THE PLAYTHING

BY MARGARET WIDDEMER

I do not so much mind that you took my heart of youth away;
Perhaps it was a foolish thing for me to keep so long;
And I know it was untidy, with its tags of gauze and tinsel
Spun from scraps of fairy tales and wonderings and song;

But I wish you had not thought that you must take away my laughter;
Perhaps you thought it silliness, bright beads slid down a string-
I suppose you could not guess it, with its gilt and silver glitter,
That looked so like a toy, to be a very useful thing:

For hard roads do not matter, nor the tragical great sorrows,
Nor mile-high hills that weary you, nor stones that cut your feet,
If you can toss it up and down, your glittering bright laughter,
And mock at all the curious things and stately things you meet;

But now that I have lost it, black and huge beneath my fingers
Is my little world I played with, that was like a colored ball
And I wish, if you please, that you would give me back my laughter,
Because I must go on and cannot find my way at all.

THE LITERARY DISCIPLINE-III

BY JOHN ERSKINE

THE CULT OF THE NATURAL

I

It belongs with the confusion of æsthetics in our time that the same people who ask art to be original often ask it to be natural. Being natural would appear at first sight the least original of programmes. Even if by originality we mean personality, yet there still seems some contradiction in the wish at one and the same time to develop a strong personality and to remain in a state of nature. Since it is the thoroughbred, not the wild animal, that is distinguished from his fellows, and the cultivated bloom, not the field flower, that charms by its single self rather than in quantity, a condition of impulse close to the unsifted accidents of life would seem to promise an art notable chiefly for its volume, its indistinction and its insignificance.

But those who ask art to be natural never mean completely natural. In their wiser moments they are only asking art not to be artificial, or at least to help them forget it is artificial. They demand a "realistic and romantic naturalism", or "a world of honest, and often harsh reality", and what they are looking for is indicated by the fact that they find something convincingly lifelike in Anna Christie or The Hairy Ape or Kiki, but something strained and mechanical in a comedy by Sheridan or Oscar Wilde. Art, no doubt, is still desirable in literature, but art shot through with crude material, to reassure us that we are human. At its best, the cult of the natural today may find a satisfying reality in The Easiest Way or in Liliom rather than in Dover Road or He Who Gets Slapped. Since all plays are highly artificial, naturalness is hardly the word for the virtue of good plays; they are convincing, rather, they take us frankly into another world, and for the moment make us forget it is not our world of everyday. Yet

those who ask the stage to be natural are apparently reassured when through the imaginary world of art breaks some accent of ordinary speech, some aspect of our common sordidness. Here, it seems, we touch earth and are strengthened. The power of The Hairy Ape or of Liliom surely comes from no gracious naturalness in the plot-young ladies on ocean voyages do not visit the stokehole swathed in white, nor do philosophical stokers resort to the zoo to get themselves strangled by the ourang-outang; what enlists our credulity is the string of oaths and rough talk which makes us feel at home, and without which the fabric of the drama would reveal itself as flimsier than cardboard.

The cult of the natural at its best asks of the medium of art also, as well as of the subject, that it wear a common aspect, untouched by artifice. Many of the new poets take as their ideal "the sequence of the spoken phrase", with a special dislike of all "inversions"; the "language of common speech" will serve their purposes. Yet most of them are better poets than their theories would indicate, and their practice, like Wordsworth's in a similar predicament, is perhaps sufficient guide to the kind of naturalness they are after. An Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg is the kind of naturalness Wordsworth fell into when he was off his guard. "Other poets," says a more modern cultivator of naturalism, "will come and perchance perfect where these men have given the tools. Other writers, forgetting the stormy times in which this movement had its birth, will inherit in plenitude and calm that for which they have fought." Most of us who are convinced that all speech is artful in so far as it is intelligible, can occasionally put up with a bit of fine writing like this, but we note in passing that "perchance" and "plenitude" are not the language of common speech today. As for the fear of inversions and the sacredness of the natural word-order, it is enough for the moment to observe that no one order is natural for all peoples, nor for any one speech at all times; different wordorders express different states of emotion, even different ideas, and one is as natural as the other. "Tell me not in mournful numbers" or "Tell not me in mournful numbers"-which is the natural order? From another and contemporary New England poet, who sticks valiantly for the natural order of speech, we may

examine a characteristic line, which has as high a percentage of nature in it as absence of art can insure—"I must pass that door to go to bed." Would it be less natural to say, "To go to bed, I must pass that door?"

To practice artifice and yet to seem spontaneous, to be natural and yet to achieve art-these ancient paradoxes against which the cultivators of the natural arrive, in both the subject matter and the medium of literature, need to be examined in greater detail, but it is well to observe them first in a general way, in order to mark how much confusion lies on the very surface of such thinking. It is emotion perhaps rather than thinking; it is a protest in another form against what seems old and inherited; it is an impatience with art itself. Yet art exerts its old charm upon us all, and the worshipper of the natural succumbs unawares to every triumph over nature. In American letters we fix on Abraham Lincoln as our type of natural expression; the legend of his humble beginnings and the plainness of his manner deceive us into a conviction that he was less indebted to art than Thomas Jefferson, and we therefore talk of the rhetorical extravagances of the Declaration and contrast them with the Attic simplicities of the Gettysburg Address. Perhaps we see a final proof of our sound taste in the story that Matthew Arnold gave up the Address for lost when he got to the colloquial "proposition"; "dedicated to the proposition," we say, was more than his artificial spirit could bear. Whether Arnold expressed such an opinion, or whether he would have been right in so doing, is of less consequence than our emotional readiness, if we cultivate the natural, to accept the Lincoln speech as an illustration of our ideal, and to set it over against the artifice of Jefferson's great document-to detect a literary manner in such a phrase as "When in the course of human events", and nothing but naturalness in "Fourscore and seven years ago"-or to find an empty and sounding rhetoric in "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", but only the democratic syllables of common sense in government of the people, by the people, for the people". Both documents are as rich as they can well be in rhetoric, as all great oratory is, and of the two, Lincoln's as a matter of fact, is rather more artful in the progress of its ideas.

II

Our confusion in the search for the natural in art springs from the many different meanings that attach to both words, art and nature. For most of us, perhaps, art is a decoration, something supplementary to life; art, we say, supplies the defects of nature, when we make grass grow in unpromising soil, or when our neighbor's wife, having by nature a poor complexion, emerges daily with a lovely one. In the spirit of this definition we understand what it is to cultivate the arts-to buy pictures when our means will permit us that addition to more primary interests, or to attend the opera after the preliminary stages of our social pilgrimage. We use the word art so often in this bad sense, with the implication of insincerity, that there is something bracing in any invitation to return to nature and to be once more what we were while we still were honest with ourselves and had a sense of humor.

This nature that we return to, haunts our thoughts as a fixed state in which the wise soul can find enduring refuge. Just how we get the idea that nature is stable, is not easy to see; the notion often exists in our minds side by side with a deep conviction that life is a flux, and that time and space are but relative terms in the universal stream. But perhaps it is the outer appearance of the world, nature as landscape, that first suggests a refuge even against time, mountains are so immovable in their mysterious silence for us as for Wordsworth, the ocean is so untamable for us, as it was for Byron. Perhaps also the contemplation of the changing universe during the past century of daring and imaginative science has endowed nature with a romantic career of its own, such as the old humanists ascribed only to men; perhaps the progress of stars, planets and solar systems, observed or guessed at, suggests in spite of the evolution it illustrates a deeper kind of rest in the laws by which that evolution conducts itself; so that the last result of turning from human art to watch the behavior of inanimate things is the conviction that nothing is really inanimate, but that all move in the wisdom of an art superhuman, in an order peaceful and eternal as only a divine vitality could conceive. When we think of nature in this sense of the word, leaving man out of the picture,