THE CONSEQUENCES OF IDEALISM
Rahab. By Waldo Frank. 12mo. 250 pages. Boni and Liveright. $2.
City Brock. By Waldo Frank. 8vo. 320 pages. Privately printed for subscribers only.
LET us imagine a room painted in this wise: there are the walls, a window, chairs, table, food on table, and two humans. These walls are aligned as inexorably as armies; one feels their seclusion and their leaden mass. Light, however, pours through the floodgates of the window, tumbles and seethes into the room, rolling with sheer commensurable bulk. The chairs fulfil their functions as chairs earnestly, even avidly; in a sense one might say that they are crying out to be chairs; they are more than chairs, by God, they are staunch havens of palliation, they are strong, tender arms to which our failing corporeal fibres may surrender with confidence. As to the table, note how it offers up its contents, as profusely, as unstintingly, one might say, as the calyx of a lily. And that man and that woman, leaning, gravitating towards each other . . . they are waterspouts growing up out of the floor. Their arms hang limp, but countless phantom arms interlock in the air. While these two humans stand "silent upon each other, heavily."
The closing quote is from Waldo Frank, as is fitting. For our painted room is in the truest manner of Rahab, or City Block. I wish mainly to bring out the element of volition behind the author's eye. He has written elsewhere that when "feet clamber up and over a hill" the hill is already there; "the feet do not create the hill, although they have a tendency to think so." Yet his own writings are a testimony of feet which, if they do not create the hill, at least re-create it, transforming it from a mere hill, qua hill, to a spiritual problem, an obstacle proclaiming its 1dentity over against the yearnings and necessities of human atoms.
In 1893 Stéphane Mallarmé gave the first definite formulation of the poetics which encompasses this attitude in writing. Building on Hegel, he found in idealism the artist's right to his own universe,
