Page:Critical Woodcuts (1926).pdf/72

 pursuit of science, capable of severing all social bonds in order to voyage through strange seas of thought alone.

Mr. Floyd Dell has also, in one way and another, acquired what young unacademic authors rather enjoy, a reputation for being dangerous to existing institutions. He has been in court under the espionage act, together with his editorial colleague, that passionate immitigable individualist, Mr. Max Eastman. He has had a book—"Janet March"—suppressed or withdrawn. He has written an admirable panegyric on John Greenleaf Whittier and other conscientious objectors. He has talked blithely of The Revolution, and has, for picturesque purposes, painted his eagerness to assist at the building of a barricade. In the spring of life a young man's talking lightly turns to social Utopias.

But talking is a privilege guaranteed by the Constitution—though it is not always upheld by the police. As Disraeli pointed out, it is "imagination," not talking, that "governs mankind." And Mr. Dell's imagination is thoroughly unsocialistic. He may, to be sure, join the Socialist party, because, being out of power, it is free from responsibility and rich in promises and because it contains a number of intellectual Jews who relish, as few "Anglo-Saxons" do, the excitement of talk, the intoxication of ideas, the exhilaration of protest. He may for an evening unite with them in discussing the redistribution of political and economic power. But the "inner form" of Mr. Dell's imagination is individualistic and anarchical. Everything in him that is deep and instinctive loathes the impositions of power, loathes regulated work, loathes regimentation, loathes forced co-operation and