CONTENTS JANUARY, 1924 The Universe and the Green Dragon-Fly's Wing By MAXWELL BODENHEIM The universe-chemical speck, Of a lunatic without hands or feet- Machines that fill the squalor of your time. Conjuring trivial quips From the stomach of vulgarities, And manufactured articles With their cheap, insipid elegance The universe receives these things As motes within an hour of typhoid fever, But you, industrious gentlemen, Wishing to correct the universe, Its freshness and vitality, And save your sputum for all men Or spread their hearts and minds to one The ebony coldness of the universe. The wing of a green dragon-fly Colored instinct released upon air- And signals to the universe, Above the latest brands of heavy rubbish Made by men to lend variety To the excrements of fears. Ohio and the Seine By LAWRENCE S. MORRIS T may seem paradoxical to assert I that American literature is in dan ger of over-aestheticism. The menace, probably, is not wide-spread. Perhaps it is limited to critics, and has not yet touched poets and novelists. It is certain, at any rate, that among some of the clearest-eyed and most intelligent of our critics an absorption in the functions of literature is leaving a blindspot in their vision of its nature. These critics realize only too well that no people's expression has value as art until it attains its "significant form." This is, of course, true. The threat of aestheticism, however, sprouts when one forgets that all technical development is a means, and begins to revere it as an end. In America this attitude is fostered by another current fallacy. There is an assumption among these same critits that in our case the "end" is something already established by European experiments. Because Americans and Europeans labor at the same machines and practice the same political chicanery, it is held that our culture must be identical with that of Europe. This belief underlies much contemporary criticism, and has been stated explicitly in certain reviews. The conclusion to which it leads is inevitably that any contribution by America to literature must be limited to the evolution of "a new art form." This theory that America is to be exempt from the task every other nation has faced of hammering out its Each European culture has its distinctive method of attack: its own strategy for driving life into terms that become intelligible values. It is easier to be aware of this strategy than to define it. Yet every one realizes how profound a recognition of man in his social aspect underlies the French consciousness. Based on this implicit limitation, which has become axiomatic, the Frenchman is free to be the most experimental individualist in Europe. This strategy has perhaps diminished for him the stark mystery of the human soul; but it has lighted up with infinite subtlety the relationships between each soul and those others with whom it shares a devouring planet. A foreshortening of life has become a strength in art, by defining the terms of the question. When Anatole France used the expression, Le Génie Latin, as a title, he was not referring to an abstraction. He was acknowledging his debt to a fertile soil of preferences and limitations, in which individual writers of France have always rooted themselves. It is common to the personal agony of Villon and the social poignancy of Georges Duhamel. The English genius, in contrast, has always been essentially anarchistic. It has never assimilated the notion of society; it has lived in the internal struggles of the individual. This lack of social sense from which to diverge has undoubtedly driven the English to protect their ineptitude for communal life with unexampled formality. Concentrating on the arena where the individual is conscious of his own contact with infinities, however, this approach loosed the finest lines of the 16th century dramatists and 17th century prose-writers. Joseph Conrad to-day, in spite of continental bonds, is frankly in this tradition. Yet France and England fight the same wars, wrangle over unemployment, and see the same plays. To feel the expressive utility of this foreshortening, let anyone compare the lambent eroticism of d'Annunzio, the divan, apartement meublé eroticism of France, and the dense, blind, subterranean eroticism of D. H. Lawrence. Each is thoroughly personal; and in each the distinctive timbre, without which there would be no value, may be traced to the points of emphasis in the local temper. Forms, as far as they may be analyzed technically, are at the mercy of this temper. It twists, lops, and adapts. The French evolved a form in the comedy of Moliére; but Moliére lifted free ly from Plautus. Certainly the contribution of a matured people cannot be narrowed down to any one "art form”. The significant thing is the development of an intense and specialized mode of feeling, which expresses itself through all the art forms that people may use. We are interested to know how any people have felt life or what they have thought about it. If their feeling has been barren or their thought commonplace, no technical ingenuity can make them important. There is, of course, only one subject in literature: human consciousness. It is the artist's job to explore this. In its pure state it is the basic matter shared by all peoples: it is still inchoate, at large, and unmeasured. Gradually a people chooses and emphasizes, wields its unique mode of feeling; in this mode the consciousness-atlarge is annealed into expression in art. Without a blood-fused immediacy there is no significance. Values are passionate exclusions. It is this which makes Don Quixote or the chronicle of Hebrew lusts and murders contemporary books, while writers barely dead, such as James Russell Lowell, evaporate into blurred eclecticism. No single facet of existence did they press upon, relentlessly, until it crystallized, burned with its own indomitable quality. Theories of political internationalism have bred a conception of international literature. A sort of spiritual Esperanto! But only when we draw our own cords honestly, tightly to their pitch, and strike them until they vibrate to the subtlest depths of ourselves, do they sound a do they sound a note other nations can recognize, and accept or reject. It is this salty, centripetal inten |