ron,
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 thin