Title: The Little Review, June-July 1915 (Vol. 2, No. 4)
Author: Ficke, Arthur Davison, Cary, Lucien, Kaun, Alexander S., Aldington, Richard, Comfort, Will Levington, Frank, Florence Kiper, Tietjens, Eunice, Shanafelt, Clara, Anderson, Margaret C., Hecht, Ben, Bynner, Witter
Language: English
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                           THE LITTLE REVIEW


                   _Literature_ _Drama_ _Music_ _Art_

                          MARGARET C. ANDERSON
                                 EDITOR

                            JUNE-JULY, 1915

   Literary Journalism in Chicago                            Lucien Cary
   Epigrams                                            Richard Aldington
   Education by Children                          Will Levington Comfort
   Notes of a Cosmopolite                              Alexander S. Kaun
   “The Artist in Life”                             Margaret C. Anderson
   Poems                                                 Clara Shanafelt
   Slobberdom, Sneerdom, and Boredom                           Ben Hecht
   The Death of Anton Tarasovitch                   Florence Kiper Frank
   Rupert Brooke (A Memory)                         Arthur Davison Ficke
   A Photograph of Rupert Brooke by Eugene Hutchinson
   To a West Indian Alligator                            Eunice Tietjens
   Epitaphs                                                Witter Bynner
   Editorials and Announcements
   The Submarine (from the Italian of Luciano Folgore by Anne Simon)
   Blaa-Blaa-Blaa                                        “The Scavenger”
   The Nine!—Exhibit!
   Book Discussion
   The Reader Critic

                           Published Monthly

                            15 cents a copy

                    MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Publisher
                           Fine Arts Building
                                CHICAGO

                              $1.50 a year

         Entered as second-class matter at Postoffice, Chicago



                           THE LITTLE REVIEW


                                Vol. II

                            JUNE-JULY, 1915

                                 No. 4



                     Literary Journalism in Chicago


                              LUCIAN CARY

Nothing succeeds like an indiscretion. I was indiscreet enough last
winter to speak my mind (a little of it) about THE LITTLE REVIEW, _The
Dial_, _Poetry_, _The Drama_, and the audience to which these papers
appeal. The result is that I have been flattered or intimidated into
speaking it ever since. In the present instance both methods have been
used most charmingly—and shamelessly. You see, Miss Anderson and I live
in the same village. And yet I said nothing, and have nothing to say
about any paper except what everybody knows.

Everybody knows that _The Friday Literary Review_ of _The Chicago
Evening Post_ under Mr. Francis Hackett and, later, under Mr. Floyd Dell
gave us the most alert, the most eager, the most intelligent, and the
best-written discussion of literature in the United States. That
eight-page supplement did what had hardly been done west of England
before: it made book reviews worth reading. There was almost as much
difference between the _Friday Review_ and _The Dial_ as there is
between Mr. George Bernard Shaw and Mr. Nicholas Murray Butler, almost
as much difference between the _Friday Review_ and _The New York Times
Literary Supplement_ as there is between M. Anatole France and Mr. Henry
Van Dyke. There was good writing in the _Friday Review_ and good
thinking behind it. It was almost never dull; and if it was young it was
not wholly unsophisticated; and if it was sometimes dead wrong it was
not stupid. If there were half as many persons interested in the
discussion of ideas as most of us like to believe the _Friday Review_
would inevitably have continued. It would, that’s all. But as things are
it was fated. Neither the mechanics nor the economics of daily
journalism permitted it. The _Post_ could not continue to give us—it
quite literally gave us—eight pages of what so few of us wanted so much.

Everybody knows that if a weekly paper dealing not only with literature
but with all the other arts in the spirit and with the journalistic
competence of the _Friday Review_ were established in Chicago everybody
would have to read it.

That is the point I wished to make. It is perfectly obvious that THE
LITTLE REVIEW is not the kind of newspaper of the arts I have in mind.
THE LITTLE REVIEW is published only once a month. It is therefore not a
newspaper, but a magazine. It is three times as good as _The Drama_,
which is published only once a quarter. But my point is that we ought to
have something four times as good as THE LITTLE REVIEW: in short, a
weekly. It may be that THE LITTLE REVIEW has other failings than its
infrequency. But why consider these lesser matters? THE LITTLE REVIEW
has one virtue in addition to its eagerness. It is informal. Informality
is the breath of life to journalism. Nobody can write anything the way
people want him to unless he feels perfectly free to write the way he
wants to. It is far more a matter of manners than a matter of truth. A
journal which insists on formality almost never has any good writing in
it. Good writing is nothing but the artistic expression of a
personality. Scientifically speaking, it can be nothing else. Not that
one must be thinking about expressing his personality in order to write
well. The very point is that he must not be thinking about it. He has
got to be thinking about what he has to say and nothing else. Take the
use of “I” as an apparently trivial but actually significant example. If
the paper for which he is writing regards the use of “I” as a breach of
good form a man will find that one finger of his left hand is
mysteriously drawn to the shift key and one finger of his right hand to
the key between the “u” and the “o” in order to make an “I” all the time
he is punching his typewriter. The least excusable riot of “I’s” I ever
saw in print was in a journal of literary discussion which believes in
the reality of that invention of the old-fashioned logician, “objective
criticism,” and which regards the use of “I” by any but elderly
gentlemen of the walnuts and wine school as impossible. I did it myself
in the absence of the editor. In a paper which does not in the least
object to the use of “I” writers soon forget all about it, and when they
do that they begin to use it only when it is effective. It is the virtue
of THE LITTLE REVIEW that it permits its contributors to use “I” as
often as they please; that it permits them to make fools of themselves
occasionally. This means that it is not impossible to write well for THE
LITTLE REVIEW. I do not say that it is not possible to write badly for
THE LITTLE REVIEW. Perfect freedom to be idiotic does not inevitably
eliminate idiocy.

But I have no more compliments for THE LITTLE REVIEW.

_Poetry_ is another matter. Miss Monroe’s magazine has printed some bad
verse. But this is not, as its most envious critics imagine, its
distinction. Every magazine prints bad verse. _Poetry_ has printed
poetry that nobody else dared to print. _Poetry_ has boldly discussed
the poetic controversy when everybody else hid behind language. _Poetry_
introduced us to Rabindranath Tagore, to Vachel Lindsay, in a way, to
Edgar Lee Masters. _Poetry_ printed Ford Hueffer’s poem _On Heaven_.
_Poetry_ has heard of Remy de Gourmont and the _Mercure de France_—an
incredible achievement for a Chicago literary journal. _Poetry_ has done
more than any other paper to furnish a meeting ground for writers in
Chicago. If _Poetry_ were concerned about novels it would not decide two
or three years after intelligent people had discovered _Jean Christophe_
that M. Romain Rolland is a successor to Tolstoi and, for the first
time, print a few paragraphs about him. If _Poetry_ were interested in
psychology it would not ignore Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. But _Poetry_
is not interested in these things. Its great wealth is devoted only to
poetry and it comes out only once a month.

It is a pity. For the spirit of _Poetry_ is nearer to the spirit of the
old _Friday Literary Review_ than anything else in Chicago. That is the
spirit I like, that seems suited to the place and the occasion. But it
needs a weekly paper of wide scope to express itself.


   A man is an artist to the extent to which he regards everything
   that inartistic people call “form” as the actual substance, as
   the “principal” thing.—_Nietzsche._



                                Epigrams


                           RICHARD ALDINGTON


                                  Blue

                             (_A Conceit_)

   The noon sky, a distended vast blue sail;
   The sea, a parquet of coloured wood;
   The rock-flowers, sinister indigo sponges;
   Lavender leaping up, scented sulphur flames;
   Little butterflies, resting shut-winged, fluttering,
   Eyelids winking over watchet eyes.


                        The Retort Discourteous

   They say we like London—O Hell!—
   They tell
   Us we shall never sell
   Our works (as if we cared).
   We’re “high brow” and long-haired
   Because we don’t
   Cheat and cant.
   We can’t rhythm; we can’t rhyme,
   Just because their rag-time
   Bores us.

   These twangling lyrists are too pure for sense;
   So they chime,
   Rhyme
   And time,
   And Slime,
   All praise their virtuous impotence.


                               Christine

   I know a woman who is natural
   As any simple cannibal;
   This is a great misfortune, for her lot
   Is to reside with people who are not.



                         Education by Children


                         WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT

A little girl of eleven was working here in the study through the long
forenoon. In the midst of it, we each looked up and out through the
barred window to the nearest elm, where a song-sparrow had just finished
a perfect expression of the thing as he felt it. The song was more
elaborate, perhaps, because the morning was lofty and glorious. Old
Mother Nature smelled like a tea-rose that morning; one would know from
that without the sense of direction that the wind was from the south.
The song from the sunlight among the new elm leaves was so joyous that
it choked us. It stood out from all the songs of the morning, because it
was so near, and we had each been called by it from the pleasant mystery
of our tasks.

The little girl leaned toward the window. We heard the other bird answer
from the distance, and then _ours_ sang again—and again. We sipped the
ecstacy in the hushes. Like a flicker the little bird was gone—a leaning
forward on the branch, and then a blur ... and presently the words in
the room:

   “... sang four songs and flew away.”

It was a word-portrait, and told me much that I wanted. The number, of
course, was not mental, clearly a part of the inner impression. However,
no explanation will help if the art of the saying is not apparent. I
told the thing as it is here, to a class later in the day, and a woman
said:

“Why, those six words make a Japanese poem.”

I wonder if it is oriental? Rather I think it belongs especially to our
new generation, the elect of which seems to know innately that an
expression of truth in itself is a master-stroke. Somehow the
prison-house has not closed altogether upon the elect of the new
generation. There are lines in the new poetry that could come forth, and
have their being, only from the inner giant that heretofore has been
asleep except in the hearts of the rarest few whose mothers mated with
Gods, merely using men for a symbol and the gift of matter....

As I believe that the literary generation which has the floor in America
today is the weakest and the bleakest that ever made semi-darkness of
good sunlight, so I believe that the elect of the new generation
contains individuals who are true heaven-borns; that they bring their
own light with them and do not stand about stretched for reflection;
that they refuse to allow the world-lie to shut the passages of power
within them, between the zone of dreams and the more temperate zones of
matter. They have refused to accept us—that is the splendid truth.

The new generation does not argue with us. They are not a race of
talkers. They do not accept what they find and begin to build upon that,
as all but the masters have done heretofore. They are making even their
own footings and abutments. And to such clean and sure beginnings magic
strength has come. The fashions and the mannerisms which we knew and
thought of as the heart of things; the artfulness of speech and written
word, the age of advertising which twisted its lie into the very
physical structure of our brains; the countless reserves and covers to
hide our want of inspiration (for light cannot pass through a twisted
passage)—all these, the new age has put away. It meets life face to
face—and a more subtle and formidable devil is required for its workers
than that which seduced us.

The few great workmen heretofore have come up in the lie, and in
midlife, the sutures closing—they were warned because they had labored
like men. For their work’s sake and for their religion, which is the
same to great men, they perceived that they must tear the lie out of
their hearts, even if they bled to death. We call it their illumination,
but it was a very deep and dark passage for them. _Except that ye become
as little children_—that was all they knew, perhaps, but quite
enough.... And the old masters invariably put their story down for us to
read: Rodin, Puvis de Chavannes, Whitman, Balzac, Tolstoi—only to
mention a little group of the nearer names—all have told the story. In
their later years they told no other story.

In the beginning they served men, as they fancied men wanted to be
served, but after they confronted the lie of it, they dared to listen to
reality from their own nature. They fought the fight for that cosmic
simplicity which is the natural flowering of the child mind, and which
modern education patronizingly dresses down at every appearance. The
masters wrenched open with all their remaining strength the doors of the
prison-house, and become more and more like children unto the end.

                   *       *       *       *       *

... I do not ask a finer fate than to write about the _New Age_ and
_Children_ and _Education by Children_ for THE LITTLE REVIEW. I think of
_you_ as one of its throbbing centers. I can say it better than that—I
think of you as a brown Arabian tent in which the world’s desire is just
rousing from sleep. I would like to be one of the larks of the morning,
whose song makes it impossible for you to doze again. I would not come
too near—lest you find me old, the brandings of past upon me. Yet
because of the years, I think I know what will be that “more formidable
and subtle devil” waiting to make you forget your way.

He is not a stranger. He is always near when people dare to be simple.
There are many who call him a God still, but they do not use their eyes.
You who see so directly must never forget that bad curve of him below
the shoulders. Forever, the artists lying to themselves have tried to
cover that bad curve of Pan as it sweeps down into the haunches of a
goat. Pan is the first devil you meet when you reach that rectitude of
heart which dares to be naked and unashamed.

Whole races of artists have lied about Pan because they listened to the
haunting music of his pipes. It calls sweetly, but does not satisfy. How
many Pan has called—and left them sitting among the rocks with mindless
eyes and hands that fiddle with emptiness!... Pan is so sad and
level-eyed. He does not explain. He does not promise—too wise for that.
He lures and enchants. He makes you pity him with a pity that is red as
the lusts of flesh.

You know that red in the breast! It is the red that drives away the
dream of peace, yet the pity of him deludes you. You look again and
again, and the curve of his back does not break the dream, as before.
You think that because you pity him, you cannot fall; and all the pull
of the ground tells you that your _very thought of falling_ is a breath
from the old shames—your dead, but as yet unburied heritage, from
generations that learned the lie to itself.

You touch the hair of the goat, and say it is Nature. But Pan is not
Nature—a hybrid, half of man’s making, rather. Your eyes fall to the
cloven hoof, but return to the level steady eye, smiling with such soft
sadness that your heart quickens for him, and you listen, as he says:
“All Gods have animal bodies and cloven hoofs, but I alone have dared to
reveal mine.” ... “How brave you are!” Your heart answers, and the throb
of him bewilders you with passion.... You who are so high must fall far,
when you let go.

... And many of you will want to fall. Pan has come to you because you
_dare_.... You have murdered the old shames, you have torn down the
ancient and mouldering churches. You do not require the blood, the
thorn, the spikes, but I wonder if even you of a glorious generation, do
not still require the Cross?... It is because you see so surely and are
level-eyed that Pan is back in the world for you; and it is very strange
but true that you must first meet Pan and pass him by, before you can
enter into the woodlands with that valid God of Nature, whose back is a
challenge to aspiration, and whose feet are of the purity of the saints.


                                 To M.

   Beautiful slave,
   I kiss your lips abloom—
   Do you not hear the surging voices
   Beyond the tomb
   Wherein you guard the candles of the dead?

   Do you not hear the winds that crown
   The towers with clouds
   Dancing up and down,
   Fluttering your shrouds?
   Do you not hear the music of the dawn,
   The strong exultant voices swelling,
   Welling like the sweep of eager birds
   Beyond your somber dwelling
   Where each somber wall enclosing flings
   Back in your ear
   The moaning passion of dead things?

   Beautiful slave,
   I kiss your parted lips abloom.
   O the splendor of the voids beyond
   The stifling tomb
   Wherein you keep your vigil by the dead.
   You are too weary-spirited
   To look at dawn, too tired-eyed to look upon the sun,
   Too weak to stand against the winds.
   What then? Farewell? No, let me—
   I will find the face of God
   With you among the worms.

                                                                 ANON.



                         Notes of a Cosmopolite


                           ALEXANDER S. KAUN

Mit dem Nationalhaß ist es ein eigenes Ding. Auf den untersten Stufen
der Kultur wird man ihn immer am stärksten und heftigsten finden. Es
giebt aber eine Stufe, wo er ganz verschwindet, wo man gewissermaßen
über den Nationen steht und man ein Glück oder Weh seines Nachbarvolkes
fühlt, als wärs dem eigenen Volk begegnet.—_Goethe._


                      _Uncle Sam vs. Onkel Michel_

You remember the story of the king parading every morning before his
meek subjects who expressed their great admiration for the sovereign’s
gorgeous raiment, until a certain simpleton shouted: “Why, the king is
nude!” I do not recall the end of the story, nor how the impudent
sceptic was punished; but the part I do remember recurs to me every time
some elemental power comes along and sweeps away the ephemeral figments
from the body of mankind. Mars has more than once played the part of the
rude simpleton; this god has neither tact nor manners; with his heavy
boot he dots the i’s and compels us to name pigs pigs. His first victim
falls the frail web of diplomatic niceties. Talleyrand’s cynicism about
the function of the diplomat’s tongue to conceal truth has become
bankrupt: who takes seriously nowadays the casuistry of the manicolored
Books issued by the belligerents? Even Tartuffian England has had to
doff the robe of idealism and to admit through the _Times_ that it would
have fought regardless of whether the neutrality of Belgium had been
infringed upon or not. Good. One of the salutary results of the war (let
us hope there will be more than one good result) has already been
realized in the wholesale unmasquing of international politics; it will
do immense good for mankind-Caliban to see his real image.

The United States holds fast to its tradition of lagging behind the rest
of the world. Messrs. Wilson and Bryan still employ the rusty weapon of
“putting one over” through transparent bluff. “Too proud to fight” has
become a classic _mot_ the world over, to the sheer delight of European
humorists and cartoonists after their wits had been exhausted over the
memorable “Watchful Waiting.” The admirable English of the President has
demonstrated its effectiveness time and again: nearly each eloquent Note
has been responded to by a German torpedo. “America asks nothing for
herself but what she has a right to ask for humanity itself”—what
obsolete verbosity! Who is this Mme. Humanity in whose name we demand
the right to send shells to Europe unhampered by the intended victims of
those shells? An American weekly, outspokenly pro-British, has cynically
summed up the situation: “The British government will not allow a German
woman to obtain food from the United States with which to feed her
children, in spite of the fact that it is buying rifles in the United
States with which to kill her husband.” We can neither blame England for
her practical purposes, nor reproach the United States for her desire to
accommodate a good customer: business is business; but why these appeals
in the name of humanity? Why the indignant outcries against Germany’s
successful attempts to check the supply of ammunition for her enemies?
The brutal Lusitania affair has merely proved the consistent and
consequential policy of Germany; had she not carried out her threats she
would have found herself in the ridiculous position of our government
which seldom goes beyond threats. Talk about the murder of women and
children in time of war! I heard of a polite Frenchman who hurled
himself from the top story of the Masonic Temple and removed his hat to
apologize before a lady on one of the balconies whose hat he happened to
brush on his downward flight. Well, the Germans are not polite.

What is the significance of Mr. Bryan’s resignation? Let us hope it is
of no import; let us hope it may cause a change in tone, but not in
action. For this country to be dragged into the whirlpool of the world
war would be a more unpardonable folly than the puerile Vera Cruz
affair. Our entrance into the war would change the actual situation of
the fighting powers as much as the solemn declaration of war by the
Liliputian San Marino has changed it; in the absence of an army
deserving mention we could depend solely upon our navy which would be
able to accomplish nothing more than joining in some calm bay the
invincible fleet of the Ruler of the Waves and indulge in philosophical
watchful waiting. On the other hand official war against Germany will
doubtless produce internal friction of the gravest importance. I say
_official_, for unofficially we have been on the side of the Allies for
many months despite our theoretical neutrality. Think of the sentiments
of the German soldiers when they are showered upon with shells bearing
the labels of American manufacturers. Had we not supplied England and
France with ammunition, who knows but that they would have found
themselves in the same predicament as Russia, that is, in the position
of an orchestra without instruments? When we shall have declared war
against Germany we shall hardly be in power to harm her more than we
have done heretofore; the Allies will do the killing, and we, the
manufacturing. But the cat’s-paw-game is ungentlemanly, especially when
it is done officially. To be sure, Mr. Wilson is a gentleman; hence our
firm hope that he will do nothing more grave than enriching English
literature with exemplary Notography.


                         _Vincisti, Teutonia!_

In his Frankfurt letters Heine wrote:

   I have never felt inclined to repose confidence in Prussia. I
   have rather been filled with anxiety as I gazed upon this
   Prussian eagle, and while others boasted of the bold way in which
   he glared at the sun my attention was drawn more and more to his
   claws. I never trusted this Prussian, this tall canting hero in
   gaiters, with his big paunch and his large jaws, and his
   corporal’s stick, which he dips in holy water before he lays it
   about your back. I am not overfond of this philosophical
   Christian militarism, this hodge-podge of thin beer, lies, and
   sand. I utterly loathe this Prussia, this stiff, hypocritical,
   sanctimonious Prussia, this Tartuffe among the nations.

Can you blame Wilhelm for opposing the erection of a Heine monument in
Düsseldorf? Those lines were written nearly four scores of years ago, a
time sufficient for turning epithets obsolete. No longer is Prussia
labeled hypocritical and sanctimonious; it is rather accused of rude
frankness and insulting tactlessness. Yet the hatred for Prussia has not
abated, but has been greatly enhanced. Heine died before the planting of
the atrocious Sieges-Allee, that symbol of the triumphant pig; it is in
the last forty years that the world has witnessed the development of
Prussian forbearance, narrowness, machine-like preciseness, and
soullessness. We have always preferred to distinguish Germany from
Prussia; we have found delight in the thought that there is a Munich as
well as a Berlin, a Nietzsche as well as a Haeckel, a Rheinhard as well
as a Bernhardi.... Today we witness the hegemony of Prussia, a hegemony
political as well as spiritual, for the great war has crowned with
triumph not only the Krupp guns but also the Prussian idea of efficiency
and preciseness. Our amazement at the achievements of the lightning-like
army that has been almost invariably victorious during the eleven months
of fighting and has held in its iron grip two hostile fronts, and our
astonishment at the diabolical accomplishment of the submarines which
have driven the English fleet to rest in North Scotland and have become
the Flying Dutchmen of the seas, pale before our admiration for the
wonderful spirit displayed by the German people within their country.
Read their press; you find nothing bombastic or boasting, but calm
reserve, set teeth, clenched fists, and deadly determination to fight
for life, even if it be a fight against the whole world. “_Weder
Schlafpulver noch Tonics!_” admonishes Maximilian Harden against
drumming up illusionary hopes. “_Stirb und werde_,” he closes up one of
his terse articles in the most virile publication I know of, the
_Zukunft_. Bernhardi’s alternative—a World Power or Downfall—is not any
longer a mere jingo-rocket but an imperative axiom uniting all Germans
in a desperate decision to preserve their national existence in face of
a universal hatred and complete isolation. They are not geniuses, those
perseverant Teutons; rather are they the reverse of geniuses. They do
not rise above reality; they adapt themselves to facts. They refuse to
be Quixotic knights; they prefer to emulate Mahomet who went to the
mountain when the mountain declined to go unto him; not to ride on the
back of conditions and circumstances, but to hold tight their tail and
be dragged after them. Herein lies the Teutonic victory, the victory of
Blond Beast over Superman, the triumph of mediocrity over uniqueness, of
fact over idea, of efficiency over idealism, of state over individual.


                       _The Prophecy of Rimbaud_

Arthur Rimbaud, the close friend of Verlaine, the “ruffian,” according
to Mr. Powys (this I shall never forgive him), was capable not only of
perceiving the color of vowels but also of foreseeing the political
situation forty-five years ahead. _L’Eclaireur de Nice_ prints an
interesting statement made by Rimbaud in 1871, a few lines of which I
shall reluctantly attempt to translate:

   The Germans are by far our inferiors, for the vainer a people is
   the closer it approaches decadence—history proves it.... They are
   our inferiors because victory has besotted them. Our chauvinism
   has received a blow from which it will not recover. The defeat
   has freed us from stupid prejudice, has transformed and saved us.
   Yes, they will pay dearly for their victory! In fifty years
   envious and restless Europe will prepare for them a bold
   unexpected stroke, and will whip them. I can foresee the
   administration of iron and folly that will stifle German society
   and German thought, in the end to be crushed by some coalition!


                      _George Brandes’ Neutrality_

There has been a good deal of misapprehension concerning Brandes’
attitude towards the war. His refusal to answer the interpellation of
his friend Clemenceau, his condemnation of the Russian policy in Finland
and of the cowardly and treacherous treatment of the Jews by the Poles,
have given cause for suspecting him of pro-German sentiments. In a
recent interview with the correspondent of the Paris _Journal_ the
Danish critic avows his full sympathy for France. Although his statement
is reserved and plausibly neutral, one easily discerns his dislike for
Germany, in whose _Deutschland über Alles_ motto he sees a Jesuitic
excuse for all means that may lead to her end. “German brutality is not
instinctive; it is a scientific one, a theory.” The cause of the war he
epitomizes in the _mot_ of Pascal: “Pourquoi voulez vous tuer cette
homme?”—“Il est mon ennemi: il habite de l’autre côté du fleuve.”
Brandes expresses himself more frankly in the Danish _Tilskueren_, where
he interprets the war as the struggle between liberalism and personal
government, between civil spirit and militarism, between a people
(England) which accords others commercial freedom and self-government
and a country overridden with economic protectionism, junkers, and
bureaucracy. “England has an independent press and a government which
voices the parliament and public opinion; in Germany the press is
semi-official, the government is responsible solely before the Kaiser,
and the Kaiser only before God.”


                      _Germanophobia ad Absurdum_

The French Immortals, too old for actual participation in the war, have
found an outlet for their patriotism in shedding red ink of ridiculous
chauvinism. It has become a matter of course to meet a name of some
“Membre de l’Academie” signed under such outbursts as this: “Nothing of
the Barbarians, nothing of their literature, of their music, of their
art, of their science, nothing of their culture, of anything Made in
Germany!” Another Academic gives vent to his ire against those Frenchmen
who still find certain German things worth admiring, and he vehemently
advocates the prohibition of the Barbarian music and art “by law, by
persuasion, by force, by violence if necessary!” The octogenarian
Saint-Saens has written a series of articles venomously attacking
Wagnerian music, labeling traitor any Frenchman who favors the art of
the arch-foe of his country. Even the semi-official _Le Temps_ was
shocked by the violent tone of the old composer; it quoted Saint-Saens’s
articles of the year 1876, in which the author appeared to be an ardent
Wagnerite and appealed to his compatriots for broad-mindedness and
toleration for “the greatest genius of our times.” As a substitute for
the atrocious Wagner Saint-Saens recommends the return to Haydn and
Mozart, even to Meyerbeer; Schumann’s Lieder he would ban for Gounod and
Massenet; he favors even Dussek, for he is “only a Bohemian.” Patriotic
as he is, he refuses to sanction the modern French composers, since
Debussy, Fauré, D’Indy, and the rest are Wagnerians in his estimation.
It is a case of “senile reactionarism,” as the _Mercure de France_
rightly observes.


                          _Comparative Morale_

It is very interesting to compare the barometer of public morale in the
European capitals, judging from their amusements. Here is one day’s bill
taken from the London _Daily News_, the Petrograd _Ryech_, the _Berliner
Tageblatt_, the Vienna _Neue Freie Presse_, and the Paris _Figaro_; I
have omitted the movies, which bear for the most part ultra-patriotic
titles, and the vaudevilles. The London bill is quite poor: _Veronique_,
a comic opera; _Mme. Sans-Gene_; Gaby Deslys in _Rosy Rapture_,
presented by Charles Frohman; _The Girl in the Taxi_; Frondai’s _The
Right to Kill_; _For England, Home, and Beauty_; and our old friends,
the Irish Players, in the Little Theatre. Still more meager is the Paris
bill: outside of _Cavalleria Rusticana_ (the chairman of the Walt
Whitman dinner pronounces it Keyveleeria Rohstikeyna), it abounds with
such tit-bits as _La Petite Fonctionaire_, _Mam’zelle Boy Scout_,
_Mariage de Pepeta_, and so forth. Berlin has on that day three
operas—_Don Juan_, _Elektra_, _Lohengrin_; three dramas—_Faust_, _Peer
Gynt_, _Schluck und Jau_ (the last one in Rheinhard’s Deutsches
Theater), not counting the minor affairs. Vienna’s bill took away my
breath: a Schönberg-Mahler Abend, a Schubert-Strauss Abend, a
Beethoven-Brahms Abend, a Brahms Kammermusik Abend, a concert under
Sevcik; _Carmen_; a play by Fulda after Molière; Ibsen’s _Master
Builder_ and _Ghosts_; Kleist’s _Kätchen von Heilbronn_. As for the
Petrograd bill, I had better not say what emotions it has aroused in me.
Judge for yourselves: five operas—_Traviata_, _Faust_, _Pagliacci_,
_Ruslan and Ludmilla_, _Eugene Onegin_; a ballet by Mlle. Krzesinsky;
two ballets by Fokin’s company; plays by Ibsen, Mirbo, Andreyev, beside
_Potash and Perlmutter_ and other importations; an exhibition of
paintings by Lancerè and Dobuzhinsky; a Poeso-Evening by Futurist poets
with Igor Severyanin as leader; an Evening of Poetry under K. R. (Grand
Duke Konstantine, whose play _King of the Jews_ recently appeared in an
English translation); public lectures on _The Blue Bird_ in Our Days, on
Dostoevsky and Nietzsche.... Allow me to stop. Are you inclined to draw
conclusions and comparisons between the stage of war-ridden Europe and
that of peacefully complacent America? I beg to be excused.


                   _Edmond Rostand on the Lusitania_

Rostand is a member of the Academy; perhaps this affliction is
responsible for his growing hoarseness as a Chantecler. Yet as of all
recent war poems his is the best, I feel justified in citing it:


                            Les Condoléances

      Bernstorff, pour aller à la Maison Blanche,
        S’est mis tout en noir.
      (L’onde a pris, là-bas, la dernière planche
        Dans son entonnoir.)

      Il entre, affigé, refuse une chaise
        D’un geste contrit.
      (Des femmes, là-bas, heurtent la falaise
        De leur sein meurtri.)

      Il tousse une toux de condoléance.
        Il s’essuie un oeil.
      (Les enfants noyés tournent en silence
        Autour d’un écueil.)

      Il se mouche. Il dit—son mouchoir embaume:—
        “Je viens de la part
      De Sa Majesté l’Empereur Guillaume
        Vous dire la part....”

      Derrière Wilson, dont on aime à croire
        Que tout le sang bout,
      Lincoln, la Vertu,—Washington, la Gloire,
        Se tiennent débout.

      Le comte Bernstorff ne peut les connaître.
        Il ne les voit pas.
      S’il pouvait les voir, il aurait peut-être
        Reculé d’un pas.

      “... Vous dire la part....”—O mornes allures!
        Touchant trémolo!
      (Les pêcheurs, là-bas, voient des chevelures
        Ouvertes sur l’eau.)

      “... Vous dire la part que nous daignons prendre
        A votre malheur.”
      (Les flots verts ont-ils d’autres morts à rendre?
        Demandez-le-leur!)

      Bernstorff pleure et dit: “J’ai su ce naufrage
        Et je suis venu.
      Ils n’ont pas souffert. Ayez du courage.
        Ils en ont bien eu.

      “Je n’insiste pas. Je suis venu vite,
        Et puis je m’en vais.
      Mais vous sentez bien que, cette visite,
        Je vous la devais.

      “Nous plaignons le sort des enfants, des femmes,
        Cela va de soi....
      Ah si vous voyiez tous les télégrammes
        Que Tirpitz reçoit!

      “C’est un grand succès pour notre marine.
        Je suis désolé.
      Veuillez constater que sur ma marine
        Ce pleur a coulé.

      “Un pleur magnifique, en cristal de roche.
        Voyez, c’est exact.
      Je ne comprends pas que l’on nous reproche
        De manquer de tact.

      “Berlin se pavoise.—Hélas!—On décore
        Le moindre faubourg.
      Ah je le disais tout à l’heure encore
        A Monsieur Dernburg.

      “Si notre avenir—souffrez que je cache
        Quelques pleurs amers—
      N’est plus sur les mers, il faut que l’on sache
        Qu’il est sous les mers.

      “Ceux qui malgré nous voyagent sur l’onde
        Sont les agresseurs.”
      (Là-bas, l’eau rapporte une vierge blonde
        Avec ses trois soeurs.)

      “Les _Tipperary_ que chez vous on siffle
        Nous ont agacés,
      Et quand Roosevelt joue avec son rifle
        Nous disons: Assez.

      “Qu’allaient donc chercher en cette aventure
        Vos Princes de l’Or?”
      (Là-bas, pour avoir donné sa ceinture,
        Vanderbilt est mort.)

      “Il ne faudra pas que ça recommence.
        Ils sont bien punis.
      Veuillez exprimer ma douleur immense
        Aux Etats-Unis.”

      (Il se fait, là-bas, d’horribles trouvailles
        Qu’on met sous un drap.)
      Et Bernstorff reprend: “Pour les funérailles,
        On me préviendra.

      “Ce désastre a fait, en Bourse allemande,
        Monteur les valeurs.
      On me préviendra pour que je commande
        Les plus belles fleurs.”

      Et comme Wilson dit, d’une voix sombre:
        “Nous verrons demain,”
      Et sent Washington et Lincoln, dans l’ombre,
        Lui prendre la main,

      Bernstorff, en pleurant, regagne la porte ...
        (Il y a, là-bas,
      Deux petits enfants qu’une femme morte
        Serre entre ses bras.)


                  _The Downfall of the International_

Another result of the war, already sufficiently crystallized, is the
bankruptcy of the illusionary spirit of internationalism. In his
remarkable book[1] Mr. Walling has taken the trouble of quoting
resolutions of national sections of the Socialist party the world over,
before and during the war. With a few significant exceptions the
Socialists of the warring nations have had to exchange their erstwhile
slogan “Workers of the world, be united!” for the less noble motto
“Defend your country!” Even when the European armies had already been
mobilized the Socialists held protest meetings at which they threatened
to call a general strike if war should be declared. But with the first
cannon boom the theoretic brotherhood evaporated and gave way to
patriotic sentiments. The workers declared that they were Germans,
Russians, etc., first, then Socialists. True, in the beginning the
German Socialists claimed that they were fighting against the
reactionary Czardom, while the Socialists of the Allies tried to justify
the international carnage as the struggle against Prussian militarism;
but ultimately such clear-headed thinkers as Kautsky and some of the
English Socialists came to see the futility of endeavoring to discover
idealistic causes for the mutual slaughter. The country is in danger,
consequently we must defend it, regardless of the rightness or wrongness
of its policy—this is the prevailing sentiment among the workers. The
grandiose structure of the International has fallen in ruins; the
“scientific” theories and calculations of the Marxians have received a
blow by the underestimated imponderabilia, that of primitive patriotism.
On the other hand, “applied” Socialism has won a considerable victory
with the development of the war. Nearly all the belligerent countries
have adopted State-Socialism in such measures as the nationalization of
railways and means of production. The capitalists are evidently shrewd
enough to utilize the doctrines of their opponents in time of need and
thus to neutralize the sting of that very opposition. What will become
of Socialism when at least its minimum-program is accepted and put into
practice by the _capitalistic_ order without the aid of a social
revolution, the inevitability of which has been scientifically proven by
Marx and his disciples?

   [1] _The Socialists and the War, by William English Walling. New
   York: Henry Holt and Company._


   Artists should not see things as they are; they should see them
   fuller, simpler, stronger: to this end, however, a kind of
   youthfulness, of vernality, a sort of perpetual elation, must be
   peculiar to their lives.—_Nietzsche._



                          “The Artist in Life”


                          MARGARET C. ANDERSON

“People” has become to me a word that—crawls. If you have ever heard Mr.
Bryan pronounce it you will know what I mean. He says it “peo-pul”....

And that is the way they act. Sometimes I see peo-pul in this kind of
picture: a cosmic squirming mass of black caterpillars moving first one
way and then the other, slowly and vaguely, not like measuring worms who
cover the ground or like ants who have their definite business, but
heavily, blindly, in the stunned manner peculiar to caterpillar
organisms. They peer and poke and nod and ponder and creep and crawl and
scramble and grow dizzy and turn around and around, wondering whether
they shall go on the way they started or go back the way they came or
refuse to go at all. Once in a hundred years one of the caterpillars
breaks his skin and flies away—a butterfly through the unfriendly air.
Then the black mass writhes in protest and arranges that the next
butterfly shall have his wings well clipped. I know my metaphor is not
scientifically intact, but what does it matter? It satisfies my
impulse—which is simply to call names. So I might as well say “People
are caterpillars” and be done with it.

                   *       *       *       *       *

I have a painter artist friend who says that to talk about the artist in
life is simply to repeat one of those silly phrases that mean nothing.
But it means entirely too much, I think—which is the reason there are so
many of the species in evidence: about two in a million perhaps—and I
know that is far too optimistic. That would mean some four or five
thousand people in the living world who have nothing in common with
caterpillars. The count is too high!

For really there are no artists among us. Living picturesquely,
artistically, has nothing to do with being an artist in life; and even
living with the poise that marks a good piece of art hasn’t necessarily
anything to do with it. If you ask me to choose a type of the real
artist in life I shall say Nietzsche rather than Goethe. For the artist
in life has inevitably to do with prophecy rather than with holding up
the mirror; and that means chiefly—to have strength!

Now where are the strong people? Of course “strength” is an indefinite
term. Sometimes it seems a matter of dominating the superfluous;
sometimes it seems the power “to meet fate with an equal gaze”; and
sometimes the resource or the daring to push one’s fate to a farther
goal. But these are beginnings! If you pick up what is known as your
soul from a wreckage and make it march on you think you are very strong.
If you manage to make it march with pride and joy you think you are a
Superman. But this is easily within the effort of Everyman. I am talking
of artists now and of the radiant possibility that such beings may
develop in this uninspired land; and, in these terms, to be strong is to
help create the farther goal!

It’s disgusting to realize that the people we know are not this sort.
Take any twenty of your friends and classify them briefly as types.
Perhaps there are five who have “personality”: but one of them has no
energy, one no will, one no brains, one no imagination, and the other no
“spirit;” there are five who have “intellect”: one of them has no
“character,” one no strength, one can’t see or hear or feel, one sees so
inclusively that he has no goal, and one sees so “straight” that he
misses the road on both sides; there are five who have a capacity for
art: one is lazy, one is ignorant, one is afraid, one is vain, one has a
lie in him; and there are five who have a capacity for living: one can’t
think, one can’t work, one can’t persevere, one can’t stand alone, one
wastes his gift on others and never realizes himself. You can work out
such combinations _ad infinitum_ and you can excuse them to the same
distance by calling it all a matter of having the defects of your
qualities. Why not call it a matter of having the complacency of your
defects?

If you’ve not got imagination you can’t help it; if you’ve not got
strength you can get it. It won’t make you an artist but it will make it
impossible for you to be confused with the caterpillars. If you’ve got a
vision—an Idea—and can find the strength to fly toward it you’ll be an
artist in life. This is not to confuse the artist with the prophet. You
can’t very well do that because the terms are so interdependent. There
has never been an artist without the prophet in him, and there has never
been a prophet who was not an artist. It’s a different thing if you’re
talking about priests or about inferior artists. And then of course you
have to remember that there are no such things as inferior artists.
Priest and demagogue are the names for those who fail as prophets or as
artists.

And what is the use of such a harangue? There is very little use. People
won’t be artists. Peo-pul don’t change. But the individual changes, and
that is the hope. Individuals are persons who can stand alone. There
ought to be Individuals coming out of a generation brought up on
Nietzsche. Such an upbringing has taught us at least two things: first
that he who goes forward goes alone, and second that it is weakness
rather than nobility to succumb to the caterpillars. Yes, and something
else: that it is from superabundance rather than from hunger that
creation comes. We start out fortified with all this. We don’t need to
wrestle with our gods every time the old laws threaten to submerge us;
our universe doesn’t totter when the caterpillars groan that we will be
lonely if we go alone or hurt if we are misunderstood or tragic if we
don’t compromise. We don’t mind these things.

It really all comes to one end: Life for Art’s sake. We believe in that
because it is the only way to get more Life—a finer quality, a higher
vibration. This bigger concept doesn’t mean merely more Beauty. It means
more Intensity. In short, it means the _New_ Hellenism. And that is a
step beyond the old Greek ideal of proportion and moderation. It pushes
forward to the superabundance that dares abandonment.


   Art and nothing else! Art is the great means of making life
   possible, the great seducer to life, the great stimulus of
   life.—_Nietzsche._


   The tree that grows to a great height wins to solitude even in a
   forest; its highest outshoots find no companions save the winds
   and the stars.—_Frank Harris._



                                 Poems


                            CLARA SHANAFELT


                               Fantastic

   I have no thoughts, no more desires—
   It is green and gray like a garden
   Stirred by apple-scented wind,
   Quick with the sense of cool and silver joys
   That come in a rainy dance
   When soft hands of clouds have pushed away
   The round red stupid face of the sun.

   In one day, I think, the wind
   Will not have had his will of the gleaming rain—
   They run about with tossed hair,
   The garden is silvered with their pleasure,
   Cool and sweet, shining
   As with arch laughter a beloved face.
   The musing pool
   Shattered in glancing flight by a sudden wing—
   This, which no words can name,
   This is my heart’s delight,
   Winging I know not whither;
   It has no measure.


                               Interlude

   To sink deeper yet
   In the green flood of twilight—
   I grope for the rich chord of the full darkness
   That drowns the piping cries of light,
   For silence fretted by cadent rain
   And the monotonous cries of insects
   That lull the tortured sense in drowsy veils.
   I am weary of lights dancing
   In limpid streets,
   Lemon and gold and amethyst,
   The jewelled laughter and the scent,
   Weaving of uneasy colors.

   I would rest now in green and gray
   Of an abandoned garden
   Where no more flowers are,
   Only grass and crabbed trees,
   Night—
   And the bitter aroma of herbs
   Trod out by myriad, whispering feet of the rain—
   Night and no stars.



                   Slobberdom, Sneerdom, and Boredom


                               BEN HECHT

It is the custom of inspired opinion to pay little attention to
mediocrities, to dismiss them with a shudder. I understand THE LITTLE
REVIEW to be an embodiment of inspired opinion, an abandonment of mental
emotion—Youth. Like some of the people who read it and even some of them
who write for it, it flies at the throats of contemporary Chimeras and
leaps upon the Pegasi of the moment. It slashes and roars, hates and
loves. It never considers the right and never considers the wrong. It
does not endeavor to be just and fair. This is at once a great crime and
a great virtue. It is criminal to be unjust and it is virtuous to be
truthful. To me THE LITTLE REVIEW is always both. I sympathize with its
spirit and share it. Leave justice to the greybeards. Why should a soul
which has the capacity for inspiration quibble in prejudices?

I think, however, that shuddering at mediocrities is a grave error. Evil
is the monopoly of the few as well as genius. Hating and loving them are
luxuries. Therefore it is that this writing is not composed in the
luxurious spirit of THE LITTLE REVIEW. My opinion is not an inspired
one, my emotion is not an abandonment. I write with a photographic
dispassion of the three great divisions of mediocrity—Slobberdom,
Sneerdom, and Boredom.

Slobbering is not an art and it is not an evil. It is not even important
except as an object of analysis. True, if encountered in print or in the
flesh it is likely to have a nauseous effect upon sensitive souls; but
then one can easily avoid encountering it. One does not, for instance,
have to attend a Walt Whitman dinner. When one hears that a Walt Whitman
dinner is to be given on a certain night in the Grand Pacific Hotel all
one has to do to remain happy and free from suffering is to stay at
home. My friend K—— and I went to a Walt Whitman dinner because we were
young and curious and hungry, and because Walt, after all, is a great
artist.

The dinner proved to be like most dinners of its kind—a glorious
opportunity for saccharine drool at the expense of a great name.
Appreciation and love of an artist—a poet—are highly commendable
qualities if practiced in private, if put into proper print. It is the
same as with love of a woman. But to stand up in a public place, to shed
tears of ecstasy, wave one’s arms, pull at one’s hair and strike at
one’s bosom—these are, as they always have been, the slobbering methods
of egotistical mediocrity. It is simply a prostituting of the emotions.

Mediocrity is not insensible to art. It is very probable that the Rev.
Preston Bradley, who insists he is a reformed clergyman, really likes
Walt Whitman, feels thrilled with the reading of him. But the joy the
Rev. Bradley derives from reading Walt in his library is not enough for
him. In fact, it is not a joy at all. It is an irritation. Give the Rev.
Bradley an opportunity to show what he thinks of Walt Whitman, to stand
up on his feet before three hundred and fifty sympathetic souls and
prove what a keen sense of taste and an advanced instinct of culture he
(Rev. Bradley) possesses by yawping:

“I love Whitman, I adore Whitman. He is this to me. He is that to me—”

—then and not till then does the Rev. Bradley feel the real joy of
appreciation for “good old, dear old, wonderful old Walt.” Give the Rev.
Bradley a decent chance to platitudinize, attitudinize, and
blatitudinize, and the love he bears old Walt oozes from him in dewy
sighs and briny words.

Do not imagine that I am violently indignant with the Rev. Bradley, or
wish the reader to be, for his insincerity. It is indeed one of his best
qualities. By being insincere, by having no actual ground for his
ecstacy, the Rev. Bradley must, perforce, pay a great deal of attention
to what he says. He is free to pick out the best words, the best pose,
the most arresting and perhaps enlightening point of view. I say he is
free to do this, but of course he doesn’t. It is not the fault of his
insincerity, however. If the Rev. Bradley were an artist he would profit
by it and be great. But why all this talk about such a person as the
Rev. Bradley? Surely not because he is deserving of careful censure. The
reason is that there were at least three hundred male and female Rev.
Bradleys listening to him, slobbering in silence.

And now the next division of mediocrity. Mr. Clarence Darrow was another
of the talkers. Mr. Darrow sneered. Mr. Darrow sneered at Homer,
Euripides, Shakespeare, Dante, Landor, Whittier, Tennyson, Milton,
Kipling, and Heine because they didn’t write as good old Walt wrote.
Because they wore fetters in their art and insisted on making the last
word in the first line rhyme with the last word in the third line. They
were weak, ignoble creatures, these copybook writers, said Mr. Darrow;
they insisted on using a singular subject with a singular predicate and
believed that a violation of such procedure was a sin. One of the things
you learn in your school text books on physics is that a gentleman by
imposing a pencil-point before his eye can obscure his vision of the
Colossus. The idea seems apropos in the case of Mr. Darrow. Mr. Darrow
by imposing his soul upon the figures of the world’s big men can obscure
them entirely for himself and evidently his sympathizers. After he had
concluded three hundred and fifty persons, every one present so far as I
could see except my friend K—— and myself, stood up and sneered with Mr.
Darrow. They passed him a rising resolution of love and cheered him
three times, omitting, however, the customary tiger.

The greatest trouble with Mr. Darrow was his sincerity. He didn’t
slobber any more than a public speaker has to in order to have a public
to speak to. But his sneers were deep and earnest. They were entirely
intellectual, the intellectual essence of mediocrity. All of us sneer,
of course. The sneer is the one great American characteristic. When I
told a man in the office in which I work that I had attended a Walt
Whitman dinner he sneered at me.

“Fourflushers,” he said. “I can’t see how you put that highbrow stuff
over. A lot of long-haired, flea-ridden radicals, ain’t I right? I
wouldn’t let my wife associate with a bunch like that.”

(This is my office friend’s highest conception of manly virtue,—a
thoroughly American one,—being careful of whom his wife associates
with.)

Then my office friend went on to assert that Whitman was undoubtedly an
immoral, not to say degenerate, party, that he “got by with his stuff
because it was raw,” and that everybody who professed any admiration for
him was a suspicious character and one he “would think twice about
before inviting to his home” (where his wife is).

It is rather a complicated matter, this sneering business; and after
attending a Walt Whitman dinner I don’t know whose sneers disgust me
more, Mr. Darrow’s or my friend’s. They are both, however, identical in
spirit, the spirit of mediocrity and sincerity when sincerity becomes,
as it most always does, the cloak for ignorant convictions and bigoted
fanaticism.

And now we come to the third and last condition—boredom. Among the
speakers at this memorable dinner was Mr. Llewellyn Jones. Mr. Jones is
a critic of literature by profession if not qualification—although I do
not say it, really. Of all the orators at good old Walt’s memorial
gabfest Mr. Jones was the least offensive. He said nothing that shocked
the taste or violated one’s innerself or harrowed one’s soul. I don’t,
of course, remember what Mr. Jones did say. One never does, not only in
the case of Mr. Jones but in the thousands like him. They occupy time
and space and leave them empty. Not for them the sneer or the slobber.
Mr. Jones wouldn’t sneer for the world. And as for slobbering Mr. Jones
has too much good taste and discretion for that. Not that he is above
them. His fear of them, his apparent uncertainty in distinguishing
between these two characteristics and the characteristics of inspired
opinion, indicate this plainly enough.

So to be safe Mr. Jones resorts to the time-honored entrenchment of
mediocrity. He barricades himself behind the bulwarks of boredom. He
discharges no cannon, he commits no sins, he makes no false steps or
takes no false flights. He is boredom incarnate, the eternal convention
in the arts whether he deals with Nihilism, radicalism, or stands pat on
the isms of the past. Mr. Jones never gets anywhere, I repeat. I speak
of all the Joneses. Nobody derives anything from him—from them—except
ennui. He, they, never offend, never elate. He, they, are always Mr.
Jones.

Listening to the Joneses is as elevating an experience as watching the
water blop-blop out of the kitchen hydrant. And this idea leads me back
to where I started—THE LITTLE REVIEW.

Can you imagine what a thorough contempt a kitchen hydrant would have
for a fountain rising from the rocks, for a brook gurgling down the
hillside, or a strong river capering to sea? It wouldn’t exactly sneer
at them. Mr. Jones doesn’t. But it would feel moved to spirited reproof.
How juvenile it is to gurgle, the hydrant would say, how vain and
foolish it is to rise from the rocks, how upsetting it is to be
continually capering to sea. I do not claim any super-intelligence in
the matter of hydrants. But Mr. Jones and all the Joneses do say, and I
have enough intelligence to understand them if not to sympathize with
them, that THE LITTLE REVIEW is young and idiotic and given to
unnecessary emotions and so forth. All of which is true, looked at from
the elevation of a kitchen sink. “Why don’t you,” remonstrates the
hydrant to the brook, “blop blop with me?”

An afterthought: at this Whitman dinner there was one among the speakers
who sustained a dying faith in Walt, humanity, and _vers libre_ in
general. He was Carl Sandburg who read a free verse poem of his own on
Billy Sunday.


   It is provided in the essence of things that from any fruition of
   success, no matter what, shall come forth something to make a
   greater struggle necessary.—_Whitman._



                     The Death of Anton Tarasovitch


                    A Short Story of the Present War

                          FLORENCE KIPER FRANK

Anton Tarasovitch lay dying. He lay in a pleasant cornfield whither he
had dragged himself in the heat of the afternoon, for a shelter against
the merciless sun. But now it was evening and the stars were out, and
dying was not now so bad an affair as it had been in the dust and the
blinding sunlight. True, the pain was at times terrible, but at other
times it made one only light-headed, so that oneself or the part that
was Anton Tarasovitch seemed to be a different thing altogether from the
body of Anton Tarasovitch which lay beneath It shot to pieces, while It
fluttered and hovered above.

He had not been lying for many hours in the Austrian cornfield. He knew
that by the progress of the sun downward—downward until it made the long
summer shadows that he loved in the fields at home; downward until it
brought a breath of coolness and a gray light that had brushed out the
clear distinction of shadows and sunlight; downward until it was gone
forever and a few stars burned quietly in the sky overhead. It was the
last sunset that Anton Tarasovitch was to see in this world. But time
had no longer any meaning for Anton Tarasovitch. Lying on one’s back,
so, and waiting to die, a minute can seem all there is of the world, and
then an hour can be burned up like a minute, while one faints into
unconsciousness, before one is slowly dragged back again to the thought,
“I am I”—the thought that makes the world for each man, that creates for
him the stars and the shadows and the sun sinking downward.

Yes, Anton Tarasovitch knew that now—that it was this thought that made
the world. And when he stopped thinking it, the world would again be
nothing. Down! down! down! one would plunge, and then the world would be
nothing. But it would exist still for other men. Yet how could that be?
Tomorrow the sun would come up again into the sky just as every day it
had come up in the fields at home, making the long shadows that he had
so loved in the mornings and in the evenings. Tomorrow other men would
see the sun—many other men would see it. But if Anton Tarasovitch did
not see it——! In vain he struggled to create for himself a universe in
which there would be no Anton Tarasovitch. Well, he was not clever
enough to understand such matters. Men in universities and men who wrote
books had figured them out and knew all about them. But how was he, who
had never been to a University, who had not been to school even, to
understand!

Yet this much he understood—that he was dying for his country. This the
general had told them, and he had known always, since a boy, that it was
a brave and fine thing to fight for one’s country and to die if need be.
Anton Tarasovitch was dying that his country might be saved.

Yet it was strange that the big Russia had need of him, just one common
peasant. The great Russia had so many men that were strong and powerful,
men with uniforms that glittered—men that were much cleverer and braver
than Anton. Why should the country have need of him? Sasha needed him,
and the children. Sasha needed him in the fields and she needed him in
her heart too. She had often called him the light of her heart, in the
strange words—so different from the words of other women—that Sasha
often used. And he knew by her face that she needed him. She didn’t have
to tell him so. He knew by the kindling of her face, as of a curtain
behind which suddenly a candle appears. So her face would light up when
she saw him. Sasha would mind greatly if she never saw him again.

He was dying because it was a glorious thing to die for one’s
country—for the White Tsar, the little Father. You died to protect your
country, so that your great country might live forever. But if you
weren’t there to know that it lived forever!—now why couldn’t he think
of the world without Anton Tarasovitch in it? Why did he land against a
black wall every time he tried to think of tomorrow without Anton
Tarasovitch?

It was needful that he die to save his country. What if, to the general,
he _were_ only one of thousands and to Sasha and the children all of
life—nevertheless, if every man should think that, then there would be
no one at all to save the country. It was rather clever of him to figure
it out so, especially with the fire in his side that made his head so
light and his thoughts fly off from it and refuse to anchor down for
more than a minute. It was clever of him to reason it out—Anton
Tarasovitch who had never been to a University—that if every man should
say to himself, “O, I don’t count. Just one more or less!”—then there
would be no army at all to fight the Tsar’s battles.

Yet he was not fighting or dying now to save Sasha. Nor was he dying to
save his children even in the years to come. That wouldn’t be bad—to die
so that years afterwards, even though it might be many years afterwards,
one’s children would prosper and would live more happily. That would be
a sort of living when one was dead, because one’s children were in a way
oneself in different bodies. But he couldn’t see how Maxim and Ignat and
Sofya and Tatya would at any time be better off because he was dying
right now. He couldn’t see but that the land would be poorer and that
they would have to work harder because he and the other peasants were
dying for the Little Father and for their country.

But if he couldn’t figure out just what people he was saving, at least
he knew against what men he was fighting. He was fighting against the
Austrians. The Austrians were a horrible people who spoke a language one
couldn’t understand at all. When you tried to understand them, you
couldn’t understand a word they were saying. He had known an Austrian
once—a big blonde fellow who had stayed a few days at their little
village. One day Anton had been walking with the tiny Tatya on the road
that led to the market and they had met the Austrian, who had stopped
and had given Tatya a flower out of his button-hole. Anton remembered
Tatya’s crows of delight. The Austrian had smiled at her, a nice,
friendly smile, and Tatya had grabbed for his hand as children will,
even when the people they grab at are Austrians.

Tatya had seemed to like the Austrian. And Anton had had to confess to
himself that he wasn’t a bad fellow. But he must have been pleasant only
because of Tatya. No one could help being pleasant to Tatya. The
Austrian had been for a moment friendly because of her. At heart he was
a hateful fellow. All Austrians were hateful. They all hated the Tsar
and the Fatherland and they all hated him, Anton, because he was a
Russian.

There must be some Austrians lying in this cornfield now, wounded as he
was wounded. But he could see no one. Flat on his back, he could see
only the stars which were thick now against the sky. And he began to
think that this was a cruel thing—that a man should be alone when he was
dying. Even when a chap was just ill, he wanted someone to take care of
him. Once when Anton had been ill of a fever he had been just like a
baby, so weak and helpless. He had cried then because the milk that
Sasha had brought him had been too hot for his tongue and had burned
him. It was silly for a big man to cry, but that was the way you became
when you were sick—weak and silly. He had never in his life cried when
he was well. When men were well they were never silly.

Women—women were different! Five times had Sasha been so ill that it was
terrible—four times for the children that were living and once for the
little one that had died. Sasha had almost died too that time. She had
been so white and so hopeless looking for weeks after! But in all the
times she was ill she had not complained as much as he had, that one
month that he was sick with the fever. That must be because women were
used to pain. The good God had so ordained it. For every life that they
brought into the world they had to suffer, not only at the time, but for
months before and then for years afterward.

They were strange creatures, were women. If a child became ill or died,
its mother suffered again, just as the day she had borne him. At least
so Sasha had suffered when the baby had died—and other women that he had
seen in the village.

Birth was a strange thing now! He had never really thought of it before,
but wasn’t it a strange thing that each time a person was born into the
world, there should be pain and the long months of waiting. Then in one
second an Austrian shell could blow away the body that some woman had
waited for and had carried in her own body. In one second—why, so he had
been waited for—he, Anton Tarasovitch. Now wasn’t that wonderful!—and he
had never until this minute really thought of it. He, Anton Tarasovitch,
had been carried in the body of his mother and had been born in pain and
in rejoicing. Why, it was like a miracle! And he had thought so lightly
of it, had just taken it for granted that he should be born and that she
should love him.

He would like to make it up to her in some way now. But it was too late.
She had been dead for very many years now and he also was dying. Well,
he could tell her about it when he saw her with the saints in Heaven.

Heaven! He would go there, of course, because he had always, since a
boy, been obedient and had done just what the priests had told him. He
ought to think now about Heaven. But somehow he did not care to think
about it, and the strange part was that it did not trouble him that he
did not care. Even if he woke tomorrow in Heaven, he would not be the
same Anton. He might live forever, but that wouldn’t be the same thing
as waking up in the morning with Sasha at his side. He tried to think
what “forever” meant, and he fetched up against the same black wall that
he had when he had tried to think of a world without Anton Tarasovitch
to know himself in it. Forever! ever! ever! No stopping! On and on! But
that would be horrible. No! no! he couldn’t bear that. One could do
nothing, nothing, to get out of it. Even if one could be blown to pieces
with a gun, say a thousand years from now, in Heaven, one’s soul would
gather itself together again and go on and on, forever and forever.

No, he mustn’t think about it. If he thought about it any more, he would
lift his hands and strangle himself, so as to be able to stop thinking
about it. Now he would think about Sasha. When he thought about her, he
could feel her right next to him. He couldn’t see her face exactly, nor
could he see her standing there. And yet it was as if she really _were_
there, and he _could_ see her. That was the way it was when you loved a
person. She was, as it were, in you, or at least right next to you, and
yet she was separate from you, too.

He had liked life with Sasha. He didn’t know until now how much he had
liked it. True, it was a hard life they had lived together. One was on
the go every minute—in bad weather when the frost stung and to walk even
a mile became an agony; and in good weather one was constantly on the
go, when it might perhaps have been pleasant to sit under the trees and
play with the children. But life was good, for all that. Of course, if
they could have saved money—only a little money—it would have been
better. But the little money they could save had had to go for the
taxes. The taxes were for the Fatherland, the priest had told him. The
taxes were paid so that when the need came, Anton would be able to die
for his country. But there was something confusing about that. Life
would be better if it were not for the taxes, and the taxes were paid so
that he might—no, that was bewildering. With the fire in one’s side and
in one’s brain, how could one think clearly about so difficult a matter?
Besides, there were many matters of that sort that he, Anton
Tarasovitch, was not clever enough to think about. One left such things
to the priests, who were good men, and to the clever men at the
universities.

The stars were sometimes a long way off now and sometimes very near to
him. But neither near nor far away did they seem to care about him. They
were the only things he could see in the world and they did not seem to
care about him. Undoubtedly they had seen many men dying. He knew about
the stars! A young teacher who had come to the village when he was a boy
had talked about them and Anton had never forgotten.

The young teacher had not stayed long in the village. He was
“dangerous,” they said, and Anton heard afterwards that he had gone to
America. It gave one many thoughts to listen to the teacher. He had said
that the stars were worlds, just like our own earth—the earth that Anton
knew the good Christ had come down to save. Anton, who was just a boy,
had wanted to ask him if Christ had had to save all these worlds that
were stars. But that was only one of the many confusing thoughts one had
in listening to the young teacher. One felt strange in listening to him,
as if the world weren’t solid at all, but were flowing like a river. * *
*

Anton felt very sorry for himself, lying there under the stars that did
not care for him. He began to cry—silly, weak tears that tasted of salt
as they touched his mouth. It was only at times that he knew that he was
crying. At other times the soul of him entirely left his body and went
shooting up and up, to be recaptured only with a struggle.

The two of them—the burning body and the light soul—would have held
together better, he knew, if someone could grip his hand tightly. At
least that was the way they had done in the fever. When Sasha had
gripped his hand, as if by a miracle he had been restored for a moment
to a complete man, and was no longer two pieces—a body below and a soul
that went fluttering above it.

If only he could touch someone’s hand now—anyone’s hand—the hand of a
human being! To be all alone with the cruel, flickering stars up above,
that was no way to die—snuffed out into the darkness. That was no way
for any man to go, even though he _were_ just a peasant. But Anton knew
himself important now, almost as important as a general. He knew himself
important, with a strange, tremendous importance. He was as important as
almost anyone in the world, and he was dying alone in the darkness.

Then he remembered that there must be other men in the cornfield. He had
thought of that before, and afterwards he had forgotten. If there were
other men here—even one other man, an enemy—he would find that comrade
and they would die together.

Slowly, painfully, inch by inch he dragged himself. The stalks were like
an impenetrable thicket. They entangled him as snares or a forest of
swords set about him. He dragged himself on his palms, inch by inch,
butting away the cornstalks.

An Austrian was lying on his back, gazing upward. He was dead now, but
Anton did not know it. There was a wound in his neck, and the flies had
begun to gather.

Anton gave a sob as he saw the Austrian. One more effort and he would be
near enough to touch him. Perhaps the Austrian would grip his
hand—hard—as Sasha had gripped it.

The hand of the Austrian did not grip hard when Anton touched it. It
fluttered a little, however—Anton was sure of that. So Anton covered the
hand with his own, and with his own hand gripped hard, as Sasha had
gripped the hand of Anton.

And so died Anton Tarasovitch, looking up at the stars.


   Art as it appears without the artist, i. e., as a body, an
   organization (the Prussian Officers’ Corps, the Order of the
   Jesuits). To what extent is the artist merely a preliminary
   stage? The world regarded as a self-generating work of
   art.—_Nietzsche._



                             Rupert Brooke


                              (_A Memory_)

                          ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE

   One night—the last we were to have of you—
   High up above the city’s giant roar
   We sat around you on the generous floor—
   Since chairs were lame or stony or too few—
   And as you read, and the low music grew
   In exquisite tendrils twining the heart’s core,
   All the conjecture we had felt before
   Flashed into torch-flame, and at last we knew.

   And Maurice, who in silence long has hidden
   A voice like yours, became a wreck of joy
   To inarticulate ecstasies beguiled.
   And you, as from some secret world now bidden
   To make return, stared up, and like a boy
   Blushed suddenly, and looked at us, and smiled.

                 [Illustration: RUPERT BROOKE, MCMXIV]



                       To a West Indian Alligator


                    (_Estimated age, 1957 years_)[2]

                            EUNICE TIETJENS

   Greetings, my brother, strange and uncouth beast,
       Flat-bellied, wrinkled, broad of nose!
   You are not beautiful—and yet at least
       Contentment spreads your scaley toes.

   The keeper thwacks you and you grunt at me,
       Two hundred pounds of sleepy spleen.
   He tells me that your cranial cavity
       Will just contain a lima bean.

   How seems it, brother, you who are so old,
       To lie and squint with curtained eye
   At these ephemera, born in the cold,
       These human things so soon to die?

   You were scarce grown, a paltry eighty years,
       Too young to think of breeding yet,
   When Christ the Nazarene loosed the salt tears
       Which on man’s cheeks today are wet.

   Mohammed rose and died—you churned the mud
       And watched your female laying eggs.
   Columbus passed you—with an oozy thud
       You scrambled sunward on your legs.

   So now you doze at ease for all to view
       And bat a sleepy lid at me,
   You eat a little every year or two
       And count time in eternity.

   So, brother, which is wiser of us twain
       When words are said and meals are past?
   I think, and pass—you sleep, yet you remain,
       And where shall be the end at last?

   [2] _I cannot vouch for the science of this. It is “Alligator
   Joe’s” estimate._



                          Villon’s Epitaph[3]


                             WITTER BYNNER

   I who have lived and have not thought
   But gone with nature as I ought,
     Letting good things occur,
   And now amazed and cannot see
   Why death should care so much for me.
     I never cared for her.



                          Scarron’s Epitaph[3]


                             WITTER BYNNER

   He who now lies here asleep
   None would envy, few would weep:
   A man whom death had mortified
   A thousand times before he died.

   Peaceful be the step you take,
   You who pass him—lest he wake.
   For his first good night is due.
   Let poor Scarron sleep it through.

   [3] From the French of François Villon.



                      Editorials and Announcements


                              _Our Credo_

I have lost patience: people are still asking “What does THE LITTLE
REVIEW stand for?” Since we have been so obscure—or is it that people
have been so dull?—I shall try to answer all these plaintive queries in
a sentence. May it be sufficient: I cannot “explain” every day why the
sunrise seems worth while or, as Mr. Hecht would say, why the brook
rises from the rocks.

THE LITTLE REVIEW is a magazine that believes in Life for Art’s sake, in
the Individual rather than in Incomplete people, in an age of
Imagination rather than of Reasonableness; a magazine that believes in
Ideas even if they are not Ultimate Conclusions, and values its Ideals
so greatly as to live them; a magazine interested in Past, Present, and
Future, but particularly in the New Hellenism; a magazine written for
Intelligent people who can Feel; whose philosophy is Applied Anarchism,
whose policy is a Will to Splendor of Life, and whose function is—to
express itself.


                       _Mr. Comstock’s Dismissal_

This great blessing comes sooner than we could have expected, and yet,
as _The Chicago Tribune_ remarks, it is belated by about forty years.
Mr. Comstock has been Post Office Inspector all that time. I remember a
few years ago in New York hearing an interesting woman send a group of
people into paroxysms by the passionate childish seriousness with which
she said, “I wish Anthony Comstock would die!” Now that the government
has accomplished this desideratum, it is almost time for it to be
congratulated. I wonder how long it will be before this same government
can “see its way clear” to suppressing the agent provocateur and letting
his victims go free, or—well, never mind: it is beyond hoping.


                             “_Succession_”

When one of my friends fails to like Ethel Sidgwick’s _Succession_ I am
left in a predicament: on what basis are we henceforth to understand
each other? Succession goes so deep into music, into personality, into
life that has its foundations in art.... You can explain all the
subtleties of your most difficult emotions by referring to how Antoine
felt on page so and so. How does one live without Antoine?


                              _The Strike_

And God said: “Let there be!” And there was.

And when the modern god, the omnipotent Proletariat, says: “Let there
not be!” ...

You say the strike of the Chicago car men is of purely local
significance. You crack jokes about the pleasure of walking and about
the adventure of jitney-rides. You are calm and complacent, you blind
and deaf men and women dancing on a dormant volcano.

You are right. Your complacency is justified. Why fear the
million-headed mule who has borne his yoke for centuries? He
grumbles?—Oh, it’s a trifle: just fill his flesh-pot, and he will take
up anew with bestial delight his eternal task of enriching the few at
the expense of his blood and marrow.

But fear the eruption of the volcano! For it will not remain dormant
forever. Have we not witnessed the spasmodic awakenings of the giant?
Recall the achievement of the Russian proletariat in 1905. Did it not
wrest concessions from the obstinate Czar by means of a passive
revolution? Recall the general strike in Belgium. Did it not cripple its
commerce and industry for months?

The strike of the Chicago car men is pregnant with potentialities. It is
a symptom of a refreshing storm. Those who produce everything and
possess nothing have slept long in ignorance of their power. But they
are slowly awakening. And when they become aware of the magic wand in
their hand, whose passive motion can stop the wheels of the universe....
Take heed, O merrymakers at Belshazzar’s feast. Behold the MENE, TEKEL,
PERES on the wall.

                                                                    K.


                          “_The Country Walk_”

A young Englishman by the name of Edward Storer—I am assuming that he is
young and that he is English—has protested effectively against the
condition which decrees that a piece of writing, a painting, a sculpture
has to be judged as a commodity _before_ it can be judged as a work of
art by issuing little four-page leaflets containing portions of his work
denied publication by the commercialism of the times. The first, which
is called _The Country Walk_, has some quite uninspired though rather
charming prose poems in it. _The Lark_, for instance:

   Out of the young grass and silence you arise, frail bird,
   spinning upwards to the sky. Faster beat the wings, and shriller
   is the voice, and soon you are lost in the high blue, so that
   scarcely can I hear your voice or see the maddened flutterings of
   your wings.

   Then suddenly all is silent, and softly you drop to earth again
   to rest your aching body against the good brown earth.


                         _The June-July Issue_

On account of being so late with our May number we have decided to
combine the June and July and thus come out promptly again on the first
of the month. Subscriptions will be extended accordingly.


                          _Edgar Lee Masters_

In the August issue there will be a new poem by Edgar Lee Masters,
author of _The Spoon River Anthology_, and also a photogravure portrait
of the poet which has just been taken by Eugene Hutchinson.



                             The Submarine


    (_Translated from the Italian of Luciano Folgore by Anne Simon_)

   It sinks. In the twilight of the water
   the conquered submarine
   falls straight to the bottom
   and seems like a black corpse
   thrown to the coral below,
   thrown to the tomb that devours
   with liquid joy
   the refuse and remains of the old world.
   The propellers, devourers of motion,
   buzz no more,
   the rudder has ceased turning,
   the prow no longer points its sharp beak,
   but the submarine extends itself
   on the viscid bed,
   and a multitude of unknown
   fish, coral and sea-nettles
   try to enter the closed apertures.

   And yet once you leaped in the sun
   like a sentinel of burnished steel
   shining in the distance,
   and then rapidly returned to the green gorge
   where the sun never reaches,
   but where you find
   the tremendous task
   that is always with you and that whispers courage
   in the void of your soul.
   And once with your agile metallic prow
   you agitated the green water
   all around your shining body,
   and you did not feel the torments
   of the winds nor the black
   clouds of the hurricane
   that remained like spiteful women
   in a corner of the horizon,
   with hair dishevelled and the eye eager
   to spy below, from the firmament,
   the lost, the shipwrecked, the unknown
   that have no pilot.

   Once from your sonorous sides,
   quietly, but vigilant and mad,
   the torpedo shot out,
   making its track in silence,
   and carrying
   within its thin body
   death, and the infinite
   power of dynamite.
   As you passed the sharks fled,
   as you passed the corals
   suspended their tenacious and clumsy work,
   and the fish with rapid movement
   swam away.
   You seemed like an enormous monster
   of a fantastic destiny
   and yet you are only a light submarine,
   a slender ship
   that the blow of a beam
   could sink, that a whirlpool could submerge
   in the abyss.

   I do not know your story,
   but I will sing your glory
   that is part of the desire
   of audacious men.
   Submarine, Destiny may have willed
   you to sink silently,
   and remain lost forever in the viscid bed of the sea-weed,
   (O submarine, able to challenge the unconsciousness of the seas
   and the impotence of the lighthouses,)
   but you are alive and strong;
   there is no death, but only an appearance
   of death that remains. Destiny
   newly moulds you
   in a long phantom
   and you are run, submarine,
   by the courage of men
   who, in the unfathomable silence of the water,
   are piloted
   by the will of the strong.

   New brothers will arise
   and pursue you
   because your shining back
   carries a banner, not tri-colored,
   nor French,
   but the only color
   that dazzles;
   the banner of the battle
   that amidst disasters combats
   with this ferocious mystery
   that is foolishly determined to shut us out
   from the doors of Nature.



                             Blaa-Blaa-Blaa


I am sick of words—spoken words—verbal refuse thrown off by the mental
hypochondriacs who imagine themselves suffering from thought and
afflicted with ideas.

I am sick of the artificial inanities of the drawingroom—the polite
poppycock, the meaningless, emotionless enthusiasms. I often have
entered a room where male and female husks sat, their faces wreathed in
empty grimaces—animated masks discharging automatic phrases—and wished
to God I was dumb and could be forgiven for silence. Listening is not so
bad because one doesn’t have to listen.

I am sick of the salon-like groups who gather for the purpose of
thinking aloud and then forget to think and make up for it in noises.
Monotonous varieties, dropping pop-bottle gems from their lips, each
individual amusing and delighting himself beyond all understanding with
his sterile loquaciousness. Here in the salon groups, the discursive
congregations which come together in all manner of odd places and all
manner of regular places, garrulity approaches torture. Here the
professional discourser flops and waddles about in his own Utopia. He
doesn’t crave understanding but attention. As for truth, as for taking
the pains to express his innermost reactions to a subject, this is
impossible. The discourser doesn’t know what he thinks, doesn’t know
what the truth is until he starts discoursing. And then he discourses
himself into a state of mind. I have heard him discourse himself into
the most startling convictions; into matrimony and out of it into
religion and out of it, into and out of every variety of
damn-foolishness imaginable.

Persons who use written words instead of spoken words as the parents of
their thought suffer from the same hypnosis. But in writing this is
commendable. It is commendable for a writer to be insincere if he can be
more logical and enlightening as a result. The result may be _De
Profundis_ or _Alice in Wonderland_. It is my notion that men are
sincere only in their appetites. A man craves food and woman and other
stimulants with unquestionable sincerity. But in the realm of thought I
have arrived at the conclusion that sincerity is an inspired and not
inspiring condition of the mind.

I am sick of the blaa-blaaing hordes, from the smirking “supes” of the
let’s-adjourn-to-the-other-room species to the simpering cacophonists of
the Schöngeist nobility.

I am sick of the open mouths, the trailing sentences dying from
weakness, the painstaking use of wrong words and the painstaking use of
correct words; of the stagnated humor of deodorous sallies.

I am sick of the Argumentatives, people with an irritating command of
phrases, who balance paradoxes on their noses and talk backwards or
upside down with equal lucidity; who must be contradicted or they
suffer; who rumble bizarrely from the depths of every philosophical
sub-cellar they can ferret out in order to be startling; who shriek and
howl and wail and protest and—the Devil take them—tell the truth and
make it impossible to believe. Their only reason for talking is to
impress. They are as noisy as cannon and as effective as firecrackers.

I am sick of the delicate, searching souls who prick themselves with
their own words, who operate on fly specks, who grope and search and
struggle for fine and truthful things, who deal in verbal shadings
intelligible only to themselves—and then not for what they said but for
what they meant to say or desired to say or wouldn’t say for the world.

I am sick of their kinsmen, of the surgical tongues who dissect, who
vivisect and auto-sect.

I am sick most of all of my own talk. But I continue to talk. I talk out
of boredom and manage only to increase it. I talk out of vanity and
spread disillusionment. I talk out of love and have to apologize. A
victim of habit, I continue speaking, although I know the spoken word is
the true medium of misunderstanding. Words, words, they keep tumbling
out of my mouth and blowing away like dust before the wind. A pock on
them.

There have been revolutions in literature, authors have changed the size
and construction of the novel, publishers have changed the color of
their bindings, poets have changed the form of their poetry and the
essence of its style, thinkers even have altered slightly the trend of
their thought. Music, painting, decorating, carving—everything changes
with time except talk, which only increases. What a staggering
illustration of the theory that it is only the weak things which
survive. For talk is the commonest of weaknesses. Blaa, blaa, blaa—why
not a revolution? What ails the radicals? Do they not realize that the
time is ripe? They have changed the moral forms, the literary forms, why
not the spoken forms? Why not a substitution of expressive grunts and
whoops and growls and chuckles and groans and gurgles and whees and
wows? Or is this matter one not for the radical but for

                                                      “The Scavenger.”



                           The Nine!—Exhibit!


Sometime in the winter a rumor got about that nine artists of Chicago
were to form themselves into a group and hold an independent exhibition.

At once the other artists were divided into two factions, those who
jeered and those who applauded, those who said unpleasant things and
those who had the enduring hope that at last something better was to be
done in our exhibitions.

The Great Nine, as the group began to be called—whether by themselves or
by others, it matters not: the phrase is a handicap—consists of Frederic
C. Bartlett, William Penhallow Henderson, Lawton Parker, Karl Albert
Buehr, Louis Betts, Charles Francis Browne, Ralph Clarkson, Wilson
Irvine, and Oliver Dennett Grover. They were too generous in their
number. Five, and there would have been no comment; nine, and there was
aroused indignation, criticism, and a “show us” spirit which should have
put the Nine on their mettle and made them give a stunning and silencing
show.

On May thirteenth, after one postponement when expectation was tense,
the exhibition opened. What had we? A new setting and old stuff!

One of the East Galleries had been chosen. William P. Henderson designed
and executed the room. He made a piece of work having faults but being
the best thing about the exhibition, a contribution in itself. The walls
with their subtle color, divided into spaces by pilasters of deep
wistaria, red, and gold, rising on slender stems and blossoming out
above; the screen of red at one end with the Zettler torso against
it—they complimented themselves upon using this; the beautiful vases;
and the green of the trees made a room too obtrusive for pictures, or
one in which pictures are intrusive.

Were the setting less self-sufficient, still there are many things to be
said. The sophisticated, almost exotic, color of the walls, emphasizing
in the work of some all that is crude and materialistic in execution or
interpretation, makes their work appear to less advantage than would the
usual bleak gallery. And why so many pictures? Why not one picture in
each space and that the best each artist could offer? How much more
satisfactory the room would then be. Anyone who follows exhibitions will
agree that each exhibitor has shown better work at other times.

Frederic Bartlett’s group is in many ways the best, and holds its own in
the room. Surpassingly beautiful in color are Mr. Henderson’s things.
The little nude is exquisite, but he should not easily be forgiven his
portrait of Florence Bradley, even if it is not meant as a character
study. However, he is one of the artists who can do more than put paint
on canvas. He can make Art in many ways, as men did in the “high white
days” of art.

The artists themselves have seen from this first effort wherein they
have failed. This grouping must have been a very arbitrary one. Let us
hope that a group founded on mutual endeavor and on equal ability will
continue the effort to make our exhibitions comparable in some degree
with the best European efforts.

Chicago has now so many artists that it is impossible for them all to be
gathered into the old Chicago Society. There should be many societies.
Competition and co-operation among them would make the art life here
less anemic and super-sensitive and bigoted.

                                                                    R.



                            Book Discussion


                      THE APOTHEOSIS OF PETTINESS

       _One Man, by Robert Steele. New York: Mitchell Kennerley._

“There is nothing which reflects the smugness of a people so much as the
manner and temperament of its vice. And the temperament of American vice
is more distinctly and monotonously bourgeois than any of its
virtues”—from Ben Hecht’s “Phosphorescent Gleams” in the May LITTLE
REVIEW. I have pondered over this maxim while reading Mr. Steele’s novel
which is hailed by the critics as “the essence of America.” The hero is
essentially American, horribly so. If the “average” type of any nation
is repulsive, the American “Average” is a thousandfold more so. For he
is more petty than vicious. The “one man” gives a confession of his
life, full of puny deeds, from committing petty larceny to “picking up”
a girl in the street and taking her to a “swell” hotel. The nauseating
details have the flavor of the adventure stories which you may hear at a
gathering of travelling salesmen in a provincial hotel lobby. What makes
the boring Odyssey intolerably loathsome is its note of syrupy Christian
penitence which the hero expresses after each penny-crime by falling on
his knees and praying to his convenient god for forgiveness.

The book has been hailed as a masterpiece. It is as far from a
masterpiece as a lewd “photo” is from art. The facts may be true, even
autobiographical, as some critics presume; the confessions will furnish
good material for Billy Sunday and his lesser brethren. But photography,
even if it be pornography, is not art. Let me quote the ever-new Edgar
Poe: “Art is the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature
through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of
what _is_ in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of ‘Artist.’ ...
We can, at any time, double the true beauty of an actual landscape by
half closing our eyes as we look at it. The naked Senses sometimes see
too little—but then _always_ they see too much.” I blush at the
necessity of digging up ancient truths, but, my dear friends, read the
reviews of Mr. Steele’s novel and you will admit with me the crying need
of teaching the American critics the A-B-C of art.


                    ICY OLYMPUS AND THE BURNING BUSH

    _The Need for Art in Life, by I. B. Stoughton Holborn. New York:
                            G. Albert Shaw._

     _The Spirit of Japanese Art, by Yone Noguchi. New York: E. P.
                          Dutton and Company._

The complete man must consist of three essential fundamentals—the
Artistic, the Intellectual, the Moral (mark the initials: aim!); man’s
aim should be the full expression of his tripartite nature; he must not
leave out any of the three sides, nor develop any one at the expense of
the rest. Unfortunately our age has achieved only two-thirds of the
diagram, the I and the M, remaining wretchedly poor in the A part. When
we look back we find that in the Renaissance period the A and I were
overdeveloped, with the total lack of the M side. The Middle Ages
present the presence of A and M and the absence of I. It is the Greek
ideal we must look for in our endeavor for the complete expression of
man. The Greek gentleman, the καλος κάγαθος, the reserved, the
moderately good, the not excessively just, the harmonious, the
symmetrical—he shall be our standard, our criterion for the completeness
of being. Is not Mr. Holborn clever and Olympian and icy-cold?

Now listen:

   The evening had already passed when I returned home with that
   hanging of Koyetsu’s chirography under my arm. “Put all the
   gaslights out! Do you hear me? All the gaslights out! And light
   all the candles you have!” I cried. The little hanging was
   properly hanged at the “togonoma” when the candles were lighted,
   whose world-old soft flame (wasn’t it singing the old song of
   world-wearied heart?) allured my mind back, perhaps, to Koyetsu’s
   age of four hundred years ago—to imagine myself to be a waif of
   greyness like a famous tea-master, Rikiu or Enshu or, again,
   Koyetsu, burying me in a little Abode of Fancy with a boiling
   tea-kettle; through that smoke of candles hurrying like our
   ephemeral lives, the characters of Koyetsu’s writing loomed with
   the haunting charm of a ghost.

It is painful for me to stop quoting the religious ravings of dear
Noguchi. And all this pathos is about a bit of old Japanese writing! I
can see the indignant Mr. Holborn’s moderate condemnation of the
Oriental’s unreserved passion, canting the cold-beautiful Μηδὲν ἄγαν
(nothing in excess). But, O forgive me, Olympian gods, I must come back
to the Burning Bush where Yone Noguchi worships Hashimoro, Hiroshige,
Kyosai, Tsukioka, Utamaro, and other such rhythmical names; I am aware
of the abyss of excess that yawns before me, but the exotic wine is so
luring, so intoxicating, the call of the Orient is so irresistible—I
plunge:

   I will lay me down whenever I want to beautifully admire Utamaro
   and spend half an hour with his lady (“Today I am with her in
   silence of twilight eve, and am afraid she may vanish into the
   mist”), in the room darkened by the candle-light (it is the
   candle-light that darkens rather than lights); every book or
   picture of Western origin (perhaps except a few reprints from
   Rossetti or Whistler, which would not break the atmosphere
   altogether) should be put aside. How can you place together in
   the same room Utamaro’s women, for instance, with Millet’s
   pictures or Carpenter’s _Towards Democracy_? The atmosphere I
   want to create should be most impersonal, not touched or scarred
   by the sharpness of modern individualism or personality, but
   eternally soft and grey; under the soft grey atmosphere you would
   expect to see the sudden swift emotion of love, pain or joy of
   life, that may come any moment or may not come at all.

I recall an evening at “The Vagabonds,” where some ultra-modern
paintings were exhibited and bravely discussed. An idiotic friend of
mine suggested that the Vagabonds pass an evening in contemplating the
canvasses in absolute silence. The obliging chairman, who is a fair
parliamentarian, had the suggestion voted upon with the result of one
vote in favor of it. I recall that evening in connection with Noguchi’s
lines about Koyetsu:

   What need there be but prayer and silence? There is nothing more
   petty, even vulgar, in the grey world of art and poetry, than to
   have a too-close attachment to life and physical surroundings; if
   our Orientalism may not tell you anything much, I think it will
   teach you at least to soar out of your trivialism.

I refuse to say any more about the book, for I am tempted to quote him
all the way through. If you wish to forget yourself and your
environment, to melt away in the unreal atmosphere of Japanese
prints—read Yone Noguchi’s little book.

                                                                    K.


                           THE SLAV IN CONRAD

       _Victory, by Joseph Conrad. New York: Doubleday, Page and
                               Company._

The Slavs are not adventurous people in the Western sense of the word;
for the most part an inland race spread over the great monotonous Plain,
they are inclined for melancholy introspective searchings and spiritual
struggles rather than for actual physical adventures. Their writers need
not create for their heroes an atmosphere of dizzying stunts and
elemental cataclysms; they find sufficient dramatic “plot” in the soul
experiences of the restless yearning men and women who dwell not on a
South Sea island but in ordinary cities and villages, fighting their
human fights, wrestling with God and man, gaining their ephemeral
victories, but more often suffering defeats. Yet, despite their lack of
adventurousness, the stories of the Russian and Polish writers, from
Dostoevsky to Kuprin and from Orzezsko to Zeromsky, have seldom caused a
yawn in their reader.

The checkered life of Conrad has placed a distinct stamp upon his works,
distinct from both the writers of his race and from the Western writers.
We observe a dualism in his art, an eternal collision between fact and
fiction, between realism and symbolism. His inborn Slavic mysticism is
weighed down by the ballast of his rich experiences, and he continually
wavers between the Scylla of lyric melancholy and the Charybdis of
picturesque plot, preserving the equilibrium at times more and at times
less skilfully. The reader thus finds in Conrad that which he is after.
For my part, I am rather distracted by the over-complex plot of
_Victory_; I should much prefer to meet Heyst and Lena in less dizzy
surroundings, for then the interesting psychology of the quaint lovers
would appear accentuated, like the flame of a candle, and would not be
blurred by a pyrotechnic mass of startling coincidences and marvellous
adventures. The atmosphere of Doom that breathes throughout the story is
reduced in the end to a sensational Eugène Sue-like climax—a heap of
dead bodies.

                                                                    K.


                             SICK IDEALISM

   _Erdgeist (Earth-Spirit): A Tragedy in Four Acts; Pandora’s Box, by
          Frank Wedekind. New York: Albert and Charles Boni._

Poor, foolish Frank Wedekind. Hapless Idealist. Luckless dreamer. Have
you read _Der Erdgeist_ and _Pandora’s Box_? He wrote them—this
enfevered fancier. In two kindred flashes of madness he illuminated
several hundred sheets of paper and out of them—out of their blood-shot
words and illegitimate truths—a new figure is born for the bookshelf.
Not an old figure in new binding and fresh rouge. Not a Lescaut or a
Thaïs or a Nana. This mocking idealist of virtue removes indeed the
eighth veil from Salome. He hurls into the midst of the twittering
parlor thinkers and sex chatterers a most disturbing answer to the
eternal question, “What is woman?” It didn’t disturb me because I don’t
believe it. And anyway, I don’t mean that kind of disturbance. I mean,
virtuous reader, it is impossible to consume Wedekind without blushing.
If you were disappointed in Shakespeare and Balzac and Casanova and
Jacques Tournebrouche and could find nothing to blush at in them, do not
despair. Here is a fellow, this Wedekind, who will daub a real blush out
of a rouge pot, a miserable fellow whom you can condemn and ostracize
and, having relegated him to his proper place, enjoy thoroughly or
secretly or not at all.

It was Wedekind who first made people blush by a tasteless dissertation
on the ignorant smugness recognized by society as the proper state for a
young woman’s mind. He called it _Spring’s Awakening_. It was chiefly
instrumental in awakening theatrical writers and managers. They spread
the blush at $2 a head and waxed fat. But how did they spread the blush?
Did they talk like Wedekind did? Did the mawkish plagiarist Cosmo
Hamilton talk like Wedekind—tastelessly, vilely, brutally,
and—horrors!—indelicately? Not he. Mr. Hamilton and the other
get-rich-quick propagandists wouldn’t talk that way for the world. They
are nice gentlemen. Not for them the idealist’s leer. Rather the
bathroom wink. They will reveal a delicious girl in her delicious
boudoir wearing a delicious nightie. They will make her out a virtuous
girl, charmingly endowed but utterly stainless.

Having established this fact they roguishly introduce into her boudoir
an estimable young man and permit him to caress her dramatically. But
the whole proceeding is stainless. It is drolly suggestive of
unspeakable things—see box office receipts. But suggestiveness is
necessary to bring home to people the blindness of virtue and the
dangers that beset the underpaid young women who ignorantly make it its
own reward—(if that means anything). Anyway, when the audience leaves it
has been enlightened. Its taste has not been offended. Virtue has been
shown to be a dangerous thing—that is, uneducated virtue has. Everyone
agrees. And if not they disagree. In either case the discussion properly
conducted (under the auspices of the “Amalgamated Virgins of the 21st
and 22nd Wards”) is pleasing and improving. The press argues delicately
and in good taste about sex hygiene. A new physiology is placed in the
public schools containing information on the most effective way of
brushing the teeth of the young and preserving the hair of the old.

And last week Coroner Hoffman told me that it was impossible to estimate
how many girls were killed annually in Chicago by abortive operations.
He put the number in the hundreds. Hooray! Death is the wages of sin.

But all quibbling aside, what does this low fellow Wedekind whom I
started out by calling an idealist (I will prove it shortly) do? To
begin with, he talks about sex. Not about stockings and undergarments
and perfumed kisses, ankles, asterisks and anomalies. Everyone knows
that this kind of talk, particularly when produced in drama form, is in
the first place inexcusable, and in the second place unnecessary, and in
the third place vulgar. And in the fourth place, instead of making the
best of a bad job—that is, making his contributions a mental stimulus
for snickering roués and ladies sensitive of their status—he insists
upon being nasty without being covert. Is there anything more
unpardonable? Nobody can enjoy nastiness. The argument is an endless
one. It leads to nothing except blows or blushes.

As for the plays—I almost forgot I was reviewing them—Wedekind explodes
volcanically on the subject he treats, and blows the question mark out
of woman. He takes all the crimes a policeman ever heard of, rolls them
up in a package of soft warm flesh and labels it “Woman.” He cracks his
showman’s whip and calls attention to the texture of her skin and the
white meat of her body. And then he sends her forth to ruin, to sweep
like a polluted and wreck-strewn wave through life, breaking at last in
a dirty crest on a foreign shore and leaving a scum behind her. Are
these the worst things Wedekind could find to label woman—incest,
butchery, lecherous animalism, bloody business and abandonment? Who but
a sick idealist would pick a careless and care-free prostitute as a
flaming example of woman at her worst? And is the power to destroy the
most terrible power woman possesses?

Wedekind imagines that people idealize sex and hold it a beautiful
force. Poor Wedekind, where did he get such an idea? And then he
imagines that in reality sex passion is a smashing force that knocks
people into each other’s arms, tumbles their heavens, smears their
lives. He imagines that men and women love without thought, mate with
the irresponsibility of hyenas. And imagining all this Wedekind creates
a sort of droll fiend to prove it. Behold her—a creature to confound
saints and sinners, to tear the beauty out of men’s souls and dance with
muddied feet upon the finery of life. He dangles her before our eyes,
naked and glorious—the diseased siren of the ages. And he calls her
Lulu, the earth spirit.

He introduces her fresh and joyous and vibrating with tabooed emotions.
She is in love with her own beauty. Her body thrills her with its
whiteness and its movement. She already has felt its power. Were I in
these plays I would as soon think of kissing Lulu as biting a stick of
dynamite. But I am not an ideal conception. There are other men—Wedekind
digs them up from every corner of life—who fall at her feet and who
shoot each other and themselves for the sake of being contaminated by
her caresses. Queer men, idealists. They tumble about her, whining,
cursing, chanting, forswearing their Gods, their souls and their
vanities.

And she tumbles with them, from one precipice down to another, faithful
only to her nervous system. Her only virtue is a complete absence of the
quality. If only Wedekind had invested her with a single human moral
conviction—merely for the sake of completing her diabolically. If only
he had made it possible for her to sin against something. But she hasn’t
anything to sin against—not a conviction, not a moral. In this country
she would be tried for her murders and treasons and sent to an asylum
for incomplete people. What she does she does simply. When this hussy
kills the father who owned her in order to save herself from his threats
and then throws herself laughingly into the arms of the son, she does it
all without malice. It is all natural, spontaneous. When she rebukes her
own father for making love to her (she tells him he’s getting too old
for such tricks), when she murders, deceives and pollutes she hasn’t any
feeling of doing wrong, any reaction except one of satisfaction. If this
isn’t an ideal I’d like to know what is. If everybody was like she is
there would be no sorrow or suffering in the world. We would all be
simple animals dashing around, biting each other, drinking from each
other’s throats, feeling pain only when our nerves were touched and joy
only when our nerves were touched. Wedekind imagines that this state is
the true reflection of today. He exaggerates what according to his
experience may be a logical prejudice and hurls it brutally behind the
footlights and into the bookcase.

Lulu, bedraggled, walking the streets of London in the rain, looking for
prey, Lulu wheedling quarters out of ragged sensualists, hiding her
father and her lover and the woman who desires her while she
“entertains” her victims, Lulu spreading disease, and then Lulu running
wildly around the dirty garret in her chemise pursued and killed by a
red-eyed, nail-bitten Jack the Ripper—that is the end of woman. Poor
Wedekind. What an exaggerated opinion of virtue he must have,—an
idealist’s. There is but one more thing. It is Wedekind’s master stroke.

He introduces a note of unselfishness and poetry as a climax. Lulu lies
stabbed by the delighted and enthusiastic Ripper. And kneeling before
the picture of her in her hey-dey is the “Countess,” the woman who loved
her—a homo-sexualist—an irritating creature.

“I love you, you are the star in my heavens,” she cries purely. I don’t
remember whether the Ripper kills her or not. _What a mess!_

                                                                 B. H.



   _Rabindranath Tagore: A Biographical Study, by Ernest Rhys._ _New
                     York: The Macmillan Company._

Shrill Chicago and thousands of similar examples of Western civilization
have more to learn from a book of this sort than can be readily
explained. Taking Chicago as fairly representative of the swiftest
modernity, one must blush for the city of “I Will” whenever he picks up
Ernest Rhys’s keen and quiet study of the talked-about Hindu. The
blushes are for the vast herds whose only ventures upon new paths are to
trample and set back, whose only ideals center in or near the stomach.
In the white light of this book—reflected radiance from a
first-magnitude luminary—Chicago and her kind appear as blundering
heedless egotists who never listen. Their ears have not developed, their
eyes are turned to the ground. “I Will”—what? To grow strong,
high-minded, clean of heart, and wise of soul? Anything but this.

Tagore, by his very tolerance and avoidance of condemnation, seems
vehemently to remind the thinker of all this—by force of the law of
contrast. The clear-eyed Easterner even points out a scant virtue or two
in Western civilization, such as the value of mastering materials, which
the Westerner himself overlooks when in self-defense; and no blame is
placed on the feverish civilizees. Tagore moves in a state of peace
which is the very essence of activity, and has no part in the fanatics’
plan which begins with lassitude and ends in stagnation. He is a man of
action, forceful, definite, wasting no energy nor sparing the use of it.
Modern methods of doing things and “getting there” become mere feeble
noises by comparison. This is not the tragedy, that Westerners blunder
and fail,—the East has its failures,—but it lies in the fact that
America arrogantly chooses not to listen, not to see and learn. A few
scattered listeners must catch the harmonies intended for a whole
nation, the majority having been sophisticated to extinction. The herds
in Chicago and elsewhere will go on indefinitely in their own swaggering
way, blind and deaf, sure beyond correction that the chief desirability
lies in digestion, decoration, and diversion ... while Rabindranath
Tagore and the beautiful element he personifies are ever-present,
waiting within reach of all, working out the biggest things in the
world, and living the last word of true joy.

Ernest Rhys is very gentle and sparing in making comparisons. He leaves
this to his reader, and is mainly occupied with the re-creation of the
steady magnetic atmosphere which is a natural attribute of Tagore. The
paragraphs devoted to the boys’ school at Bolpur give one a feeling of
something lost, at least to those who thirsted through the schools of
the U. S. Rhys is successful in giving out an excellent idea of the
great man and his works.

                                                     HERMAN SCHUCHERT.


   Militarism is the German spirit.

   Militarism is the self-revelation of German heroism.

   Militarism is the heroic spirit raised to the spirit of war. It
   is Potsdam and Weimar in their highest combination. It is _Faust_
   and _Zarathustra_ and Beethoven’s score in the trenches.

   For even the _Eroica_ and the _Egmont_ Overture are nothing but
   the truest militarism. And just because all virtues which lend
   such a high value to militarism are revealed to the fullest
   extent in war, we are filled with militarism, regarding it as
   something holy—as the holiest thing on earth—_Werner Zombart_.



                            Have You Read——?


      (_In this column will be given each month a list of current
     magazine articles which, as an intelligent being, you will not
                            want to miss._)

The Imagist Number of _The Egoist_, May 1.

H. D. and Imagism, by May Sinclair. _The Egoist_, June 1.

Redemption and Dostoevsky, by Rebecca West. _The New Republic_, June 5.

Back of Billy Sunday, by John Reed. _The Metropolitan_, May.

The Old Woman’s Money, by James Stephens. _The Century_, May.

Quack Novels and Democracy, by Owen Wister. _The Atlantic_, June.



                            Can You Read——?


     (_In this column will be given each month a resumé of current
    cant which, as an intelligent being, you will go far to avoid._)

Fiction reviews by Llewellyn Jones in _The Chicago Evening Post_.

A typical literary judgment from _The Dial_: “But, in the main, his
wholesomely harsh utterances ought to be, and must be, in some degree,
tonic and bracing and curative.”

An editorial from _The New Republic_, a journal of opinion whose
function, we believe, is to circulate ideas:

   During the past ten months the German Ambassador at Washington
   has done nothing to promote a better understanding between his
   own government and nation and the American government and nation.
   He is consequently all the more to be congratulated upon his
   behavior at a moment of acute and dangerous contention between
   the United States and Germany. He has on his own initiative and
   perhaps at his own risk intervened on behalf of a possibly
   peaceful solution of the differences between the two governments.
   He has sought by means of a frank talk with President Wilson to
   break through the barrier of misunderstanding which the exchange
   of notes was building up between the two governments and to
   re-establish a genuine vehicle of communication. The conversation
   may not lead to agreement, but at the top of a peculiarly
   forbidding crisis it has at least made an agreement seem not
   impossible. Everybody who detests war, everybody who hopes that
   the friendship between the United States and Germany will not be
   involved in the wreckage of the hideous conflict, will be
   grateful to Count von Bernstorff for his enterprise.



                           The Reader Critic


_Mrs. Jean Cowdrey Norton, Hempstead, Long Island_:

Since coming in contact with THE LITTLE REVIEW last December, I have
more than enjoyed each issue with your own impulsive, warm-hearted,
dauntless personality coming through its pages; and it is for that
reason I do not hesitate to ask you for an explanation of a sentence
that you wrote in the April number, which led me to subscribe for that
horrible output, viz., _The Masses_. You pronounced it indispensable to
intelligent living. On that I sent in a subscription, and whereas I am
not so awfully stupid I cannot understand how you, who are evidently an
artist with high ideals, could possibly have such a magazine on your
desk. The cartoons are so untrue, so damnably vulgar,—which good art
never is,—the insistent harping on the shadows of life, the exaggerated
outlook which tinges the whole paper—quite as one-sided on its side as
other papers are on theirs; all of which I know must be in complete
contradiction to your self. It fills me with astonishment. We
acknowledge with our ever-increasing complex civilization that we must
more than ever perhaps help each other; but I don’t just understand
which class this perfectly rotten sheet is intended to reach. If it’s
the so-called down trodden, they are apt to have so much unhappiness any
way I should say a good brace up does more good than harping on
injustice in general; as for the class that “does not think,” its
inartistic drawings alone would be enough to queer it. When I am down
and out—I happen to be a working woman too—I most decidedly _do not_
want to be made more down and out by more woes, that often spring from
lack of intelligence, that both rich and poor suffer alike from. You
will see I believe in the responsibility of the individual, that you
Socialists rather avoid. I do not expect you to answer this letter, but
I shall look in THE LITTLE REVIEW for a stray line that will give me
some idea of your outlook.

     [I have so much to say in answer to this letter, and so little
   time to say it that I have asked someone who shares my view to do
     it for me. Mr. Davis says it much better than I could, anyhow.
   And I must add that I am not a Socialist. I am an Anarchist—which
      means, an Individualist; which means everything that people
                 think it doesn’t mean.—_The Editor._]

_F. Guy Davis, Chicago_:

I will try to indicate very briefly why I think so much of _The Masses_.
The group that is getting it out are real students who know the crowd
with all its hope and despair, much better than the crowd knows itself.
They are interpreting the crowd. The mass would never like _The Masses_.
It is too true. It is not got up for them. _The Cosmopolitan_ is the
ideal of the mass. _The Masses_ is for the few brave spirits who want to
know life as it is, the shadows as well as the flights up into the
sunshine. _The Masses_ to my mind has as broad a range of feeling
reflected in its pages as any magazine I know of. Humor, tragedy, light,
shade, drama, color, yes, and mud too, as you say. But isn’t mud a part
of life? In some respects mud is the condition of life. The great need
of the sensitive mind of today is contact with the vital life-giving
things and ideas which come from the earth. The life of such a mind is
like the life of a plant. Its roots must go down beneath the surface or
it will die. _The Masses_ to my mind is the spirit of the earth put into
magazine form, and to read it understandingly is to put the roots of the
soul down into the earth where they should be if a healthy growth is
desired. One could get too much of that contact of course, but that is
another matter.


                      _FREE POETS v. FREE VERSE._

    [As Mr. Carter suggests in the following letter, reprinted from
   _The Egoist_, I hope THE LITTLE REVIEW agree with Mr. Aldington’s
     point of view. I hope the latter may be induced to answer Mr.
           Carter at length in the same issue.—_The Editor._]

_To the Editor, The Egoist_

Madam,—I notice that in his contribution to the Imagist number of _The
Egoist_ Mr. Harold Monro, writing on the history of the Imagist
movement, states that the movement owes its origin to the large
discovery of “Poetry as _an_ art” [my italics]. He then proceeds to
point out that the Imagist verse fails as poetry not because the writers
love poetry less, but because they love expression more. Being what it
is it would be no better if Tennyson had written it, and no worse if it
proved to be by, say, Mr. Rudyard Kipling. Indeed, it is not poetry any
more than little Congreve’s tiresome stream of depreciation is comedy,
despite what certain hopeless apprentice play critics assert to the
contrary. Poetry, I suppose Mr. Monro would say, is not expression but
the thing expressed. All this is good and true. But Mr. Monro fails to
make one thing quite clear. The Imagists have been mistaken in their
very conception of poetry which lives alone by the power to see it as
Art and not as “_an art_.” I am convinced that some at least of the
Imagists are not without the secret of this power, and if they will be
guided by the vision they gain thereby, to the extent of forgetting
their literary erudition, it will transform their conception of poetry.
The strict literature at which they aim is not proper poetry. In fact,
literary technicians do not, as a rule, write poetry for the simple
reason that even if they dream the poet’s dream of reality they at once
proceed to smother it under literary form. We must look to those rich in
poetical experience, and free to express it, for the true expression of
poetry. In plain words, “Poetry as _an_ art” (that is, as expression or
form) is not the same as Poetry as Art (that is, the thing expressed).
The distinction is so big and vital and so necessary to be maintained at
this moment, that I propose to consider it in an article in THE LITTLE
REVIEW. I hope to prove that what poetry needs nowadays is free poets,
not free verse.

                                                        HUNTLY CARTER.

    [As the nearest available Imagist, perhaps I may be permitted to
   comment (without prejudice to the other Imagists) on Mr. Carter’s
     letter. I am not quite sure that I know what Mr. Carter means,
       but I think he means that it is useless for a man to study
   classic quantity and mediaeval rhyme and modern free verse, if he
    has no particular impulse or mood to make those studies valuable
      as a means of expression. If that is what Mr. Carter means I
    agree with him. I will also agree that it is useless to try and
   teach a dumb man to lecture or a lame man to break the hundred yards
   record. If a man is to lecture, if he is to be an athlete, we take
     for granted that in the first case he has ideas and a certain
    eloquence, and in the second a good physique and an aptitude for
   sprinting. Mr. Carter would be a rotten trainer if he didn’t make
     his man diet, take cold baths and long walks and an occasional
     sprint; he ought even to make him do a little boxing. I feel,
     somehow, that Mr. Carter never went in for violent exercise or
      that he relied upon his “Soul-Flow” or “Art-Ebb” to get him
                                through.

   Now poetry is not so very unlike athletics. You may have no aptitude
    for it, and then all the training in the world won’t get you in
    first; you may shape very well, but if you don’t train you will
   be an “also ran.” I believe in having an aptitude and in training
   it; Mr. Carter believes in having an aptitude and not training it.

    I object to Mr. Carter informing us of the existence of our “of
    courses.” We take for granted that a man is sincere, that he has
   lots of impulses and that he is “free.” All that is the stuff out
   of which poetry is made. The making of it, the “training” is what
     we are immediately interested in. We take for granted that we
    have the essentials of poetry in us or we should not attempt to
        write it. We are now after clarity of form, precision of
   expression. Mr. Carter, like the majority of our fellow citizens,
   does not value these things; we find them present in every work of
     art which is beautiful and permanently interesting; hence our
     anxiety to attain by practice that clarity and that precision
                    which practice alone can give.]

                                                    RICHARD ALDINGTON.


   If only every Celt will refuse to fight for anything but the
   freedom of his own country, the English will soon destroy
   themselves altogether, and we shall inherit their language, the
   only worthy thing they have, and which their newspapers have not
   yet succeeded in debauching and degrading beyond repair. There
   are still universities in England. However, they have made it a
   crime in England to write good English—for style itself is a form
   of truth, being beauty; and truth and beauty are as welcome in
   England as detectives in a thieves’ kitchen.—Aleister Crowley in
   _The International_.



                               THE DRAMA


              for May Contained This Interesting Material

      THE CLASSICAL STAGE OF JAPAN Ernest Fenollosa’s Work on the
                 Japanese “Noh.” Edited by Ezra Pound.

             “Noh” Dramas (from the Fenollosa Manuscript).

      Sotoba Komachi.
      Kayoi Komachi.
      Suma Genji.
      Kumasaka.
      Shojo.
      Tamura.
      Tsunemasa.
      Kunasaka.

        THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF THE CENSORSHIP, by _Thomas H.
                               Dickinson_

          MAURICE MAETERLINCK by _Remy de Gourmont_ Authorized
                   translation by Richard Aldington.

        THE “BOOK OF THE PAGEANT,” AND ITS DEVELOPMENT by _Frank
                            Chouteau Brown_

             ON THE READING OF PLAYS by _Elizabeth R. Hunt_

      A PYRAMUS-AND-THISBE PLAY OF SHAKESPEARE’S TIME, with notes
                     by _Eleanor Prescott Hammond_

              THE PUBLISHED PLAY by _Archibald Henderson_

       THE THEATRE TODAY—AND TOMORROW, a review, by _Alice Corbin
                               Henderson_

        THE GERMAN STAGE AND ITS ORGANIZATION—Part III, Private
                 Theatres by _Frank E. Washburn Freund_

       ASPECTS OF MODERN DRAMA, a review, by _Lander MacClintock_

        THE JAPANESE PLAY OF THE CENTURIES by _Gertrude Emerson_

       A SELECTIVE LIST OF ESSAYS AND BOOKS ABOUT THE THEATRE AND
          OF PLAYS, published during the first quarter of 1915
                   compiled by _Frank Chouteau Brown_

   THE DRAMA for August will contain Augier’s _Mariage d’Olympe_,
   with a foreword by Eugene Brieux; an amusing account of his
   experiences with Parsee drama, by George Cecil; a paper on the
   _Evolution of the Actor_, by Arthur Pollock; a discussion of
   Frank Wedekind, by Frances Fay; a review of the work of the
   recent Drama League Convention; a plan for an autumn community
   festival; an outline of the nation-wide celebration of the
   Shakespeare tercentenary, and an article entitled
   _Depersonalizing the Instruments of the Drama_, by Huntly Carter.

                        _The Drama, a Quarterly_
                            _$3.00 per year_

                        _736 Marquette Building_
                               _Chicago_

   The most difficult business in life is to get advertisements for
   an “artistic” magazine—particularly for one that has the added
   stigma of being a free lance. We will give a commission of $5.00
   to every one who secures a full-page “ad” for THE LITTLE REVIEW.
   Write for particulars.

   On the following pages you will find the “ads” we might have had
   in this issue, but haven’t.

   Mandel Brothers might have taken this page to feature their
   library furnishings, desk sets, and accessories—of which they are
   supposed to have the most interesting assortment in town. I
   learned that on the authority of some one who referred to
   Mandel’s as “the most original and artistic store in Chicago.” If
   they should advertise those things here I have no doubt the 1,000
   Chicago subscribers to THE LITTLE REVIEW would overflow their
   store.

   Marshall Field and Company might have used this page—but they
   wouldn’t. I have been to see them at least six times. They have a
   book department where you can actually find Nietzsche when you
   want him without having the clerk say, “We’ll be glad to order
   it.” Such a phenomenon ought to be heralded.

   Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company ought to advertise something,
   though I don’t know just what. The man I interviewed made such a
   face when I told him we were “radical” that I haven’t had the
   courage to go back and pester him for the desired full-page. The
   Carson-Pirie attitude toward change of any sort is well-known—I
   think they resent even having to keep pace with the change in
   fashions.

   A. C. McClurg and Company could have used this page to advantage.
   They have lots of books to advertise and they ought to want to
   advertise them in a Chicago magazine. I am willing to wager that
   they will: I plan to interview them once a week until they
   succumb.

   There is least excuse of all for the Cable Piano Company. They
   know what we think of the Mason and Hamlin Piano and they know,
   whether they advertise or not, that we will keep on talking about
   it whenever we feel like appreciating a beautiful thing—which is
   rather often.

   This page might have been used very profitably by Mr. Mitchell
   Kennerley to announce the publication of a book of poems by
   Florence Kiper Frank. I think it is to be out this summer—though
   of course I can’t pretend to give the details accurately, not
   having been provided with the “ad.” But THE LITTLE REVIEW readers
   will want the book nevertheless.


                                 Poetry


                          A Magazine of Verse

                            543 Cass Street
                                Chicago

   PADRAIC COLUM, the distinguished Irish poet and lecturer, says:
   “POETRY is the best magazine, by far, in the English language. We
   have nothing in England or Ireland to compare with it.”

   William Marion Reedy, Editor of the St. Louis _Mirror_, says:
   “POETRY has been responsible for the Renaissance in that art. You
   have done a great service to the children of light in this
   country.”

   CAN YOU AFFORD TO DO WITHOUT SO IMPORTANT A MAGAZINE?

   POETRY publishes the best verse now being written in English, and
   its prose section contains brief articles on subjects connected
   with the art, also reviews of the new verse.

   POETRY has introduced more new poets of importance than all the
   other American magazines combined, besides publishing the work of
   poets already distinguished.

   THE ONLY MAGAZINE DEVOTED EXCLUSIVELY TO THIS ART.

   SUBSCRIBE AT ONCE. A subscription to POETRY is the best way of
   paying interest on your huge debt to the great poets of the past.
   It encourages living poets to do for the future what dead poets
   have done for modern civilization, for you.

   One year—12 numbers—U. S. A., $1.50; Canada, $1.65; foreign,
   $1.75 (7 shillings).

                                 POETRY
                       543 Cass Street, Chicago.

      Send POETRY for one year ($1.50 enclosed) beginning .........
      .......................................................... to
      Name ........................................................
      Address .....................................................



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   Culture have failed to bring peace and well-being to humanity,
   isn’t it time for you to listen to the message of Anarchy?

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   With biographical sketch and twelve propaganda lectures showing
   the attitude of Anarchism towards social questions—economics,
   politics, education, and sex.

              The Social Significance of the Modern Drama

                            By Emma Goldman

                         $1.00; postpaid $1.15

   A critical analysis of the Modern Drama in its relation to the
   social and revolutionary tendencies of the age.

                     Prison Memoirs of An Anarchist

                          By Alexander Berkman

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   A powerful human document discussing revolutionary psychology and
   portraying prison life.

                             Selected Works

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   America’s foremost literary rebel and Anarchist propagandist.
   Poems, short stories and essays.

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                                RADICAL
                               BOOK SHOP

   Headquarters for the sale of radical literature representing all
   phases of libertarian thought in religion, economics, philosophy,
   also revolutionary fiction, poetry and drama. All current radical
   newspapers and magazines.

                      Mail orders promptly filled.
                          Send for catalogue.

                        817½ North Clark Street
                           Chicago, Illinois



                          Transcriber’s Notes


Advertisements were collected at the end of the text.

The table of contents on the title page was adjusted in order to reflect
correctly the headings in this issue of THE LITTLE REVIEW.

In the poem _Les Condoléances_, the line _Qu’il est sous les mers_ was
moved from the end of the stanza beginning with _“Je n’insiste pas. Je
suis venu vite,_ to the end of the stanza beginning with _“Si notre
avenir—souffrez que je cache_ where it most likely belongs.

The original spelling was mostly preserved. A few obvious typographical
errors were silently corrected. All other changes are shown here
(before/after):

   [p. 9]:
   ... seines Nachbarvolkes fühlt, als würs dem eigenen Volk ...
   ... seines Nachbarvolkes fühlt, als wärs dem eigenen Volk ...

   [p. 11]:
   ... for life, even if it be a fight against the whole world.
       “Veder Schlafpulver ...
   ... for life, even if it be a fight against the whole world.
       “Weder Schlafpulver ...

   [p. 34]:
   ... And where shall be the end at last. ...
   ... And where shall be the end at last? ...

   [p. 41]:
   ... I am such of the artificial inanities of the
       drawingroom—the polite ...
   ... I am sick of the artificial inanities of the
       drawingroom—the polite ...

   [p. 42]:
   ... Schoengist nobility. ...
   ... Schöngeist nobility. ...

   [p. 42]:
   ... rumble bizarrely from the depths of every philosophical
       sub-celler they can ...
   ... rumble bizarrely from the depths of every philosophical
       sub-cellar they can ...

   [p. 42]:
   ... I am sick of their kinsmen, of the surgical tongues who
       dissect, who who ...
   ... I am sick of their kinsmen, of the surgical tongues who
       dissect, who ...

   [p. 54]:
   ... Huntley Carter. ...
   ... Huntly Carter. ...




*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Little Review, June-July 1915 (Vol. 2, No. 4)" ***

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