to it as he left it-blank verse with more than a memory of Shakespeare for those of us who love it, and poignant with the sadness of that "mattress grave" from which it was written, though the tone is triumphant throughout! The first question in a discussion of Flecker's work is always "What outside influence swayed him?" It is not always easy to see. There is perhaps no personal influence so strong as that of his wife, Greek, with all the inheritance of her race. In the later poems there is unquestionably a reflected radiance from an understood and adequately grasped idea of beauty that is Greek itself, not just the love of loveliness that had so intoxicated Flecker in the days of his youth when under the influence of Swinburne's rhythmic swing or Wilde's passionate apostrophe to beauty, he produced much decadent verse, teeming with a passion totally inexperienced and rather remarkable for a looker-on in Vienna. Mr. Frank Savery was the one personal friend throughout his life whose influence was at first hand and whose devotion survived separation and other interruptions to the end. There are flashes in his writings of Sir Richard Burton, but very faint they seem to me. Less faint are illuminating gleams of Herédia, but perhaps I know Herédia better and recognize them more readily. In his decidedly luscious use of the words expressing fruition, the vine, wines, there comes to me a short and fleeting vision of de Régnier, but were not these two his companions upon Parnassus? For Flecker unquestionably attained the heights and there he found the goodly company of the French Parnassians, with whom he at once recognized kinship, camaraderie-never discipleship, but we are apt to reflect the ideas of our friends, is it not true? At times Flecker repeats an idea as if it had laid hold of him. The ugliness of physical death was one of these visions which held him in bonds, as it does all of us occasionally. For example, take the closing lines of The Town Without a Market, itself an admirable commentary upon the Spoon River Anthology, but with a beauty of line and thought not found in the American poetic symposium: Then said my heart, Death takes and cannot give. and compare I'd rather be A living mouse than dead as a man dies. Again The True Paradise-every line would bear quoting -no fault remained after his last pruning. Each word was weighed down to a perfect balance, and in this poem is especially evidenced the Greek influence; a worship of beauty, an overmastering desire to take into the beyond. those images that had lured in life: We poets crave no heaven but what is ours— Trees by the river, birds upon the bough. * * Nor listen to that island-bound St. John, Is this the man who said Do I remember tales of Galilee, I who have slain my faith and freed my will? and yet there is the well-defined individualism, the same freedom of thought But if prepared for me new Mansions are Chill and unknown in some bright, windy Star, Mid strange-shaped souls from all the planets seven, Like the Dawn-writing of an April day! It is the man I think who after many years among the Mohammedans said he found more good in Christianity than he had hitherto suspected! This "lean and swarthy poet of despair" was less despairing, more courageous than he would put into his lines for us to read. We must find the real crux of his thrilling battle with death between those lines, for Flecker is not of that class of poets who, like the birds, build their nests from bits of string and grass collected here and there, but rather is he like the spider who weaves her web out of her innermost self. It is through the warp and woof of his poetry that we come to a knowledge of man! His early poems are of the bird class. No philosophy, no experience is there, but the last songs, the ones which came from the soul of experience, of a life lived, are the spider's web; we may unravel it if we will. His Juvenilia should never have been included in the collected poems; it was his right to let his youthful inexperience play its part in his development and be forgotten! Perhaps nothing is so personal, so reminiscent, as Stillness, next only, in my opinion, to The Dying Patriot in beauty of form and that fine distillation of mental experience which sets a poem apart, and brings to us a feeling almost that we have ourselves lived through it. . . It is of profoundly experimental rhythm, expressing the poet's complex cosmos in its form as well as its context; we see him drifting out into the unknown, far beyond his hold on things corporeal, and then returning abruptly to the realities with a confidence that is as moving as it is childlike. There is a freshness of image, old words in new relations. The idea of words rustling is subtly suggestive. The symbol of his own trade applied to space and time has a quality which is original, startling in its aptness. The "drum of silence" is an image unexcelled in the literature of any day, and at the last the return from those bankless streams of ether to the one on whom he rested for the life force has a ringing sound of realism, coupled with a pathetic yearning that brings to us the memory of a small boy, afraid in the dark, reaching for the maternal hand When the words rustle no more And the last work's done, When the bolt lies deep in the door, And Fire, or Sun, Falls on the dark-laned meadows of the floor; When from the clock's last chime to the next chime Silence beats his drum, And Space with gaunt grey eyes and her brother, Time, Wheeling and whispering come, She with the mould of form and he with the loom of rhyme: Then twittering out in the night my thought-birds flee, I am emptied of all my dreams: I only hear Earth turning, only see Ether's long bankless streams, And only know I should drown if you laid not your hand on me. Food for eternal argument is in the words of him who loved conversational combat. It is an un-Anglo-Saxon touch, this combativeness, for does not the true Britisher stand upon his statement, unwilling to be moved by your argument and un-anxious to waste time combating it? There is about Flecker a subtle wit, a wit that his slightly sardonic smile might tempt you to believe is humor, but it is wit that produces argument and so let us talk of Flecker! ON LOGIC AS SCIENCE AND ART ERNEST CARROLL MOORE University of California, Southern Branch When the will of the late Dr. Charles Arthur Mercier came before the Probate Division of the London courts it was found that he had provided for the setting up of a professional chair of logic and scientific method. "The purpose of this foundation is that students may be taught not what Aristotle or some one else thought about reasoning, but how to think clearly and reason correctly, and to form opinions on rational grounds. "The better to provide that the teaching shall be of this character, and shall not degenerate into the teaching of rigid formulae and worn-out superstitions, I make the following conditions: "The professor is to be chosen for his ability to think and reason and to teach, and not for his acquaintance with books on logic, or with the opinions of logicians or philosophers. "Acquaintance with the Greek and German tongues is not to "To him who knows neither Greek nor German. "Last of all, to a candidate who knows both Greek and "The professor is not to devote more than one-twelfth of his course of instruction to the logic of Aristotle and the schools, nor more than one-twenty-fourth to the logic of Hegel and other Germans. "He is to proceed upon the principle that the only way to acquire an art is by practicing it under a competent instructor. Didactic inculcation is useless by itself. He is, therefore, to exercise his pupils in thinking, reasoning and scientific method as applied to other studies that the students are pursuing concurrently, and to other topics of living interest. "Epistemology and the rational ground of opinion are to be taught. The students are to be practiced in the art of defining, classifying, and the detection of fallacies and inconsistencies." |