"Pure Poetry"

...If these conversions continue to increase, it may be that the deadly pall of dullness will be lifted, and that once more Saint George will be invoked as the patron of a land of happiness and true merriment...

...One can only estimate its value by studying trends of the past and the present...

...THAT recent debate in London, between Gilbert K. Chesterton and Lady Rhondda, on The Menace of the Leisured Woman, with Bernard Shaw as chairman contributing to the discussion, must have been worth attending...

...but that means merely that he is adding to the achievement of the most important faculty of human nature the achievement of the other faculties...

...Curious vases, perhaps funerary, some of them like the so-called "owl vases" of Troy, have aIso been found...

...Similarly, prayer needs definiteness of intention, of import, of petition if it is to avoid being merely an "elevation of the spirit...

...PURE POETRY" RANCE has been stirred by a peculiar and, in so far as most Americans are concerned, ethereal debate...

...He expressed the fear that the woman of leisure who forswore pleasure for herself, might occupy her time wholly in interfering with the pleasures of other people...

...Well, the two aspects of the debate which demand attention are the interest which it aroused and the condusions to which it was brought...

...Even though few of the Ahh~ Bremond's correspondents and fellow-critics could define poetry, they were able to manifest great familiarity with it and to show that they had formulated valuable and often profound ideas about it...

...Mumford's objections to so stark a challenge, and his insistence that there is a middle course might be applied to almost arty category of immigrants...

...Merrie England" passed with the substitution for a religion, which made work a delight and recreation a complete relaxation, of a gospel of "getting on in the world" which encouraged the exploitation of one's neighbor to this supreme aim, and which crushed all merriment as a menace to efficiency...

...We may lament the impossibility of deciphering the tablets found near Vichy, but if their authenticity continues to stand the test of experts, the discovery will certainly gratify those who believe in a western origin for European civilization...

...It is an interesting and not altogether cheering consideration to look back over the history of immigration in the last sixty years, and to surmise what the benefit to the culture and dignity of American life might have been, had its new citizens come into it, not as isolated and bewildered units, stunned into conformity, but as ordered groups fully aware of the value of their contribution to the complex national genius...

...He averred that even the fragments of a genuine poet's work are suffused with a spiritual vitality which is immediately perceptible but which does not depend upon the ideas, facts, or even images outlined...

...It was the lot of the Abb6 Bremond to receive visits from authorities in phonetics and physics, who carried their inventions with them and guaranteed results...

...At first there was considerable suspicion about them, but they have been examined by competent authorities who consider them genuine...

...Such fear is not unfounded...

...Though both are "supra-rational," in the sense that they are guided neither by logic nor by cosmic actuality, yet poetry is a tentative essay of the spiritual force which in true mysticism finds its proper sphere and its winged flight...

...Pebbles, with carvings of animals, seem to indicate the very end of the old stone ageuperhaps six or seven thousand years ago...

...Among these are to be found every one of the letters of our alphabet except b. They are not formed exactly as we form them today, but they are recognizable by palaeographers as forms of our letters familiar in archaic writings...

...in fact, in days when, as the chairman pointed out, the house and the housekeeper have been got rid of, and service-flats and residential hotels have taken their place, and when practising birth control has left no children to take the attention of the woman of means, if she cannot enjoy her leisure, she manifests a determination to see that that leisure becomes a burden to all...

...The latter happened to be interested in archaeology, and he bought the patch of ground from the farmer, and since then has been excavating it with the help of the boy who made the first find...

...But if the discoveries recently announced by M. Salomon Reinach should prove all they are asserted to be, this conclusion must be discarded...

...Would it not, therefore, be more correct to say that poetry is pure expression of the personality of man, including reason...

...One echo of the debate reached this country, in the guise of a paper contributed to the New York Times Book Review by the inimitable Paul Souday...

...Accordingly, rational standards in the creation or judgment of literatwl'emeverything that is "classic" in the sense of Boileau or Pope--are negative of poetry as such...

...37 ~ THE COMMONWEAL vebruary 9, I9~ ford, whose name is no stranger to these columns...

...The Abb6 did not undertake to answer the question immediately, but suggested that it be termed "pure poetry" in contradistinction to all subsidiary elements which, in their turn, might well be called "impure poetry...

...These remarks opened a veritable stadium for contestants of every variety...

...The r6sume of the discussion, published in two volumes, has already attained more than twenty editions...

...Ages of education, like our own, need to be reminded that their neatly arrived at formulae do not explain all the mysteries of art and religion...

...During weeks the pages of the French literary papers and reviews bristled with discussion, and the most eminent critics, philosophers, and creative writers signed their names to published comment...

...He showed them to the village school-master, who in turn showed them to the village doctor...

...It is unlikely that these inscriptions will ever be translated...

...But M. Souday's eloquent defense of "reason," fortified as it was by his general opaqueness of temperament, served only to make readers of the Times wonder once again why it must be our national fate to encourage the worst of European critics...

...but over all, deadly dullness...

...CANON HOWSON, an Anglican rector, has caused considerable discussion in England by a sermon, in which he made the assertion that a hundred years hence there will be no "Merrie England...

...The conclusions arrived at by the Abb6 Bremond are diverse, but the most significant is his identification of the experience which is the source of poetry with the experience which is the source of mysticism...

...In surveying The American Scene, so far as it affects Judaism, Mr...

...Is not the word, which is the material of the poet, a vessel of reason as well as a wave of sound ? The most elementary combination of syllable and sense is already a ship afloat...

...But by far the most remarkable objects which have been discovered are the clay tablets first unearthed by the farmer's son, several more of which have been found...

...Some years ago, the son of a French farmer who was clearing some land near Vichy, came upon two bricks with curious markings on them...

...What is this vitality...

...THE ALPHABET ENERATIONS of school-children have been taught that our alphabet came from Phoenicia, the inhabitants of that region being the first to advance beyond the pictographic stage of Egyptian hieroglyphics...

...They are covered with long and weU-engraved inscriptions...

...Mumford waxed pardonably indignant over the "false alternative" which exacts from the Jewish immigrant one of two things---"retrospective and isolated ghettoes," or a "IOO percent Americanism" which virtually means the casting of everything, save an inherited shrewdness, into the discard...

...However, as some of the characters appear to be indifferently written, going either to the right or left, it is possible to reduce the number to about fifty...

...This idea is a part of the great theory which derives all culture from the eastern end of the Mediterranean...

...He declared that there would be less poverty and drastic dealing with the unfit...

...It is an excellent thing that points of view like this should be brought to the general attention...

...In addition, letters poured in from every part of the world--letters from scientists, from poets, from simple villagers who wished to report what they had come to feel during quiet evenings spent in the company of masters...

...The poet may attach more importance to the shadowy suggestions of a term than to its precise content...

...No metal, nor any Celtic or Roman pottery has been found...

...and it is quite correct to say (what could not be said outside of aesthetic, Catholic France) that not even the problem of the franc or the fortunes of M. Poincair$ aroused more intense sympathy...

...As yet these tablets are untranslated, and are written in a language which had an alphabet of ninety letters...

...Mutatis mutandis---Mr...

...It brings us directly, in fact, to the basic matters which the world today is once more anxious to decide...

...The discoveries are of an earlier age, and consist of a few neolithic polished ax-heads and flint implements, the material of which must have been brought from a distance, since there is no flint in this district...

...Our alphabet has only twenty-six letters, and the Gaelic even fewer...

...In this sense it is correct to define the romantic attitude as the correct one--a statement which the Abb6 Bremond had made prior to the debate, and which had caused a considerable flutter...

...He is only one man venturing a guess, but it is likely that his guess is a fairly good one...

...The problem, you see, leads very far...

...Why look forward a full century to the passing of "Merrie England," when for more than a century past, the Englishman has been known to the rest of the world as the individual with a fixed determination to take his pleasures sadly...

...Not that the two are the same...

...Never has leisure had a more consistent and valiant champion than it has in the person of G. K. C. When the most prolific of writers has had an hour or two to spare from his labors as an essayist, a critic, a philosopher, a producer of detective stories, and a working editor, he has used them to scatter the glad tidings from the public platform of the loveliness of leisure by the home fire, or a good loaf at ease in his inn...

...So when one of the busiest of women announced her intention of upholding the thesis that the existence of the leisured woman constituted a grave menace to modern civilization, it became imperative that the apostle of the quiet and peaceful should appear to champion the cause of those for whom the strenuous life has no attractions...

...These have faces modeled on them, with eyes and nose, but no mouth, indicating that death is silence...

...Hence there appears to have been in western Europe a genuine alphabet of great antiquity...

...There is only one factor which the Anglican divine may have omitted from his calculations in making his prophecy, and which may alter the whole aspect of English life in the next century--every year, for several years past, some IO,OOO Englishmen have returned to the Church of their fathers...

...But posFebruary 9, I927 THE COMMONWEAL 37I sibly it is assumed--this may be said in passingmthat even though M. Souday is neither informative nor effective, he is unconsciously amusing...

...And yet, if we may for our part inject a word into the debate, too close an identification of "poetry and prayer" seems to encourage a mistake which, it is true, is the opposite of the rationalistic mistake...

...This is encouraging to a generation which has listened rather penitentially to Spengler and the expressionists...

...During the course of his formal address to the members of the Academy, the Abb6 Henri Bremond proposed the question: "What is pure poetry...