Hawaian Kahanamoku. He reckons dates before or after Sullivan. His memory is a Niagara of chukkers, standings, pentathlons, dry-flies, dribbling, clinches, bunkers, magnetoes, push strokes, sacrifices, weights carried, and clay birds. When the green pages have lost their freshness, he reads a little Borrow, more Jack London, and thinks of motors. "Fistiana," is his "Iliad," "The Newgate Calendar" his Odyssey," Rowlandson his Rembrandt. His taste in associates is for red blood. As to women, he is sure the ballot will rob them of their charm and fragrance. He will probably send his son to Yale if the boy comes on, but there is a chance he may be musical. A BRISK BOHEMIAN. He sniffs respectability as far off as a battle. When you speak of virtue, he laughs roguishly and whispers of hypocrites and dupes. There are, he says, three grades of folly: cants, prejudices, and idolatries. He has no cant, because his whole zeal is to find life. He bars out parents, brothers, work, the law, honors, and thundering tradition, and shows you that what he finds in the remainder is real because it is singular. He has no prejudices, because, scorning the suffocation of crowds, he avoids all forms and constantly builds his conduct on his own capacities and desires. He has no idolatries. This is because he early saw danger in the normal and he has shunned that as he would the plague or a bore. The only law he honors is the imperishable law of free-and-easy, to which, after all, one must adhere with passion. Those who violate it, fall off into majorities and so lose sight and knowledge of the truth. THE DEADLY BENEFACTOR. He teaches charity to be implacable, hunting the poor to their homes and washing them. He credits the needy with many virtues; to wit: patience, sympathy, gratitude, honor among themselves, and a constant ache for labor. You ask about the great human traits of pride, sloth, stupidity, but he calls you cruel. You hesitate your belief that the poor differ from the rich only in income; he asks how poor you have ever been, then freezes your answer with a story of the slums, where the sun never penetrates, nor laughter, nor decorum. He burns to protect the criminal from punishment; he wonders why any one is out of prison. You murmur of discipline and the wages of sin; he talks of economic urge and slavery. His tears flow for the poor without ceasing. He groans that individuals have time to make themselves straight ways in a wry world. He voices the one great right of man-to receive charity; he denies all but one privilegeto give it. CARL VAN DOREN. ON REEKING OF THE SOIL. THE TEXAS REVIEW comes into the world with no mission, nothing so flamboyant or remonstrant or overt. It has in mind the law of thought and life and letters only; neither to upset nor convert the world, but only to speak with it in its finer and quieter moments. And this review does not dream-it cannot-of great popularity, with subscribers and revolutions, or of pleasing the general, for what begins on nothing but the wish to please the general, ends in being pleased by them. For the birth of such a venture no small amount of advice was asked, and sometimes taken: to include poetry in a respectable proportion to the other matter; to combine articles of varied interest; to eschew book reviews that are perfunctory and done on a formulary; to open on occasion the doors of our pages without the key of the Phi Beta Kappa. The strongest advice, however, and the most assured, was to let your magazine reek of the soil. Reeking of the soil is a fine term, no doubt, especially when used by literary experts who never knew the soil. In the sense that the classic myth and classic art and classic poetry are open and clear and inevitable, full of beauty and the tears of things, as is the classic land of myrtles and white rocks and violet sea and hills, the phrase is a good one. In the sense that the old ballad of Chevie Chase is full of heather and frost and border hardihood, well and good. Only, those things seem but the soil flowering into human life. They do not reek. Your reeking is a modern affair, conscious, heavy with journalistic sweat. It is apt to be an exploitation, a marketing. Say, for example, then, that we should set outselves to reek of the Texas soil; I have lived in Texas some time and am too near, perhaps, to know how to begin. Like Shylock, these Texans laugh if you tickle them, bleed if you scratch them, and if you wrong them are pretty sure to be revenged. That sort of reeking, then, will include Venice or Israel or England, and will never do. But, then, we have cowboys-in a fraction of the State at least-many of them young fellows with outside beginnings, in some college, some city, some enlightened land or other. I ask them to reek and I get a silly cowboy song, an imitation of Longfellow's worst or of After the Ball, cowboy songs whose music or camp setting is well enough, but whose printed form reeks less of the soil than of the semi-poetical worthies of school primers and almanacs. I find many Texas people hearty and busily rolling their tubs, like Diogenes, in imitation of the national bustle and stir. They remind me of the Golden Age or of Fielding's Squires: they are full of fine scorn sometimes, or of youthful curiosity and concern; they are rarely snobs. I find cultivated people contemplating, or studying softly, or sniffing at life, as is the case elsewhere. The East of Texas is like Mississippi and Ohio and Middle France; the South is like Louisiana and Trieste; Austin is violet and open like Greece; and the West reminds me always of Mexico and North Africa. What then? We shall presently reek of the whole world-ah, that we only could, for that is what true literature has done forever, what we can faintly dream upon as yet. The one unusual thing in Texas seems to be the opinion at home and abroad that there is something quite unusual about us. There are doubtless nuances of experience, varieties of condition, that may appear in our arts, and if the soil of Texas happens to colour finely some literary flower, it will be a fine thing; and yet the Burbank method applied to art, though it may be very chic, is not like Aristippus, mother taught. THE TEXAS REVIEW asks of the critic and of some provincial citizens of the world, patience if we do not always reek. THE EDITOR. THE NEGRO CHAIN GANG. Margaret Law. Big Brother and I are playing hide and seek in the garden and I am counter. I sit on the joggling board under the mimosa tree and mumble "Five-ten-fifteentwenty." My blue sunbonnet is tied so close to my ears that my voice sounds vague and muffled. The sun has dropped somewhere out of sight, and it is that strange almost-dark time when the pine trees cast queer, long shadows, and a yellowish light speads over the tangled rose vines, which might conceal any genus of hobgoblin or "ha'nt." Gardenias are heavily sweet in the air, and this is the time when I may hear an owl hoot. I listen, half afraid. There is the awful tu-who-oo. I try to be brave and forget Ma'm' 'Riah's stories. Just then I hear the dreadful clank, clank of chains, and see a cloud of dust away down the road, very far away. It is a puffy cloud, weirdly fascinating, and I stare, shivering, as I listen to the singing, faint and droning. The clank and rattle grow more vehement and the dust cloud rolls dangerously close. I see stripes and shambling bodies and then dusty black faces and shining white teeth and rolling eyes. More than all things I want to run; but I can not. My throat is dry, I choke and stand fixed, terrified yet fascinated. Where has Big Brother hidden, and why isn't he here to protect me? What these half human creatures may do to me, I dare not imagine-in my mind there runs a gamut of all horrors that a small brain can hold. Now they are in front of the gate. The white man with the gun pulls off his battered hat with a "Howdy, little Miss." And after all they are just negroes, most of them singing and looking quite happy, not different |