow rich on theft than stay poor on honesty. So that the divorce of the essential Jesus and the institution which foully outrages his - 1910 75 THE CONSERVATOR name is natural enough. The alternative would not be natural. Would be without a reason. This has the best reason. The situation as we face it. It would be grotesque to patch up a compromise between the man who denounced the vipers and the vipers who were denounced. The priest at one moment seems to think a recan- tation possible. That the church might own up. Then his optimistic mood is disturbed, Then he shakes his shorn head and mournfully says a re- cantation is incredible. Of course it is incredible. And who cares anyhow? Atom by atom the foundations of the church are being eaten away. Let this process of disintegration go on. We wont destroy the church by some drastic act of defiance and demolition. We will outgrow it. Just as we outgrow summers and winters. Out- grow it. Leave it behind. The awakened brain of the world has already left it behind. there's plenty more brain left to stir up. And it will inevitably awake. And the treacherous priest- hoods will inevitably vanish. And · Ꭲ . The en- I cant make much out of Noyes. Not chanted much but faultless rhymes and immac- ulate beauty. Not much but flawless island* verse and impeccable form. I dont make life out of him. Anything but life. He is beyond criticism. He is technically proficient. Some men write with all their clothes on. With But shirk- all their jewels on. They wig themselves. They get as far from their naked bodies and naked souls as they can. Then they write. With rings on their fingers and bells on their toes. They call this art. Art is not getting as near life as you can. It is getting as far from life as you can. Being removed from the real. Being separated from the sources of energy. Getting a verbalism all its own. And a form all its own. ing the underlying earth. Scorning the ground you tread on. Despising the people you come from and go to. That is art. That is art. The man who does this the most successfully is the best artist. Noyes may be all that Gosse and Watts-Dunton say he is. But that would not make him a poet. The poet does not go with words. Words go with the poet. And forms the same. Forms go with the poet. The poet does not go with the forms. I dont care what you sing. If you dont sing life then you dont sing for me. Then you dont *The enchanted Island. And other poems. By Alfred Noyes. New York: Frederick A. Stokes and Company. sing to be really heard or to really last. You can But do your fuss work with brilliant efficiency. proficiency is not enough. Only life is enough. Blood with life. Dreams with life. Sacrifice with life. That alone is enough. Noyes writes out of dictionaries and school books. He writes out of everything but out of his own heart. The heart disdains arbitrary forms. The heart creates its own alphabet. Chooses its own vocabulary. Fre- quently gives up grace for truth. The recognized grace for a grace still maligned and outlawed. De- Noyes has a deadening effect upon me. presses me. What do you get out of the av- erage gallery of paintings? Omnipresent tech- nique. Omniabsent life. The brag of shape. The emptiness of substance. Noyes is never so useless and helpless as when he tries to handle As simple matters with his complex manners. when he tries to write down. The artist regards the experience of everyday, the struggle of the crowd, as below him. Then he goes through mo- tions as if to reach down and lift somebody up. The man who understands the people in fact knows that he never has to crook his knees to meet them face to face. He knows that he has if anything to tiptoe some if he wants to find the level of the crowd. Noyes sings not like some- thing out of doors but like something in a cage. This scholarship from which so many of the best fellows get the worst results. What does it amount to if it keeps a fellow tethered and afraid and only nice to hear and merely pretty to look at? We We know people whose smile wont wear off. know poetry whose smile wont wear off. As some women would rather have an impossible dress than a possible soul so some artists would rather achieve an impossible ostentation than a possible integrity. They dont produce so much to get things said as to get them admired. Think of what stands in the way of Noyes. Rhyme. Good looks. Manicured nails. Patent leather shoes. Gentility. What the critics think about him. Such things and more such things stand in his way. Is it any wonder he cant break through? And then Gosse and Watts-Dunton stand in his way. Is it any wonder he cant break through? The man who n Gosse and Watts-Dunton say is all right had better look at himself again. It's not safe to be all right to those who are all wrong. Noyes may have song in him. But he's not going to get it out through the channels of an endowed and graduated sophistication. This rhymed bal- derdash, which the authorities pronounce to be It wouldn't genuine, is merely a counterfeit art. pass for good in any world in which values are 76 JULY THE CONSERVATOR not confused and the people are not disdained. The artists have thought that by detaching them- selves from the people they could secure them- selves in their art. But they have found that by detaching themselves from the people they have destroyed themselves in their art. We hear it said: The people do not read poetry. But some- thing prior should be said: The poets do not write poetry. Nor is that all. Another thing should be said: The people dont want the new poets to write the old poetry. Another thing should be said: The poets dont know why but they are blind: the people dont know why but they see. Art does not need the Noyes styles any more. That theatrical bom- bast in a fakery of rhyme must go. It will be less and less read. It will in the end be less and less written. Schiller said; I belong to no religion that you can name. Why? From religion. The people are saying: I believe in no poetry that you can name. Why? From poetry. We wont say We wont say of poetry: The form is dead: long live the form. We will say: The form is dead: long live the spirit. I do not say: Noyes is dead: long live Noyes. I say: Noyes is dead; long die Noyes. T. A poet This book was not sent me by the pub- lishers. It is a limited edition book. That limited me out, of course, in- in exile*** stead of in. But Gable had an idea that I should be included. So Gable presented me with a copy. And what Gable wrote on the fly-leaf of the book was far and away better than anything in the book itself. This is how Gable dedicated his gift to me: "You will agree with me, I know, when I say that John Hay will be loved and remembered for his Pike County Ballads long after his work as Secretary of State has been forgotten. We can easily forget the statesman and politician but we will always remember and love the author of Jim will always remember and love the author of Jim Bludso." Yes, Gable, I do agree with you. And I more than agree with you. Hay wrote things in his early life which seemed to show that he was the real stuff. Then he went back. Then he for- got who he was and thought he was somebody else. He was not a wreck. But he was not himself. He never went as high as himself again. Hay was right in instinct. He was not a narrower of ideas. He was not intellectually, spiritually, He was not intellectually, spiritually, penurious. But after the first years he reined himself in. He became the father of policies *A Poet in Exile. Early letters of John Hay. Edited by Caro- line Ticknor. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. As a rather than the child of principles. He denied himself the liberal latitudes and longitudes of spontaneity. He did not sing last as he sang first. He in fact did not sing last at all. figurer in the international politics of his time he was on the side of peace and fraternity. As far as a gentler man committed to capitalistic con- clusions could be. His influence on the whole was towards the light. But he never sang again. After singing as he originally did about liberty it seemed like a tragedy for him to shut up and say no more. no more. Not to follow his own lead and keep on singing and add to rather than subtract from the product of his youth. But he shut up. He was Hay no more. He was another Hay. I shall never forget his adhesion to Whitman. He was Walt's friend when Walt had practically no friends. And he was Walt's friend when Walt had a few friends. had a few friends. And he was Walt's friend to the last when Walt had more than a few friends. and when Hay had more than a little conventional prestige to maintain. I cant forget that bit of history. Hay wrote Walt affirmatively about him- self. He wrote me affirmatively about Walt. He said things to Walt's friends in love and admira- tion of Walt. And he said things to Walt's ene- mies frankly proclaiming the same love and admi- ration. I cant forget that. Though he evolved into politics and commerce, he never receded from that. Hay was always friendly and simple with me. We never met. But his letters were ami- able and ingratiating. I always realized that his courtesies to me were on Walt's account. One episode in which I figured curiously indicates the narrowness of the political career. When the post office department put its ban upon Helen Wilmans several of my envelopes addressed to her came back unopened (of course undelivered) rubber-stamped with the usual departmental an- athema. I sent a bunch of these letters to Hay asking him if there was any way by which he could interest anybody in power in Washington against so palpable an injustice. He answered at once but said he did not see how he could do any- thing in the matter. I did not see how either. And I really had not seen how from the first. But I wondered what the John Hay who once wrote so sublime an exordium to liberty would have to say to a flagrant violation of liberty hap- how he could do anything in the matter. There pening within his own horizon. He did not see That's what Gable sees and what I see and what was a wide deep gap between the two John Hays. history will see. A poet in exile. There's a good title for a story. The story of Hay's second - BO Un 1910 77 THE CONSERVATOR At home life. His first life was spent at home. with himself. At home with insight and a young man's dreams. The second life was a life of ex- ile. No matter how it flourished. No matter what it brought him in fame and popularity. No matter how high it lifted him on the political peaks. It was still a life of exile. Hay exiled Hay. I dont see any use for this book. It con- tains nothing. It does nothing for Hay or for you or for me. Nothing except perhaps to stir up this regret. This personal lamentation. Hay will maybe last awhile. But he will last in his po- ems. In the signal power of a few lines nobly written in his untarnished youth. I dont feel that Hay went bad. But I do feel that he did not do his normal good. I dont feel that he was a traitor. But I do feel that he was not rigidly and sternly loyal. He deserved better of himself. One of the things you find it difficult to realize as you go along is how blind men are. How they so often give up so much for so little. A whole soul for an income. A whole heart for an office. A whole life for a flutter of applause. How they give up the indispensable joys of the unseen for the gratu- itous titillations of the visible. How little they know, giving the best up for the worst. Just be- cause they would rather have the crowd or the castes think well of them than think well of them- selves. Just because they are afraid of being for- gotten. As if being forgotten was not the best part of being remembered after all. T. Karl Marx: I have not yet read Spargo's his life and story. I have looked through it and around it and over and under work* it. I have sort of taken the feel of the matter. Sensed it. Yielded myself to its atmosphere. To the man Marx. To his sacri- ficial leadership. The big man who was at first taken for so little. The little fame that has grown to so much. There was a personal side to Marx of which so far the world in general has been but little aware. He was not a logic chopper. He He was not un- was not a deadening machine. adulterated brain. The psychology of his repu- tation is intensely vividly fascinating. The con- ventional mind has always associated Marx with lawmaking. Marx was not a lawmaker. He was a law discoverer. He was a law announcer. He was not a mechanism. He was a spirit. He was a prophet. Most people think the prophet is the man who makes something out of nothing. Who tells of what he does not see for the benefit of those who do not want to know. But the prophet is not an inventor. He is a seer. He looks ahead. He looks in. He sees below and above surfaces. He goes under worlds and over worlds. He reports his voyagings. That's all the prophet is. A man with his eyes open. Marx was a prophet. He saw over a certain area of social struggle more clearly than it had been scanned before. Then he gave out what he saw. I remember a man who interrupted Ingersoll one night. Ingersoll had been talking about the law of gravitation. His questioner was very mad. Ingersoll answer- ed him smilingly: "You mustn't get so mad at me. I didn't invent gravitation." A good many respectable scholars have been swearing at Marx for some decades with about the same good rea- son. Marx might well have said: "I didn't in- vent gravitation." What physical science has done with atomic gravitation Marx has done with economic gravitation. Marx of course must be associated with this sociological conclusion. But the extreme conventionals and the extreme individualists have been equally guilty in drawing conclusions from this conclusion which are out- rageously unjust. As if Marx had some tyrant system up his sleeve with which to enslave the race. Marx never says: I give this to you. He says I carry it to you. We know for how long Darwin was wrangled and rasped over in the same way. How he suffered as a man from the wild personal hatred of theologians and metaphysi- cians. How the public notion of him was a pure bogey notion. Marx coming along doing the same work in the economic field has had to en- dure the same ostracism and the same persecu- tion. But just as Darwin at last shines resplen- dent as a man. After being seen for what he was. So Marx will come to his own. Spargo's story will go far towards sweeping away for good the virulent stupid counterfeits. Marx will be seen for what he was. Will be honored and gloried in for what he is. Not only as an intellect. As a man, too. Will be understood as a savior. As one who went to the cross. Who gave the world all he had. His body and his soul. A man with vision enough to see for a world. A man with courage enough to be brave for a world. A man with life enough to outlast infinite deaths. A man who was bound to die before he lived. A man who was bound to live eternally after he had died. *Karl Marx: his life and work. By John Spargo. New York: B. W. Huebsch. 1 T. 78 JULY THE CONSERVATOR A LEAVES OF GRASS REPRINT price fixed will be ten dollars for each c I propose to publish in fac-simile Walt Whitman's per- sonal copy of Leaves of Grass, edition of 1860-1861, in which he did much of the work of revision for the edition that fol- MOSHER BOOKS lowed five years later. This copy of Leaves of Grass is historic. It is the volume abstracted by Secretary Harlan from Whitman's desk in the Interior Department and made the basis for Whitman's dis- charge from that branch of the service. An account of this incident, written by Whitman himself, will be photographically reproduced and included. The edition will be limited to five hundred copies. The copy. No books will be sent to editors for review and no rebates or discounts will be allowed to collectors or booksellers. THE INTERNATIONAL STUDIO JULY The art of Cecelia Beaux The Royal Academy exhibition, 1910 The new salon in Paris. Lady Alma-Tadema's pictures The last of the Alexander Young collection The paintings of William Rothenstein R. Tait McKenzie JOHN LANE COMPANY NEW YORK Norse legends carved in wood Faience decoration Recent applied design Two country houses in Montclair Studio talk Reviews and notices Art school notes The text matter of this book will be printed from the original plates, which still exist. The chirographical matter in Whit- man's hand will be superimposed. In order to maintain a strict likeness to the original, in which Whitman used black ink and pen- cils of several colors, it will be necessary for each sheet to go through the press from three to five times. This is a costly process. The production of this work calls for the C finest skill of the photographer, the engraver and the printer. But it will be faithfully su- pervised to the remotest particulars. SELECTIONS FROM THE PROSE AND POETRY OF WALT WHIT- MAN: Edited with introduction by Oscar Lovell Triggs, Ph. D. The best introduc- tory volume to the study of Whitman's writings. It contains representative ex- tracts from poems, prose and letters, together with a most excellent critical and biographi- To persons who have a special interest in Whitman, as well as to students and libraries (particularly to the libraries of schools and colleges), this remarkable reprint must have unusual significance. No steps will be practically taken in this matter until subscriptions sufficient to cover the initial expenses are received Send for circular. HORACE TRAUBEL The standard authorized editions of WALT WHITMAN'S WHITMAN'S WRITINGS WRITINGS issued under the superintendence of Whitman's literary executors in strict conformity with the author's final arrangement of text LEAVES OF GRASS: Complete poems-including Sands at Seventy, Good bye my Fancy, Old age Echoes (posthumous additions) and A backward glance o'er travell'd Roads-library edition, with index of first lines, two portraits, and a fac simile of manuscript, octa- vo, cloth decorative, gilt top, two dollars. Popular edition, same text as library edition, twelve mo., handsome cloth binding, steel portrait, one dollar. Paper covers, complete with portrait, fifty cents. COMPLETE PROSE WORKS: Containing Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs, and Good bye my Fancy. Uniform with corresponding editions of Leaves of Grass library edition, octavo, cloth decorative, gilt top, five full page portraits and illustrations and a fac simile of manuscript, two dollars. Popular edition, same text as above, twelve mo., cloth decorative, one portrait, one dollar and twenty five cents. Each volume will be authenticated by a number and my signature. Subscriptions The puzzle to me is how you will be filled in the order they are received. can turn out such books for the money. cal introduction and a carefully prepared bibliography. Twelve mo., cloth, with portrait, one dollar and twenty five cents. THE WOUND DRESSER: Hospital let- ters in war time. Edited by the late Dr. R. M. Bucke, one of execu- • THE Any of these books can be supplied by D. APPLETON AND COMPANY New York WHAT BOOKLOVERS SAY ABOUT THESE EDITIONS I can find nothing which as gifts please better than your books. Your books brought me back the sense of charm of beauti- ful things and the resolution to hold on with both hands to ideality. Nothing more beautiful in the publisher's art was ever done in America or in England. For a person of very small means who wishes to give an inexpensive but dainty and un- usual wedding present your books are ideal. Your catalogue is a thing to praise without praising in idle words. Reading between the lines, it is a literary joy. GRO My catalogue—a remarkable piece of bookwork in itself-explains these unusual compliments, and is sent free on request to booklovers any- where that can be reached by mail. Thos. B. Mosher PORTLAND, MAINE BACON CRYPTOGRAMS IN SHAKE-SPEARE AND OTHER STUDIES: By ISAAC HULL PLATT net $1.00, by post $1.06. Can be had of The Conservator. SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY: BOSTON The Conservator keeps a high place in my regard among JULIA tors. Twelve mo., cloth decorative, gilt MARLOWE American publi- top, two portraits, one dollar and fifty cents. cations. I wish all the great American public might feel its influence now as it is bound to be felt later. 1910 79 THE CONSERVATOR Broadcast: by Ernest Crosby A sequel to Plain Talk in Psalm and Parable, containing Mr. Cros- by's latest verse, some of which appeared first in The Conservator. LONDON TIMES: There is a good deal of thought, force and de- scriptive power in the book. Cloth. 12mo. Will be sent post free on receipt of 80 cents in stamps or money order by the FUNK & WAGNALLS CO., 60 East 23d Street, New York. Also by the same author, two little books on Tolstoy : TOLSTOY AS A SCHOOLMASTER CHICAGO COMMONS: To try to express in these few prosaic sentences the delightful charm of this little book would be to court failure. TOLSTOY AND HIS MESSAGE PHILADELPHIA ITEM: A genuinely illuminative interpretation of the great philosopher's being and purpose. Each book in cloth. Small 12mo. 93 pages. Put a dollar bill in an envelope and both these books will be sent to you post free on receipt by the HAMMERSMARK PUBLISHING CO., Wabash Avenue, Chicago. 151 Two newly-discovered Whitman manuscripts and a new life WALT WHITMAN'S DIARY IN CANADA Limited to 500 copies. 8vo. Net two dollars and fifty cents. post ten cents extra. 11 Thomas B. Harned, Phila. 12 Thomas B. Harned, Phila. 13 Thomas B. Harned, Phila. 14 Isaac Hull Platt, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania 15 Leonard Abbott, New York 16 Gustav P. Wiksell, Boston 17 Gustav P. Wiksell, Boston 18 Gustav P. Wiksell, Boston 19 Charles G. Garrison, Mer- chantville, New Jersey 20 Walter Leighton, Boston 21 Lymen Chandler, East Au- rora, New York 22 Ladson C. Butler, East Au- rora, New York By 38 George M. Williamson, Grand View on Hudson, New York 39 Mary Van Bibber, Baltimore 40 Mary F. Lang, Toledo 41 Alfred W. Beville, London 42 Mary E. Hawley, Chicago 43 Louis I. Haber, New York Chants Communal, by Horace Traubel: a representative collection of prose pieces radical but con- structive: price one dollar net: by post ten cents extra AN AMERICAN PRIMER by WALT WHITMAN A very early MS. never included in Whitman's works. Limited to 500 copies with photogravure portrait. 8vo. Net two dollars. By post ten cents extra. A new Beacon Biography WALT WHITMAN by ISAAC HULL PLATT Net seventy five cents. By post five cents extra. SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY: Boston SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY: Boston 46 Thomas Earle White, Phila. 47 A. B. Drake, Boston 48 Minot J. Savage, New York 49 Frank P. Held, St. Louis 50 Louis Prang, Boston 51 Lucius D. Morse, Atlanta 52 Library of Congress, Wash- ington GEORGE D. HERRON: It is a book of the highest value and beauty that Horace Traubel proposes to give us, and I can only hope that it will be read as widely and appreciatively as it more than deserves to be for it is with a joy that would seem extravagant, if I ex- pressed it, that I welcome Chants Communal. EUGENE V. DEBS: The best there is in the gifted author is in flower in these pages. There is a heart beat in every word. The book not only deals with life: it is life, radiant, glorious, immortal EDWIN MARKHAM: The Chants of Horace Traubel are an arraign- ment of the civilization that now is and a cheery hail to the civili- zation that is to come. He has something to say and a striking way of saying it. All readers will not agree with his ideas, but all read- ers will be set a-thinking by them. SUBSCRIBERS TO LEAVES OF GRASS REPRINT 101 C. F. Nesbit, Washington 102 Thomas B. 53 Harry Gaylord Wilshire, New York HENRY DEMAREST LLOYD: You are needed in the outside world, outside of Camden, outside of The Conservator. You can do a Conservator in the great world. That which you have been grow- ing and shaping in the nest take now upon a longer flight. Go out where you can encounter the men and the events of the world with your poetry and philosophy. I say this not to deny you, but to affirm. CLARENCE DARROW: Horace Traubel has the soul of the poet and the eye of the seer. All of his work breathes the spirit of liberty and justice. He finds the truth not through the narrow, unsafe rules of the logician, but from that inward perception of right and equality which cannot be deceived. Horace Traubel is both a poet and a philosopher. No one can say anything too good about him or his work. CARLETON NOYES: What Horace Traubel has to say is eminently and always worth hearing. To the consideration of present social conditions and the eternal problem of individual living he brings an open mind and a boundless sympathy. 103 Thomas B. Mosher 44 Charles Warren Stoddard, 73 J. Levering Jones, Philadelphia 104 Levi N. Powers, Haverhill Saratoga, California 74 Public Library, Syracuse 45 Charles Sixsmith, Adlington 75 J. A. Risser, Toronto 105 Charles Lloyd Serrill, Phila near Chorley, Lancashire, 76 John M. Robertson, Moosic, 106 Curtis Hidden Page, Colum- England Pennsylvania bia University 77 Cornell University, Ithaca 107 Wayland Hyatt Smith, Los 78 Edmund Clarence Stedman, 108 George Howarth, Blackburn, Angeles, Cal. England New York 79 Frederick Rowland Marvin, 109 James A. Wilson, Pittsburgh Albany, New York 110 Charles E. Lauriat Co Boston 111 Franklin Wentworth, Bos- ton, Mass. 80 Mayer Sulzberger, Phila. 81 W. P. Wesselhoeft, Boston 82 Willis J. Abbot, Battle Creek 83 Henry D.Lloyd, Winnetka, Ill. 84 Mrs. Sterling, New York 112 Eugene Heffley, New York 113 Henry E. Legler, Madison 114 Edwin Grover, Chicago 115 George B. Wheeler, Chicago 23 Ellen M. Calder, Providence 24 Brown University, Providence 25 Henry S. Borneman, Phila 26 Joseph Fels, Philadelphia 27 John Hay, Washington 56 Yale College, New Haven 57 Harvard College, Cambridge 58 Horace Howard Furness, Wall- ingford, Pennsylvania 116 Howard C. Warren, Prince- ton, New Jersey 117 F. W. Bain, Burlington, Ont. 118 A. Gruenberg, New York 119 B. Weinig, New York 120 T. Dean Swift, Lawrence- ville, N. J. 28 Athanæum, Boston 29 Talcott Williams, Philadelphia 59 J. H. Coyne, St. Thomas, 30 Marie Smith, Philadelphia 90 P. K. Foley, Boston Ontario 121 Jacob Klein, St. Louis 31 John Johnston, Bolton, Lanca- 60 Columbia University, New shire, England York 91 Henry Harrison Brown, San Francisco 92 Leon Bazalgette, Paris, France 122 William Marion Reedy, St. 93 John Moody, Cranford, N. J. 62 George D. Herron, New York 94 George Wharton James, Syra- 123 William Marion Reedy, St. 63 Edward Lauterbach, New cuse, New York 32 John Johnston, Bolton, Lanca- 61 Chicago University, Chicago shire, England Louis Louis York 33 H. Buxton Forman, London 34 H. Buxton Forman, London 35 Public Library, Boston 36 Edward L. Farr, Camden 65 Leland Stanford University 64 Clarence Darrow, Chicago 95 Thomas B. Mosher, Portland, 124 Herbert Chamberlin, Victo- Maine ria, B. C. 96 Alberta Montgomery, Gray 125 Robert Bittong, Philadelphia Abbey, County Down, Ire- 126 William F. Gable, Altoona land 127 George Wolfe Plank, Phila- delphia 37 Thomas S. Marvin, Boston 66 Joseph Fels, Philadelphia 97 Herbert W. Ross, Bridgeport, Conn. 67 Joseph Fels, Philadelphia 68 Joseph Fels, Philadelphia 69 Samuel Kalish, Newark 70 Samuel Kalish, Newark 71 Samuel Kalish, Newark 72 Robert Mackey, Jr., York 98 Harrison N. Hiles, Canton, Ohio New 99 Art. V. Raley, Texas 100 Jerome Conner, Syracuse 54 John Spargo, New York 55 W. H. Trimble, Dunedin, 85 Stockham Publishing Com- New Zealand pany, Chicago 86 Carleton E. Noyes, Cambridge 87 Annie T. Auerbach, Boston 88 P. K. Foley, Boston 89 P. K. Foley, Boston 128 Amy Smith, Philadelphia 129 Gordon Craig, Berlin 130 Gordon Craig, Berlin 131 Gordon Craig, Berlin 132 H. Gail Davis, South Bend 80 JULY 1910 THE CONSERVATOR Keep the hinges of your mind well oiled and your soul busy -but dont forget your body Exercise that too. And all the wholesome helps to exercise we have Marshall E. Smith & Brother 25 S. Eighth Street Philadelphia Athletic Outfitters Men's Furnishers. may be con PHILADELPHIA One dollar a year WPC THE AMERICAN JOUR- The Conservator dollar and a quarter a year: is- NAL OF EUGENICS: one sued monthly: samples, ten cents. Trial three months with pamphlet Institutional Marriage, thirty cents in post- age stamps. Los Angeles, California DR. J. M. HABEL'S ACADEMY prepares students for college, teaches modern languages. Tourists and commercial travelers find Professor Habel's half-hour linguistic conversations of great benefit in European countries. 1120 Girard street, Philadelphia THE MASK The only journal devoted to the art of the theater: printed on handmade paper and illustrated by wood engravings, lithographs and (to subscribers) etchings. The object of the publication is to bring before an intelligent public many ancient and modern aspects of the Theater's Art which have been too long disregarded or forgotten. JOHN SEMAR, Editor. GORDON CRAIG, Art Director. Four dollars a year. Florence, Italy. It is worse than waste for any woman to boil and scald the clothes and tire herself out washing them in the old-fashioned way. Use Fels- Naptha soap according to the easy COLLECTS directions. No boiling Of grocers Fels & Co., Philadelphia THE ARTSMAN Oscar Lovell Triggs writes this: "I believe as firmly as ever in the truth and permanency of the art-craft movement. I read The Artsman with the greatest satisfaction because as an exponent of the new indus- trialism it represents the idealism which is at the bottom of the movement. We do not need more material products but we do need all the idealism and romanticism possible to attach to the products we have. The Artsman is practical also and deserves the combined allegiance of workers and thinkers." THE ROSE VALLEY PRESS sixteen hundred twenty four Walnut street 'TWENTIETH YEAR I want to thank you at this late day for the reviews you have JACK LONDON given me in The Conservator. Leaving out every- thing else, you have done what not one in a hundred reviewers has done- grasped the innermost meaning of my work. I regard the Conservator as one of the best papers published in America; in fact, I know of no JOHN P. ALTGELD high a plane and is such an inspi- other paper that stands on so ration. G HORACE TRAUBEL One: Put money in your purse Two: Give all to love Three: He died for us Four: Make room for man Five: The soul of the workman Single copies will be sent postpaid for twelve cents. Ten copies will be sent for one dol- lar. Address The Conservator, Philadel- phia THE CALL S the only Socialist daily east of Chicago is published in New York city and is indispensable to those who aim to keep in- formed in matters appertain- ing to the labor question. It is suggested that Socialists in particular should do every- thing possible to extend the circulation of THE CALL Write to the business office for information. . The Conservator ROSE VALLEY PRESS Moral conscientiousness, crystalline, without flaw, not godlike only, entirely human, awes ard enchants forever.—WIIITMAN Twenty first year PHILADELPHIA, AUGUST, 1910 I am glad to join with others of my comrades in conveying greetings to Comrade Cahan on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his birth, and in recognition of the eminent services that he has rendered in the Socialist movement. Yet my gladness is not untinged with a certain note of apprehension lest in expressing so conspicuously our esteem of an honored comrade we obscure the broader scene which if equally illumined would disclose tens of thousands of other comrades, laboring with equal devotion, and each no less worthy of praise. When we flash a beam of light through the darkness, all save the spot illumined is for the time less easily seen than before. THE CONSERVATOR Published monthly by Horace Traubel, 1624 Walnut street, Philadelphia. Entered at the post office, Philadelphia, as second class matter. YEARLY SUBSCRIPTION, ONE DOLLAR. CENTS. SINGLE COPIES, TEN FOREIGN SUBSCRIPTIONS, ONE DOLLAR TWENTY FIVE CENTS Glad as I am to rejoice over the services of Comrade Cahan, I am gladder still to rejoice with him on this occasion over the services of those scores of thousands of less prominent comrades without whose labor and devotion his own exceptional opportunities for service would not have arisen, Instead, then, of regarding the occasion we celebrate as marking the culmination of fifty years' growth and service by Comrade Cahan, I would rather regard it with him as marking the culmination of fifty years of devoted labor by his comrades throughout the world in creating the environment of comradeship and coopera- tion in social strife that has nurtured his great ability and that of others, and thus made possible, incidentally, the distinguished services that have marked his career and theirs. In our rejoicing over the services of Comrade Cahan let us not forget that the facilities that he and that each of us enjoys, are the products of scores of thousands of other men and women, and sometimes of children too. We have aided, to be sure, but the bulk of the labor that has made our respective services possible has been done by others. In our rejoicing let us recall that we cannot safely assume that any comrade's services to the movement have been greater than the movement's services to him; that we are but fellow-workers together, deriving help and perhaps inspiration one from another and each from all. In our rejoicing let us place the emphasis rather upon the services of the many to each, than upon the services of any one to the many; upon the achievements of the many in union, rather than upon the separate achievements of the few; upon the devotion of the many to all and to the common Cause, rather than upon the devotion of any one comrade, as though it were more noteworthy than the devotion of scores of thousands of others. Hail to a loyal comrade, Abraham Cahan! HORACE TRAUBEL, Editor anne montGOMERIE, Associate Editor GERTRUDE TRAUBEL, Associate Worker The editors may also be addressed at Camden, New Jersey CLARENCE DARROW: Your paper is the best and bravest and truest of all, and this I say without any sort of qualification. It never has a false note and is always true to the great real cause of human freedom-the only cause for which it is worth while to work and live and die. man magte van M Number six CONTENTS The science of poetry-T., Althea-T., 92 J. G. PHELPS STOKES. Collect-H. T., 81 We all seem to be moving together-Horace Traubel, 84 A note on Walt Whitman's prosody, 11-Fred Newton Scott, 85 As to Books and Writers 90 The gold brick-T., 92 Let me ask you a question, dear Ben Lindsey-T., 93 Advertisements, 94, 95, 96 Collect What are you doing with love? We have only a few years here to love in. H. T. What are you doing with your few years? I am not counting on what is to come. hereafter. I know the hereafter is to come. I في 82 AUGUST THE CONSERVATOR treasure. know it is not only a guess. A mistake. But the hereafter will take care of itself. I want the here to take care of itself. So I go about talking about love. Nothing but love. Making people tired of seeing me. Some of you. Some of you who ask: Dont you know anything to talk about but love? Some of you to whom I must say No, I dont. So I go about talking about love. Putting the main question to you. Letting others put the other questions. Admitting that there are Admitting that there are other things. But knowing that love is the main thing. You are to pass along with the rest. But what are you to leave behind you? What are you doing with love? Love is not to be fooled with or thrown away. Is not to be wasted. It is a Your capacity for love is your capacity for life. Tell me how much a man loves and I will tell you how much he lives. Tell me how much fire is in the sun and I will tell you how much light is in the world. Loving is knowing how to live. Living is learning how to love. A man can no more escape love and be a man than he can escape feeding and be alive. They say: You preach sentiment. Call it anything you choose. I preach life. They tell me: You say the same thing every day. So I do. So do the seas. So do the stars. So must the laws. They say the same thing every day. And if I did not, and if the moons and the oceans did not, there would be no every day. I breathe every day. But that is no reason why I should stop breathing. And my heart beats every day. Always, unceasingly, whether I am awake or asleep, beats on, eternally beats on. But that is no reason why I should stop the beat of my heart. So I love. And I say things about love. Every day. Repeating the same story. Starting at the old place every new day. Starting at the new place every old day. I never get tired of being a lover. I never get I never get tired of loving. I never find love oversaid or overdone. I know love is very old. As old as infinity. As old as the firstborn. There was nothing before love. There will be nothing after love, There is no too soon and no too late for love. Love is always in order. Wherever life is. There love is in order. For without love life can never be in order. Love. What is it? I dont know. But I find its evidences every- where. If I was a hater I would not see why the solar system hung together. But being a lover I find gravitation plausible. I do not need to mouse about in the universe looking for explanations. Love is the explanation. But if I hated then I would be lost. Then my eyes would be out. I would have to grope around feeling the blank walls of my cell for a door. I do not say that love is reasonable. I only say that love pre- vails. I do not say that the tides are reasona- ble. I only say that the tides flow. I am not compelled to prove myself. I am only expect- ed to stand out where I may be seen. Love stands out wherever I look so that it can be seen. In whatever I look, stands out. Love. The drawing together of particles. The drawing together of bodies. Your body and my body. The drawing together of souls. Your soul and my soul. When we say universal we say drawing. together. When we say drawing together we say love. Make way for love. I hear the command. Let the currents flow. Do nothing to hinder them. Reach through them to everlasting life. Endure. Die. But do not stand in the way of love. You would not stand in the way of Jupiter. Of the Amazon. Of waterspouts or tornadoes. Noth- ing can and live. Nor in the way of love. Noth- ing can and live. The earth has given you love. What do you give the earth? You were born rich. Are you going to die poor? You are not at liberty to do as you please. You can only do as love pleases. Otherwise you forfeit life. We are never free till we love. And when we love we no longer wish to be free. Can you cut your- self loose? Not unless you give up love. But self loose? if you give up love you give up life. Which means that freedom is suicide. I do not crave isolation. I crave love. I do not crave privi- lege. lege. Gifts. Preferments. No. I crave love. I want all the life that love can contain. But I dont want any life that does not contain love. What are you doing with love? What are you doing with love? In the average of your life. In the cut and dry of your hehavior. In the habits of your trade. Your profession. What are you doing with love? You makers of pictures. You who write. You who sing. You who are married or not married. You who are afraid to be yourselves. What are you doing with love? What are the boundaries between states doing with love? Or race hatreds? Or theo- logical quarrels? What are they doing with love? Or your income? What is your income doing with love? Is it making more of love or less of love? Is it accentuating or reducing the gaps be- tween men? You believe in systems as they are. In killing children before they are born and old men and women before they are dead. In levy- ing tribute on the crowd. In growing fat on the world's lean. In getting along and being satisfied with getting along no matter who is crushed or who is left behind. What are you doing with love? 1910 THE CONSERVATOR 83 For nothing is so dead as a thing without love in it. It may be a great noise. It may be very big. It may be sustained by imposing sophistries. It may be glorified in the cry of the parasite. But nothing is so dead. If you get money that does not come to you by rights. If you get an office that does not come to you by deserving. Then you are dead. Nothing can save you from death. If you employ your art for anything but love. For admiration, for instance. For private glamor. For a reputation. For anything but love. Then you are dead. Nothing can save you from death. That alone can live which lives through love. What are you doing with love? You say you would like to. But you say you cant. You say love is irrefutable but impos- sible. You say love is a dream. But dreams and dirt wont go together. Therefore you choose dirt. Not because you prefer dirt. No. But because you obey the mandate. Still I ask: What are you doing with love? How far have you gone with love? You accept life. On what terms? According to love? No. According to so much a year. According to a place. Accord- ing to prestige. According to dress and property and glitter. You exchange love for a row of ci- phers. What are you doing with love? Life be- longs to love. Everything in life belongs to love. Because love is what holds things together. You reply as if you thought love was someone's drivel. A clumsy mawkish sentiment. You have put it out of life. Out of your business. Out of your bargains and sales. Out of your daily here and there, What have you come to? Until you Until you come to love you have come to nothing. Noth- ing. Done nothing. Every life has got to be love's life. Recreating the base in the noble. Kindling the farther joy out of the nearer sor- row. I see no other course. No way but love's way. Do you steer by some other chart? You You think you are alive. But you are against the crowd. You think you are alive. But you are willing to prosper alone. You think you are alive. But you are not interested in being beau- tiful. You are only interested in being recog- nized. You think you are alive. But you are an alien in the homestead. Being alive is being loving. Being alive is refusing life without love. A man who robs mẹn is not a scoundrel. He is only dead. He is not to be damned by some god in a removed hell. He is damned by his own will in the room where he sleeps. To take without giving. That is being dead. We are cheated by an illusion. We imagine our world to be extra alive. But it is extra dead. For we have done everything to remember profit and to forget men. That is death. Everything to make it easy for a few and hard for all. That is death. Everything to deepen the chasm between the palace and pov- erty. That is death. Everything to make our arts contemptuous of ignorance and the poor. That is death. Everything to make the state an oppressor instead of a deliverer. And the church: to make it a no rather than a yes. That is death. Everything to make money suffice. No matter how got or for what used or who must go penniless: to make money suffice. That is death. Can a man Can a man on the earth survive his own death? Or can a civilization on the earth survive its own death? sons. What are you doing with love? There is only one thing to do with love. To make more love out of it. I guess love is foolish. But then nothing real was ever done except by foolish per- I guess it is very easy to prove that love is blind. That it has no ears. That it feels with- out thinking. That it has no sense. That it flies in the face of testimony. That is very easy. Any- one can do that. Any hater can do it. Haters can do it particularly well. I do not believe in love because it is logical. Because it always can tell why. Because it is justified. Because it is consistent. is consistent. Because it is inevitably four by four. No. I believe in love because it is love. I believe in gravitation because it is gravitation. It is not a bad idea for love to have brains. But love is not brains. With love everything seems just right. Without love nothing can liquidate. The other things are handy to have around. around. But love comes first. Your machines. Your books. Your courts. Your courts. Your legislatures. They are handy to have around. But love comes first. Things are partial till love makes them whole. Prop- erties are partial. Vice and virtue are partial. The workman and the boss are partial. Slaves and the owners of slaves, rulers and the ruled, are partial. All are partial till love makes them whole. Success is as partial as failure. The gods are as partial as the devils. Heaven is as partial as hell. All are partial till love has made all whole. Husbands and wives are partial. A man and a woman are partial. Even those who want to love and are afraid to love are partial. The laws are partial. All are partial till love has made. them whole. One man making money off an- other. Superior people and inferior people. The man who thinks he is better than somebody else and the man who admits that he is worse than anybody else. The cowards and the heroes. They are all partial. All partial till love makes them whole. them whole. Our fears are so partial. Love will P 84 AUGUST THE CONSERVATOR It Will make our fears whole in courage. We postpone It makes me feel so little to feel all the girls and love for someone's opinion about love. I ask boys, my farthest children, dragging me into whether I should love. I should ask how I dare the future: not to love. I ask sometimes whether it is right It makes me feel so much like being all together to love. I should ask whether it is ever right not to love. What excuse have I for not loving? A priest's scripture? A statesman's law? A man's ownership of a woman or a woman's ownership It of a man? They are not enough. I have no more excuse for not loving than the sun has for not shining. Being the tyrant is so partial. Be- ing a proprietor is so partial. Being set apart in any way for special consideration is so partial. Love alone will make the partial whole. make industry whole. Make the arts whole. Make a man's relation with a man whole. Tak- ing toll is so partial. Interests, rents, profits, are so partial. Being jealous, a man of a woman, a woman of a man, is so partial. Being tickled by applause, being depressed by adversity, is so par- tial. Not being able to mix with the crowd. To be one of the mob. To be like one of their own in the press and fury of the struggle. That leaves a man or a woman so far behind. That is so par- That is so par- tial. We need love to make it whole. To make competitions whole in fraternities. To make the individual whole in the commune. Making life whole in love. In sacrifice. Limiting life to its affections. Denying the partial for the whole. Reaching beyond the love of life to the life of love. Escaping from the partial into the whole. Do you see the roadway? Out of the atom into the world? Out of severance into Out of commerce and battle into service and peace? Out of suspicion into brotherhood? Out of being against into being for? Against the crowd, against the person, into being for? Find- ing a path broken through the partial into the whole? What are you doing with love? We all seem We all seem to be moving to- to be moving gether: together Little and big, clean and corrupt, superior and inferior, we all seem to be moving together: Something is pushing us on: back of us eras and generations of men: pushing us on: Try as we may to separate ourselves, to lift up our heads with pride, to mask and dodge: Try as we may we cant cut loose-we may drift from the harbor but we are still on the sea. It makes me feel so big to feel all my fathers and mothers back of me pushing me ahead: -all together with all of the others: makes me feel so much like being all together -all together with all of myself: does not make me free: I am not to be free: but it is to make me love: I am to love: And so I am not unhappy for giving up what I never possessed and getting what I never ex- pected: For the feel of the ground, the feel of the air we breathe, is the feel of being together: For the feel of the dreams of my soul and the feel of the fires of my body is the feel of be- ing together: For having all the earth to myself would be noth- ing to me if I did not have the people inhab- iting the earth: For being promoted to paradise would be nothing to me if I was compelled to receive salvation alone: We all seem to be moving together: together we have meanings: any other way we have no meanings: You with me, anyone with anyone, the blackest with the whitest, the robber with his victim: All, all, moving together towards something big enough and good enough for us all: Big enough for all the little, good enough for all the bad: Moving together: not divining why or to what: but sure that the cause is sufficient, sure that the place is worth while. There we were on the boat in the wide river: all of us moving together: The waters moving with the sky, the stars moving with the clouds: Nothing still, nothing dead or inert, nothing tired or worn out: The mountains as fresh every morning as the day they were heaped up out of the first fires: Everything moving with everything: the earth in space distance itself with time : Nothing left behind: not a shred or a patch: not a derelict or an outlaw: Worlds within worlds moving, moving: souls within souls moving, moving: Light moving with darkness, the past moving with the present: The dead moving with the living: even the dead: the dead not lost, either: moving, moving: 1910 THE CONSERVATOR 85 Across the streams and the lands moving: across Something is moving us on: I feel it: its arms the heavens moving: all with all: embrace me: its kiss is on my lips: Something is moving us on: a personal some- thing: a you or a me: keeping me always closest to itself: Something is moving us on: we all seem to be moving together. The endless procession, the march of eternities, the pilgrim deliverance: moving, moving: Out of all into all, out of nothing into nothing: moving, forever moving: Not stopping to argue or separate: not waiting for anyone or anything to catch up: Knowing that all is moving together: whether a little behind or in advance what does it mat- ter? Knowing that though we fight we move together: or enjoy or suffer, move together: You with me, dear brother: you with me: listen man's pros- to me as I say it: moving together: Making all the isolations useless: making all clois- ters blasphemous: ody* II Moving, moving: all together: all in the same course: moving, moving: Farthest moving with nearest, oldest moving with youngest, together, together: Into the enclosing darkness, into the emancipating light, moving, moving, together: Enemies and friends, saints and sinners, begin- nings and endings, all moving together: Without reason yet with the best of reasons, pass- ing, repassing, in tireless journeys: Moving, moving, moving: together, together, to- gether. We all seem to be moving together: what other way is there to move? The whole body and spirit of the globe undergoes a change with the simplest word I speak : I take a single step: all life and death are recast in the ebb and flow of my desire: There is no loss but all lose there is no gain but all gain we move together: There is no love, no lack of love, but all love, but all lack love, in the current of the common sea: Something is moving us on: something that in- cludes us all that sweeps us all into its com- petent span: Something is moving us on: something that after it has passed has left no debris behind: Something is moving us on: something that takes no account of castes-that only takes account of love: Something is moving us on: all of us, with one intention: something finally hospitable: Something is moving us on: something that after death moves on to life once more without stopping: Horace Traubel. A note on Doubtless one may find in Whit- Walt Whit- man's own utterances warrant for what I have called the orgiastic view of poetry. "I finish no specimens," he says in one of his poems, "I shower them by ex- haustless laws, fresh and modern continually, as nature does". And again : G I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future. I but advance a moment only to wheel and hurry back in the darkness, I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping, turns a casual look upon you and Leaving it to you to prove and define it, then averts his face, Expecting the main things from you. In the same vein is the poem written in Platte Canyon, Spirit that Form'd this Scene, in which, as we learn from his diary, Whitman embodied his poetic creed: it that form'd this scene, These tumbled rock-piles grim and red, These reckless heaven-ambitious peaks, These gorges, turbulent-clear streams, this naked freshness, These formless wild arrays, for reasons of their own, I know thee, savage spirit-we have communed together, Mine too such wild arrays, for reasons of their own; Was't charged against my chants they had for- To fuse within themselves its rules precise and gotten art? delicatesse? The lyrist's measur'd beat, the wrought-out tem- ple's grace-column and polish'd arch for- got? But thou that revelest here-spirit that form'd this scene, They have remember'd thee. * Reprinted, with some alterations, from the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, vol. vii, pp. 134-153. 86 AUGUST THE CONSERVATOR Here and in other passages Whitman seems indeed to adopt unreservedly the doctrine of po- etic formlessness. But, it may be asked, doth not the muse protest too much? Poets have from time immemorial had the privilege of ex- pressing wild and rebellious thoughts about any- thing in the universe, their own art included; but curiously enough they have expressed these re- bellious thoughts best when they have spoken in orderly and chastened language. In spite of his disclaimer, therefore, it may be that Whitman at the very moment when he thinks he is uttering tufts and tussocks of grass, is in reality building the lofty rhyme. I believe that this is so and I think that we shall find some evidence to support this contention if we turn to Whitman's prose. In the first place, there are in his prose writings passages not a few in which the claims of regu- larity, symmetry, measure, and obedience to ryth- mic law are clearly recognized. I will cite one or two of them : Ca The fruition of beauty is no chance of miss hit -it is as inevitable as life-it is exact and plumb as gravitation. From the eyesight proceeds an- other eyesight, and from the hearing proceeds an- other hearing, and from the voice proceeds an- other voice, eternally curious of the harmony of things with man. These understand the law of These understand the law of perfection in masses and floods-that it is profuse and impartial-that there is not a minute of the light or dark, nor an acre of the earth and sea, without it-nor any direction of the sky, nor any trade or employment, nor any turn of events. This is the reason that about the proper expres- sion of beauty there is precision and balance. In one curious and significant passage Whitman fairly makes a return upon Whitman, candidly admitting that his sense for the beauty of nature may have its roots in art itself: "That spread of waves and gray-white beach, salt, monotonous, senseless-such an entire absence of art, books, talk, elegance—so indescribably comforting, even this winter's day-grim, yet so delicate-looking, so spiritual-striking, emotional, impalpable depths, subtler than all the poems, paintings, music, I have ever read, seen, heard. (Yet let me be fair, perhaps it is because I have read those poems and heard that music.)" (Specimen Days, p. 95.) In the second place, corroborative evidence may be drawn from Whitman's method of composition. Burroughs says that Whitman "did not build any- thing strictly speaking. He let himself go". But this view does not square with Whitman's own words. We know that far from throwing off his poems in a mad, delirious ecstasy-with "rushing spontaneity", as Mrs. Gilchrist would have it- he labored long and hard to bring them to perfec- tion. By the spring of 1855, says Dr. Bucke, "Whitman had found or made a style in which he could express himself, and in that style he had (after as he told me elaborately building up the structure and then utterly demolishing it five dif- ferent times) written twelve poems, and a long prose preface which was simply another poem ". When he was correcting the proofs of the sev- enth edition of Leaves of Grass in 1881, he said to a reporter of the Boston Globe, "This edition will complete the design which I had in my mind when I began to write. The whole affair is like one of those old architectural edifices, some of which were hundreds of years building, and the designer of which has the whole idea in his mind from the first". What is this but the method of all great constructive artists from Eschylus to Browning? Whether the artist's design is com- pleted in a day or in a lifetime is of little conse- quence; the essential and characterizing trait is surely the ability to plan and foresee a construc- tive whole, and to keep it steadily before the in- ner eye until the whole is completed. But the most convincing proofs are to be found in Whitman's own manuscripts. Through the kindness of Mr. Horace Traubel, the Boswell of Whitman and one of his literary executors, I have had the privilege of examining the notes, outlines, and preliminary studies of two of Whitman's po- ems, together with the many versions through which each poem passed on its way to the final copy. From these remains it is evident that the poet's "spontaneity ", like that of most artists, was the result of prolonged and painful toil. The underground work which preceded the actual com- position is in its extent and thoroughness amazing. In the inception of the poem hundreds of vague suggestions are noted, examined and rejected. In course of time the "spinal idea", as Whitman terms it, emerges and is triumphantly announced. Then in page upon page of tentative outlines, all possible developments of this spinal idea are fore- casted and subjected to searching criticism, When the structure of the poem has been determined with some exactitude, other pages are devoted to lists of words and phrases suitable for the expres- sion of the prominent ideas. sion of the prominent ideas. Finally come the successive versions of the poem, most of them so disfigured by erasures and interlineations as to be nearly or quite illegible. I venture the opinion. that no fair-minded critic, after examining these ev- idences, will deny to Whitman the name of artist. Whether one likes his art or not is another ques- 1910 87 THE CONSERVATOR tion, but that he held before himself a high and difficult ideal and strove with all the powers of his genius to attain it, is as certain as anything in lit- erary history. I shall conclude, then, that Whitman, in throw- I shall conclude, then, that Whitman, in throw- ing aside the traditional scheme of English versi- fication, still adhered to artistic methods. If his poems are difficult of scansion, as undoubtedly they are, we need not hastily assume that they are amorphous or recklessly misshapen, nor yet that It is at they are the negative of extrinsic art. least permissible to assume as a working hypothe- sis that their seeming departures from traditional canons may have an artistic rationale. Starting with this assumption let us then inquire what poetic principles he adopted and why he adopted them. We may take as a starting point an illumi- native passage from his own writings. It appears in the books entitled Collect under the heading New Poetry : In my opinion the time has arrived to essen- tially break down the barriers of form between prose and poetry. I say the latter is henceforth to win and maintain its character regardless of rhyme, and the measurement-rules of iambic, spon- dee, dactyl, etc., and that even if rhyme and those measurements continue to furnish the medium for inferior writers and themes, (especially for persi- flage and the comic, as there seems henceforward, to the perfect taste, something inevitably comic in rhyme, merely in itself, and anyhow,) the truest and greatest poetry, (while subtly and necessarily al- ways rhythmic, and distinguishable easily enough,) can never again, in the English language, be ex- pressed in arbitrary and rhyming meter, any more than the greatest eloquence, or the truest power and passion. While admitting that the vener- able and heavenly forms of chiming versification have in their time play'd great and fitting parts -that the pensive complaint, the ballads, wars, amours, legends of Europe, etc., have, many of them, been inimitably rendered in rhyming verse -that there have been very illustrious poets whose shapes the mantle of such verse has beautifully and appropriately enveloped-and though the mantle has fallen, with perhaps added beauty, on some of our own age-it is, notwithstanding, cer- tain to me, that the day of such conventional rhyme is ended. soul to the general globe, and all its relations in astronomy, as the savans portray them to us-to (as the modern, the busy nineteenth century, grandly poetic as any, only different,) with steam- ships, railroads, factories, electric telegraphs, cylin- der presses to the thought of the solidity of na- tions, the brotherhood and sisterhood of the entire earth-to the dignity and heroism of the practical labor of farms, factories, foundries, workshops, mines, or on shipboard, or on lakes and rivers— resumes that other medium of expression, more flexible, more eligible-soars to the freer, vast, diviner heaven of prose. In America, at any rate, and as a medium of highest esthetic, practical or spiritual expression, present or future, it palpably fails, and must fail, to serve. The Muse of the Prairies, of Califor- nia, Canada, Texas, and of the peaks of Colorado, dismissing the literary, as well as social etiquette of over-sea feudalism and caste, joyfully enlarging, adapting itself to comprehend the size of the whole people, with the free play, emotions, pride, pas- sions, experiences, that belong to them, body and It appears, from this passage, that Whitman, feeling his genius confined by accentual meters and seeking for a different medium of expression, turned from verse to prose. Why he did so will perhaps become clear if we consider how these two types of literature differ in their rhythmical structure. As I have tried to show elsewhere,* the funda- mental difference between prose and poetry if we trace each to its origin, is that in one speech is used mainly for purposes of communication, in the other mainly for purposes of expression. The earliest poetic forms were the results of man's ef- forts to give free vent to his emotions. Poetry was the spontaneous expression of joy, grief, re- ligious fervor and the like, and its closest associa- tions were with the communal dance. The earliest prose forms, on the other hand, were communica- tive forms. They sprang from situations in which man's most urgent need was to transmit his thoughts and feelings to his fellows. Prose was thus the out- come of conversation, signals, calls for aid, cries of warning, and, in general, of intercourse whose chief purpose was the maintaining of social or- ganization. Each of these branches of literature has its spe- cial type of rhythm. With the rhythm of verse everyone is familiar. It is composed of units of speech which we call syllables, arranged in rhyth- mic patterns called feet, which are again combined in larger rhythmic patterns called lines. Its chief characteristics are perhaps the brevity of the re- curring units and the frequency with which the same rhythmic pattern is repeated. Augą The materials out of which the pattern of verse is woven may theoretically be any of the elements of speech. These elements are, generally speak- ing, stress, quantity, quality, pitch, number of units, rate of movement and pause. history of literature now one element now another has gained the upper hand and formed the regu- But in the * Publications of the Modern Language Association xix. 2. S 88 AUGUST THE CONSERVATOR lative principle of a nation's prosody. Thus in ancient Persian and some of the oldest Latin po- etry the norm was (I believe) the number of syl- lables, and the same is perhaps true of modern French. In classic Greek and Latin verse the basic element was quantity. In Anglo-Saxon verse, quality, in the special form of alliteration, was an essential feature. In modern Germanic verse the fundamental rhythm-stuff is undoubt- edly stress. The rhythm of prose is not as yet very well understood, but it seems, in English at any rate, to be a different thing from meter. Instead of the short, pulsating rhythm characteristic of verse, we find in prose a long, sweeping, swaying, cumu- lative movement like that of ocean waves. A prose sentence seems to be made up of rushes of sound, rising and falling, hastening and delaying, swell- ing and dying away, in a complex and evasive BAN sequence. If the basic element of modern English verse is stress, that of modern English prose is prob- ably pitch. That is to say, prose is in the main a succession of pitch-glides. The unit, or foot, is composed of a rising followed by a falling glide. These units are susceptible of considerable varia- tion, and when artfully combined give the impres- sion of a distinct tune or pattern. In order to distinguish these types of rhythm I have applied to the rhythm of verse the term nu- tation, to the rhythm of prose the term motation. Employing these convenient terms, we may say that Whitman, in his prosody, turned from the nutative to the motative principle, from the rhythm of beats to the rhythm of pitch-glides. Why he did so I have already indicated in part. It was because the rhythm of prose, being larger and freer than the rhythm of verse, seemed nearer to the uncramped spirit of nature from which he drew his inspiration. But another reason may be found in a peculiarity of Whitman's genius to which, I believe, sufficient attention has not hith- erto been given. I mean his quick and delicate susceptibility to certain modes of motion and se- quences of sound. One cannot read far in Whit- man, either in his poetry or his prose, without be- ing struck by this characteristic. ދ The trait is particularly noticeable in the book of notes and reflections called Specimen Days, which, better than his poems, reveals his fashion of observing nature and his predilections. From passages in this book it is obvious that Whitman took keen delight in natural free motions of every kind, especially swaying, or, as he would say, "urging" motions. "motions. I will give a few examples out of many that I have noted. "It did me good," he says of a band concert, "even to watch the vio- linists drawing their bows so masterly-every mo- tion a study". On the steamer sailing out of New York harbor he notes with satisfaction the "long, pulsating swash, as our boat steams seaward". Crossing the Delaware on a winter night, he writes: I don't know anything more filling than to be on the wide, firm deck of a powerful boat, a clear, resistlessly through this thick, marbly, glistening cool, extra-moonlight night, crushing proudly and ice. The whole river is now spread with it- some immense cakes. There is such weirdness. about the scene-partly the quality of the light, with its tinge of blue, the lunar twilight-only the large stars holding their own in the radiance of the moon. Temperature sharp, comfortable for But the sense of motion, dry, full of oxygen. power-the steady, scornful, imperious urge of our strong new engine, as she ploughs her way through the big and little cakes. The ferry boats moving from shore to shore, and the yachts, "those daring, careening things of grace and wonder", "with their fierce, pure, hawk-like beauty and motion", the "perpetual travel of the horse-cars", the tide of humanity on Broadway, "bubbling and whirling and moving like its own environment of waters"-these things fascinate him. He is particularly stimulated by the rolling thunder of passing railway trains, of which he says, "I like both the sight and the sound". Riding on the railway exhilarated him like wine. His notes of his journey through the west in 1879 are full of his delight in rapid motion. "What a fierce, weird pleasure," he says, "to be in my berth at night in the luxurious palace-car, drawn by the mighty Baldwin-embodying and filling me, too, full of the swiftest motion and most resistless strength!" In his observations of nature from day to day he rarely fails to mark the flight of birds. If he speaks of the polished surface of the pond, it is always because it mirrors some flying thing over- head. "Rare music" is his term for the sound of the midnight flight of birds in their migra- tions. "You could hear the characteristic mo- tion-once or twice 'the rush of mighty wings,' but oftener a velvety rustle, long-drawn out.' The flight of an eagle over the Hudson against the storm is "like reading some first-class natural tragedy or epic, or hearing martial trumpets. The splendid bird enjoys the hubbub-is adjusted and equal to it-finishes it so artistically. His pinions "" 1910 THE CONSERVATOR 89 just oscillating-the position of his head and neck -his resistless, occasionally varied flight-now a swirl, now an upward movement—the black clouds driving the angry wash below-the hiss of rain, the wind's piping (perhaps the ice colliding, grunt- ing)-he tacking or jibing-now, as it were, for a change, abandoning himself to the gale, moving with it with such velocity-and now resuming control, he comes up against it, lord of the situa- tion and the storm-lord, amid it, of power and savage joy". He never tires of the graceful evolutions of the kingfishers. "For nearly an hour I indolently look and join them while they dart and turn and take their airy gambols, sometimes far up the creek disappearing for a few moments, and then surely returning again and performing most of their flight within sight of me, as if they knew I appreciated and absorb'd their vitality, spiritual- ity, faithfulness and the rapid, vanishing, delicate lines of moving yet quiet electricity they drew for me across the spread of the grass, and the blue sky." Another day with equal delight he dwells upon the fluttering of myriads of light-yellow but terflies "dipping and oscillating" over a field of clover-hay. "In the lane as I came along just now I noticed one spot, ten feet square or so, where more than a hundred had collected, hold- ing a revel, a gyration-dance or butterfly good- time, winding and circling, down and across, but always keeping within the limits." He had strange dream-trances in which fixed objects moved about, "sequacious of the lyre" of one of them he says: "I saw my favorite trees step out and promenade up, down, and around very curiously-with a whisper from one, leaning down as a he passed me, we do all this on the pres- ent occasion, exceptionally, just for you." Akin to this almost morbid sensitiveness to mo- tion, is Whitman's delight in certain sequences of sounds, particularly rushes of sounds, or sounds that swell and die away-the "rolling music" of the distant railway trains, "the low rising and fall- ing wind-purr from the tops of the maples and willows", "the musical low murmur through the pines, quite pronounced, curious, like waterfalls, now still'd, now pouring again", "the loud swell- ing, perpetual hum" of the bumble-bee, "varied now and then by something almost like a shriek". We may note particularly his absorption in the note of the locust-"a long whirring, continued, quite loud noise graded in distinct swirls, or swing- ing circles, increasing in strength and rapidity up to a certain point, and then a fluttering, quietly tapering fall". To this peculiar sound he calls special attention. special attention. "Let me say more about the song of the locust," he adds, a paragraph or two later, "even to repetition; a long, chromatic, trem- ulous crescendo, like a brass disk whirling round and round, emitting wave after wave of notes, be- ginning with a certain moderate beat or measure, rapidly increasing in speed and emphasis, reach- ing a point of great energy and significance, and then quickly and gracefully dropping down and Not the melody of the singing bird-far from it; the common musician might think with- out melody, but surely having to the finer ear a harmony of its own; monotonous-but what a swing there is in that brassy drone, round and round, cymbaline-or like the whirling of brass quoits". out. None of the foregoing motions or sounds, how- ever, ploughed so deeply into Whitman's feeling and imagination as the movement and sound of the sea—the surge of the waves in mid-ocean, the ebb and flow of the tides, the pounding of the surf on the shore. In one highly significant pas- sage he tells how the conception of the sea became in a sense the regulative element of his composi- tion (Seashore Fancies): Even as a boy, I had the fancy, the wish, to write a piece, perhaps a poem, about the sea- shore-that suggesting, dividing line, contact, junction, the solid marrying the liquid-that cu- rious lurking something, (as doubtless every objec- tive form finally becomes to the subjective spirit,) which means far more than its mere first sight, grand as that is-blending the real and ideal, and each made portion of the other. Hours, days, in my Long Island youth and early manhood, I haunted the shores of Rockaway or Coney Island, or away east to the Hamptons or Montauk. Once, at the latter place, (by the old lighthouse, nothing but sea-tossings in sight in every direction as far as the eye could reach,) I remember well, I felt that I must one day write a book expressing this liquid, mystic theme. Afterward, I recollect, how it came to me that instead of any special lyrical or epical or literary attempt, the seashore should be an invisible influence, a pervading gauge and tally for me, in my composition. (Let me give a hint here to young writers. I am not sure but I have unwittingly follow'd out the same rule with other powers besides sea and shores-avoiding them, in the way of any dead set at poetizing them, as too big for formal handling-quite satisfied if I could indirectly show that we have met and fused, even if only once, but enough—that we have really ab- sorb'd each other and understand each other.) tervals, (sometimes quite long ones, but surely There is a dream, a picture, that for years at in- again, in time,) has come noiselessly up before me, and I really believe, fiction as it is, has enter'd 90 AUGUST THE CONSERVATOR largely into my practical life-certainly into my writings, and shaped and colored them. It is nothing more or less than a stretch of intermi- nable white-brown sand, hard and smooth and broad, with the ocean perpetually, grandly, roll- ing in upon it, with slow-measured sweep, with rustle and hiss and foam, and many a thump as of low bass drums. This scene, this picture, I say, has arisen before me at times for years. Some- times I wake at night and can hear and see it plainly. f To be compared with this poetic credo is the assertion in one of his latest poems that he would gladly exchange the metrical art of Homer, Shake- speare and Tennyson for the rhythms of the ocean waves: These, these, O sea, all these I'd gladly barter Would you the undulations of one wave its trick Fred Newton Scott. to me transfer. As to Books and Writers *My tailor's shears I scorned then; I strove for something higher : To edit news, live by the pen- The pen that shall not tire. The pen that was my humble slave Has now enslaved its master; And fast as flows the Midas wave, My rebel tears flow faster. The world once clothed I, tailor-hired, Whilst in my rags I quakéd; Today, myself are well attired And let the world go naked. What human soul, the chain oppressed, Can feel my chained soul's yearning? A monster woe lies in my breast, In voiceless anguish burning. Oh, swing ajar the shop door: do! I'll bear as ne'er I bore it. My blood!... you sweatshop leeches, you! Now less I'll blame you for it. * Translated by Rose Poster Stokes. I'll stitch as ne'er in former years! I'll drive the mad wheel faster! ¿ Slave will I be not to the shears. The pen? I must be master! The sci- ence of poetry MORRIS Rosenfeld. Maxim wants poetry written like guns are made. There is a way to make a gun. A hard and fast way. There must be a way to make a poem. A hard and fast way. An unmistakable authorita- tive way. tive way. Let him say it for himself: "The main object of this book is to provide a practical method for literary criticism and analysis, and a standard of uniform judgment for determining the relative merits of literary productions, and further, to supply a more practical and efficient means than we have had heretofore for the standardization of poetry, whereby any poem may be assayed and the amount of its poetic gold determined and separated from the slag and dross." "Poetry must be a natural effect, subject to laws which may be investigated and formulated." ee We may judge poetry by scientific method." So Maxim is going to standardize poetry. Is going to make it rise straight up and explain itself. Is going to make it make good or get off the stage. It takes so much metal and so much shape and so much hole to make a gun. It takes so much cheek and so much size and so much hot air to make a poem. Consequently poems are calcula- ble like guns and guns are estimable like poems. As a little too much or too little hole may ruin a gun so a little too much or too little hot air may ruin a poem. Therefore, get out your writing pads and blackboards and figure for yourself till you have standardized the poetic formulations. I know a professor in a big university who used to demonstrate poetry on a slate. He, too, had standardized poetry. He had all its ones twos threes and fours down fine. He would get mad if you suspected his results. Anything that is true can be demonstrated. He was always say- ing that. Demonstrated in additions subtrac- tions multiplications and divisions. Clouds, seas, dreams: they were all the same. Maxim goes my old friend a few better. He sees poetry as a sys- As a perfect machine. As something any- one may produce who chooses the right weapons. The poet is not born. He is made. He is self made. This business of trusting anything to the free spirit is nonsense. To hell with the free spirit. We want science. We want men to know tem. *The Science of Poetry and The Philosophy of Language. By Hudson Maxim. New York: Funk and Wagnalls Company. 1910 91 THE CONSERVATOR what they are about. That it takes so many bricks to build a wall so high and so wide. That it takes so many words to build a poem. Maxim chooses Walt as one of the men who didn't obey the law. The result was that Walt never got beyond "rag- time" and "the occasional excellent lines" that "staggered in by accident". "Nearly all he ever wrote comes as near being the antithesis of poetry as could well be produced." But you cant fool Maxim with Whitman. He shakes his head. He knows the genuine article when he sees it. Max- im is not immodestly modest. He not only says what should be done but shows how it can be done. He takes the piece Ingersoll wrote about the tomb of Napoleon. He presents In- gersoll's original. Then he exhibits his reflected revised improved more conclusive version. You can imagine the catastrophe. He paraphrases Hamlet's soliloquy. You can imagine the catas- trophe. Now, Maxim may seem absurd. You may be laughing at him. But is he doing any- thing which criticism does not as a rule do with any work of art which violates the traditions of form? Maxim is only a bit cruder. Is only a trifle more mathematical. Is only in effect guilty of an extension of their own code. Is perhaps brutally candid. Gives the case away like a kid. Cant keep his mouth shut or his pen quiet. Al- Al- lows himself a hundred and twelve thousand words in which to explain what he cant show and to prove that he is emptily full or fully empty of essential knowledge. The pedagogues do the same thing. More gracefully, probably. But to the same effect. "To define God is to deny him," says Spinoza. To define poetry is to deny it. Maxim imagines he is writing about poetry. He is not. He is writing about a machine. His book might have been more fitly described as ex- plicating the science of murder and the philoso- phy of gunbarrels. A few changes in words here and there would give us a very excellent treatise on rifle making. He has standardized art. Max- im would standardize the visions of the prophets. He would standardize making love. He would standardize motherhood. He would pushbutton poetry. Set rules and oblige poets to conform. If we get poetry sufficiently standardized we may be able in the end to get rid of the poet entirely. Have poetry without poets. Get our harvest with- out planting. Who knows but Maxim has blun- dered upon a wholesome truth? That while he has been trying to prove one thing he has proved an- other? Showing without intending to show how inevitably artificial the accustumed poetic forms are anyhow? How sternly immorally hopelessly shade up. rigid inelastic immobile they have to be? Just what I have contended always? Maxim instead of giving me less has given me more whys. In- stead of justifying his case has only made it more lamentable. Has made more than ever plain the impossibility of passing the perfunctory poetic in- heritance much farther along. You tie the spirit You fasten it down. You clip its wings. You bruise its feet. You burn out its eyes. You get it where it cant see hear or speak. Then you ask it to deliver its message. The spirit says: I want the message to take its form from me. The letter objects. The letter wants to deter- mine the form. Maxim stands by authorities. So many measurable words to so many measura- ble silences will make a poem. How many? We will see. We will calculate it to a hair. We will standardize our equations. Dont be led away by any notion that you can evade or outrage this pre- scription. You can only do so at your peril. You should know what will happen if you try to go along on your own hook. Doing as you please. Obeying any interior personal intuitions. You should know what will happen. Maxim will par- aphrase you. And if Maxim paraphrases you you're down and out. He paraphrased Milton, Shake-speare, Ingersoll. They are down and out. He wouldn't even paraphrase Whitman. Walt offended so basely that he was out of court entirely. Was discredited altogether. Did not even give Maxim anything to fasten para- phrasing on. Maxim has tried to chain the light- ning. He has tried to bucket up the sea. He has tried to burn the sun in his cookstove. He has tried to put Parsifal in a bushel basket. But somehow you'll never lose them. They'll stay where they are. In the soul. Stay. But Max- im? Well, you'll lose Maxim all right. Maxim and his brother critics. Maxim and his compan- ion levellers. Maxim and his court of last ap- peal. That final resort of standards and authori- ties. You'll lose them all right. All of them and forever. But the rest will always remain. Always. And poetry as poetry never was before. Without the standardization. But poetry. And even Walt. Even Walt will remain. As all the essential wholesized things always do remain and expand and increase after the critics and the stand- ardizers have criticised and standardized them- selves off the earth. As the man survives the dandy. As inspiration survives mathematics. As being capable of love outlasts being capable of hate. As spontaneity outlasts and refutes and shames rule. As scripture outlasts doggerel. So do the songs of revolt outlive the songs of G + J - 92 AUGUST THE CONSERVATOR rote. art. So does life in art forever outlive death in you may know how by this process the people would take Elysia. Give everybody time. Give the rich time to learn how to be poor. Give the poor time to learn how to be rich. Whenever you meet the morally half emancipated, the spiritually half freed, you find a man or a woman who couples delay with assent-who plays for postponements. All these dialoguists discuss the human situation as if it was grave if not perilous, and face its pos- sible tragedies with a certain dignity of demeanor. But they dont dig into the ground as if they actu- ally expected to hit the roots of the problem. They dawdle with it as if it was lacework or fret- glass. They dont contemplate it as if they might wake up tomorrow morning and find it come. Or any morning within the present vision of thought. That's all because they imagine that historic move- ments are concocted like plots in human brains and formulated out of merely personal back- grounds. So they see reasons. But they do not see the reason. One of the dialoguists alludes to the shell and kernel of the walnut. The shell is bad and the kernel is good. But that's the little not the big statement. The big statement is not that one is good and another bad but that one is And so men good to eat and the other is not. are not good and bad, or good or bad, but men and men. And no one who cant account for the bad man in good men can account for the good man in virtue. Reasons give us good men and bad men. But the reason Give us large men and small men. Reasons give us love and hate. gives us men. But the reason gives us life. Vernon Lee touches the puzzles with reasons but not with the reason. Her dialoguists are choked with reasons. not one of them contains the reason. But T. Al- thea* A book often stumbles on the way but arrives. It often plays tom fool tricks with itself but comes to a ripe conclusion. Vernon Lee adds up to a veritable total. But there's much to be charged to her account. She's too bookish. She's too Latiny. These conver- sations are efforts of a few cultivated people to get adjusted to life. To size and shape up with the crowd. To achieve some sort of democracy. They talk sense and nonsense. Oftener sense than not. And on the whole they are on the side of liberty and fraternity. But their twists and twaddles are painful. Especially in the chapter About the Social Question. They all say good things. But none of them say the good thing. They handle Socialism in manner as if they knew all about it and in matter as if they knew nothing about it. You can be socialistic without being a Socialist. Men can. Men can. Things can. Events can. The dialoguists still remain with those who re- gard Socialism as an invention. As personally propounded by an individual or individuals bent upon forcing an extraneous philosophy down the throat of the world. The idea that it was no more invented than gravitation never occurs to them. They study it at short range. They dont see that it is not a thing put into men from the outside but a thing coming out of men from the inside. For instance, one of them speaks of "sowing class hatred". That sounds so stale- like the last echo of the last echo. Classes are already sown. We reap them. We dont need to do what has been done for us. Voltaire said that if God did not exist we'd have to invent him. I may say that if the Class did not exist we'd have to invent it. Merely for today's ephemeral con- ditions, of course. For just as surely as classes came classes will go. But because they came according to a reason they will have to go because of as good a reason. There's no accident. There's only law. The dialoguists are of the leisure class. So they try to discover excuses for leisure. They believe in change. But they want the change to be slow. They dont want the people to chuck themselves into Elysia. They want them to ac- quire Elysia as McClellan took Richmond. You know how McClellan took Richmond. And so ww * Althea. Dialogues on aspirations and duties. By Vernon Lee. New York: John Lane Company. T. G The gold These stories are not made out of the whole cloth but out of the whole brick* life. Whitlock is always less inter- ested in being pretty than in being honest. So he always lets his pros and cons argue on to a square result. Whitlock is one of the men who dig to the roots of an evil. He is not fooled by superficial glitter. He is not dazed by an elegant respectability. He passes all the ephemera by. The dainty elect persons, men and women. The safes and the sanes. The goods and the trues, He passes all of them by. For he is not de- ceived in the clothes people wear or in the clothes *The gold Brick. By Brand Whitlock. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company. 1910 93 THE CONSERVATOR they dont wear. He is not led off the scent by trick decencies. He keeps on till he gets some- where. Now, all his stories arrive. They go on until they are done. They stop when they are through. Whitlock expounds the political idea. Shows what it comes to when left alone. When divorced from the humanistic impulse. When it pigs its way into sties. When it noses its way into corruption. Why shouldn't a politician be a politician? If it is right for a merchant to be a merchant then it is right for a politician to be a politician. As the lords of profit make faces at the lords of graft I remember Ingersoll's state- ment that when the priests of different religions meet they laugh up their sleeves at each other's miracles. I think the merchant and the states- man laugh up their sleeves at each other's virtues. Whitlock makes mince of these virtues. Opens a few doors and windows and lets you look in. Most of what is going on inside you know of. Vaguely, perhaps, but know of. But there are incredible diabolisms practiced by the heelers and their hirers. Deviltries below the deviltries of or- dinary prostitution. Whitlock goes ahead. Clears the way. Gives you a chance to see. He writes like a man who has been there. Who has not re- lied upon evidences. Who has trusted all to his own vision. He does not moralize. He does not give you a blackboard exposition of good government. He shows that good government is impossible until we have a good sociology. That we cant leave trade where it is and push politics forward to what is to be. Rent, interest and profit are the root of all political evil. Whit- lock does not say so. But he means it. His stories mean it. They would mean nothing if they did not mean that. They might just as well not have been written if they meant anything else. But they mean that. Wholly that. Not more than that or less than that. Whitlock is not argu- ing the case. He is illustrating it. He is giving you pictures whose intimation cant be misunder- stood. He lets you sum up. He says two add- Lindsey ed to two make-what? And you answer. And he says this picture added to this picture added to this picture make-what? And you answer again. Which is better than for him to answer for you. Read Whitlock. You will see how hard it is for the politician to be a man. Just as it is hard for the merchant to be a man. How all the interests pull against it. How all the pulls are interested against it. Resist it. You are tossed about like a little boat on a big sea. Maybe wrecked. All the fight is taken out of you. You want to be a good man. But you find that to be a good man Let me ask Let me ask you one question, dear you one Ben Lindsey. I have just finished reading The Beast. I stand in love question, dear Ben and awe before you. Your fire. Your nobly human sentiment. Your vis- ion of a great evil. Your courage. Your sacrifice. No one makes more of such things in you than I do. Your picture is tragi- cally true. It is fiercely convincing. Nothing can escape it. No scoundrel person, no villain. system, can elude its accusing grasp. But, Ben Lindsey, how do you propose to get rid of your Beast? You dont say. But maybe you see. You have learned that nothing can be done with- in the Beast to get rid of the Beast. That the organization as it is will not change its own skin. You are an optimist. What is the way out? T. is not enough. That you have also to be a know- ing man. Goodness wont steer your ship. Only knowledge will steer the ship. Here you have your data. Here you encounter conclusions. With what do you combat the monster? With a good heart? That is not enough. Good heart is good enough. But good heart is not wise enough. You must know as well as feel. Lind- sey has got as far as feeling will take him. How much does Lindsey know? And Whitlock has gone as far as feeling can take him. How much does Whitlock know? I see no reason for doubt- ing that Whitlock knows. I know no reason for doubting that he sees. He stands back. Keeps still. Waits. But he will some day make his announcements. He will pass on from his pic- ture to his philosophy. He will emerge from his resentment into his religion. He is as well aware as anybody that if you let man alone he'll size up big and shapely. He is aware that our profit- bearing system will not let man alone. There- fore that man sizes up little in his malformations. So that it is left to us to rescue ourselves from our own system. To free ourselves from our own bonds. For trade to take down its signs. For politics to take down its laws. So that the mo- tives of men may run riot between service and sacrifice. So that the unencumbered genius of the crowd may at last utilize its faculty. Compe- tition has reduced our hustling earth to a hostile desert. See how busy we are. But we are not producing love. If we are not producing love we are producing nothing. With all our show of insane activities, producing nothing. T. 94 AUGUST THE CONSERVATOR A I propose to publish in fac-simile Walt Whitman's per- sonal copy of Leaves of Grass, edition of 1860-1861, in which he did much of the work of revision for the edition that fol- MOSHER BOOKS lowed five years later. LEAVES OF GRASS REPRINT price fixed will be ten dollars for each This copy of Leaves of Grass is historic. It is the volume abstracted by Secretary Harlan from Whitman's desk in the Interior Department and made the basis for Whitman's dis- charge from that branch of the service. An account of this incident, written by Whitman himself, will be photographically reproduced and included. The edition will be limited to five hundred copies. The copy. No books will be sent to editors for review and no rebates or discounts will be allowed to collectors or booksellers. The text matter of this book will be printed from the original plates, which still exist. The chirographical matter in Whit- man's hand will be superimposed. In order to maintain a strict likeness to the original, in which Whitman used black ink and pen- cils of several colors, it will be necessary for each sheet to go through the press from three to five times. This is a costly process. THE INTERNATIONAL STUDIO AUGUST Edward Redfield William Quiller Orchardson Japanese art and artists of today The Glasgow school of embroidery Tintern and Wye as a sketching ground The prehistoric pottery of Costa Rica Harry Eldridge Goodhue M. Evergood Blashki The miniatures of Laura Hills Comments on a series of designs for an entrance lodge A picturesque spot at the Germantown Cricket Club Reviews and notices Studio talk JOHN LANE COMPANY NEW YORK SELECTIONS FROM THE PROSE AND POETRY OF WALT WHIT- MAN: Edited with introduction by Oscar Lovell Triggs, Ph. D. The best introduc- tory volume to the study of Whitman's writings. It contains representative ex- tracts from poems, prose and letters, together with a most excellent critical and biographi- Each volume will be authenticated by a number and my signature. Subscriptions will be filled in the order they are received. - To persons who have a special interest in Whitman, as well as to students and libraries (particularly to the libraries of schools and colleges), this remarkable reprint must have unusual significance. No steps will be practically taken in this matter until subscriptions sufficient to cover the initial expenses are received Send for circular. The standard authorized editions of WALT WHITMAN'S WRITINGS issued under the superintendence of Whitman's literary executors in strict conformity with the author's final arrangement of text LEAVES OF GRASS: Complete poems-including Sands at Seventy, Good bye my Fancy, Old age Echoes (posthumous additions) and A backward glance o'er travell'd Roads-library edition, with index of first lines, two portraits, and a fac simile of manuscript, octa- vo, cloth decorative, gilt top, two dollars. Popular edition, same text as library edition, twelve mo., handsome cloth binding, steel portrait, one dollar. Paper covers, complete with portrait, fifty cents. COMPLETE PROSE WORKS: Containing Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs, and Good bye my Fancy. Uniform with corresponding editions of Leaves of Grass library edition, octavo, cloth decorative, gilt top, five full page portraits and illustrations and a fac simile of manuscript, two dollars. Popular edition, same text as above, twelve mo., cloth decorative, one portrait, one dollar and twenty five cents. The production of this work calls for the finest skill of the photographer, the engraver Nothing more beautiful in the publisher's art was ever done in America or in England. and the printer. But it will be faithfully su- pervised to the remotest particulars. HORACE TRAUBEL cal introduction and a carefully prepared bibliography. Twelve mo., cloth, with portrait, one dollar and twenty five cents. THE WOUND DRESSER: Hospital let- ters in war time. Edited by the late Dr. R. M. Bucke, one of Whitman's literary execu- Twelve mo., cloth decorative, gilt top, two portraits, one dollar and fifty cents. tors. Any of these books can be supplied by D. APPLETON AND COMPANY New York THE WHAT BOOKLOVERS SAY ABOUT THESE EDITIONS I can find nothing which as gifts please better than your books. Your books brought me back the sense of charm of beauti- ful things and the resolution to hold on with both hands to ideality. The puzzle to me is how you can turn out such books for the money. For a person of very small means who wishes to give an inexpensive but dainty and un- usual wedding present your books are ideal. Your catalogue is a thing to praise without praising in idle words. Reading between the lines, it is a literary joy. My catalogue--a remarkable piece of bookwork in itself-explains these unusual compliments, and is sent free on request to booklovers any- where that can be reached by mail. Thos. B. Mosher PORTLAND, MAINE BACON CRYPTOGRAMS IN SHAKE-SPEARE AND OTHER STUDIES: By ISAAC HULL PLATT net $1.00, by post $1.06. Can be had of The Conservator. SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY: BOSTON The Conservator keeps a high place in my JULIA regard among MARLOWE American publi- cations. I wish all the great American public might feel its influence now as it is bound to be felt later. • 1910 95 THE CONSERVATOR Broadcast: by Ernest Crosby A sequel to Plain Talk in Psalm and Parable, containing Mr. Cros- by's latest verse, some of which appeared first in The Conservator. LONDON TIMES: There is a good deal of thought, force and de- scriptive power in the book. Cloth. 12mo. Will be sent post free on receipt of 80 cents in stamps or money order by the FUNK & WAGNALLS CO., 60 East 23d Street, New York. Also by the same author, two little books on Tolstoy : TOLSTOY AS A SCHOOLMASTER CHICAGO COMMONS: To try to express in these few prosaic sentences the delightful charm of this little book would be to court failure. TOLSTOY AND HIS MESSAGE PHILADELPHIA ITEM: A genuinely illuminative interpretation of the great philosopher's being and purpose. Each book in cloth. Small 12mo. 93 pages. Put a dollar bill in an envelope and both these books will be sent to you post free on receipt by the HAMMERSMARK PUBLISHING CO., 151 Wabash Avenue, Chicago. Two newly-discovered Whitman manuscripts and a new life WALT WHITMAN'S DIARY IN CANADA Limited to 500 copies. 8vo. Net two dollars and fifty cents. By post ten cents extra. AN AMERICAN PRIMER by WALT WHITMAN A very early MS. never included in Whitman's works. Limited to 500 copies with photogravure portrait. 8vo. Net two dollars. By post ten cents extra. 11 Thomas B. Harned, Phila. 12 Thomas B. Harned, Phila. 13 Thomas B. Harned, Phila. 14 Isaac Hull Platt, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania 15 Leonard Abbott, New York 16 Gustav P. Wiksell, Boston 17 Gustav P. Wiksell, Boston 18 Gustav P. Wiksell, Boston 19 Charles G. Garrison, Mer- chantville, New Jersey 20 Walter Leighton, Boston 21 Lymen Chandler, East Au- rora, New York 22 Ladson C. Butler, East Au- rora, New York 23 Ellen M. Calder, Providence 24 Brown University, Providence 25 Henry S. Borneman, Phila. 26 Joseph Fels, Philadelphia 27 John Hay, Washington Chants Communal, by Horace Traubel: a representative collection of prose pieces radical but con- structive: price one dollar net: by post ten cents extra A new Beacon Biography WALT WHITMAN by ISAAC HULL PLATT Net seventy five cents. By post five cents extra. SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY: Boston SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY: Boston 38 George M. Williamson, Grand View on Hudson, New York 39 Mary Van Bibber, Baltimore 40 Mary F. Lang, Toledo 41 Alfred W. Beville, London 42 Mary E. Hawley, Chicago 43 Louis I. Haber, New York GEORGE D. HERRON: It is a book of the highest value and beauty that Horace Traubel proposes to give us, and I can only hope that it will be read as widely and appreciatively as it more than deserves to be for it is with a joy that would seem extravagant, if I ex- pressed it, that I welcome Chants Communal. EUGENE V. DEBS: The best there is in the gifted author is in flower in these pages. There is a heart beat in every word. The book not only deals with life: it is life, radiant, glorious, immortal EDWIN MARKHAM: The Chants of Horace Traubel are an arraign- ment of the civilization that now is and a cheery hail to the civili- zation that is to come. He has something to say and a striking way of saying it. All readers will not agree with his ideas, but all read- ers will be set a-thinking by them. SUBSCRIBERS TO LEAVES OF GRASS REPRINT 101 C. F. Nesbit, Washington 102 Thomas B. Mosher 103 Thomas B. Mosher 44 Charles Warren Stoddard, 73 J. Levering Jones, Philadelphia 104 Levi N. Powers, Haverhill Saratoga, California 105 Charles Lloyd Serrill, Phila 74 Public Library, Syracuse 45 Charles Sixsmith, Adlington 75 J. A. Risser, Toronto near Chorley, Lancashire, 76 John M. Robertson, Moosic, 106 Curtis Hidden Page, Colum- England bia University Pennsylvania 46 Thomas Earle White, Phila. 77 Cornell University, Ithaca 107 Wayland Hyatt Smith, Los 78 Edmund Clarence Stedman, 108 George Howarth, Blackburn, Angeles, Cal. New York 79 Frederick Rowland Marvin, 109 James A. Wilson, Pittsburgh Albany, New York 110 Charles E. Lauriat Co Boston 111 Franklin Wentworth, Bos- ton, Mass. 47 A. B. Drake, Boston England 48 Minot J. Savage, New York 49 Frank P. Held, St. Louis 50 Louis Prang, Boston 51 Lucius D. Morse, Atlanta 52 Library of Congress, Wash- ington 53 Harry Gaylord Wilshire, New 80 Mayer Sulzberger, Phila. 81 W. P. Wesselhoeft, Boston 82 Willis J. Abbot, Battle Creek 83 Henry D. Lloyd, Winnetka, Ill. 84 Mrs. Sterling, New York York 112 Eugene Hefley, New York 113 Henry E. Legler, Madison 114 Edwin Grover, Chicago 115 George B. Wheeler, Chicago 116 Howard C. Warren, Prince- ton, New Jersey 117 F. W. Bain, Burlington, Ont. 118 A. Gruenberg, New York 119 B. Weinig, New York 120 T. Dean Swift, Lawrence- ville, N. J. 121 Jacob Klein, St. Louis 122 William Marion Reedy, St. Louis 32 John Johnston, Bolton, Lanca- 61 Chicago University, Chicago shire, England York 33 H. Buxton Forman, London 34 H. Buxton Forman, London 35 Public Library, Boston 36 Edward L. Farr, Camden 64 Clarence Darrow, Chicago 65 Leland Stanford University 37 Thomas S. Marvin, Boston 66 Joseph Fels, Philadelphia 67 Joseph Fels, Philadelphia 68 Joseph Fels, Philadelphia 69 Samuel Kalish, Newark 70 Samuel Kalish, Newark 71 Samuel Kalish, Newark 72 Robert Mackey, Jr., York HENRY DEMAREST LLOYD: You are needed in the outside world, outside of Camden, outside of The Conservator. You can do a Conservator in the great world. That which you have been grow- ing and shaping in the nest take now upon a longer flight. Go out where you can encounter the men and the events of the world with your poetry and philosophy. I say this not to deny you, but to affirm. CLARENCE DARROW: Horace Traubel has the soul of the poet and the eye of the seer. All of his work breathes the spirit of liberty and justice. He finds the truth not through the narrow, unsafe rules of the logician, but from that inward perception of right and equality which cannot be deceived. Horace Traubel is both a poet and a philosopher. No one can say anything too good about him or his work. CARLETON NOYES: What Horace Traubel has to say is eminently and always worth hearing. To the consideration of present social conditions and the eternal problem of individual living he brings an open mind and a boundless sympathy. 54 John Spargo, New York 55 W. H. Trimble, Dunedin, 85 Stockham Publishing Com- New Zealand pany, 56 Yale College, New Haven 57 Harvard College, Cambridge 58 Horace Howard Furness, Wall- ingford, Pennsylvania 28 Athanæum, Boston 29 Talcott Williams, Philadelphia 59 J. H. Coyne, St. Thomas, 20 P. K. Foley, Boston 30 Marie Smith, Philadelphia Ontario 31 John Johnston, Bolton, Lanca- 60 Columbia University, New York shire, England 86 Carleton E. Noyes, Cambridge 87 Annie T. Auerbach, Boston 88 P. K. Foley, Boston 89 P. K. Foley, Boston 91 Henry Harrison Brown, San Francisco 92 Leon Bazalgette, Paris, France 93 John Moody, Cranford, N. J. 62 George D. Herron, New York 94 George Wharton James, Syra- 123 William Marion Reedy, St. 63 Edward Lauterbach, New cuse, New York Louis 95 Thomas B. Mosher, Portland, 124 Herbert Chamberlin, Victo- Maine ria, B. C. 96 Alberta Montgomery, Gray 125 Robert Bittong, Philadelphia Abbey, County Down, Ire- 126 William F. Gable, Altoona land 127 George Wolfe Plank, Phila- Herbert W. Ross, Bridgeport, delphia Conn. 128 Amy Smith, Philadelphia 98 Harrison N. Hiles, Canton, 129 Gordon Craig, Berlin Ohio 130 Gordon Craig, Berlin New 99 Art. V. Raley, Texas 131 Gordon Craig, Berlin 132 H. Gail Davis, South Bend 97 100 Jerome Conner, Syracuse 96 AUGUST 1910 THE CONSERVATOR Keep the hinges of your mind well oiled and your soul busy —but dont forget your body Exercise that too. And all the wholesome helps to exercise we have Marshall E. Smith & Brother 25 S. Eighth Street. Philadelphia Athletic Outfitters Men's Furnishers THE AMERICAN JOUR- dollar and a quarter a year: is- NAL OF EUGENICS: one sued monthly sued monthly: samples, ten cents. Trial three months with pamphlet Institutional Marriage, thirty cents in post- age stamps. Los Angeles, California DR. J. M. HABEL'S ACADEMY It is worse than waste for any woman to boil and scald the clothes and tire herself out washing them in the old-fashioned way. Use Fels- Naptha soap according to the easy directions. No boiling Of grocers PHILADELPHIA One dollar a year prepares students for college, teaches modern. languages. Tourists and commercial travelers find Professor Habel's half-hour linguistic conversations of great benefit in European countries. 1120 Girard street, Philadelphia W FC THE MASK The only journal devoted to the art of the theater: printed on handmade paper and illustrated by wood engravings, lithographs and to subscribers) etchings. The object of the publication is to bring before an intelligent public many ancient and modern aspects of the Theater's Art which have been too long disregarded or forgotten. JOHN SEMAR, Editor. GORDON CRAIG, Art Director. Four dollars a year. Florence, Italy. Fels & Co., Philadelphia THE ARTSMAN Oscar Lovell Triggs writes this: "I believe as firmly as ever in the truth and permanency of the art-craft movement. I read The Artsman with the greatest satisfaction because as an exponent of the new indus- trialism it represents the idealism which is at the bottom of the movement. We do not need more material products but we do need all the idealism and romanticism possible to attach to the products we have. The Artsman is practical also and deserves the combined allegiance of workers and thinkers.' THE ROSE VALLEY PRESS sixteen hundred twenty four Walnut street The Conservator TWENTIETH YEAR I want to thank you at this late day for the reviews you have given me in The JACK Conservator. LONDON Leaving out every- thing else, you have done what not one in a hundred reviewers has done- grasped the innermost meaning of my work. I regard the Conservator as one of the best papers published in America; in fact, I know of no JOHN p. ALTGELD other paper that stands on so high a plane and is such an inspi- ration. COLLECTS HORACE TRAUBEL One: Put money in your purse Two: Give all to love Three: He died for us Four: Make room for man Five: The soul of the workman Single copies will be sent postpaid for twelve cen. Address The Conservator, Philadel- will be sent for one dol- lar. phia THE CALL the only Socialist daily east of Chicago is published in New York city and is indispensable to those who aim to keep in- formed in matters appertain- ing to the labor question. It is suggested that Socialists in particular should do every- thing possible to extend the circulation of THE CALL Write to the business office for information. G The Conservator ROSE VALLEY PRESS Moral conscientiousness, crystalline, without flaw, not godlike only, entirely human, awsi ard enchants forever.-WHITMAN Twenty first year PHILADELPHIA, SEPTEMBER, 1910 Number seven Well, there is hidden in our complicated American civilization just such a beast of the jungle. It is not a picture in a picture puzzle. It is a fact in a fact puzzle. There is no man among us, in any sort of public business or profession, who has not seen its tail or its paw concealed among the upper branches, or its eyes and ears watching and listening in the lowest underbrush and fallen timber of our life. It is there waiting. To some it has appeared to be a house cat merely; and it has purred to them very soothingly, no doubt. But some have come upon its claws, and they have been rather more than scratched. And others have found its teeth, and they have been bitten-bitten to the soul. A few, who have watched it and stalked it carefully, know that it is, at the last, very like the dragon in the old fable of Greece, to whom some of the people were daily sacrificed. For it lives upon us. Yes, it lives upon us-upon the best of Yes, it lives upon us—upon the best of us as well as the worst—and the daughters of the poor are fed to it no less than the sons of the rich. If you save your life from it, it is at the price of your liberty, of your humanity, of your faith with your fellows, whom you must hand over to it, helpless. And if you attack it — ! I propose to tell, in this story of my own experience, what happens if you attack it. I propose to show the Beast from its tail to its nose-tip, and to show it as it is when it has ceased to purr and bares its teeth. I propose to mark its trail and name its victims, to warn you of where it lurks and how it springs. I do not hope to set you on in any organized assault upon it—for I have learned that this is too much to hope—but I trust that I shall be able to show you where the fight against it is being fought, so that you may at least recog- nize your own defenders and not be led to cry out against them and desert them-when the Beast turns pole- cat—and even, at the instigation of treachery, to come behind your champion and stab him in the back. The Beast in the jungle! How it fights! Any man who truthfully writes the story of his campaigns against it will not write from any motives of vainglory; there is anything but glory to be gained in that war. And I do not write in any "holier than thou" attitude of mind, for I understand how I blundered into the hostility, and how the accidents of life and the simplicities of misunderstanding have brought me again and again into collision with the brute. But I write because men have said to me, "You are always crying 'Wolf! Wolf!' when we see no wolf. Show us. We're from Missouri. Don't preach. Tell us the facts." And I am going to tell the facts. They will be "personal". They must be personal. I shall have to write about myself, about my friends, about those who consider me their enemy. There is no other way. It is a condition of this whole struggle with the Beast that the man who fights it must come out into the open with his life, con- spicuously and with the appearance of a strut—like some sort of blessed little hero-martyr—while it keeps modestly under cover and watches him and bides its time! - BEN LINDSEY. THE CONSERVATOR Published monthly by Horace Traubel, 1624 Walnut street, Philadelphia. Entered at the post office, Philadelphia, as second class matter. YEARLY SUBSCRIPTION, ONE DOLLAR. SINGLE COPIES, TEN CENTS. FOREIGN SUBSCRIPTIONS, ONE DOLLAR TWENTY FIVE CENTS HORACE TRAUBEL, Editor ANNE MONTGOMERIE, Associate Editor GERTRUDE TRAUBEL, Associate Worker The editors may also be addressed at Camden, New Jersey CLARENCE DARROW: Your paper is the best and bravest and truest of all, and this I say without any sort of qualification. It never has a false note and is always true to the great real cause of human freedom-the only cause for which it is worth while to work and live and die. CONTENTS Collect-H. T., 97 You are many miles off not many loves off-Horace Traubel, 100 Babushka-Grace Potter, 102 A note on Walt Whitman's prosody, 111-Fred Newton Scott, 102 The sea comrades-Eliot White, 104 As to Books and Writers The beast-T., 107 A modern chronicle-T., 108 My country, right or wrong-T., 109 Advertisements, 110, 111, 112 Collect Make it easy, all of you, for everybody to tell the truth. Telling the truth is not H. T. being virtuous. It is getting into right relations with life. There is no other way to fit with the whole of life. No other way but for the 98 SEPTEMBER THE CONSERVATOR til a lie is a lie to itself no lie can be made to work. Until a lie can victimize itself it has failed to arrive. to arrive. You do not need to be a saint to see this. If you did nobody would see it. You only need to know what a lie is. Only need to know how the ground we stand on and the air we breathe are safe. Then we will know the only conditions under which a man can be safe. The only condi- tions under which a lie can be safe. There are no two things. There is only one thing. Everything has to belong some where in the one thing. Not in some chance where. In some definite unquestion- able where. Where does a lie belong? I am not calling you names. I do not think you are bad and I am better. and I am better. I guess that is not the point. Where does a lie belong? If you can find a place for it, all right. But I know you cant find a place for it. It has no place. It hustles about. It makes noises. Sometimes it wears the best clothes. Sometimes you even envy it or imitate it. But it has no place. A lie cant lie to itself. Therefore it has no place. Does not even belong to itself. Therefore it has no place. It may be easy to lie. Easier than to tell the truth. I may choose the velvet road. But my lie remains un- proved. My lie has no home. In all the spaces, has no home. Lifted into whatever renown, has no home. Dear to whatever coterie or caste, has no home. Reaches nowhere. Enjoys no liber- ties. Dreads the light of day. Not because my lie is bad and not good. No. But because my lie must wander houseless forever. Make it easy, all of you, for everybody to tell the truth. Do you? Hardly. You make it hard instead of easy. Civilization makes it hard. Money makes it hard. Our incomes make it hard. Parlors make it hard. When a man starts to tell the truth he finds everything in the way of it. Good people and bad people are in the way of it. The social order is in the way of it. When you show an inclination to talk out everybody ad- vises you to stop. Even the church says stop. Even the college says stop. They dont say truth is evil. They dont say truth is not truth. They say truth is not safe. We have to be liars. What becomes of the preacher if he will not lie? Of what use are you to those who pay if you will not lie? When you are young and green you think the truth is the easiest thing in the world. That being honest with yourself. That trying to see straight and clear. That talking out freely. That living the life of your impulse. You think all that is the easiest thing in the world. You try it. You discover at once that it is the hardest thing in the world. That the last thing the world en- pieces of life to be honest. Nothing is safe but the truth. No building put up on other princi- ples is safe. It may stand but it is not safe. No career created through other processes is safe. It may be created but it is not safe. No art is safe. No love is safe. We do proceed on alien infer- ences. But we are not safe. We do challenge the truth. But that is like putting out to sea without an aim or a rudder. The world, the things in the world, you, anybody, are so con- stituted that to appeal from a lie is to demur to the universe. I do not object to a lie because it is wrong. I object to it because it is impossible. I because it is impossible. I do not threaten a lie. A lie contains its own threat. The truth will take care of itself. And the lie will take care of itself. I am not a censor or a prompter. I do not condemn. I do not make more of a lie than a lie makes of itself. I I leave lies to themselves. Lies always defeat them- selves. A lie never lies to itself. It cant. It tells the truth to itself. That is the trouble. That is why a lie never can get rid of a lie. Has to ac- count for it. Has to pay. Has to liquidate. That is why a lie finally has to confess. It cant pass itself off on itself for good. The laws and the earths question its credentials. We lie. That is, we step aside. That is, we try to shift out of things. Out of life. Out of life. Out of evolution. How far can we go with that illusion? You would not think of trying to fool the suns or the stars or the seas or gravitation. You would say it was incon- ceivable. But you try to fool men. The souls of men. Their hearts. Their dreams. The ways they travel. Their thirsts and hungers. You try You try to fool them. You come along veiled. You wear false faces. Your lips smile when your heart is broken. You want to take men in. You say you must. That the conditions force you to it. You love men in your souls but hate them with your hands. You have to. It is inconceivable. But you say you are given no alternative. You say being honest is too hard. Is made too costly. Means too much sacrifice. Therefore you will lie. Not because you endorse lying. But be- cause lying alone will save you. Will it save you? A lie cant save itself. How can it save you? It may make you some money. It may make you some reputation. But is that being saved? We have seen what a lie can do. It can wreck a man. And we have seen what it cant do. It cant save a man. It saves a house over his head. But it does not save him. Not because a lie is wrong. No. But because there is no place to put a lie. Look where I may inside myself or outside myself I see no place to put a lie. Un- [ 1910 THE CONSERVATOR 99 courages is the truth. This is not speculation. This is description. I am making no guess. You have lived a few years. You have done a a few things. You have dreamed. You have reached forward. You have studied. You may be peculiarly situated. Something in your per- sonal environment or background may release you from the fight. But if you are in the tussle be- cause you have to be then you know what to ex- pect for any innovaation. You know what to expect for any moral punctiliousness. What are we here for? a little boss asked the big bosses at a convention. What are we here for? What are you in commerce for? What do you draw in- comes for? What are per cents and dividends and premiums and bounties and profits for? Did you suppose they were for love? Try again. That was a bad miss. Business asks: What are we here for? If anybody said love everybody would laugh. If anybody said truth everybody would look puz- zled. If anybody said service and sacrifice every- body would look bored. If anybody said discov- ery everybody would look horrified. What are we here for? For money. For what we must have and for extras if possible. For going be- yond someone else. For getting all we can. What are we here for? To get. Not to give. To get what we get any way we can. If you ask Is this nice? the world shrugs its shoulders: No: but what can we do? That is so. What can we do? We can do what we are doing or we can do something else. We have made it hard for peo- ple to tell the truth. We have made it harder still for people to be true. What can we do? We have the lie on our souls. We have the lie in our hearts. A black cloud. A stolid depres- sion. Where does the thing belong? I dont say it's evil. I dont call it ugly names. I dont blame it for what's happened. But I ask: Where does it belong? Where does the hate belong? The greed? The antagonism of class? Where does the landlord belong? Where does the master of the factory belong? Do you know where they belong? We could not find where the lie be- longs. Do you think you can find any better where the earthlords belong? We tried to find a place for the lie. It had broken its treaty. It had cast off its anchorage and gone rudderless into the infinite. A lie. We try to find a place for the profitmonger. Where is it? I have look- ed. I dont know. But here he is. The profit- monger. His shadow is over everything. Not only over trade. Over the arts, too. Over love. Over cradles and coffins. Profitmongering and the truth dont go together. One has got to give way One has got to give way to the other. Which will give way? Profitmong- ering and love dont go together. One has got to give way to the other. Which will give way? A man's will is raised against the infinite will. Where does the man's will belong? We create a system of industry. It is personal not communal. Where does it belong? Can you find a place for it? You say we know where it belongs today. Do we? We know where it is but we dont know where it belongs. belongs. We cant find the place it fits into. It does not fit into the heart or the brain of man. It does not fit into the need or the aspiration of the crowd. It does not fit into the beauty and progress of the world. It may have a place. A today's place. But what is its place? The jungle is its place. Where rob- Where murder is: that is its place. bery is, where starvation is: that is its place. It has a place, Yes. Like a lie has a place. But the lie cant lie to itself. Trade is only trade to itself. And that is not enough. Trade must be more than trade to itself. Trade cant live on trade, Where does trade belong? Look into the pit. See its gasping choking populations. Where does the pit belong? Where does the pit belong? It belongs where a lie belongs. A lie is a floater. It can settle no- where. It has no home. Is alien. Look into the pit. Listen. Hear its fierce denunciations. of life. That pit. We call it by nicer names. But where does it belong? Your so much money a year and so little love a year. Where does it belong? Your so much gain at someone else's so much loss. Where does it belong? Your arts perishing for truth. Your sciences postponed. Where do Where do they belong? belong? Your Your foredoomed hopes. Your foresworn liberties. Where do they belong? They belong where the lie be- longs. They will go where the lie goes. Make it easy, all of you, for everybody to tell the truth. Make it easy for the soul to live with the body and for the body to live with the soul. Make it easy for the truth. Make it easy for the truth. Make it hard for the lie. I often look at my body. I say to my body: You have had a hard time of it. And I look at my soul. I say to my soul: You have had a hard time of it. I say to our systems. I say to our incomes. I say to our hypocrisies. I say to our greeds. I say to those who have won and to those who have lost. I say to the wrongdoer and to the wronged. I say to starvation and surfeit. I say to all of them: You have had a hard time of it. You have lied to be easy. You have made lying easier than telling the truth. Now you see what that ends in. It does not end in love. It ends in hate. It does not end in joy. Not even for you who come out ahead. Even for you it ends Unna 100 SEPTEMBER THE CONSERVATOR in discontent. For underneath all and in all is the homeless lie. I say: Make the truth easy. Make it easy for the sayers of the truth to live. Make it easy for love to live. You make it easy for hate to live. Make it easy for hate to pros- per. But love? Well, love can live a little but must not live too much. Must live within the system. Must live within the custom. Must live within the law. Must live within what ma- jorities say of love. Not what love says of love. What profit and interest say of love. Not what love says of love. But where has this put us? It has put one man against another. It has put love against love. It has severed the arteries. It has nearly bled us to death. The fratricidal knife. Our separatist competitions. Where do the hates belong? Where do the fights belong? We have got to find places for them. Something is out of place. When a thing is out of place we call it hate. When a thing is in place we call it love. When it is out of place we call it wrong. When if is in place we call it right. We have tried to make it easier for life to be out of place than in place. Easier for us to quarrel than for us to make up. Easier for us to take than to give. So that we have found ourselves taking all we can and giving what we must instead of giving all we can and taking what we must. The lost lies have worn themselves out looking for home. There is no refuge for our lies but in the truth. is no refuge for our hates but in love. No refuge for trade but in the fraternities. Make it easy for There I have started on eager feet to travel to you and have dropped worn out almost before I had begun : could not close the vast break between us: it was unbridgeable : You, my love, who are in the far away land: and you, my people, who are in the remote places of the earth: the alien to find its way home. Initiate a new dis- I could not see to you, I could not feel to you, I cipleship. Listen to the new songs. Dont close your ears. Reach out into the hospitable dis- tances. Eager for whatever may turn up. De- termined to reject anything which trifles with men. Trifles with the free flow of love. Trifles with the free interplay of justice. Trifles with the crowd. Do you know where you belong? Do you say you belong with the system? Not unless the tem is noble. You belong to no system that is not noble. And no evil system belongs to men who are noble. Our systems are homeless. They are lost in the immensities of their own treason. sys- movement easier than stagnation. How? By making an open earth easier than ownership. By making not possessing easier than possessing. By making liberty easier than slavery. By making God easier than the Devil. How? By opening the way. By not blocking the path. Blocking the path? Yes, with your systems. With your dividends. With your monies. With your prop- erties They must all be put out of the way. You may love truth. You cant live it. You will do more. You will pass on. You will love life. Then the truth will be easy. You will not ac- cept life as a burden and a duty. You will accept it as an ecstasy and an impetus. You will destroy everything that interferes with the love of life. It may be the greatest thing in the world. The thing you have taken the most pride in. The thing you have most sworn by. You will destroy it. You will see that it stands in the way of life. Make it easy, all of you, for everybody to tell the truth. You are ma- ny miles off not many loves off You are many miles off not many loves off: I have looked across the gap and lost myself in its distances: I have reached helplessly towards you with my two short arms just a few inch- es long, Oh! how I have sat here in my chair at my work and joined you and rejoined you in the days and nights of my desire: Oh! how I have felt helpless seeing so much space. dividing us, and yet adequate, too, knowing that I contain something to overcome all in- terruptions: A system has got to be a heart. A soul. An I, a single man, facing the areas of areas of space in my path: I, a single man, facing the hours of hours taken out of my time: ideal. A look beyond. A dream of common. joy. A foreswell of incoming justice. It cant last as a system. It can only last as love. Like our marriages. They cant last as a system. They can only last as love. How can we make our sys- tems last? How? By making love easier than I with my ardent unspeakable hunger countless hate. The confession of love. The life of love. miles off but not countless loves off- By making discovery easier than sloth. By mak- By mak- I with my wish to be of use to you getting next ing revolt easier than conformity. By making to you wherever you are: Being despondent often, coming up so squarely against the despairs and terrors of separa- tion: 1910 101 THE CONSERVATOR Getting next to you, into you, possessing you, For I live, I feed, not on miles but on nations: wherever you are: and nations are nowhere off: they stay where I am : Many miles off: yes, many; but no loves off at all: no, no loves off at all. You may be the other side and I may be this side but there is no other side and no this side to love: You may be where China is and I may be where America is but there is no China and no America to love: You may have lived a thousand years ago and I may not live till a thousand years from today but there is no yesterday and no tomorrow to love: To love everything is right here and everything is today: For to love everything is inconsequent but love: all the boasted and the feared differences are inconsequent : For loving is seeing: loving is seeing as far off as ends from as near by as beginnings. The little nations fight: they think there is some- thing between them: they think miles are something: The little men quarrel: they think themselves better or worse: they think there is some- thing between them: To love nothing is between anywhere: everything To love nothing is off somewhere else-nothing My heart refuses to measure time and space in is some other day: any other way: I see only this way to meas- ure it: nearest horizon, My body is not strong enough to bear me across the border into the country of the alien, Yet somehow I am heard: I hear myself discussed wherever there are people: Yet somehow I arrive: any port is my port: I am welcomed: my very body is embraced in ardent congratulation. When I think how many miles off you are O my beloved the burden is more than I can carry: But when I think you are no loves off at all I am as light on my feet as a summer dance: For I live, I feed, not on miles but on your love: and your love is nowhere off: it stays where I am : Even the man in the next house is miles off if the wall between divides you: Even the man in the next room, even the man or the woman in your bed, is miles off if a wall or a wish divides you: And so with you, you peoples: when I think how many miles off you are I am sunk in de- spair: But when I think you are no loves off at all I am as defiant as unchained infinities going where they please: But nothing is any loves off if it belongs to you: and what does not belong to you? A million miles is no miles at all if love fills in the million miles between: But any distance at all however small is a million miles and many million miles off if love does not fill in whatever is between: A little film between: that is as much as a million. miles without love is as much as a million. miles. So I say to you my far off loved one that you are no loves off at all: And I say to you you far off loved peoples that you are no loves off at all: somewhere touches everything else: My voice is not loud enough to be heard over the When you push a man out of your heart he is a million miles off: And I say that anyone or anything that is not loves off is not off at all: And I say that I am secure in my earthhold be- cause it keeps everything next to everything else in my single heart. Or a people: when you push a people out of your hear or those who work : When you push them out of your heart they are a million miles off: They may be just outside: they may be waiting there: right on the threshold: but they are a million miles off: There is no other way to know and not to know : you can only know through love: There are wise leaders who will hand you other keys and point to other doors: But you will be wise for yourself: you will lead yourself: you will open the door your heart points to: The worlds are not farther from each other than you are from the man you have pushed out of your heart: Though you meet him every day on the street and shake hands with him he is as far away from you as stars are from stars and farther; stars and stars farther away: 102 THE CONSERVATOR SEPTEMBER A note on Whitman's reasons for rejecting Walt Whit- the stress-and-quantity principle man's pros- which has generally satisfied the ears of other English poets, should now be clear. His delight in large, free movements and rushes of sound made him impatient of the short units, the There is no far to you when you have made him at home in your heart: no near or far to the crowd: No near or far to him: no near or far to peoples: quickly recurring beats, of the nutative rhythm. He wished to embody in his verse the largo of nature, especially the flux and reflux of the waves, the rise and fall of the murmur of the pines, the circling dip of bird flight, the crescendo and dying fall of the locust song. Though you pay him wages, though you go to the same church, you are as far away from him as stars are from stars and farther: There is no near to you when you have pushed him out of your heart, No near or far to you, my loved one, and to me whom you love. You are many miles off not many loves off. Horace Traubel. And now this woman lives not as others do in the body's life. She lives in her soul's life. No prison shuts her in. No solitude is lonely. No bleakness is cold. No noon is hot. No night is dark. No hurt is pain. Babush- "I want the strongest, most beautiful of the sense. ka love in the world," said a woman to Fate. "So?" said Fate. "But will you give what is needed to make it?" "I will give," said the woman. "But first you must know what you give," said Fate. And the woman was lifted up to Life. And she knew of all she had to give. And Fate laughed. For not many give when they know. But this woman looked Fate in the eyes. "Now," she said. "So?" said Fate. "I shall take what is need- ed." For Strength Fate took the woman's heart and broke it. Went its power into love. Went the pull of a baby's lips on her milky breast. Went the faith of the man she loved. Went the fear of Death's near wings. For Beauty went her heart's leap at others' hap- piness, the feel of her lover's head on her bosom, joy at the sunlight, bliss at the water's music, the ecstasy of carrying a baby in her womb. Went the amethyst of her eyes, the goldlights of her hair, the rose velvet of her body. All went to make the love she asked. Men never say of her," Her hair is grey". Or "Her heart is broken". But they come from far away to the land of her exile and press their faces. against the ground her foot has passed. And they speak in a whisper as if saying a prayer: the strongest, most beautiful love in ९९ the world." ody* III Grace Potter. Other poets had done this, to be sure, but mainly by way of making the sound an imitation Mere imitation, however, was not enough for Whitman. He did not wish to make a" dead set at poetizing" these sounds and move- ments; he sought to make them the very founda- tion of his prosody, the regulative principle of his rhythm. N Moved by this desire he turned from verse to prose. In the pitch-glides and speech-tunes which are the basis of the prosaic pattern, in the swift upward rush and retarded cadence of the prose sentence, he found the principle he sought. He adopted it. But, having adopted it, he found it in its ordinary form inapt to his purpose. Prose, as prose, is the instrument of communication. It suggests and implies the communicative attitude, whereas Whitman's genius, like that of every great poet, was mainly expressive. In the tide of poetic creation, therefore, he instinctively and perforce turned to the nutative pattern. But he brought back with him from his incursion into prose new materials for the weaving. With these materials f he created for himself a new and peculiar kind of verse, in which the dips and glides and evolu- tions of the prose rhythm were woven into a pat- tern of nutation. In this seemingly hybrid form he found a medium adequate to the expression of his peculiar genius. J When I read Whitman's poetry in the light of this conception, a fantastic myth passes through my mind. I seem to see in Whitman some giant- limbed old heathen god who has descended to the earth fain to take part in the dance of mortals. He begins by practicing the waltz, but soon tires of the mincing steps and quick gyrations. He wants a larger, freer movement. He then tries. marching and running and leaping, only to find that what his soul hungers for is the undulating * Reprinted, with some alterations, from the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, vol. vii, pp. 134–153. 1910 103 THE CONSERVATOR movement of the waltz. So, devising a kind of colossal minuet, he moves through it with a grandi- ose, galumphing majesty peculiar to himself, fling- ing his great limbs all abroad and shedding am- brosia from his flying locks, yet with all his aban- don keeping time to the music, and in all the seeming waywardness of his saltations preserving the law and pattern of the dance. I have implied that the form of his verse was original with Whitman, but this is not strictly true, for something akin to it is found in the prose translation of the Hebrew prophets and psalmists, in the Ossianic poems, in Blake's Prophetic Vis- ions, and even in the insipid poetry of Martin Farquhar Tupper. But the resemblance is only a family resemblance. One needs to make but a few comparisons to see that Whitman has devised a new thing. Copy To exhibit in detail the methods and devices. by which the poet has so handled the elements of prose as to produce some of the effects of verse, would not only be tedious but would extend my paper beyond reasonable bounds. Not wholly to disappoint curiosity, however, I will indicate a few of the most striking features. To illustrate the difference between Whitman's verse and the ordinary accentual meters, let us compare a passage from Shake-speare with a pas- sage from Whitman. We may take for this pur- pose some lines of Juliet's apostrophe to night in the third act of Romeo and Juliet, and the address to night in Whitman's Song of Myself. In parts of each of these selections the rhythm of the lines is curiously similar: GRAN Come night; come, Romeo; come, thou day in night; For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night Whiter than new snow on a raven's back. Come, gentle night, come loving black-brow'd night, Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die, Take him and cut him out in little stars And he will make the face of heaven so fine That all the world will be in love with night. Now turn to Whitman: I am he that walks with the tender and growing night, I call to the earth and sea half-held by the night. Press close bare-bosom'd night! press close mag- netic nourishing night! Night of south winds-night of the large few stars! Still nodding night! mad naked summer night. Smile O voluptuous cool-breath'd earth! Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees! Earth of departed sunset-earth of the moun- Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tains misty-topt! tinged with blue! Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river! Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake! Far-swooping elbow'd earth-rich, apple-blos- som'd earth! Smile, for your lover comes. Underlying the Shake-spearean verse is the reg- ular pulse of the iambic pentameter-tee-dee'/tee- dee'/tee-dee'/tee-dee'/tee-dee'/-like the beat of horses' hoofs. We are not allowed to forget it. The quick recurrence of the stress can be felt even in the most impetuous phrases, such as "Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow'd night"; for the nutative tune has been impressed upon us by such regular lines in the preceding parts as "For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night", and comes out again immediately in the following, "And he will make the face of heaven so fine". Not so in Whitman's lines. Here the rapid beat of the metrical foot is absent. In its place we detect rushes or glides of sound, accelerations and delays of speed, long swellings and diminu- tions of energy, these units of the verse being combined in an intricate and ever varied pattern by the recurrence of similar phrases and by subtle correspondences of one part of the stanza with another. In general, it may be said that the Whitmanian line, scanned in routine fashion, consists, like the prose sentence, of an advancing and retreating wave. This simple movement is varied almost infinitely (1) by varying the length of the suc- cessive waves proportionally, (2) by allowing the speech-rhythm now to coincide with the routine scansion, now to conflict with it, (3) by introduc- ing minor waves or impulses in varying numbers and proportionate lengths, (4) by the artful use of alliteration and refrain.* · A careful reading of Whitman convinces me that he is fairly scrupulous and regular in the ob- he is lax at times-but so were Shake-speare and servance of his own prosodic rules. Doubtless Byron, and dull and prosy at other times-but so were Chaucer and Wordsworth. Taking him all *The structure of Whitman's verse with referenee both to the line and to the stanza, has been analyzed in detail by P. Jannaccone, in his La Poesia di Walt Whitman e l'evoluzione delle forme ritmiche (Torino: 1898). 104 SEPTEMBER THE CONSERVATOR . I : in all, it may be doubted whether many poets who have produced as great a bulk of writing as Whit- man has, have lived up to their lights more con- sistently. Indeed it is not too much to say that of all American poets Whitman is the only one whose sense of artistry is comparable with that of the greatest British poets. In conclusion, the question may be raised whether the Whitmanian prosody is effective. Will it endure? Whitman has himself in By Blue Ontario's Shore given the final test of po- etry: Rhymes and rhymers pass away, poems distilled from poems pass away, The swarms of reflectors and the polite pass, and leave ashes, Admirers, importers, obedient persons, make but the soil of literature, America justifies itself, give it time, no disguise can deceive it or conceal from it, it is impas- sive enough, Only toward the likes of itself will it advance to meet them, If its poets appear it will in due time advance to meet them, there is no fear of mistake, (The proof of a poet shall be sternly deferr'd till his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorb'd it.) If America should ever absorb Whitman as Whitman absorbed America, no doubt his mode of versifying would pass into the consciousness of the race and seem as much a matter of course as iambic pentameter. But that stern proof can- not now be adduced. Meanwhile I can only give my own testimony to its effect upon me person- ally. I find that if I turn to some favorite passage of Whitman and read it over three times, it passes through as many transformations. At the first reading it is fine and moving poetry, well articu- lated, beautifully rhythmed, altogether satisfying. But upon a second reading it seems to degenerate slightly and parts of it sound commonplace. Sep- arate phrases are still good, but the tension of the structure has relaxed. A third reading takes a good deal of the life and spirit out of it as far as these qualities depend on the close knitting- together of the phrases. I must put the poem aside for a time in order to renew the first fine careless rapture. This is not true of the fine passages of Shake- speare, Wordsworth, or Keats, or of passages of great prose. These I can repeat to myself not only without loss but with some gain. They grow firmer and better articulated with each reading. Why this difference should be I am unable to say. Perhaps it is because in reading Whitman the ear hungers for the familiar beat of the nuta- tive rhythm, and after the stimulus of a first con- tact is over, finds it something of a strain to keep pace with the poet's largo. At any rate, this personal experience shakes my faith somewhat in the immediate and general ac- ceptance of the new poetic form. I cannot be- lieve it likely that the prosody of Whitman will soon drive from the field the prosody of Chaucer, Shake-speare, Milton and Wordsworth. Fred Newton Scott. G The sea There are four young fellows enjoy- comrades ing a frolic on the sunny beach this morning before they take their plunge. One of them rowed on his freshman crew in the spring, and his arms, shoulders and legs are swarthily tanned, and comely indeed to look at with their supple interplay of sinew as he wrestles with the others or darts racing away. They envy him his gypsy color, his development, and the prestige of his athletic record, yet generously praise all these, and are glad to find the sun lay- ing a richer hue on their own skins, while their daily swimming and games are bringing them to agile muscular trim from head to heel. Certainly the group is as good to watch in the sunshine and clear air as were ever Greek lads at the surf whitened shore of the Aegean. The oarsman wears his rowing shirt with armholes opening almost to the nipples, over chest muscles that stand out so abruptly as to cast a wedge of shadow on the flesh beneath, and shoulder muscles in their thick and pliant bands across his back. All four of the boys have tugged their bathing trunks for greater freedom halfway up their compact thighs, till they show the beginning of paler skin above the hinged walnut columns flossed with. black hair. Their eyes glisten with the good- humored trickery they play, and their laughing mouths are graced with sound teeth, while their tumbled locks flutter in the salt scented breeze as they thrust and grasp at one another on the scat- tering sand. G But now, have they been half consciously wait- ing and longing for some element they could not supply among themselves, for all their jocund vi- tality and apparent satisfaction with their sport? What else can explain this sudden quieting of their merriment, and the eager attitude of all their figures, as they see a girl friend running to- ward them waving a greeting with one arm lifted 1910 THE CONSERVATOR 105 straight over her head? She is nearing the end of her "teens", and is no less athletic than the boys, though her muscle curves smoothly on her bare arms and black stockinged legs, where theirs is sharper in its lift and shows the tendons above and below its contractions. Her winter of gym- nasium work and basket ball has imparted this lithe energy and resilience, while the fervor of the summer sun on the shore has contributed the golden brown of her warm tan hued with rose; and her untrammeled running over the sands and the swimming against the wavechop have wrought the free stroke of every limb, showing now in her fleet approach. Under the scarlet kerchief that wraps her hair a few escaping tendrils hover against the russet nape, and the quick smile of her berry red lips discloses teeth as white as the wet quartz pebbles along the tideline. Yes, she brings abundantly of what the young fellows lacked without fully knowing it, and flings to them the mysterious and intangible, yet most real gift, as lavishly as the oversea wind pours the priceless boon of its ozone, while she laughs blithe- ly with delight in their willing surrender to her un- sought control. In all her companions there seem to have poised already magnetized, tremulous nee- dles, which required only the lodestone of her complementing vitality entrant among them, to begin oscillating and then quickly fix themselves in its direction with unaccounable inner gladness. Now the five join hands in a row fronting the water, and when one gives the starting signal in staccato commands they rush together into the surf amid flashing spray jetted high from their impetus, while their laughter dies in the gurgling plunge into the oncoming waveflank. Like the beginning of waterspouts the heads and thresh- ing arms burst through to the surface again, as the swimmers make for the raft that is rearing and tilting on the wavetops thirty yards out. The girl is the last to reach it, but she will have none of the help the boys offer in scrambling aboard. She draws herself waisthigh on her hands, with triceps mounding firmly on the straightened arms, then throws one knee sidelong across the plunging raft edge as though mounting a mettlesome pony, while the pectoral muscles lift in a V-slope from both shoulders at the square cut loose neck of her suit. When she has rolled over like a happy seal into the wavewash already sweeping the floating platform, her weight adds enough to keep one side or the other too deeply immersed, and after a few attempts to hold their footing the boys are flung toppling or diving off by the steep cant, leaving her alone, laughing triumphantly at her success in maintaining her clutch on the raised siderim. As they swim about her while she prepares for a dive, and see her darkclad figure outlined against the blue of the midsummer sky with its lustrous, billowy clouds, they think no nymph or mermaid could ever be so graceful as their straightlimbed comrade poising on the restless dais. She snatches the kerchief from her head and shakes her hair down her shoulders, and wrapping her combs in the cloth gives it to one of the swimmers to keep for her in the chest of his jersey. Then she raises her arms overhead with palms together, waiting a few moments for the wavelift that she needs, and darts headlong like a tensebodied fish into the water with so little water with so little splash that the boys call "good!" as she comes up again blowing the drench from her lips and nostrils, and with hair webbed across her shining face. A few days before I watched the sea comrades in their radiant freedom, I had seen in a magazine an advertisement of a lotion for sunburn, with the picture of a bather to her waist smiling from an inflexible ocean that seemed unable to penetrate her costume, or dampen one wisp of her coiffure; and now as I contrasted this with the quintet of swimmers just returning from their games at the raft, I felt that immense relief and refreshment that the dash of disarrayed, heedless reality brings, after the wearily artificial. Here a flying spray surrounds the figures just clambering out of the surf, as they shake themselves and pass quick hands like strigils over their dripping heads, arms and faces; the boys' suits, adhering to their well- knit bodies, glisten like the dark bronze of stalwart statues, while the girl's skirt clings to her thighs like crumpled, windblown silk, and the soaked jacket is molded smoothly to the little breasts. As the companions separate and trot away in different directions, already half famished for their dinners, they think of tomorrow with buoyant ex- pectations of more such romps, in uninterrupted sunshine and health. But yet none of the lads has discovered what it was they lacked until the girl comrade came, nor why she made the differ- ence to them all between a passable morning and one that left no want. And as she wends her way alone between the gleaming dunes, with slower tread in the softer, yielding sand, it is as inex- plicable to her why she ran among the lads with such glee, and was as afloat on even brighter waves than mound the summer ocean, as long as they girt her about with their vigor and unsullied ad- miration. Eliot White. C 106 SEPTEMBER THE CONSERVATOR A beau- A practical education is an education tiful ed- that arrives. Is an education that sub- ucation* serves its purposes. What do you want to do? If you do it you are practical. If you dont do it you are not prac- tical. Suppose you designed being a burglar or a plutocrat. You are practical if you can break out of a house as well as into it. You are practi- cal if you can rob the people without being caught as well as robbing them. You are only half edu- cated if you fail. Your education is perfect if you succeed. That is the say-so of a practical education. Being practical is being adequate. Being equal to your intention. Making good. If you ask me: "What is a beautiful educa- tion?" you involve me in another tangle. Being practical is one thing. Being beautiful is another thing. The ordinary idea of education is myste- riously vulgar. A man talks good English. He is educated. He has good manners. He is edu- He is edu- cated. He may be a fool with all his good Eng- lish and good manners. But he is educated. When we say "education" what do we imply? Everything depends on that. What do we want to produce? Upstarts or humbles? Thieves or honest men? Lovers or haters? Lords or citi- zens? We speak of practical marriages. What are practical marriages? Marriages in which prop- erties most largely figure. Marriages not of bod- ies and souls but of incomes. When a man makes money we say he is practical. When he writes a poem we call him a dreamer. The practical thing is the thing that pays. Pays in houses and rents and profits. Pays percents. Not the thing that pays in love. No. The thing that pays in dol- lars. Being practical is getting there. No matter what the there consists of. No matter how dis- graceful its victories may be. Getting there. That is practical. The men who make laws for themselves and against the people get there. They are practical men. They have had the right sort of education. Whatever you do dont miss the mark. A man said to me: You are a failure. I asked him: What have I failed to do? He said: You He said: You have failed to make money. I said: I did not try to make money. I said to him: You are a failure. He asked me: What have I failed to do? I said: You have failed to make poems. He said: I did not try to make poems. Being practical is being efficient. Our popular ideals are money ideals. Our education is there- *From The Globe, Boston, in a symposium answering the ques- tion: What is a practical education ? ་ fore a money education. Our great men are mil- lionaires. Being perfectly practical is being a full- blown millionaire. Being semi-demi practical is being comfortable. Being practical today is one thing. Being practical tomorrow may be another thing. The emphasis may be shifted. We like fine clothes. We like pretty surfaces. We like elaborate decorations. Being practical today means devotion to and success with the ephemeral and the sophistical. We teach the children that their leaders and masters are generals and politicians. We bait them. We drive them. We lie to them. We tell them to be practical. That is, to bury them- selves in things. To estimate all values in meas- ures of the concrete. Not to go off after visions. Not to reach for the moon. We say to the chil- Not to reach for the moon. dren: Make a living. We dont say: Love so that you may live. We dont say: Love is the only life. We say: Live, anyway, even if you cant love. The world says being practical is proving yourself in loot. I say being practical is proving yourself in love. So we are both prac- tical. We bring down our game. The game we are after. Those who are after loot bring down loot. loot. I who am after love bring down love. As a servant of loot I am a dead failure. As servants of love they are dead failures. We put our children into schools and send them down into the future polluted. We poison the stream at the fount. Do we give the children a practical education? That's according. If we mean to perpetuate competition and hate, we do. If we mean to evolve the commonwealth and love, we dont. If we mean to go on accumu- lating profits, we do. If we mean to develop the idea of service, we dont. Being practical with our youngsters has nothing to do with instructing them in gesture and everything to do with in- forming them with impulse. I would rather talk about a beautiful education than a practical education. In the long run the only practical education is the beautiful education. Today we are producing masters and slaves. It is practical to produce masters and slaves. But to- morrow will come. And tomorrow's tomorrow. And then we will want to produce neither mas- ters nor slaves. We will want to produce men. Being practical will be producing love. Being practical will be producing neighbors instead of aliens. Producing unity instead of severance. Producing communities instead of classes. We rob our children of their manhood and we rob our men of their childhood. We take care to preserve in our children that which we should Ging 1910 THE CONSERVATOR 107 throw away and to destroy in our children that which we should save. We seem to need to abolish the school in the interest of the school. To cease being practical in order to be practical. To rescue education from its own successes. To free culture from its own triumphs. To lift learn- ing above its own summits. Horace Traubel. As to Books and Writers But to all wildly popular things comes, suddenly and inexorably, death, without hope of resurrection. All the king's horses and all the king's men cannot set the street pianos playing Nancy Lee again, though the tune is as good as ever it was and they once played nothing else. No book within our recollection had so mad a vogue in America as Du Maurier's Trilby: the elders of Trilby's day said there had been nothing like it since Uncle Tom's Cabin. But the American booksellers still talk of the miracle of Trilby's death. They aver that the demand stopped in one day. When La Fille de Madame Angot was new, audiences used to encore the Conspirator's Chorus (borrowed from an old tune on which Beethoven wrote variations) half a dozen times. When Sir Charles Wyndham tried to revive the work, that chorus passed without the slight est notice. The street piano men of the East End will you that this psychological phenomenon repeats it- tell self with every music hall song that becomes the rage. For weeks and sometimes months nothing else will be listened to; there is no limit to the number of repeti- tions people will not only stand but clamor for. Then in one day they will not tolerate it on any terms: it would be safer to play a Bach fugue. Now this does not happen to the higher works of art. The master- piece begins by fighting for its life against unpopu- larity, by which I do not mean mere indifference, but positive hatred and furious denunciation of it as an instrument of torture. Beethoven's Ninth Symphony did not "catch on" like the Intermezzo in Cavalleria Rusticana. It was described even by eminent musi- cians as an outrage by a madman. But in the long run Beethoven leaves Mascagni nowhere. BERNARD SHAW. No cheating or bargaining will ever get a single thing out of nature's "establishment" at half price. Do we want to be strong?—we must work. To be hungry?—we must starve. To be happy?—we must be kind. To be wise?—we must look and think. No changing of place at a hundred miles an hour, nor making of stuffs a thousand yards a minute, will There make us one whit stronger, happier or wiser. was always more in the world than men could see, walked they ever so slowly; they will see it no better for going fast. And they will at last, and soon. too, find out that their grand inventions for conquering (as they think) space and time, do, in reality, conquer nothing; for space and time are, in their own essence, unconquerable, and besides did not want any conquer- ing; they wanted using. A fool always wants to shorten space and time: a wise man wants to lengthen both. A fool wants to kill space and kill time: a wise man, first to gain them, then to animate them. JOHN RUSKIN. The beast you going to do about it? again. That is the question of ques- tions. In the face of his challenge there is no other question. He has accused the Beast. He has exposed it. He has shown its threat. Has proved that it is limitless in its ramifications. That it goes wherever capitalism goes. That in fact it is capitalism. Well: what does he propose to do about it? I have read Lindsey with admira- tion and love, I appreciate what he has done I acknowledge his power and his humanity. He All the is a force. But my question still recurs. more so because Lindsey is what he is. Because he seems to lead out and away from the methods he has so far pursued. Not that they are alto- gether wrong. But that they are so ineffective. He can do some things under capitalism. But he cant destroy the evils that capitalism spawns without destroying capitalism. Lindsey has work- ed with all the vital joy of a disciple. But what is his master? As I have said before: He has gone as far as feeling will take him. Now, what does he see? What a man feels: that is much. Some- times, in some places, that is all. But much de- Last month I asked Lindsey: What are * I ask it The Beast has pends also upon what he sees. eyes. It takes a force with eyes to destroy the Beast. We cant meet the bad head of the Beast with the good heart of the Protest and think that enough. Heart is much. Sometimes it is all. But heart alone here is not enough. Lindsey has done wonderful work. Now the question is whether he He has shown about all that an absolutely devoted is ready to pass on to a more wonderful work. lover and fighter can do with the conventional weapons. Now the question is whether he will recognize and utilize weapons more vehemently *The Beast. By Ben B. Lindsey. New York: Doubleday, Page and Company. 108 SEPTEMBER THE CONSERVATOR to the purpose. Reform has done its best. But its best is never best. Beyond reform is revolt. Is he ready for revolt? No man has more no- bly acquitted himself of a conviction than Lind- sey has. He has proved his democracy. He has proved his tremendous force. Now he has other things to prove. He has his vision to prove. He will do it. But he has not so far But he has not so far done it. Going up to the legislature with peti- tions. Being bandied about between the old po- litical parties as a man to be reckoned with but to be thrown down. Making the appeal within the lines. Saying nothing about origins. Calling the Beast names without showing what the Beast came from. Supposing that somehow you can protect yourself from the thief after you have accepted him as a part of your household. That will not work. That will not carry the gospel along. That will not rescue the victim. I do not quar- I do not quar- rel with Lindsey's righteous personal denuncia- tions. But I dont think any personal charge how- ever carefully chosen will meet the case. For while we are all victims of the Beast it is just as true that the Beast is the victim of something. What is that something? We want to know what that is. We want to get at it and finish it. Until we are clear about that we are ourselves at least apologetically that Beast. We suffer from an in- justice which we essentially do nothing to remove. Nothing could be finer than what Lindsey has done except that thing which I look for him still to do. No one could be dearer to me than the loving Lindsey of today except the more loving Lindsey of tomorrow. No Lindsey could be of more use to the world than the Lindsey we know. And yet there is another Lindsey to be born. Maybe he is born already. And that Lindsey will be of more use to the world. Lindsey's one love is that love for the crowd. Now, love for the crowd is magnificent. But something must go along with love for the crowd. That is, vision for the crowd. I am not feeling like saying a word that seems critical of Lindsey. He is be- yond criticism. I am only asking him a question. He is not beyond a question. Besides, the Lind- sey we know is responsible for the Lindsey we still expect to get acquainted with. He has done so well going so far that we are forced to expect him to do better going farther. I could not ad- mit readily that a man who saw as he does so clearly what he was up against would fail to learn the obvious lesson. Lindsey cant stay where he is. He will go back or he will advance. He wont go back. Therefore, he will advance. That sounds like an inference in a b c. And so it is. For Lindsey is an a b c man. He is elemental. He has not got too far away from first things. In fact, he remains a first thing. That is why I am not likely to be doing him any wrong when I say big as his yesterday has been his tomorrow will vastly overshadow it. Or justify it, rather. For what Lindsey has been can never be lost in what he is to be. he is to be. Lindsey's life will in the end all go harmoniously together. T. determined. Then he writes too. A modern Churchill has got his growth. His chronicle length breadth and thickness are much. He would write better if he wrote less. Like Herrick, he thinks he should produce a book a year. Some men can. Churchill and Herrick cant. Herrick cant. In Mister Crewe's Career Church- ill seemed to have taken a farther step. Seemed promising. Made me think that after all he was going to amount to more than I originally sup- posed. Now I return to my doubts. He has got himself said. Our men and women who write novels are afraid of life. write novels are afraid of life. They shrink from the dirt. They dont forgive life for being nasty as well as nice. And they dont forgive them- selves when they write nasty as well as nice. They are qualified for short runs and for sur- faces. They are made for apologies. They re- fuse to grapple with real sins. Therefore they are incapable of evolving real virtues. They only see so far. And that not very far. Or they close their eyes. They stuff their ears. If you talk with them about it they say the American people wont stand for the truth. They blame it on the public. We are willing. But the public is reluc- # tant. We are free. But the public is chained. We would but the public wont. They blame themselves on the public. themselves on the public. They play the game. Just as much as brokers on the stock exchange each other. And authors sell out and sell each the game. And brokers sell out and sell other. Churchill hardly sizes up with anything beyond the casual. He digs away in the same hole. Drops the dirt back again. Digs again. Keeping up a ceaseless round of sterotyped pro- duction. The same women, the same men, the same events. The Americans of both sexes who live the usual lives. No intimation of revolt. No intimation of the vast struggle of our democ- racy to express itself in new forms. The break- *A modern Chronicle. By Winston Churchill. New York: The Macmillan Company. 1910 THE CONSERVATOR 109 Not ing loose from the past. The freer resolutions of sex. Women having as much to say as men about it all. Women often saying the bravest farthest things. Men dreaming, women dreaming, of strange alignments. Not sure what. clear. Groping about in fogs often. But grop- ing. Not lying still. Not moored. Sailing at will. Often going to wreck. Preferring to die alive to living dead. Gladder to be outlawed and disgraced for love than to be accepted and cush- ioned and coddled on false pretenses. Churchill sometimes makes a move as if he knew something of the situation. Then he sweeps all evidences of It out of sight. Seems to be reaching towards rebel solutions. Then draws back. Then ad- mits that he is only average and is satisfied with the allowed liberties of interpretation. Staying a little behind rather than going a little ahead. Not trying himself against dangerous risks. Going just as far as he can safely go. Leaving the difficult passes to others. Remaining on quiet streams. Leaving the seas to others. Churchill is not wholly meaningless. But he is certainly not meaningmore. He belongs to the puritan holdons who stand baffled and scared in the face of the enemy. Who are not strong enough to appease or to fight that enemy. That undeniable problem of our resentful democracy. We need story tellers who can go as far as revolution goes. Who can go where revolution goes. Who defy compromise. Who court fire and death. But Churchill is not such a story teller. He belongs in the settlements not on the margins. He is most at home where love and progress are least at home. He will continue to write books. But it looks as if he would never write a book. T. My coun- What hell is to the church patriotism try, right is to the state. One is as good as the other. Each is as bad as each. Peo- or wrong* ple used to expect to get to heaven on preferred credits. You belong to a certain church. Therefore you are saved. Or to a cer- tain race. Therefore you are saved. Without hell what becomes of persecution? Without pa- triotism what becomes of war? You thought you believed in hell. Assumed hell. Never stopped to really see what hell means. Just believed in it. Someone comes along and shakes you up. Hell? You believe in hell? You dont say so. Hell? Why, that is impossible. Say, do you know what hell means? You can never know whether you believe in it until you know exactly what it means. Maybe you'll find you dont believe in it at all. That's the turn theological discussion took all of a sudden about twenty years ago. And just as suddenly millions of people discovered they did not believe in hell. They had told themselves they did. But they asked themselves some fur- ther questions. They looked deeper and higher and farther around. They found that hell did not give love enough horizon. That hell did not account for enough. Herve is handling patriot- ism as Farrar handled hell. He is asking people what patriotism really is. Not what the politi- cians and the priests say it is. What it really is. What it stands for and goes to and does by the way. Whether patriotism gives love enough ho- rizon. Whether patriotism accounts for enough. Herve especially addresses his Socialist confreres. What have they to say to patriotism? It is con- sistent enough for the old school to perpetuate the old cries. But the new school? What can it say? He describes the orthodox inferences. Then he indicates the difference of view among Social- ists. Herve does not argue for and against. He argues against. He does not admit that there are two sides in this thing to a Socialist. There is only one side. When will the whole movement consent to stand unequivocally against patriotism? We are either one race or we are not one race. We are either a brotherhood or not a brother- hood. If we are one race, if we are a brother- hood, then the patriot is out of place. He be- longs to another world. Unfortunately, not to a world that the world has outlived, Hardly that. But to a world that we are outliving. To a world that the Socialist certainly has outlived. Herve declares that labor should not meet even a just declaration of war with acquiescence but with re- volt. If labor put up a big enough no the yes of the authorities-the kings and parliaments, the presidents and congresses-would be nullified. Herve wants to break down the last motive and temptation for strife between peoples. He of course sees how impossible internationalism is to capitalism. How antagonistic they inevitably must triot is easily explicable. But the Socialist? What be. So that the psychology of the capitalist pa- can we say to the Socialist patriot? He is an an- omaly. He is without a reason for being. He is not a challenge. He is a compromise. Herve wants to see the Socialist contradiction cleared *My Country, Right or Wrong. By Gustave Herve. Translated up. by Guy Bowman. London. A. C. Fifield. 7'. A 110 SEPTEMBER THE CONSERVATOR A LEAVES OF GRASS REPRINT SEPTEMBER I propose to publish in fac-simile Walt Whitman's per- sonal copy of Leaves of Grass, edition of 1860-1861, in which he did much of the work of revision for the edition that fol- lowed five years later. that for This copy of Leaves of Grass is historic. It is the volume abstracted by Secretary Harlan from Whitman's desk in the Interior Department and made the basis for Whitman's dis- charge from that branch of the service. An account of this incident, written by Whitman himself, will be photographically reproduced and included. THE INTERNATIONAL STÚDIO The edition will be limited to five hundred copies. The price fixed will be ten dollars for each copy. No books will be sent to editors for review and no rebates or discounts will be allowed to collectors or booksellers. Daniel Chester French The paintings of Walter W. Russell American paintings in Germany Plant drawings from an Indian cotton printer's pattern book Architectural gardening A Swedish sculptor: Carl Milles Painting in Mexico JOHN LANE COMPANY NEW YORK The lay figure: on sources of inspiration Wood carving and architecture The ceramic art of the Pueblo Indians The towers of Boston Blue shadows in nature and art Recent designs in domestic architecture Studio talk Art school notes Reviews and notices SELECTIONS FROM THE PROSE AND POETRY OF WALT WHIT- MAN: Edited with introduction by Oscar Lovell Triggs, Ph. D. The best introduc- tory volume to the study of Whitman's writings. It contains representative ex- tracts from poems, prose and letters, together with a most excellent critical and biographi- 1 The text matter of this book will be printed from the original plates, which still exist. The chirographical matter in Whit- man's hand will be superimposed. In order to maintain a strict likeness to the original, in which Whitman used black ink and pen- cils of several colors, it will be necessary for each sheet to go through the press from three to five times. This is a costly process. C Each volume will be authenticated by a number and my signature. Subscriptions will be filled in the order they are received. To persons who have a special interest in Whitman, as well as to students and libraries (particularly to the libraries of schools and colleges), this remarkable reprint must have unusual significance. No steps will be practically taken in this matter until subscriptions sufficient to cover the initial expenses are received Send for circular. The standard authorized editions of WALT WHITMAN'S WRITINGS issued under the superintendence of Whitman's literary executors in strict conformity with the author's final arrangement of text LEAVES OF GRASS: Complete poems-including Sands at Seventy, Good bye my Fancy, Old age Echoes (posthumous additions) and A backward glance o'er travell'd Roads-library edition, with index of first lines, two portraits, and a fac simile of manuscript, octa- vo, cloth decorative, gilt top, two dollars. Popular edition, same text as library edition, twelve mo., handsome cloth binding, steel portrait, one dollar. Paper covers, complete with portrait, fifty cents. COMPLETE PROSE WORKS: Containing Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs, and Good bye my Fancy. Uniform with corresponding editions of Leaves of Grass library edition, octavo, cloth decorative, gilt top, five full page portraits and illustrations and a fac simile of manuscript, two dollars. Popular edition, same text as above, twelve mo., cloth decorative, one portrait, one dollar and twenty five cents. HORACE TRAUBEL The production of this work calls for the finest skill of the photographer, the engraver Nothing more beautiful in the publisher's art was ever done in America or in England. and the printer. But it will be faithfully su- pervised to the remotest particulars. cal introduction and a carefully prepared bibliography. Twelve mo., cloth, with portrait, one dollar and twenty five cents. THE WOUND DRESSER: Hospital let- ters in war time. Edited by the late Dr. R. M. Bucke, one of Whitman's literary execu- tors. Twelve mo., cloth decorative, gilt top, two portraits, one dollar and fifty cents. Any of these books can be supplied by D. APPLETON AND COMPANY New York THE MOSHER MOSHER BOOKS WHAT BOOKLOVERS SAY ABOUT THESE EDITIONS I can find nothing which as gifts please better than your books. Your books brought me back the sense of charm of beauti- ful things and the resolution to hold on with both hands to ideality. The puzzle to me is how you can turn out such books for the money. For a person of very small means who wishes to give an inexpensive but dainty and un- usual wedding present your books are ideal. Your catalogue is a thing to praise without praising in idle words. Reading between the lines, it is a literary joy. My catalogue—a remarkable piece of bookwork in itself-explains these unusual compliments, and is sent free on request to booklovers any- where that can be reached by mail. Thos. B. Mosher PORTLAND, MAINE BACON CRYPTOGRAMS IN SHAKE-SPEARE AND OTHER STUDIES: By ISAAC HULL PLATT net $1.00, by post $1.06. Can be had of The Conservator. SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY: BOSTON The Conservator keeps a high place in my JULIA regard among MARLOWE American publi- cations. I wish all the great American public might feel its influence now as it is bound to be felt later. 1910 111 THE CONSERVATOR Broadcast: by Ernest Crosby A sequel to Plain Talk in Psalm and Parable, containing Mr. Cros- by's latest verse, some of which appeared first in The Conservator. LONDON TIMES: There is a good deal of thought, force and de- scriptive power in the book. Cloth. 12mo. Will be sent post free on receipt of 80 cents in stamps or money order by the FUNK & WAGNALLS CO., 60 East 23d Street, New York. Also by the same author, two little books on Tolstoy : TOLSTOY AS A SCHOOLMASTER CHICAGO COMMONS: To try to express in these few prosaic sentences the delightful charm of this little book would be to court failure. TOLSTOY AND HIS MESSAGE PHILADELPHIA ITEM: A genuinely illuminative interpretation of the great philosopher's being and purpose. Each book in cloth. Small 12mo. 93 pages. 93 pages. Put a dollar bill in an envelope and both these books will be sent to you post free on receipt by the HAMMERSMARK PUBLISHING CO., 151 Wabash Avenue, Chicago. WALT WHITMAN'S DIARY IN CANADA. Limited to 500 copies. 8vo. Net two dollars and fifty cents. post ten cents extra. AN AMERICAN PRIMER by WALT WHITMAN A very early MS. never included in Whitman's works. Limited to 500 copies with photogravure portrait. 8vo. Net two dollars. By post ten cents extra. A new Beacon Biography 11 Thomas B. Harned, Phila. 12 Thomas B. Harned, Phila. 13 Thomas B. Harned, Phila. 14 Isaac Hull Platt, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania HENRY DEMAREST LLOYD: You are needed in the outside world, outside of Camden, outside of The Conservator. You can do a Conservator in the great world. That which you have been grow- Two newly-discovered Whitman ing and shaping in the nest take now upon a longer flight. Go out manuscripts and a new life where you can encounter the men and the events of the world with your poetry and philosophy. I say this not to deny you, but to affirm. By 15 Leonard Abbott, New York 16 Gustav P. Wiksell, Boston 17 Gustav P. Wiksell, Boston 18 Gustav P. Wiksell, Boston 19 Charles G. Garrison, Mer- chantville, New Jersey 20 Walter Leighton, Boston 21 Lymen Chandler, East Au- rora, New York 22 Ladson C. Butler, East Au- rora, New York Chants Communal, by Horace Traubel: a representative collection of prose pieces radical but con- structive: price one dollar net: by post ten cents extra 56 Yale College, New Haven 57 Harvard College, Cambridge 58 Horace Howard Furness, Wall- ingford, Pennsylvania 28 Athanæum, Boston 29 Talcott Williams, Philadelphia 59 J. H. Coyne, St. Thomas, 30 Marie Smith, Philadelphia Ontario 31 John Johnston, Bolton, Lanca- 60 Columbia University, New shire, England York 32 John Johnston, Bolton, Lanca- 61 Chicago University, Chicago shire, England York 33 H. Buxton Forman, London 34 H. Buxton Forman, London 35 Public Library, Boston 64 Clarence Darrow, Chicago 36 Edward L. Farr, Camden 65 Leland Stanford University 37 Thomas S. Marvin, Boston 66 Joseph Fels, Philadelphia 38. George M. Williamson, Grand 67 Joseph Fels, Philadelphia View on Hudson, New York 68 Joseph Fels, Philadelphia 39 Mary Van Bibber, Baltimore 40 Mary F. Lang, Toledo 41 Alfred W. Beville, London 42 Mary E. Hawley, Chicago 43 Louis I. Haber, New York 69 Samuel Kalish, Newark 70 Samuel Kalish, Newark 71 Samuel Kalish, Newark 72 Robert Mackey, Jr., York P GEORGE D. HERRON: It is a book of the highest value and beauty that Horace Traubel proposes to give us, and I can only hope that it will be read as widely and appreciatively as it more than deserves to be for it is with a joy that would seem extravagant, if I ex- pressed it, that I welcome Chants Communal. WALT WHITMAN by ISAAC HULL PLATT Net seventy five cents. By post five cents extra. CARLETON NOYES: What Horace Traubel has to say is eminently and always worth hearing. To the consideration of present social conditions and the eternal problem of individual living he brings an open mind and a boundless sympathy. SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY: Boston SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY: Boston EUGENE V. DEBS: The best there is in the gifted author is in flower in these pages. There is a heart beat in every word. The book not only deals with life: it is life, radiant, glorious, immortal EDWIN MARKHAM: The Chants of Horace Traubel are an arraign- ment of the civilization that now is and a cheery hail to the civili- zation that is to come. He has something to say and a striking way of saying it. All readers will not agree with his ideas, but all read- ers will be set a-thinking by them. SUBSCRIBERS TO LEAVES OF GRASS REPRINT 101 C. F. Nesbit, Washington 102 Thomas B. 103 Thomas B. Mosher 44 Charles Warren Stoddard, 73 J. Levering Jones, Philadelphia 104 Levi N. Powers, Haverhill Saratoga, California 74 Public Library, Syracuse 45 Charles Sixsmith, Adlington 75 J. A. Risser, Toronto 105 Charles Lloyd Serrill, Phila near Chorley, Lancashire, 76 John M. Robertson, Moosic, 106 Curtis Hidden Page, Colum- bia University England Pennsylvania 46 Thomas Earle White, Phila. 77 Cornell University, Ithaca 107 Wayland Hyatt Smith, Los 78 Edmund Clarence Stedman, 108 George Howarth, Blackburn, Angeles, Cal. 47 A. B. Drake, Boston England 48 Minot J. Savage, New York 49 Frank P. Held, St. Louis 50 Louis Prang, Boston 51 Lucius D. Morse, Atlanta 52 Library of Congress, Wash- ington New York 79 Frederick Rowland Marvin, 109 James A. Wilson, Pittsburgh Albany, New York 110 Charles E. Lauriat Co Boston 111 Franklin Wentworth, Bos- ton, Mass. 80 Mayer Sulzberger, Phila. 81 W. P. Wesselhoeft, Boston 53 Harry Gaylord Wilshire, New 112 Eugene Heffley, New York 113 Henry E. Legler, Madison 114 Edwin Grover, Chicago York 115 George B. Wheeler, Chicago 86 Carleton E. Noyes, Cambridge 87 Annie T. Auerbach, Boston 88 P. K. Foley, Boston 89 P. K. Foley, Boston 90 P. K. Foley, Boston 116 Howard C. Warren, Prince- ton, New Jersey 117 F. W. Bain, Burlington, Ont. 118 A. Gruenberg, New York 119 B. Weinig, New York 120 T. Dean Swift, Lawrence- ville, N. J. 91 Henry Harrison Brown, San Francisco 121 Jacob Klein, St. Louis Louis 92 Leon Bazalgette, Paris, France 122 William Marion Reedy, St. 93 John Moody, Cranford, N. J. 62 George D. Herron, New York 94 George Wharton James, Syra- 123 William Marion Reedy, St. 63 Edward Lauterbach, New cuse, New York Louis 95 Thomas B. Mosher, Portland, 124 Herbert Chamberlin, Victo- Maine ria, B. C. 96 Alberta Montgomery, Gray 125 Robert Bittong, Philadelphia Abbey, County Down, Ire- 126 William F. Gable, Altoona land 127 George Wolfe Plank, Phila- Herbert W. Ross, Bridgeport, Conn. 97 delphia 128 Amy Smith, Philadelphia 98 Harrison N. Hiles, Canton, 129 Gordon Craig, Berlin Ohio New 99 Art. V. Raley, Texas 130 Gordon Craig, Berlin 131 Gordon Craig, Berlin 132 H. Gail Davis, South Bend 100 Jerome Conner, Syracuse 82 Willis J. Abbot, Battle Creek 83 Henry D.Lloyd, Winnetka, Ill. 84 Mrs. Sterling, New York 54 John Spargo, New York 23 Ellen M. Calder, Providence 55 W. H. Trimble, Dunedin, 85 Stockham Publishing Com- New Zealand pany, Chicago 24 Brown University, Providence 25 Henry S. Borneman, Phila 26 Joseph Fels, Philadelphia 27 John Hay, Washington CLARENCE DARROW: Horace Traubel has the soul of the poet and, the eye of the seer. All of his work breathes the spirit of liberty and justice. He finds the truth not through the narrow, unsafe rules of the logician, but from that inward perception of right and equality which cannot be deceived. Horace Traubel is both a poet and a philosopher. No one can say anything too good about him or his work. **** 112 SEPTEMBER 1910 THE CONSERVATOR Keep the hinges of your mind well oiled and your soul busy -but dont forget your body Exercise that too. And all the wholesome helps to exercise we have Marshall E. Smith & Brother 25 S. Eighth Street Philadelphia Athletic Outfitters Men's Furnishers W THE AMERICAN JOUR- The Conservator dollar and a quarter a year: is- NAL OF EUGENICS: one sued monthly: samples, ten cents. Trial three months with pamphlet Institutional Marriage, thirty cents in post- age stamps. Los Angeles, California DR. J. M. HABEL'S ACADEMY PHILADELPHIA One dollar a year prepares students for college, teaches modern languages. Tourists and commercial travelers find Professor Habel's half-hour linguistic conversations of great benefit in European countries. 1120 Girard street, Philadelphia WFG The only journal devoted to the art THE MASK of the theater: printed on handmade paper and illustrated by wood engravings, lithographs and to subscribers) etchings. The object of the publication is to bring before an intelligent public many ancient and modern aspects of the Theater's Art which have been too long disregarded or forgotten. JOHN SEMAR, Editor. GORDON CRAIG, Art Director. Four dollars a year. Florence, Italy. It is worse than waste for any any woman to boil and scald the clothes and tire herself out washing them in the old-fashioned way. Use Fels- Naptha soap according to the easy COLLECTS directions. No boiling Of grocers Fels & Co., Philadelphia THE ARTSMAN Oscar Lovell Triggs writes this: "I believe as firmly as ever in the truth and permanency of the art-craft movement. I read The Artsman with the greatest satisfaction because as an exponent of the new indus- trialism it represents the idealism which is at the bottom of the movement. We do not need more material products but we do need all the idealism and romanticism possible to attach to the products we have. The Artsman is practical also and deserves the combined allegiance of workers and thinkers." THE ROSE VALLEY PRESS sixteen hundred twenty four Walnut street TWENTIETH YEAR I want to thank you at this late day for the reviews you have JACK given me in The Conservator. LONDON Leaving out every- thing else, you have done what not one in a hundred reviewers has done- grasped the innermost meaning of my work. I regard the Conservator as one of the best papers published in JOHN P. America; in fact, JOHN P. I know of no ALTGELD other paper that stands on so high a plane and is such an inspi- HORACE TRAUBEL us One: Put money in your purse Two: Give all to love Three: He died for Four: Make room for man Five: The soul of the workman Single copies will be sent postpaid for twelve cents. Ten copies will be sent for one dol- lar. Address The Conservator, Philadel- phia THE CALL the only Socialist daily east of Chicago is published in New York city and is indispensable to those who aim to keep in- formed in matters appertain- ing to the labor question. It is suggested that Socialists in particular should do every- thing possible to extend the circulation of THE CALL Write to the business office for information. ... BANATA BOUND W 34 • MAY 191913 Calle RY 1 * A { 2: g XX In S ".... ASTRA susanagia de l X