The Birds of the Field
THE
COMMONWEAL
A W~kly Review of l~iter~ur The Arts, and Public Affairs. Volume V New York, Wednesday, December 8, 1926 Number 5 CONTENTS
The Birds of the Field ................. I...
...Next there followed a generation which consumed the profits that had been amassed and moved on in their turn, driven by the same dream of virgin treasure...
...now the majority lost their land in exchange for money, and those few into whose hands it came did less service for it, or less obvious service...
...Meadows, Katherine Br~gy x36 J. B. M. Clark x29 The Quiet Corner...
...But when he lived up to his mother's fondest hopes, he never became an Iowa farmer...
...These roots do at least guarantee stability...
...THE COMMONWEAL A W~kly Review of l~iter~ur The Arts, and Public Affairs...
...yet the freeman was as rare as the landless man, while the man in whose power it was to leave his holding and his lord and his trade was only the landless man and no other...
...120 Communications...
...It, too, is picking up ideas in the easy, chaotic fashion char- acteristic of men when they fail to sit down together for a long while and think in their own way...
...Poems...
...The English peasant--and his example was followed everywhere else in greater or less degree--in gaining his liberty lost his land...
...Land, because of the demand for service made upon its holders as a condition for holding it, meant a loss of personal freedom to whomsoever it belonged...
...Even the Hebrew mind, firm during thousands of years against the impact of environment, is not re-sisting the current of American modernity...
...We said some of these things recently to a very competent observer of Iowa farm life...
...To be free in your choice of dwelling meant only to be dispossessed of dwelling...
...It was an age in which you were perpetually faced with the cut-throat menace: 'Stand and deliver...
...And therefore the real danger of our era is not that it is becoming more immoral or violent than other eras...
...the earlier the society the more exceptional was he...
...Thus under the stress of the peasant revolt the lord became a landlord...
...132 Man and the Origins of Life...
...But perhaps it would be more correct to say that the trouble came from the simul- taneous Romantic emphasis upon freedom...
...These people were pioneers but the~ were also strangers--to the soil, to one another...
...But one wonders if any progress has really been made toward the solution of this basic problem...
...Volume V New York, Wednesday, December 8, 1926 Number 5 CONTENTS The Birds of the Field...
...When men and women are constantly eddying round a few centres of economic attraction, it is impossible to deal with them properly in literature...
...But surely we must have learned enough from time to realize that forcing industrialism upon societies, civilizations, where the agricultural community still exists and prospers is not entirely a good thing...
...A vendor does not carry dinners of substantial dimensions through the aisles of a crowded train...
...It may be that mankind will never go back, urged as it is by the dis- illusionment of centuries...
...and the result of the first great strike was to dispossess the strikers of what they had in order that they might gain what they lacked...
...It may be that the future rests rather upon the gradual change of the industrial system itself into something like the mediaeval land system...
...T. C., Henry Longan Stuart, Henrietta Dana Skinner, Theodore May- nard, Robert W. Morse, George D. Is There a Business Psychology...
...He answered rather hopefully that the people destined finally to take over the land and till it have not yet arrived...
...It is something of a shock to realize that all our best fiction and poetry is a record of dessication...
...If the thing continues, all hope for a definite culture, as distin-guished from a standardized polish, must disappear...
...Even the free tenants were in practice tethered to the soil...
...The majority forgot that they had surrendered it, the few forgot they had not al-ways owned it...
...It is not, as everybody can see, merely a question of farming and raising hogs...
...All the ranks of society had once owned more land, but none without doing service for it...
...All this in a new land--in a country which seemed to THE COMMONWEAL December 8, I926 L , ,i, Emerson like a young Mercury with endless areas for its playground l If you trusted these books, there would be no way out of believing that the prairie is, humanly speaking, more weary than the Campagna...
...Norbert Engels, Medora C. Addison x33 Henry Longan Stuart I23 The Play...
...Our New England story-tellers offer dark little albums filled with portraits of spiritual anaemia...
...Sometimes they managed to form something like a community, but the times were against them and their heart was really with their own business...
...I IS Search (verse...
...He serves sandwiches...
...Labor was the prodigal who demanded cash down for the portion of his inheritance that he might go into the far country of freedom...
...II7 Puccini's Turandot...
...They make it pos- sible to realize the seasonal variety of the earth, to formulate the heritage of custom and belief, to hoard the strength of family blood...
...A recent English critic has pointed out the peculiar fact that while all the Romantics were singing enthusiastically of life "close to nature," the people who listened and applauded were running farther and farther away from nature...
...It owned the men and not they it...
...However that may be, the wanderings of the American citizen may really be likened to a migration~to an ebb and flow governed by rules inherent in industrialized society, by opportunities of pasturage and climate...
...This is what the great businesses of today, with their insistence upon "welfare organization" and shareholding seem to be struggling for...
...John Keppler New Ideas and Old Scholasticism...
...James E. Tobin I3I Week by Week...
...Is there not a great deal of truth in what Oswald Spengler seems to imply--that culture is the fruit of a humanity deeply rooted in the soil...
...For the sake of this educa- tion was coveted, business ventures were planned, mi- gration was undertaken...
...In Dom Bede Jarrett's Social Theories of the Middle Ages, a brilliant new book which is reviewed elsewhere in this issue of The Commonweal, there is a discussion of the problem of land from which we should like to quote a little...
...You were a traveler in the world, and to travel well you must travel lightly...
...Here is outlined succinctly an historical event which seems absolutely basic to any understanding of our time...
...The fad of the recipe and the "symbol" as opposed to a doctrinal heritage is always a sign that the race is traveling at random...
...R. Dana Skinner I34 Mexico: Occident Versus Orient...
...The landless man was art exception in mediaeval society...
...freedom of work and oppor-tunity was granted in place of fixed and regulated service...
...Competition came to stay in the place of custom...
...And though one middle-western poet has been brave enough to praise Chicago, his fellows have all been shouting about churchyards and villages even more ghastly...
...Ernest Sutherland Bates x24 I26 Books...
...Sister M. Madeleva, Kwei Chen, Bertram C. A. Windle x22 Mary Carolyn Davies, Speer Strahan, On Reading Some Lines in Horace (verse...
...Your land or your freedom.' The surrender of one or the other was essential to your life...
...Always it was "oppor- tunity" that i~eckoned...
...In the long run, birds who are properly of the field tire of the ettort to fly...
...the new was the holding of property to avoid service and be untrammeled...
...There was a generation which rushed here anxious for wealth and opportunity, determined and almost dizzily eager to rifle the virgin treasure of the continent...
...Little by little, declared our informant hopefully, these will be superseded by a generation in whose hands the land will finally remain...
...x4x THE BIRDS OF THE FIELD T HERE is a prediction that business will soon thrive on the western coast of Florida, which means that a goodly number of those who meandered southward before hurricanes seemed an immediate possibility are going to migrate again...
...The old order had been virtually property communism based on service...
...you must jettison your cargo to ride free in the storm...
...And therefore little by little the problem of the country has grown into not merely a serious economic and financial diffi- cult'y, but also into a vast and apparently battling hu- man difficulty with which those concerned do not know how to deal...
...The real danger is an appalling shallowness manifested in numerous ways...
...absolute ownership was substituted for condi- tional ownership, but was narrowed to a very few...
...Labor of its own free will forced the lord to take over from it all its land...
...He argues that they didn't really want it...
...They do not stand still long enough to have their pictures taken...
...The middle-ages had made one disposition of the matter, but out of the repudiation of this the modern world grew...
...The shocks that come to romantically minded pilgrims to Acadian Louisiana, or the plantation South, are among the most desolating of experiences...
...One of our great American difficulties, at any rate, is the rapid depopu- lation and incidental drying-up of regionalized society...
...The boy of an Iowa farmer became a bank president, a congressman, a lawyer...
...The abrasion of tradition is inevitable under the circum- stances, because tradition is cumbersome baggage to people who must at all costs acclimatize themselves rapidly...
...Grenville Vernon I3I The Marlborough Muddle...
...To some extent it con-cerns the whole business of .holding property, and to some extent also surely it affects the nature of all human society and cultural ettort...
...If, for instance, there is to be a race between us and the Orient, it may well be a race backward...
Vol. 5 • December 1926 • No. 5
