The Little Review, June 1914 (Vol. 1, No. 4)Various
General
The Little Review, June 1914 (Vol. 1, No. 4)
Various
Literature, Modern -- 20th century -- Periodicals
All the fine arts are subsidiary to and dependent upon material
progress, and the primal source of well-being is the soil. Man is a land
animal, and he must have access to the land with the same freedom that a
babe enjoys at its mother's breast; otherwise he will be stunted and
dwarfed. The earth is the Old Mother, yielding an abundance of food for
all her children. More reason and more consciousness on their part will
induce them to share it with one another, not like unreasoning pigs but
like reasoning men. The "new freedom" means eventually the accessibility
of the earth to every man. In the meantime the biggest business at hand
is to build soils as well as schools; to keep the land full of sap; to
extend mechanism into the arts of agriculture; to unify the thought and
purpose of city and country. All this will follow the world-mindedness
that is being developed by industrialism and internationalism.
All constructive thought and action must deal not less with the city but
more and more with the country--the land. Typical cities are sapping the
wealth of life that grows up round them. The obsessed man in the market
place needs the poise and power of the shepherd on the hill. The only
true and durable magnificence of a state lies in the equitable use of
its natural resources. No man who has thought profoundly wants to own
land, but the majority of men do want to use it. That ought to be every
man's privilege, for every man is in some fashion a lover of the verdant
earth. But even the millions of us who are landless, because a few men
legally own the earth, have occasional esthetic accesses to it, and if
we passionately loved its beauty we should hasten the day of its release
by an uneconomic monopoly. An intelligent love of the earth as a living
thing is at the bottom of the dynamic impulse of man to be forever
becoming.
And as these lovely days of wanton greenness steal like fairies into the
secret recesses of his child-heart, man has a sense of eternal kinship
with
... that small untoward class which knows the divine call of the
spirit through the brain, and the secret whisper of the soul in
the heart, and for ever perceives the veils of mystery and the
rainbows of hope upon our human horizons; which hears and sees,
and yet turns wisely, meanwhile, to the life of the green earth,
of which we are part, to the common kindred of living things,
with which we are at one--is content, in a word, to live, because
of the dream that makes living so mysteriously sweet and
poignant; and to dream, because of the commanding immediacy of
life.
Gloria Mundi
EUNICE TIETJENS
In what dim, half imagined place
Does the Titanic lie to-day,
Too deep for tide, too deep for spray,
In night and saltiness and space?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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