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“Helios makes all things right–
night brands and chokes,
as if destruction broke
over furze and stone and crop
of myrtle-shoot and field-wort,
destroyed with flakes of iron,
the bracken-stone,
where tender roots were sown
blight, chaff, and wash
of darkness to choke and drown.

“A curious god to find,
yet in the end faithful;
bitter, the Kyprian’s feet–
ah, flecks of withered clay,
great hero, vaunted lord–
ah, petals, dust and windfall
on the ground–queen awaiting queen.”

What it all means–who can tell? It is as empty of intelligent meaning as a rubbish-heap. Yet these men claim to get their charter from Whitman. I do not think Whitman would be enough interested in them to feel contempt toward them. Whitman was a man of tremendous personality, and every line he wrote had a meaning, and his whole work was suffused with a philosophy as was his body with blood.

These Reds belong to the same class of inane sensationalists that the Cubists do; they would defy in verse what the Cubists defy in form.

I have just been skimming through an illustrated book called “Noa Noa,” by a Frenchman, which describes, or pretends to describe, a visit to Tahiti. There is not much fault to be found with it as a narrative, but the pictures of the natives are atrocious. Many of the figures are distorted, and all of them have a smutty look, as if they had been rubbed with lampblack or coal-dust. There is not one simple, honest presentation of the natural human form in the book. When the Parisian becomes a degenerate, he is the most degenerate of all–a refined, perfumed degenerate. A degenerate Englishman may be brutal and coarse, but he could never be guilty of the inane or the outrageous things which the Cubists, the Imagists, the Futurists, and the other Ists among the French have turned out. The degenerate Frenchman is like our species of smilax which looks fresh, shining, and attractive, but when it blooms gives out an odor of dead rats.

I recently chanced upon the picture of a kneeling girl, by one of the Reds in art, a charcoal sketch apparently. It suggests the crude attempts of a child. The mouth is a black, smutty hole in the face, the eyes are not mates, and one of them is merely a black dot. In fact, the whole head seems thrust up into a cloud of charcoal dust. The partly nude body has not a mark of femininity. The body is very long and the legs very short, and the knees, as they protrude from under the drapery, look like two irregular blocks of wood.

To falsify or belie nature seems to be the sole aim of these creatures. The best thing that could happen to the whole gang of them would be to be compelled to go out and dig and spade the earth. They would then see what things are really like.

THE EVOLUTION OF EVOLUTION

It is interesting to note that the doctrine of evolution itself has undergone as complete an evolution as has any animal species with which it deals. We find the germ of it, so to speak, in the early Greek philosophers and not much more. Crude, half-developed forms of it begin to appear in the eighteenth century of our era and become more and more developed in the nineteenth, till they approximate completion in Darwin. In Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in 1795 there are glimpses of the theory, but in Lamarck, near the beginning of the nineteenth century, the theory is so fully developed that it anticipates Darwin on many points; often full of crudities and absurdities, yet Lamarck hits the mark surprisingly often. In 1813 Dr. W. C. Wells, an Englishman, read a paper before the Royal Society in London that contains a passage that might have come from the pages of Darwin. In the anonymous and famous volume called “Vestiges of Creation,” published in 1844, the doctrine of the mutability of species is forcibly put. Then in Herbert Spencer in 1852 the evolution theory of development receives a fresh impetus, till it matures in the minds of Darwin and Wallace in the late fifties. The inherent impulse toward development is also in Aristotle. It crops out again in Lamarck, but was repudiated by Darwin.