Mid-West Quarterly, The (1913-1918)

Lionel Johnson

T. K. Whipple — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:48:22 PST

A score of years have passed since that courageous band of young Englishmen who styled themselves the Rhymers' Club tried to transplant the air of the Latin Quarter into London, by meeting at the Cheshire Cheese to discuss welsh rarebits, ale, and each other's verses. Time has played havoc with their ranks, and to some extent with their works. Some of them have died; several have abandoned song for scholarship; Mr. Le Gallienne has migrated to America; Mr. Yeats devotes himself to managing the Irish renascence. Of the two most characteristic voices of the period, one, that of Ernest Dowson, was silenced years ago; Arthur Symons alone still carries the old banner. French decadence apparently did not flourish on English soil, and Dowson's "one strayed, last petal of one last year's rose" has yielded to Mr. John Masefield' s pugilism and to the smoke of Mr. W. W. Gibson's factories.

A Classical Romanticist

George R. Throop — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:46:23 PST

It is necessary in the interpretation of any writer, and especially if he be of the present day, that the literary motives which actuate him should be thoroughly understood. Through their realization and through what we might term his interpretation of his own ideals, we are enabled to form a sufficient idea of his literary originality and a better comprehension of his relation to his own and preceding times. It is of course truistic that all writers can not create new fields, that they can only follow, modifying, adapting, enlarging, or lessening, as the case may be, the accumulated heritage of the past.

The Man from the Moon

W. G. Langworthy Taylor — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:44:39 PST

Man from the Moon: I thought I knew something about mundane affairs from my study of the newspapers; but to see a Jeffersonian with a ring through his nose led about like a dancing bear by a socialist! It's enough to make a man believe in possession- or what amounts to much the same thing, conversion. But hold; I will accost him. (To Jeffersonian.) Why do you offer yourself to be bullyragged by this person, whom I recognize by his salt-and-pepper suit, white tie, and kid gloves to be a follower of the creed, "property is robbery"?

Jeffersonian: Why, I do this quite willingly, sir.

Man from the Moon: My reading of history is that you used to stand up bravely for the "rights of man," intending thereby the claim of each man to the fruits of his own labour. By that you understood, further, his security in undertaking anything that might bring him either a wage of labour or a rent of luck.

Theories of Cosmic Evolution

Ellery W. Davis — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:41:15 PST

The framing of theories is an occupation in which men like to indulge. To imagine how things may have come about is probably the nearest approach to a creative act to which we finite beings will ever attain; and the field of astronomy has been an especially tempting one in which to try our creative powers. We like to do things on a large scale; and it is quite as easy to construct, in imagination, a planet or a solar system as something less pretentious. From the first men have been explaining how the cosmos came to be; naturally these imaginings have reflected strongly the philosophy of the times and places and peoples that gave them birth. We have had theories spiritual, theories fanciful, and theories frivolous. Men have told us how the civil engineers on neighbouring planets run their lines and dig their Culebra cuts; and long before this age of engineering they have explained how the starry sky was peopled with divinities and heroes.

Sociology and the Law

Arthur W. Spencer — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:39:09 PST

A significant recent development in the field of legal science in this country, the importance of which is not yet generally recognized by laymen, is the noteworthy awakening of interest in the philosophical literature of the continent of Europe dealing with legal institutions. Progress in this field of legal philosophy has been especially rapid since the late seventies, particularly in Germany. In English-speaking countries no phenomena of equal significance have occurred. America has never produced any notable philosophical jurists; and the work of English legal scholars of the past generation, though in some instances it has been brilliant and of far-reaching value, has been mainly historical or critical in tendency. The opportunities for American lawyers to familiarize themselves with the product of continental investigations, either through translations or through descriptive accounts, have been few and far between. Hastie's translations from the works of Puchta, Friedlander, Falck, and Ahrens, published at Edinburgh as far back as 1887, formed, until very recently, almost the only serviceable work of the kind in existence, and the doctrines incorporated in it are now regarded as old-fashioned.

French Opinion of Our Civil War

Louis Martin Sears — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:37:47 PST

In these days when America is the spectator of world war, it is of increased interest to notice the views of Europe when America was the battle ground itself. An awakening interest in this study has recently impressed upon our public the paramount importance of the English attitude toward the war; and our vast debt to Cobden, Bright, and John Stuart Mill and other English Liberals has stirred the national gratitude. The Liberals of France played an equal role. Their voice, not loud but deep, operated to curb the opportunism and militancy of Napoleon III and his cabinet of adventurers. The spirit of liberalism was abroad in the world, and Europeans instinctively recognized the Unionists as champions of a common cause wherein all lovers of humanity claimed a stake.

German Versus English Aggression

A. D. Schrag — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:35:41 PST

The present state of public opinion is quite inexplicable unless we remember that great wars are periods of the abnormal, not only in the political, the industrial, and the commercial, but in the intellectual sphere as well. The mental chaos that confronts us on every hand can be accounted for only on the theory that wars are days of sickness in the life of the human race. The bold assertions, wild speculations, fanciful prophecies which one hears on every hand must be regarded as the incoherent prattle of a delirious public mind. Not only the unthinking public but men of learning have thrown cold reasoning to the winds and are swayed by feeling and passion. The scholar vies with the man of the street in seizing upon vague and conflicting newspaper reports to bolster up his whims and prejudices. Facts are ignored and principles of thought which were formerly deemed fundamental are now utterly disregarded. Personal bias has replaced the desire for truth, with the result that there is found among all classes a decided tendency to represent things not as they are but as people would have them be. The time-honoured and sound principle of historical thought, to subordinate the immediate to the remote cause, is at present generally rejected, and people hasten to fix the responsibility for war on the strength of the conflicting reports that have reached them since the outbreak of the struggle. Instead of judging current events in the penetrating light of the historical past, the public views them in the flickering gleam of a confused present.

The Diplomatic Background of the European War

Bernadotte E. Schmitt — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:33:21 PST

When on August 1, 1914, the fateful news came over the wires that Europe stood at Armageddon, the people of this country were scarcely able to accept the fact, for it was difficult to understand why the flower of European manhood should be sent forth in arms to shatter the cultural and material progress of a century. But to the close student of European diplomacy it has long been evident that some day the conflicting interests of the Great Powers and some of the smaller states, an intricate system of alliances, ententes, and secret agreements, and the armaments accumulated in the last generation must produce a "catastrophe - of which it is impossible to measure either the dimensions or the effects" (Mr. Asquith). The various peoples involved have been preparing against the Great War till most of them were near the end of their resources, and now that it has come, they have accepted their fate calmly and bravely, on the ground that even defeat is preferable to uncertainty. The historian, however,. is impressed by the peculiar alignment of the warring nations~ It is the first war between Austria and Russia, the first between England and Germany, the first since 1763 between Germany and Russia. Except for the Crimean War, France and England have not fought together since the seventeenth century, nor England and Russia since the struggle against Napoleon, with whose country they are both now in alliance.

Canada and the War

J. E. Le Rossignol — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:23:32 PST

Canada is a protected country and the Canadian people have given little thought to the danger of war. On the Atlantic and Pacific coasts she is protected by the sea; on the north there is a wilderness of barren land, a barrier of ice and the Arctic Ocean; on the south there is a good neighbour, with whom she has had no serious trouble for a hundred years. There are no enemies close at hand, and the danger from distant foes has always seemed remote and problematical.

Giosuè Carducci

Ruth Shepard Phelps — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:21:06 PST

It is a commonplace to say that the nations of the north have seen in Italy from the first the home of romance, the pleasure-place of the imagination. And they have always delighted to heighten her effects. From Chaucer to Walter Pater she has been ever the land of mystery and tragedy, of soft lascivious manners and gorgeous crimes, of a deep magical melancholy which has laid a spell upon the northern mind-a spell, however, which that mind itself and its tastes have largely created. The deep racial differences have fascinated the Teutonic imagination, which in turn has exaggerated them; and they have done for the Italian temperament, in our fancy, what the Tuscan cypress does for the grave Italian landscape, given it that touch of strangeness added to beauty which for Pater's mind constituted the romantic. But to think thus of Italy is to deal in a kind of pathetic fallacy. Italy is not romantic in her own view; in her own view she is classic, wholly and unescapably. Her mystic landscape is the same that Virgil and Horace celebrated without a hint of mysticism; Pliny had a villa on Lake Como, Catullus one at Garda; everywhere the antique world underlies the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Italy was classic before ever romanticism was invented, and classic she remains.

American Traits as Seen by the French

George D. Morris — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:17:33 PST

Long before the vogue of Taine's theory of literary criticism made it incumbent on the critic to explain the characteristics of his author by race, milieu, and moment, many of his compatriots had already employed the method-in so far, at least, as the element of environment is concerned--in attempting to account for the peculiarities of American novelists. Each of these attempts, whether it was successful or not, gives us a glimpse of the author's conception of the American people. If we supplement the information obtained in this way with that contained in the direct affirmations which they have made concerning our national characteristics, we have sufficient data to enable us to determine what, in their estimation, our leading traits are.

The Ideal of Peace

S. B. Gass — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:15:20 PST

The present temper of peace-loving America is very close to that of a nation on the brink of war. There is something in it almost baffling to one who has thought of his countrymen as a people to be saved from excess by a cool humour. No doubt their moral sympathies have been deeply stirred by the present conflict. Many of their prepossessions have been shocked, and one at least has been quite shattered. It had been hoped in many quarters that the age of war had passed, that international understanding and economic interdependence had made an open breach between the Christian nations of Europe an improbability if not an impossibility. There is small doubt that it is the violation of this recently cherished ideal of peace that has stirred America. Nothing else could account for the eagerness with which she has overlooked the remoter and more real causes of the war, ignored its justice or injustice, and sought for the immediate aggressor. Whether her findings even in this matter have been based on unprejudiced information is beside the present point. She has looked for the aggressor with honest intentions; and believing with a fair degree of unanimity that Germany was guilty of breaking the peace, she has, as a people, centred her surprising animosity upon that nation.

Plato's Political Ideas

P. H. Frye — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:13:07 PST

If we seek a rallying point, to begin with, for Plato's political conceptions, we shall find, I think, that they all centre about a single idea - the idea of justice. No other problem has given rise to more discussion, I. suppose, than just this problem of the relation of justice to society and the individuals composing it; and in no age, perhaps, has it given rise to more discussion than it did in the age of Plato. The difficulty has to do partly with the nature of justice itself and partly with the discovery of a practical working definition. Abstractly it is easy enough to explain that justice consists in giving every one exactly what he deserves. But who in any conceivable state of society is able to determine exactly what anyone deserves-least of all himself; and how is it possible to make sure that he gets it, neither more nor less? It is bad enough to administer the approximate, the rough and ready justice of the courts of law without undertaking to settle such questions as these with the fallible judgment at our disposal.

Nietzsche

P. H. Frye — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:10:59 PST

On account of the attention which Nietzsche has been attracting of late, the occasion seems a favourable one for reviewing once more his life and work. In a letter to one of his acquaintances, written in March, 1884, he himself prophesies with the proverbial modesty of genius that" in fifty years, perhaps, will the eyes of some few (or of one, for it requires genius) be opened to what has been done through me. For the present, however, it is not only difficult but quite impossible (in accordance with the laws of 'perspective') to speak of me publicly without falling boundlessly short of the truth." To be sure, the time of which he spoke is not yet up; but since men's eyes are turned in that direction, it is fair to assume that the subject is not without interest at present.

The Mantle of Browning

Hardin Craig — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:08:33 PST

As one grows older one becomes sadly conscious that there are problems in one's life and in society for which there is no solution in the poetry of Robert Browning. A very great deal has happened since Robert Browning wrote; and what he tells us to do is not the thing we want to do, and his presentation of the situation in which we stand is not one that commends itself as entirely adequate. Part of the great outcry for the practical with its too wholesale rejection of the idealistic teachings of the last century, is a definite feeling that we do not know what to do or how to do it. There is even in some quarters a well-founded distrust of pure literature, because it is thought to have so little to say about life. All centuries speak disparagingly of their predecessors and we are no exception. The coat that our fathers left us is out of style: we are tired of being told what is the matter with it; we want to know how to make it over or get a new one.

Literature and the New Anti-Intellectualism

Philo M. Buck, Jr. — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:07:14 PST

" Never has he drawn so deeply from the well that is the human heart; never so near those invisible heights which are the soul." The reviewer who wrote this sentence probably meant that the author of the book he so enthusiastically welcomed wrote with a little more than the ordinary insight. Indeed if we are to judge from the encomiums in our less critical reviews the world has never been so blessed with novels and plays which touch the secret springs of the heart. The old fiction had generalised, had conventionalised, much as the old art had done. This, to the new, is all wrong. The type characters, let us say, of Thackeray and even of George Eliot were interesting enough, but often as faulty as the old drawings of a galloping horse, which showed him with feet extended in an arc. As the art of photography has taught us that the horse has always one of his feet on or near the ground, so the new psychology has put us on our guard against accepting too literally such personages as Becky Sharp, Colonel Newcome, or Silas Marner. These pictures of life are entirely too set, far too regular for an adequate portrayal of life itself. The new fiction is to present life itself, "to draw deeply from the well that is the human heart," to mount "near the invisible heights which are the soul." And thus vivisectionist-wise, the writers of to-day stand, with scalpel and forceps delicately poised, before a clinic of admiring readers.

The Qualities of Browning

Harry T. Baker — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:05:12 PST

The opening lines of Pippa Passes pulse with the tremendous vitality which the reader of Browning has early learned to expect of his poetry:

"Day!
Faster and more fast,
O'er night's brim day boils at last:
Boils, pure gold, o'er the cloud-cup's brim
Where spurting and suppressed it lay,
For not a froth-flake touched the rim
Of yonder gap in the solid gray
Of the eastern cloud, an hour away;
But forth one wavelet, then another, curled,
Till the whole sunrise, not to be suppressed,
Rose, reddened, and its seething breast
Flickered in bounds, grew gold, then overflowed the world."

Of this remarkable vital force the last poem from his pen, the Epilogue to Asolando, shows no diminution. Activity is the motto of his volume; few indeed are the lyrics of peace such as star the pages of his predecessor, Wordsworth. The only modem English poet with anything like an equal fund of vitality is Byron; but Byron has little of the intellectual eminence of Browning, who may not incorrectly be said to combine Byronic energy with Miltonic intellect.

The Renaissance

E. Benjamin Andrews — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:02:46 PST

In the early part of the fifteenth century a change as subtle and indefinable as it was significant, came over the spirit of European society. Without sharp break with the past, involving no strictly new creation, no sudden or unheralded revolution of ideas, gradually rose an altered mode of viewing man, the world, life-far less theological than the old, less respectful to tradition, more confident in man's powers and future-in fine, laic and human. Renewed study of classical antiquity was sign and instrument, rather than essence, of the new movement. If men looked back, it was mostly to clear their vision to look and walk forward. The new thinking, if marked by temporary unbelief, and more given than the old to human and secular things, was not essentially irreligious; if less scholastic, not less profound. Vaster conceptions of the field of truth were born. It was felt that no problem had been absolutely settled, and that the human faculties, either fettered or discouraged or else applied to inane inquiries, had as yet scarcely given a hint of the productive activity possible to them. Hence fresh, courageous, successful effort to see what man might be, do, know.

Colonial Aspects of the War

Cephas D. Allin — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:01:13 PST

In a recent speech Mr. Asquith declared that the greatest mistake that Germany had made in respect to the war was in her failure to recognize that there was a British Empire. Great Britain has long been regarded as a small, insignificant island off the European coast. She has been looked upon as a second-rate European power somewhat in the class with Italy and Spain. And such she is in fact if considered by herself alone. But the war has revealed, what the Empire has long since known, that England is an imperial rather than a European nation, that she is but the heart of a group of free autonomous states, that her strength lies not alone in her own people and resources, but in the loyal support of her children and children's children throughout the seven seas,

Joseph Chamberlain, The Radical

Cephas D. Allin — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:59:24 PST

The approaching retirement of Joseph Chamberlain from the House of Commons awakens a sympathetic interest throughout the world. It is pathetic indeed to see the oft-victorious warrior stricken down and borne from the field at the very moment of the triumph of his political foes. Time has turned against the venerable statesman. The principles for which he so stoutly fought are apparently going down to defeat. The Home Rule question, which he had hoped was buried, has risen again to haunt his declining days. The policy of preferential trade, to which he owes his imperial reputation, has been practically set aside by his own colleagues. He has lost the ear of the public. A younger set of political leaders has appealed to the imagination of the nation. New social and economic questions have largely superseded the old political issues. For some time past he has been a helpless and disappointed spectator of passing events.