The Little Review, August 1915 (Vol. 2, No. 5)

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Title: The Little Review, August 1915 (Vol. 2, No. 5)
Author: Various
Language: English
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1915 (VOL. 2, NO. 5) ***

THE LITTLE REVIEW

_Literature_ _Drama_ _Music_ _Art_

MARGARET C. ANDERSON
EDITOR

AUGUST, 1915

The American Family Ben Hecht
Patterns Amy Lowell
The Piano and Imagism Margaret C. Anderson
War Impressions Florence Kiper Frank
Lawson, Caplan, Schmidt Alexander Berkman
Father and Daughter Edgar Lee Masters
Poems from the Greek Richard Aldington
Nudity and the Ideal Will Levington Comfort
“Rooming” Helen Hoyt
The Ugliest Man George Burman Foster
A Photograph of Edgar Lee Masters by Eugene Hutchinson
Emasculating Ibsen; Death “The Scavenger”
{ Alice Oliver Henderson
Children’s Poems { Arvia Mackaye
{ Robin Mackaye
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

AUGUST, 1915

No. 5

The American Family

BEN HECHT

The dead fingers of spent passions, spent dreams, spent youth clutch at
the throat of the rising generation and preserve the integrity of the
American family. Not that there is a typical American family. There is
only the typical struggle between the dead and the living, between the
inert and hideous virtue of decayed souls and the rebellious desires of
their doomed progeny.

The ambitious and educated American mother is a forceful creature, a
strong, powerful woman. As an individual she is dead. Once she knew and
had the desire for beauty. Dead fingers reached into her heart and
killed it. The force of which she was doomed to become a part crushed
her. The conventions of the world are stronger than its natural
destinies. Those conventions—the conventions of the family—are not of
the man’s making. Woman attends to her own subjugation. She preserves
the spirit of the family, struggles and labors to keep it a unit, to
keep its members alike. Moaning with the tyrannical lust for possession
she enfolds her daughter in her arms. There are certain things in her
daughter which must be killed. There is a dawning of love for
“impossible” things in her daughter’s heart. There is an awakened mental
curiosity, a perceptible inclination to break from the oppressiveness of
the surrounding dead. In the night the daughter wonders and doubts. She
would like “to get away”—to go forth free of certain fiercely applied
restrictions and meet a different kind of folk, a different kind of
thought. She would like to be—to feel the things she is capable of. It
is all vague. Always revolt is vague and intangible for the daughters of
women. Revolt is for souls still living, and the living are weaker than
the dead. The living soul is a lone, individual force, its yearnings are
ephemeral and undefined. The mother knows what they are. The dead always
know what it is they have lost. And in this knowledge the mother is
strong. But the living cannot say to itself what it wishes to gain, what
it reaches to attain. Only in the stray geniuses of time has the
individual soul fought desperately and triumphantly for its
preservation. And there is no genius in the daughter. There is merely
the divine and natural instinct for self-realization. Once the mother
felt it and it was killed. Now the daughter has caught the dread
disease—the contamination which starts a cold sweat under the corset
stays of society; the thing which brings down upon it for its
destruction the phalanxes of fierce fatuities—the moribund mercenaries
employed by the home for its defense and preservation.

Something happens to crystallize the revolt. It is a man outside the
pale, a good man, a bad man. It is a book. It is a friend. Often the
struggle is fought through little things too numerous to mention and the
struggle itself too casual to classify. Sometimes it wages without a
word; at other times there are blows. And at such times the enshrouding
veils are torn aside. One can see the dead rise up, their pasty limbs
dragging with the mould and slime of their couch. One can see them
reaching their dead arms out, with the bloodless flesh hanging from them
in shreds. One can watch them crawl on their bony feet and as they come
close—these dead—the foul odor that issues from their sightless,
twisted, rotted faces hangs like a grey smeared canopy above them.

They come. They take their stand at the mother’s back. And the pitiful
struggle is on.

It is the mother who strikes the blows. Her first weapon (she uses it
like a poison) is her love. She calls it that. “You are my only
happiness,” she cries. “I have given you everything, a part of me, all
you have needed. I have sacrificed everything for you. All my dreams
have been for you. O, how can you permit anything to come between us?”

The daughter listens. There is a selfish ring to it. But love must be
forgiven for selfishness. In the schools and the churches the
preliminaries of the struggle have been insidiously fought. Children owe
duties to their parents and not to themselves. It was what the daughter
learned at school. It is what she read between the lines of her books
and heard from the lips of all around her. And now it is the murmur that
rolls into her ears. It is the odor of the dead.

Day after day the mother strikes with this weapon. Her red, furious eyes
dripping tears, she moans it out. Her voice is like the yelp of a
frantic animal. Her voice is like the whine of a woebegone fice. Her
voice is cold and hard and hollow like the echo in a tomb.

The beauty that has come to her daughter is a fragile thing. The
lovliness she visioned is the most delicately mortal of life’s
treasures. Fiercely the mother hurls herself against it, hurls the
reproaches of her dead soul, the recriminations of her entombed
spirit—the odors of the dead.... And her weapons are tangible things.
They are sentences. They are the moral perversions with which the family
unit always has fought for its preservation. They are tried things,
prophetic precedents. And the beauty in the normal being is an
indefinite force—a vagueness. It has no weapons with which to strike.
Triumphant revolt is only for martyrs and artists. It is the losing
force in normal existence.

Gradually it becomes clouded in the daughter’s soul. She feels unclean.
She imagines it is the beauty which is unclean. She does not know that
it is the uncleanliness of the dead—the uncleanliness of her mother
revealed to her in her heart by the divine light that is dying within
herself. An agony comes into her. The struggle narrows to pain. Cold
things reach at her heart. It leaps and flutters. She stands, her face
white and a look of uncanny suffering about her eyes. The dead fingers
grip fast.

The mother, moaning, shuddering, her eyes gleaming, enfolds her daughter
in her arms. “I dare you to take her from me,” she cries out to the man,
to the friend, to the book, to the world of beauty, whatever it is
toward which her daughter inclined for the divine instant of awakened
soul. “I dare you. I dare you.”

“Nothing can ever take me from you,” the daughter weeps. Death.

Tears, a form of decomposition now, roll from her cheeks. The struggle
is over. The unit has been preserved and now one may look at the unit
and see what it is. The rotted figures of the dead have dragged their
shredded flesh back to the graves.

There are different kinds of families. Only in the struggle between the
dead and the living do they become the same even when the contestants
differ. I will describe only one type. Perhaps it is _the_ American
family; perhaps it is not.

It is the family which considers culture a matter of polished
fingernails and emotional suppression and dinner table aphorisms, puns
and the classics in half morocco. It has bound volumes of _The
Philistine_ or some other mawkish philosophical twaddle on view in the
bookcase. It—the spirit of this family—knows the titles of books
memorized from literary reviews in current magazines and will discourse
bitingly on the malicious trend of these radical volumes from the
sweeping knowledge she has of their titles. In the matter of music the
spirit of this family “plays safe.” It will characterize as “tinkly” or
“syrupy” anything melodious which secretly pleases it. The rather
humorous falseness of its culture is inexhaustible.

Introspection is an indecent as well as impossible thing to the spirit
of this family. To look into her soul and see the diseased and dead
things that fill it is naturally impossible and naturally indecent.
Dostoevsky calls man an animal who can get used to anything. And a man’s
adjustment to hideous things is not so final as a woman’s.

For the spirit of this family to reveal an honest reaction when it is
contrary to the approved artificial demands of a situation is as heinous
an exhibition of bad taste as to uncover a thigh. But luckily, this
concealing of honest feeling is not often required. The spirit of this
family is incapable in the main of honest feeling. That is a part of the
beauty killed long ago in her, a part of the beauty she killed in the
daughter, a part of the beauty the daughter will strangle in her own
children. And one of the compensations for dead souls is that they
naturally feel dishonest feeling and do not have to suffer with a
realization of hypocrisy.

This family thinks of virtue in terms of legs. This family regards art
and truth with a modulated leer. It is crudely cynical of everything
outside its range. It sneers and pooh-hoos, it ostracizes and condemns.
It is vulgarly contemptuous of the factors in life superior to it. The
spirit of this family would have shrieked in outrage at the presence of
Verlaine in its home—unless he could have reflected social distinction
on it. It would have closed the doors to Ibsen,—except for the social
distinction,—to every triumphant soul that had escaped the dead fingers
and realized itself. And by some inexplicable trick of self-adjustment
the spirit of this family looks upon thought as an undesirable
affectation.

Social success means to this family a speaking acquaintance with any
wealthier unit which originally considered itself “above” this family.
Moral success means to this family an exemption from the prosecution of
the forces it has reared for its own protection—keeping out of jail, out
of scandal-mongering newspapers, out of the malicious after-dinner
gossip of its friends.

Of an evening you will find this family in the living room. The husband
and father reads a newspaper. He has worked in his office all day and is
tired. Life long ago ceased to mean anything to him. He is an animal
husk in fine linen. He has his little prejudices and his little
conventions. Indeed, he is a part of the system of the unit but not much
interested in it. He never was possessed of the capacity for beauty
which his women folk once had and which they found it necessary to kill
in each other. Man is a more natural part of the world’s ugliness. He is
coarser stuff in general. For him it is not necessary to wage any
struggle. He accepted matrimony because of a concentrated physical
curiosity in one woman, and because it was the thing to do at his age.
Love suffered epileptic dissolution in the nuptial couch. Honor toward
his woman expired when the mysteries of her flesh paled. Obedience is
his natural state—that is, long ago he established a line of least
resistance and inoculated his women folk with the fable that adherence
to _this_ line was the obedience and respect he owed them. If a latent
instinct awakens suddenly in him he indulges himself. He finds it rather
difficult to be immoral, but as he hesitates a latent strength overcomes
his fear and thus he is able to be immoral and unfaithful to his own
convenient restrictions in a natural manner and with no great loss of
sleep.

One man in ten thousand inherits the beauty of the woman who bore him
and he becomes an artist. It is not necessary for him to revolt. His
fathers have taken care of that. There is an assured place in the world
for him—not in the living room here in front of the fireplace but
elsewhere, in places of which poets sing.

The family man keeps posted. He knows what is going on in the world but
does not understand it. He is not capable of understanding. But
sometimes understanding and reason coincide with his prejudices and he
is then as liable to hold minority views as not. He is dry, sometimes
clever. But always he jogs, jogs, jogs along. He can even sleep night
after night in the same bed with his wife without feeling annoyance. His
bluntedness is complete. Dostoevsky is right.

His wife and the mother of his children is a part of the furniture of
existence for him. In his own way he is quite dead, but it was not
necessary to kill him. If his son revolts the instinct of his mother is
communicated to him and he fights. He borrows the mother’s weapons and
he blasphemes in a half-hearted way about the duty to parents. But the
beauty which the mother found easy to kill in the daughter usually
discovers a hardier citadel in the son and usually he carries it safely
into the world.

The room—this living room—is dimly and “artistically” lighted. The fire
in the grate glows. The daughter sits in a corner speaking to a friend.
At the other side sits the father—reading blankly. The wife enters. She
surveys the scene from the doorway with a feeling of warm satisfaction.
She comes in and sits down. They talk about nothing, they think about
nothing. The daughter and the young man, beneath the smooth surface of
the artificial moments, are playing at the eternal indecency. The mother
leads the conversation. Neighbors are discussed. Friends are derided.
Social inferiors are laughed to scorn. Social superiors are spoken of
with adulation and veneration. At last the father climbs to his bed like
an ox. He is tired, poor fellow. The mother follows him into the
bedroom. A victor, utterly triumphant, she hugs her dead soul to herself
and smiles. The daughter retires after being desperately kissed by the
physically curious young man, and she lies awake a while wishing in
moments of provoked sex that she too was married and meditating in
calmer spaces upon the advantages of the family unit, the fireplace, the
party calls. O, this daughter! She is the one who had the vision of
beauty. She is the one whose soul sang for a day with the capacity for
all the world’s lovliness. Honesty, purity, fineness burned in her with
their divine radiance. The lights are turned out. Death reigns supreme.

Patterns

AMY LOWELL

I walk down the garden paths,
And all the daffodils
Are blowing, and the bright blue squills.
I walk down the patterned garden paths
In my stiff, brocaded gown.
With my powdered hair and jewelled fan,
I too am a rare
Pattern. As I wander down
The garden paths.

My dress is richly figured,
And the train
Makes a pink and silver stain
On the gravel, and the thrift
Of the borders.
Just a plate of current fashion,
Tripping by in high-heeled, ribboned shoes.
Not a softness anywhere about me,
Only whale-bone and brocade.
And I sink on a seat in the shade
Of a lime tree. For my passion
Wars against the stiff brocade.
The daffodils and squills
Flutter in the breeze
As they please.
And I weep;
For the lime tree is in blossom
And one small flower has dropped upon my bosom.

And the splashing of waterdrops
In the marble fountain
Comes down the garden paths.
The dripping never stops.
Underneath my stiffened gown
Is the softness of a woman bathing in a marble basin,
A basin in the midst of hedges grown
So thick, she cannot see her lover hiding,
But she guesses he is near,
And the sliding of the water
Seems the stroking of a dear
Hand upon her.
What is Summer in a fine brocaded gown!
I should like to see it lying in a heap upon the ground.
All the pink and silver crumpled up on the ground.

I would be the pink and silver as I ran along the paths,
And he would stumble after,
Bewildered by my laughter.
I should see the sun flashing from his sword hilt and the buckles on his
shoes.
I would choose
To lead him in a maze along the patterned paths,
A bright and laughing maze for my heavy-booted lover,
Till he caught me in the shade,
And the buttons of his waistcoat bruised my body as he clasped me,
Aching, melting, unafraid.
With the shadows of the leaves and the sundrops,
And the plopping of the waterdrops,
All about us in the open afternoon—
I am very like to swoon
With the weight of this brocade,
For the sun sifts through the shade.

Underneath the fallen blossom
In my bosom,
Is a letter I have hid.
It was brought to me this morning by a rider from the Duke.
“Madam, we regret to inform you that Lord Hartwell
Died in action Thursday sen’night.”
As I read it in the white, morning sunlight,
The letters squirmed like snakes.
“Any answer, Madam,” said my footman.
“No,” I told him.
“See that the messenger takes some refreshment.
No, no answer.”
And I walked into the garden,
Up and down the patterned paths,
In my stiff, correct brocade.
The blue and yellow flowers stood up proudly in the sun,
Each one.
I stood upright too,
Held rigid to the pattern
By the stiffness of my gown.
Up and down I walked,
Up and down.

In a month he would have been my husband.
In a month, here, underneath this lime,
We would have broke the pattern;
He for me, and I for him,
He as Colonel, I as Lady,
On this shady seat.
He had a whim
That sunlight carried blessing.
And I answered, “It shall be as you have said.”
Now he is dead.

In Summer and in Winter I shall walk
Up and down
The patterned garden paths
In my stiff, brocaded gown.
The squills and daffodils
Will give place to pillared roses, and to asters, and to snow.
I shall go
Up and down,
In my gown.
Gorgeously arrayed,
Boned and stayed.
And the softness of my body will be guarded from embrace
By each button, hook, and lace.
For the man who should loose me is dead,
Fighting with the Duke in Flanders,
In a pattern called a war.
Christ! What are patterns for?

The Piano and Imagism

MARGARET C. ANDERSON

Once I said something vague about the piano music of the future. There
is something very definite to be said about it. I think the next music
written for the piano will have in it a high concentration of clear
color-sound and that the new pianist will focus his technique to just
one end: to the clearest expression of this color-sound identity. Sea
mist, for instance, has certain colors and certain smells; if you are
keen-sensed it has certain sounds. You may say it has been the aim of
all composers and musicians to put nature into music. Well, it has been
the aim of most poets to put nature into poetry, but the Imagists _have
done it_: their medium is not only a more direct one: the point is that
they seem to have dispensed with a medium. Their words don’t merely
convey color to you; they _are_ the color. The new musician can do
this—and I believe he can do it on the piano better than on any other
instrument. His music will be all these things:[1]

Sea orchards, and lilac on the water, and color dragged up from the
sand; drenched grasses, and early roses, and wind-harps in the cedar
trees; flame-flowers, and the sliding rain; frail sea-birds, and blue
still rocks, and bright winds treading the sunlight; silver hail stones,
and the scattering of gold crocus petals; blackbirds in the grass, and
fountains in the rain; lily shadows, and green cold waves, and the
rose-fingered moon; pine cones, and yellow grasses, and a restless green
rout of stars; cloud whirls, and the pace of winds; trees on the hill,
and the far ecstasy of burning noons; lotus pools, and the gold petal of
the moon; night-born poppies, and the silence of beauty, and the perfume
of invisible roses; white winds and cold sea ripples; blossom spray, and
narcissus petals on the black earth; little silver birds, and blue and
gold-veined hyacinths; river pools of sky, and grains of sand as clear
as wine....

It will be made of dream-colored wings, and whispers among the flowering
rushes; of moonlit tree-tops, and the gaiety of flowers; brown fading
hills, and the moving mist; sea rose, and the light upon the poplars;
shaken dew, and the haunts of the sun, and white sea-gulls above the
waves; bright butterflies in the corn, and a dust of emerald and gold;
broken leaves, and the rose and white flag-stones; sea iris with petals
like shells, and the scent of lilacs heavy with stillness; scarlet
nasturtiums, and dry reeds that shiver in the grasses; slim colorless
poppies, and the sweet salt camphor flowers; gold and blue and mauve,
and a white rose of flame; pointed pines, and orange-colored rose
leaves; sunshine slipping through young green, and the flaring moon
through the oak leaves; wet dawns, and a blue flower of the evening;
butterflies over green meadows, and deep blue seas of air, and hyacinths
hidden in a far valley....

It will be of harsh rose and iris-flowers painted blue; white waters,
and the winds of the upper air; green wine held up in the sun, and rigid
myrrh-buds scented and stinging; the lisp of reeds, and the loose
ripples of meadow grasses; mists on the mountains, and clear frost on
the grass blade; frail-headed poppies, and sea-grass tangled with shore
grass; the humming brightness of the air, and the sky darting through
like blue rain; strewn petals on restless water, and pale green
glacier-rivers; somber pools, and sun-drenched slopes; autumn’s gold and
spring’s green; red pine-trunks, and bird cries in hollow trees; cool
spaces filled with shadow, and white hammocks in the sun; green glimmer
of apples in an orchard, and hawthorn odorous with blossom; lamps in a
wash of rain, and the desperate sun that struggles through sea mist;
lavender water, and faded stars; many-foamed ways, and the blue and
buoyant air; grey-green fastnesses of the great deeps; a cream moon on
bare black trees; wet leaves, and the dust that drifts over the
court-yard; moon-paint on a colorless house....

It will be pagan temples and old blue Chinese gardens; old pagodas
glittering across green trees, and the ivory of silence; vast dark trees
that flow like blue veils of tears into the water; little almond trees
that the frost has hurt, and bitter purple willows; fruit dropping
through the thick air, and wine in heavy craters painted black and red;
purple and gold and sable, and a gauze of misted silver; blue
death-mountains, and yellow pulse-beats in the darkness; naked
lightnings, and boats in the gloom; strange fish, and golden sorceries;
red-purple grapes, and Assyrian wine; fruits from Arcadia, and incense
to Poseidon; swallow-blue halls, and a chamber under Lycia’s coast;
stars swimming like goldfish, and the sword of the moonlight; torn
lanterns that flutter, and an endless procession of lamps; sleepy
temples, and strange skies, and pilgrims of autumn; tired shepherds with
lanterns, and the fire of the great moon; the lowest pine branch drawn
across the disk of the sun; Phoenecian stuffs and silks that are
outspread; the gods garlanded in wisteria; white grave goddesses, and
loves in Phrygia; wounds of light, and terrible rituals, and temples
soothed by the sun to ruin; the valleys of Ætna, and the Doric
singing....

... The moon dragging the flood tide, and an old sorrow that has put out
the sun; whirling laughter, and the thunder of horses plunging; old
tumults, and the gloom of dreams; strong loneliness, and the hollow
where pain was; the rich laughter of the forest, and the bitter sea; the
earth that receives the slanting rain; lost treasure, and the violent
gloom of night; all proud things, and the light of thy beauty.... Souls
of blood, and hearts aching with wonder; the kindness of people—country
folk and sailors and fishermen; all the roots of the earth, and a
perpetual sea....

[1] _I have omitted quotation marks for the sake of appearance,
but every phrase in the next five paragraphs is taken from the
Imagists._

War Impressions

FLORENCE KIPER FRANK

The Moving-Picture Show

We sat at a moving-picture show. Over a little bridge streamed the
Belgian refugees, women, children, boys, dogs, horses, carts, household
goods—an incongruous procession. The faces were stolid, the feet plodded
on—plodded on!

“See!” said my friend, “sometimes a woman turns to look at a bursting
shell.”

I murmured, “How interesting!”

And my soul shuddered. It shuddered at sophistication.

The man who had taken the pictures told us about them. He had been not
more than three weeks ago in Belgium....

“Huzza!” sang my ancestor of five thousand years back. He led a band of
marauders into an enemy’s village. They ripped things up and tore about
the place singing and looting. There was nothing much left to that
village by the time they got through with it.

But the people many miles away did not behold his exploits. Alas, there
were no moving-picture shows in those days!

The Modern Woman With a Sense of Humor

There was a Modern Woman with a sense of humor.

“I shall,” she said, “teach to women the absurdity of bearing children
to be killed by cannon.”

“The absurdity!” exclaimed the men of the State, aghast at levity.

“Yes,” answered she, “it isn’t worth the trouble!” And she lifted her
eyebrows and smiled, but in her eyes there was Knowledge.

And the men of the State were more terrified by the phenomenon of The
Modern Woman with a Sense of Humor than by any phenomenon that had
before confronted them.

The Incredible Adventure of Spring

The year was again a-foot on the incredible adventure of Spring. The
earth broke into blossoming, and the nights were moon-drenched and astir
with the whisperings of wet winds. It was a really thrilling time of the
year to be alive—and therefore, besides all these breathless and
miraculous adventures of the grass and flowers, many innocent and
unsuspecting souls had started out on the incredible adventure of being
born.

But the war-writers kept on writing that for man to reach true
exaltation and vibrancy of spirit, he must blow out the brains of as
many people as possible.

Man and His Machines

He has builded him machines—man the Maker—using great cunning of hand
and of brain. And has not Bergson told us that thus has he evolved that
tool, the Intellect—through the dim ages of his making!

He has builded him states, politics, all the intricate architecture of
institutions.

Now who would think that what he himself has builded—builded through the
thousands of years of endeavor—should thus turn about, ungrateful, to
destroy and to rend him?

The Annual Banquet

“We shall not, this year,” said my rich friend—a Lady—“while the people
of Europe are starving and fighting—we shall not this year have our
large annual banquet.”

But had she walked not a mile from her home, she would have seen in her
own city men starving, and fighting because of the terrible dread of
starving. And not this year alone had they been doing it, but for many
years of large banquets.

However, if all Ladies and Gentlemen felt acutely all these matters,
what would become of our institution of Large Banquets—or, indeed, of
the Divine Privileges of Monarchs!

What a Veneer Is Civilization

“War,” wrote the journalists, “reveals what a veneer is civilization.
Man’s real emotions, instinctive, primitive, brutal, leap to
ascendency.”

But I did not believe the journalists, because I knew better men’s
emotions. Indeed, what tore asunder my heart was the depth and beauty of
the emotions of men and women. There was nothing—at least very
little—the matter with their emotions.

But with their thinking apparatus—ah, that is a different story!

Lawson, Caplan, Schmidt

ALEXANDER BERKMAN

I don’t know of anything more tragic and pitiful than the superstition
that “Justice will triumph.” What this metaphysical conception of
“justice” really signifies, how it is to be expressed in applicable
terms, is impossible to determine in view of the multiplicity of
individual antagonisms and class interests.

But somehow we all believe in “justice”; yet the criterion of each is
the degree of the attainment of his own purpose.

From time immemorial we humans have been clamoring for “justice,” divine
and earthly. Hence our slavery. And Kaiser and Czar both claim justice
on their side, and millions are slaughtering each other to attain the
particular justice of their respective masters.

In this blessed land of ours, justice is ranked high, and labor is
constantly basing its appeals and demands on justice. But perhaps—let us
hope—the John Lawson case has somewhat jolted the popular faith in the
metaphysical conception, at least so far as it manifests itself in the
Colorado courts. It is safe to say that there is no intelligent man in
that state who does not know that the stage for Lawson’s conviction had
been set long before his trial. He was an intelligent, active agitator.
He sought to crystallize the rebellious dissatisfaction of the miners
into effective action:—sufficient reason for the Rockefeller-controlled
state to eliminate, most emphatically, such an undesirable element.

In Colorado, as well as throughout the rest of the country, most people
know that a great “injustice was done Lawson.” What are the people of
Colorado doing about it? Not a thing. The cheerful idiot, otherwise
known as the good citizen, cares for justice only in the degree in which
it affects his own pocket. And the masses of labor who do feel
themselves and their cause injured by the railroading of Lawson to
prison—they call the verdict a “miscarriage of justice”—applaud
Professor Brewster who wired Lawson: “Unbelievable. Counsel friends keep
cool. Justice will be done.”

And the people of Colorado remain inactive, in the belief that the
Supreme Court, the Governor, or maybe the Holy Ghost will see to it that
justice is done.

Yet the Lawson lesson has not been entirely lost. It is possible that it
has shed a light that will reflect itself on coming fights between labor
and capital. It is more than probable that the lesson has already borne
fruit in the more aggressive attitude of labor in some parts of the
country. It has helped ever-growing numbers to realize that to expect
“justice” in the struggle between labor and capital means to doom the
toilers to defeat.

It will be highly interesting to watch the effect of the Lawson outrage
upon the approaching trial of David Caplan and Mathew Schmidt, the
aftermath of the McNamara case, in Los Angeles, California. The history
of this case is illuminating of our legal and social “justice”:

The labor unions in California have for the last nine years fought a
bitter fight against the Merchants and Manufacturers’ Association, the
Western branch of the Steel Trust. Every means, legal and illegal, has
been used by the employers to exterminate the unions and paralyze the
workers. And they have practically succeeded in breaking every labor
organization in the Steel Industry from New York to San Francisco.

Where twenty years ago we had a powerful union—for instance, in
Pennsylvania: the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel
Workers—today nothing but a pitiful remnant is left. Only _one_ union in
the steel industry has survived: the Structural Iron Workers. They
survived because they contested every inch of ground against the
Merchants and Manufacturers’ Association. The result of that fight was a
long war between capital and labor on the Coast. Every form of
persecution and violence was used against labor, and labor was forced to
defend itself. In consequence the Structural Iron Workers increased
their wages from $2.40 a day to $4.40, and reduced their hours from ten
to eight. Organized capital resorted to every trick to strangle the
workers, and in Los Angeles a special law was passed prohibiting
picketing. But the union defied the law, and five hundred men went to
prison during the general strike of the metal trades in Southern
California in 1910. During this fight the Los Angeles _Times_, the most
relentless enemy of labor and of humanity, was destroyed. The brothers
McNamara were arrested, as a result, and then the masters made the
solemn promise that the war would be stopped and that all further
prosecutions of labor men would cease if the McNamaras would plead
guilty. It was only on the strength of this promise that the McNamaras
were finally induced to plead guilty.

Hardly ten days passed, when the Merchants and Manufacturers’
Association broke every promise they made. They began the prosecution of
labor men in Los Angeles and Indianapolis, and did everything in their
power to railroad to prison the most effective members of the unions.
And now, four and a half years later, they have arrested David Caplan in
Seattle and Mathew Schmidt in New York, and brought them across the
country to Los Angeles to put them on trial for complicity with the
McNamaras.

This perfidious activity of organized capital has made labor in
California realize that the courts are controlled by the employers, and
that labor cannot expect justice. They now understand what a fatal
mistake was made in the case of John Lawson. The workers depended on the
innocence of Lawson for his acquittal. They failed to act, expecting
justice to be done.

At least some of the labor elements on the Coast are awakening to the
situation. They feel that they cannot expect justice from the courts of
the exploiters. They have now determined that more aggressive and
militant action is necessary, if labor is not to be submerged by the
oppression of capital. They are beginning to see that throughout the
country the masters are picking out the most effective and intelligent
fighters from the ranks of the workers and railroading them to prison,
to terrorize labor and stifle the spirit of liberty and independence.
The Lawson case, the case of Ford and Suhr, of Rangel and Cline, of Joe
Hill, and the many other cases now pending in the courts of New York and
elsewhere, all show what capital intends to do to labor.

Is labor really going to keep quiet and submit to this persecution and
slavery? The unions on the Coast have determined that they will not.
They are calling upon every one in sympathy with labor to join the great
movement to stop the aggression of capital. They have decided on strong
militant tactics to defend the workingman, his family and his union
against the tyranny of the bosses.

They have issued the call to every central body, affiliated unions and
radical organizations, to join hands at this most critical moment. This
is not a question of theory or of philosophic ism. It is the great war
of labor against capital, a struggle of life and death. In this struggle
all local and theoretic differences may be safely forgotten, and all
friends of labor make common cause.

I have been sent as a special delegate by some of the California unions
to help organize the solidaric and militant forces of labor throughout
the country. It is evident how significant this case is for the workers
in general. It is imperative that they combine in solidaric unity in
this vital matter, to register in mighty accents the sentiments and
determination of the oppressed. Thus were Haywood, Moyer, and Pettibone
torn from the clutches of the jungle beast. Thus were returned to
liberty Ettor and Giovannitti, Carlo Tresca, and other fighters for the
better day. But whenever the workers failed to sound the tocsin of
solidarity and make their gesture of protest, their prisoners of war
have invariably remained the hostages of the enemy.

Organizations and individuals who are willing to give us their moral and
financial assistance, should immediately send resolutions and funds to
Tom Barker, Secretary Building Trades Council of Los Angeles, and
Treasurer of the Caplan-Schmidt Defense Fund. Address, 201 Labor Temple,
Los Angeles, California. My own address for the present is 917 Fine Arts
Building.

Father and Daughter

EDGAR LEE MASTERS

The church is a hulk of shadow,
And dark is the church’s spire.
But the cross is as black as iron
Against the sunset’s fire.

The shops and sheds and hovels
Are massed with the church’s shade;
And a girl with a face like a lily
Is plying her wretched trade.

And a drunken man reels homeward
With a sullen leer in his eye.
And the street is filled with children,
That play and wrestle and cry.

A broken hurdy-gurdy
Rattles a hollow tune,
And a light as yellow as fever
Shines from the vile saloon.

Two men are talking together,
They pass where the children are;
And one wears a robe of sable,
The other a silver star.

And one of them goes to vespers
And one of them makes a search,
And one of them enters the groggery,
And one of them enters the church.

And a shot is fired by the drunkard,
And the girl falls dead in the street;
And God is peaceful in heaven,
And all in the world is sweet.

[Illustration: EDGAR LEE MASTERS
_Copyright, 1915, by Eugene Hutchinson._]

Poems

(_from the Greek of Myrrhine of Mitulene, and Konallis; translated
by Richard Aldington_)

Hierocleia, bring hither my silver vine-leaf-carved armlet and the
mirror graven with two Maenads,
For my heart is burned to dust with longing for Konallis;
And this is the silver armlet which pressed into her side when I held
her,
And before this mirror she bound up her golden-hyacinth-curled hair,
sitting in the noon sunlight.

I, Konallis, am but a goat-girl dwelling on the violet hills of
Korinthos,
But going down to the city a marvellous thing befell me;
For the beautiful-silver-fingered hetaira, Myrrhine, held me nightlong
in her couch,
Teaching me to stretch wide my arms to receive her strange burning
caresses.

III

Fair young men have brought me presents of silver caskets and white
mirrors,
Gold for my hair and long lemon-colored chitons and dew-soft perfumes of
sweet herbs.
Their bodies are whiter than Leucadian foam and delicate are their
flute-girls,
But the wild sleepless nightingales cry in the darkness even as I for
Konallis.

We, Konallis and Myrrhine, dedicate to thee, Proserpine, two white
torches of wax,
For thou didst watch over our purple-embroidered couch all night;
Was it thou who gavest us the sweetness of sharp caresses?
For at midday when we awoke we laughed to see black poppies blooming
beneath our eyes.

The doves sleep beside the slow-murmuring cool fountain,
red-five-petalled roses of Paestum strew the chequered marble;
A flute-girl whispers the dear white ode of Sappho, and Hierocleia by
the pool
Smiles to see the smooth blue-sky-reflecting water mirror her shining
body;
But my eyelids are shunned by sleep that is whiter than beautiful
morning, for Konallis is not here.

O reeds, move softly and make keen bewildering music,
For I fear lest Arkadian Pan should seize Myrrhine as she comes from the
city;
O Artemis, shed thy light across the peaks to hasten her coming,
But do thou, Eos, hold back thy white radiance till love be content.

VII

Last night Zeus sent swift rain upon the blue-grey rocks,
But Konallis held me close to her pear-pointed breasts.

VIII

Sappho, Sappho, long ago the dust of earth mingled with the dust of
thy dear limbs,
And only little clay figures, painted with Tyrian red, with crocus, and
with Lydian gold,
Remain to show thy beauty; but thy wild lovely songs shall last for
ever.
Soon we too shall join Anaktoria and Kudno and kiss thy pale shadowy
fingers.

When Myrrhine departed I, weeping passionately, kissed her
golden-wrought knees, saying:
“O, Myrrhine, by what god shall I keep the memory of thy caresses?”
But she, bending down like golden, smiling Aphrodite, whispered to me;
And lying here in the sunlight among the reeds I remember her words.

Hierocleia, do thou weave white-violet-crowns and spread
mountain-haunting lilies upon my couch,
For Konallis comes! and shut the door against the young men for this is
a sharper love.

This is the feast of Iacchus; open wide the gates, O Hierocleia;
Fill the kraters and kuathoi with sweet unmixed wine and snow; bring
thyrsus-wands,
And crowns of pale ivy and violets; let the flute-players begin the
phallic hymn
While the ten girl-slaves, drunken with the god, dance to the young men.

XII

Hedulia now lies with Myrrhine who aforetime was my lover,
But seeing Hedulia she forgot me, and I lie on the threshold weeping.
O marble threshold, thou are not so white nor so hard as her breasts,
receive my tears
While the mute stars turn overhead and the owls cry from the cypresses.

XIII

Wandering in tears about the city I came to the dark temple of
Priapus;
The tall, naked, scented-tressed priestesses taught me the mysteries,
And I lay between Guathina and Leuke and afterwards Chrusea and Anthea;
But now I worship the god on the mountain slopes, yet not unforgetful of
Myrrhine.

XIV

This is the tomb of Konallis; Korinthos was her city and Kleobulina
bore her,
Having lain in sweet love with Sesocrates, the son of Menophiles.
I lived three and twenty years, and then sudden sickness bore me to Dis
So they laid me here with my silver armlets, my gold comb, my chain and
with little painted figures.
In my life I was happy, knowing many sorts of love and none evil.
If you are a lover, scatter dust, and call me “dear one” and speak one
last “Hail.”

Telos.

Nudity and the Ideal

WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT

One of the young men here loved the sunlight on his shoulders so
well—had such a natural love for the feel of light and air upon his bare
flesh—that he almost attained that high charm of forgetting himself
half-dressed.... The country people occasionally come down to the water
on the Sabbath or to sell (from their homes back on the automobile
routes and the interurban lines) and for what they do not get of the
natural beauty of shore and bluff, I have a fine respect. However they
didn’t miss the Temporary Mr. Pan.

They complained that he was exposing himself, even that he was
shameless.

Now, I am no worshiper of nudity. I’d like to be, but it disappoints in
most cases. There is always a strain about an object that is conscious
of itself—and that nudity which is unconscious of itself is either
shameless, an inevitable point of its imperfection anatomically for the
trained eye; or else it is touched with divinity and does not frequent
these shores.

The human body has suffered the fate of all flesh and plant-fiber that
is denied light. A certain vision must direct all growth—and vision
requires light. The covered things are white-lidded and abortive,
scrawny from struggle or bulbous from the feeding dream into which they
are prone to sink.

It will require centuries for the human race to outgrow the shames which
have come to adhere to our character-structure from recent generations.
We have brutalized our bodies with these thoughts. We associate women
with veils and secrecy, but the trouble is not with them, has not come
from women, but from the male-ordering of women’s affairs to satisfy his
own ideas of possession and conservation. The whole cycle of human
production is a man-arrangement according to present standards, and
every process is destructively bungled. However, that’s a life-work,
that subject.

The thoughts of our ancestors have debased our bodies in color and
texture and contour organically and to be seen. Nudity is not beautiful,
and does not play sweetly upon our minds because of this heritage. The
human body is associated with darkness, and the place of this
association in our minds is of corresponding darkness.

The young man and I talked it over. We decided that it would be a
thankless task for him to spend the summers in ardent endeavor to
educate the Countryside by browning his back in public. _That_ did not
appeal to us as a fitting life task; moreover, his project would be
frequently interrupted by the town-marshal. As a matter of truth, one
may draw most of the values of the actinic rays of the sun through thin
white clothing; and if one has not crushed his feet into a revolting
mess in pursuit of the tradesmen, he may go barefooted a little while
each day on his own grassplot without shocking the natives or losing his
credit at the bank. The real reason for opening this subject is to
express, without hatred, certain facts in the case of the Countryside
which complained.

They are villagers and farm-people who live with Mother Nature without
knowing her. They look into the body of Nature, but never see her face
to face. The play of light and the drive of intelligence in her eyes is
above the level of their gaze or too bright. Potentially they have all
the living lights—the flame immortal, but it is turned low. It does not
glorify them as men or parents or workmen. It does not inspire them to
questing—man’s real and most significant business. They do not know that
which is good and evil in food, in music, in color, fabric, books, in
houses, lands or faith. They live in a low lazy rhythm and attract unto
themselves inevitably objects of corresponding vibration. One observes
this in their children, in their schools, and most pathetically in their
churches. They abide dimly in the midst of their imperfections, but with
tragic peace. When their children revolt, they meet on every hand the
hideous weight of matter, the pressure of low vibrations, and only the
more splendid of them have the integrity of spirit to rise above the
resistance.

As for the clothing they wear, they would do better if left suddenly
naked as a people and without preconceptions were commanded to find some
covering for themselves. As herds, they have fallen into a descending
arc of usage, under the inevitable down-pull of trade. Where the
vibrations of matter are low, its responsive movement is gregarian,
rather than individual. The year around, these people wear clothing,
woolen pants and skirts, which if touched with an iron, touched with
sunlight, rain or any medium that arouses the slumbering quantities, the
adjacent nostril is offended.

They are heavy eaters of meat the year round. They slay their pets with
as little concern as they gather strawberries. Their ideas of virtue and
legitimacy have to do with an ecclesiastical form, as ancient as Nineveh
and as effaced in meaning. They accept their children, as one pays a
price for pleasure; and those children which come from their stolen
pleasures are either murdered or marked with shame. Their idea of love
is indefinite with desire, and their love of children has to do with the
sense of possession.

They are not significant men in their own fields; rarely a good mason, a
good carpenter, a good farmer; the many have not even found the secret
of order and unfolding from the simplest task. The primary meaning of
the day’s task in its relation to life and blessedness is not to be
conceived by them. They are taught from childhood that first of all work
is for bread; that bread perishes; therefore one must pile up as he may
the wherewith to purchase the passing bread; that bread is bread and the
rest a gamble.... They answer to the slow loop waves which enfold the
many in amusement and opinion, in suspicion and cruelty and half-truth.
To all above, they are as if they were not; mediocre men, static in
spiritual affairs, a little pilot-burner of vision flickering from
childhood, but never igniting their true being, nor opening to them the
one true way which each man must go alone, before he begins to be erect
in other than bone and sinew.

They cover their bodies—but they do not cover their faces nor their
minds nor their souls; and this is the marvel, _they are not ashamed_!
They reveal the emptiness of their faces and the darkness of their minds
without complaining to each other or the police.

From any standpoint of reality, the points of view of the many need only
to be expressed to reveal their abandonment.... You see, I have left the
Countryside and am lost in the crowd now, any crowd, the world-crowd,
whose gods today are trade, patriotism and a certain limp-legged
tumbler.

... Yet we are told by every authoritative voice out of the past, and we
know it from the urge of our own souls, that we must love the many
before we can serve them. It is fatuous to love blindly, therefore we
must understand what we are about. I have touched here some small things
of the crowd, which are well enough to know; otherwise we are apt to
stand apart from the many crying: “How noble are the simple-minded! How
sweet the people of the Countryside! How inevitable and unerring is the
voice of the people!” As a matter of truth, unless directed by some
strong man’s vision, the voice of the people has never yet given
utterance to constructive truth; and the same may be said of those who
cater to the public taste in politics or the so-called arts. The man who
undertakes to give the people what the people want is not an artist or a
true leader of any dimension. He is a tradesman and finds his place in
his generation.

The brave workman who dares be himself and go hungry for the honor finds
sooner or later a brilliant little fact rising in his consciousness—one
that comes to stay, and which future thinking must be built around: that
while the people are all that is low and bad in their change and rush of
personality, they are also the soil of the future, a splendid potential
mass that contains every heroism and masterpiece to be; that all great
things must come from the people, because great leaders of the people
turn their passionate impregnation of idealism upon them; that first the
dreamer dreams—and then the people make it action....

That which we see that hurts us so as workmen, is but the unfinished
picture, the back of the tapestry.

To be worth his spiritual salt, the artist, any artist, must turn every
force of his conceiving into that great restless Abstraction, the many;
he must plunge whole-heartedly in the doing, but cut himself loose from
the thing done; at least, he must realize that what he is willing to
give could not be bought.... When he is quite ready, there shall rise
for him, out of the Abstraction, something finished; something as
absolutely his own as the other half of his circle.

“Rooming”

HELEN HOYT

O, I can tell when I get to my corner,
Where to turn in going to my house.
On the other corners along the avenue,
Northward and southward where the cars grind,
Are saloons and drug stores,
Glaring with signals and bright glass.
On both sides of the street the same,
One block like the next.

But on my corner is a florist’s shop
With ferns in the window
And sweet-peas and roses,
Glowing with red and pink and yellow.

And sometimes pansies
And moss.

Each night as I step down from the car
There the flowers are waiting
To say I have got home.
And I linger
Seeing gardens.

The room I have now is narrow,
Narrow
Like a coffin.
As plain and as straight
And as tight as a coffin.
Two corners at the end of it,
Are rounded off where the head lies.
Ugh!

In the bed, you stiffen
And look down at your feet
As if buried.

On the right side is the high bureau,
On the left side is the high desk—
How high and stiff and black they are!
How high and stiff and black they are
And what is “I” dwells in the cañon between,—
Where at any moment the narrowness may tumble and fall in upon me!
How far off the ceiling appears over my eyes!
At the coffin’s head one window;
At the coffin’s foot, one chair.

III

My room is narrow,
But wide enough.
My desk and pencils are wide as the world
And my books are like palaces and far journeys.

What have I need of space?
There is always room enough for thinking,
Or for dreaming or desiring.
There is always room enough to smile
And sing
And cry out.
If the feet are happy they can always dance
Even in narrowness.

(And a small room can be cold for a large one
When the mornings are gray.)

Closing the door I close out the world.
I am alone,
Free.
At home.
Castled.

After the mastery of the day
Now I am the master.
I expand and aspire:
I exult and strut and feel aware of myself.

The walls await me.
The mirror,
The chair.
Everything that is here is mine,
Familiar only to me;
Dependent upon my hands for use;
Dependent upon my heart for beauty.

The books on the shelf call to me,
They send out glances to me.
We have an understanding together.
They know I will come and touch them with my fingers.

But first I must get loosened from the day;
From people—
People crowding upon my shoulders.
I must loosen them from me.

How good to us doors are!
They make the whole universe not be except this room.

The curtain folds are full of quietness
And I have a great contentment with undressing.
My bed reaches out kind arms to me
And folds me in,
Awake with many thoughts.

How pleasant are sheets!
Smooth and fine with cool creases,
Laying comfort to your cheek,
Laying soft cleanness of touch to your throat;
Delicious with sun
And blown air
And lavender.

And then the kind wool of the blanket
Spreading out wide;
Dropping away plentifully,
Luxuriously over the edge of the bed;
Woven and spun out of living warmth,
Lightly;
Rich to possess against the proud cold.

How generously into its soft yielding lap
The bed receives us now,
And its strong arms
Fold us about as a mother folds her children,—
Comforting, and long-accustomed, and secure.

Unquestioning our deserts;
Unfailing; never denying;
Never refusing our weariness;
Taking our weariness from us like a burden.

To petulance, to discomfort,
Answering with soft answers;
Smoothing away with silence our sorrows,
Till in those faithful friendly arms
We are enwrapped with quietness and content;
With old well-being of sleep.

The Ugliest Man

GEORGE BURMAN FOSTER

Good and evil, these are time-old opposites. So are beautiful and ugly.
But these two opposites are seldom entirely coincident. No doubt there
are good and high-class men who are commonly judged to be fundamentally
ugly. And there are blinding beauties who are on a war-footing against
all that we call good. The good satisfies our moral judgment; the
beautiful, our judgment of taste. The one has to do with the content of
human life; the other, with the form. But, at bottom, the moral judgment
and the judgment of taste cannot remain entirely and materially
dissociated. It was a more nearly correct feeling on the part of the
Greeks when they let the beautiful and the good inter-grow. According to
the Greek, the good and the beautiful, intimately united, constitute the
ideal of virtue, however. We are reconciled after a fashion to the
ugliness of a man if we find a great and noble soul in the repellant
shell.

But if permanent beauty is to be preserved to human nature, efficient
and high endeavor, free self-concentrated formation of character is the
only means to this end. When the “outer man” mirrors goodness and beauty
of heart, firmness and bravery of will, seriousness and depth of
thought, his countenance glows under all circumstances with a radiance
of happy beauty, and it would be a barbarian and pitiable eye indeed
that could not apprehend such radiance or feel itself smitten with its
glory. For the man of fine feeling, therefore, all that is ugly affects
him morally at the same time. Indeed, the reproach of having behaved in
an ugly manner he feels as keenly, frequently more keenly in fact, than
the reproach of having behaved immorally.

In the case of _Friedrich Nietzsche_, the moral criterion of human worth
was totally transformed into an aesthetic criterion! This man who had
subdued all “morality” and left it behind him, who took his stand
“beyond good and evil,” submitted to a new evaluation, was measured
according to his greatness. Greatness was nobility, supremacy, beauty.
Smallness was vulgarity, baseness, ugliness. Not the wickedest, and not
the wretchedest, but the ugliest man—_der hässlichste Mensch_—represents
the power which the new culture has to struggle with—to overcome,
indeed—if man is to mount to a higher plane of being.

Who is this ugliest man? Of all the Zarathustrian enigmas, this is
perhaps the most enigmatic. It must have been a frightful ugliness which
haunted and harried the poet-philosopher when he narrates that, amid his
wanderings over men’s disappointing earth, he had met the ugliest man.
Many and many were the types of human beings that Zarathustra had met in
his lonely pilgrimages. Most of them he disposed of with high scorn or
honest contempt,—thus did he dispatch the good and reputable, the
custodians of the old tables of morals and order; then, the preachers of
the doctrine of equality, who swarmed around like flies in market
places, shunning all solitudes, able to exist only in masses; next the
poisonous tarantulas who, with envious revenge, devised punishments, in
cold blood dragged their victims to justice; finally, the wise and
upright, the schoolmasters, whose duress converted all depths into
shallows, managed to obliterate all men’s peculiarities, till nothing
distinctive was left.

But the ugliest man was uglier than any of these! These types did not so
infuriate Zarathustra as did the ugliest man. At all these Nietzsche
shook his head, but they did not floor him. He had been able to look
upon them, to scold them, to laugh at them. “And again did Zarathustra’s
feet run through mountains and forests.... When the path curved round a
rock, all at once the landscape changed, and Zarathustra entered into a
realm of death. Here bristled aloft black and red cliffs, without any
grass, tree, or bird’s voice. For it was a valley which all animals
avoided, even the beasts of prey, except that a species of ugly, thick,
green serpent came here to die when they became old. Therefore the
shepherds called this valley ‘Serpent-death.’” Here Zarathustra found
the ugliest man something sitting by the wayside shaped like a man, and
yet hardly like a man, something nondescript. And all at once there came
over Zarathustra a great shame, he blushed up to the roots of his white
hair, he would flee this ill-starred place—the worst that there was in
the whole world! But the Great Despiser, the Hater of all pity was
himself so unstrung and overpowered by pity that he sank down all at
once, like a giant oak that had weathered many a storm, or withstood
many a stroke of the woodman’s axe.

Who was this ugliest man? What was this ugliest thing which
Nietzsche—the great man-spy and life-appraiser—had ever discovered in a
human being? Before Nietzsche wrote, _thus spake Zarathustra_, he
expresses himself in another work as follows: “Nothing is ugly save the
degenerate man.... From the physical standpoint everything ugly weakens
and depresses man. It reminds of decay, danger, impotence; he literally
loses strength in its presence. The effect of ugliness may be gauged by
the dynamometer. Whenever man’s spirits are downcast, it is a sign that
he scents the proximity of something ‘ugly.’ His feeling of power, his
will to power, his courage and his pride—these things collapse at the
sight of what is ugly, and rise at the sight of what is beautiful....
Ugliness is understood to signify a hint or a symptom of degeneration;
that which reminds us, however, remotely of degeneracy, impels us to the
judgment ‘ugly.’ Every sign of exhaustion, of gravity, of age, of
fatigue; every kind of constraint, such as cramp, or paralysis; and
above all the smells, colors and forms associated with decomposition and
putrefaction, however much they may have been attenuated into
symbols,—all these things provoke the same reaction, which is the
judgment ‘ugly.’ A certain hatred expresses itself here: who is it that
man hates? Without a doubt it is _the decline of his type_. In this
regard his hatred springs from the deepest instinct of the race. There
is horror, caution, profundity, and far-reaching vision in this
hatred,—it is the most profound hatred that exists.”

Nowhere has Nietzsche told us of the zenith, who his superman is. But he
here tells us of the nadir, who the ugliest man is—and the superman is
the exact and august opposite. Thus we could ourselves construct his
superman.

But the ugliest man—we recognize this strange figure of the Zarathustra
poesy in the sharp cry of distress which all representatives of
degenerate (_de-genera_) humanity groan out where the yearning toward a
higher humanity overpowers them. The ugliest man then appears accoutered
with a crown with which he has crowned his own head, and with two purple
girdles which encircle him. In a later profound observation, Nietzsche
informs us that the ugliest man is called _der historische Sinn_, the
historical mind, or sense, which needs decoration, accoutrement, like
all ugly things that would make themselves tolerable, at least for
surface people. The degenerate man,—this is the ugly man, and the
saddest degeneration is _the surrender of life to the past_—for the past
is the big grave which swallows up all that lives. Whoever makes the
past the goal of his longing walks among corpses which make him shiver.
He becomes himself a corpse, whose society is freezing for living men.
And because this man, assimilated to the past, living in the past, is
nothing himself, he needs all kinds of fiddle-faddle to give himself the
semblance of being something. He needs pomp which makes a world-stirring
phenomenon out of a coronation; he scrambles and scratches after titles
and orders—which long ago Frederick the Great, the philosopher-king on
the Prussian throne, called the insignia of fools; he has himself
accredited by father and grandfather, so that their merit may adorn the
shield of son and grandson; in a word, he reverses the counsel of an
apostle: “Forgetting the things that are behind,” for he forgets the
things that are before and reaches back for the things that are behind.
And because there is for this backward-bent man an inconvenient monitor
and witness of all life—because there is God, the omnipresent God, who
ever sees all, even sees man through and through, this ugliest man
became the murderer of God, he took revenge on the living God for being
witness of the hiddenest life of man! “I know thee well,” said
Zarathustra, with a brazen voice, “_thou art the murderer of God_!...
Thou couldst not _endure_ him who beheld thee through and through, thou
ugliest man. Thou tookest revenge on this witness!”

We have here, I think, with all that is enigmatic and obscure, a
sharply-outlined picture of the ugliest man. Earlier Nietzsche wrote a
book on the blessing and the bane of history for life. In that book he
accorded right to historical culture and to man’s knowledge of the past
_only in so far_ as the life of the man of the present and of the future
would be advanced thereby. But the historians in the schools, in chair
and pulpit, did not so think. They acknowledged life only when it was
dead! A zealous teacher of history was a meandering mummy from out the
past, who had no blood more in his veins, no flesh more on his bones.
Therefore was he so ugly. Therefore did he create such a frosty
temperature round about him. Under the pressure of these historical
forces, all life became a _cultus_ of the past. The older a thing was,
the better it was. It was the long past, the outlived, that was noble.
The more remote that past, the prouder men were of it, and the brighter
shone its glory-beaming star to the eyes of men.

From this malady of the ugliest man, from this _de-genera-tion_, we are
by no means free. Instead of ascent to a higher _genus_ than present
man, to superman, there is descent to a lower _genus_. This antiquarian,
hoary spirit pervades our whole social life, this _re-spect_ for what
has become old and rotten, for what can show no other merit than that it
once—was! It is a sign of our own decay, this living on the dead, this
ability only to resuscitate and copy past centuries—past poetry, past
art, past philosophy, past morality, past religion!—this knowing in
consequence no life of our very own. We build “whitewashed sepulchers”
in our lives, because we have no courage of heart to create anything
that belongs to life. At all events, that the putridity and the dead
bones may be concealed, we use whitewash, much whitewash! We use
decorations, brilliant, finely-painted decorations so that men may not
observe that life has become a theatrical play, making an impression
indeed under clever management, but inspiring no living human heart. All
the splendor of this pomp, which we of today employ on the stage of
life, cannot conceal the chilly vacuity of this whole business; and the
man who peers behind the curtains and sees how people look shorn of
their decorations, without powder and paint, without the artificial
cunning luminosity of the day’s puffery, has Zarathustra’s feeling in
the valley forsaken to the old green thick snake on its way to
die,—Zarathustra’s feeling when he met the ugliest man, where much
heaviness settled on his mind, because he did not think that anything so
ugly and horrible could exist among men.

Yes, there are traces and traits of this ugliest man among us. If we but
imagine all that is decoration, flummery, stripped off from us, think
how much degenerate life would be disclosed! How much love for the dead
_that no longer lives_, how much bitter strife and war over _reliques_,
over some sacred cloak, or sacred bone, of which history narrates,
telling us that they once belonged to life. How much slavish obedience
to thoughts that once were; to institutions that once served the living.
To be sure, men call this _piety_, and have thus designed a beautiful
robe behind which they hide their moribund lives. For the sake of this
piety, they exact consideration for all ancient dust which burden the
homes and hearts of men, they arm themselves against him who, with
mighty hand, would undertake a huge house-cleaning of life and for life.
Piety,—it is this that they call admiration and veneration of every idol
which for long has been played out, but still counts us of today among
its devotees. Men must even deal God a mortal blow, the _Living_ God of
the living, and, with the ferocious hatred of their folly, pursue the
God who sees their innermost heart as a living witness of what they
would like to hide from themselves and all the world. “But he—_had to_
die: he looked with eyes which beheld _everything_,—he beheld men’s
depths and dregs, all his hidden ignominy and ugliness ... he crept into
my dirtiest corners. This most prying, over-intrusive, over-pitiful one
had to die. He even beheld me: on such a witness I would have revenge—or
not live myself. The God who beheld everything, _and also man_: that God
had to die! Man cannot _endure_ it that such a witness should live.”

Thus spake the ugliest man. Zarathustra started off, feeling frozen to
the very bowels.

The God who told men that altogether they served death, not life, that
they worked deterioration, not rejuvenation—had to die! Life is a
dying—and yet there shoots through the heart of man such a nameless
anxiety in the presence of this dying that he paints up and pencils all
death till it looks like life. And indeed many are deceived, many see
only men’s rouge and mark not the great lie which it hides. This is the
ugliest thing in the world, and it made the prophet of a new culture
shudder and freeze—_this_, that we live and walk among corpses which yet
look as if they were alive!

To fight and conquer this hindrance to a new culture, this is to fight
and conquer death; and since death is death only through man, through
his yearning or fear, the triumph of a new culture begins with the
triumphal song of life, which knows how to make a festival out of even
death. To be sure, Nietzsche did not set his most beautiful man over
against his most ugly, but we can yet read between the lines what he
conceived the most beautiful man to be. He is the man who has pushed far
from him the last vestige and survival of fear and slave-service. He is
the man who has learned dying as the great Consummator, victorious,
surrounded by men who hope and vow that there shall ever be festival
where a man who so dies dedicates himself to the living. Here
Zarathustra-Nietzsche intimates a kinship with that other Dying Man Who
proclaimed his life’s victorious career in His: “It is finished!” and
created on Christianity’s Good Friday a festival of death. Nietzsche
speaks of the Hebrew, too early dead, who would have confessed
Zarathustra’s doctrine, if he had attained to Zarathustra’s years. It
did not occur to Nietzsche that such a confession was not at all needed,
because the world had perceived the glad message already which would
make a festival out of death and teach men how the most beautiful
festival was consecrated. Christian art had opposed to the ugliest man
the most beautiful human picture: the head full of wounds and blood, the
King in the thorn-crown, who understood dying because he understood
living. With this victorious song of death began a new culture, a new
heroism of humanity, to which death ceased to be a pale ghost, but which
confessed even in death: “as dying, and behold, we live!” Then men
ceased to learn dying, and because they made no preaching of life out of
dying and no vow to life, death became to them a torturing anxiety and
care again; they did not dare name his name; they did not dare frankly
look him in the eye. And this cowardice and lie disfigure all their
action and passion; they would give to death at least the semblance of
life; they would believe in ghostly existence still allotted to all the
dead, rather than say to death: “Thou are a messenger of God, a
revelation, a witness of life; since thou art good, I will greet thee
and bless thee!”

So Zarathustra demanded of his disciples: “Let your dying be no
blasphemy of men and earth; my friends, your spirit and your virtue
shall still glow in your dying, like the evening red over the earth, or
else death has miserably betrayed you.”

Death our will even, our freedom—this is life’s highest meaning! Who but
Nietzsche could have thought that? Of course, this is not to throw life
away, when it has become hard and heavy to bear. Such a death would be
of all the most unfree. It would be a flight, not a deed; it would be a
lamentation and a feebleness, not a festival of the soul! But it means
that we take up death from the start into the order of our life, as the
night which, no less than the day, belongs to man’s full day. It means
that we give to life a worth which no death can destroy, which first in
death reveals its eternal power. I must die—so laments the slave, who
has lived only non-entities even in his life, and has never learned that
life is work, creation, consummation. I _will_ die—so speaks the hero,
to whom every fight brings the prize of a victory well worth death!—the
hero who hazards his life every moment for the highest human good, who
knows that he and his life have become a sacrifice from which a better,
higher, freer humanity shall gain its life and its strength.

Who is ugly? Who is beautiful? Who is ashamed of his death and falsifies
his deadness that it may look like life—who does this, bears death
within himself as a power that drags him down, disfigures him in the
fullness of that which he would be able to live. But who, in his power
to die, proves that he has learned to live, has overcome the ugliest
thing in man, cast it out; namely, the fear of death which creates all
the lies of life, and all the servility and unfreedom of men—which
creates men over whom _das Gewesen_! the dead past, possesses power, so
that they can never breathe a joyous breath, can never commit themselves
to the living and the growing. But a _beautiful_ culture will also
become a _good_ culture because one that is living is at once good and
beautiful; the eternal life of God, of whom it is said: There is none
good but God alone.

Emasculating Ibsen[2]

Dear Mr. Ibsen: I hope this letter finds you well as it leeves us the
same. The reason why I write you is that I seen your play called
_Ghosts_ at the Bijou Movie Theater last night and I thought it was so
grand that I had to tell you. I thought it was awful the way poor Mr.
Alving is always seeing that hand which was pulling his hair out of the
past. And it was awful too the way poor Mr. Alving crawled across the
floor on his stomich and pulled the poison offn the icebox before he
killed himself. The way his poor, dear mother suffered, that was
terrible. She was such a strong, brave woman that I cried for her all
the time. And The Rev. Manders he was such a real swell minister that my
heart was all torn watching him. It ain’t natural for everybody to be so
good as ministers because they ain’t got so much time and don’t read the
Bible so often. But he was certainly all there when it came to pureness
and kindness. But even if the play was awful it was just grand the
lesson that it taught. I sent my friend to see it and he thought it was
swell. He said the kissing scenes where the terrible Cap. Alving hugs
the different ladies was real stuff and that the lesson against the
evils of drink was good for the young. This is what I want to write you
about, Mr. Ibsen. We’re going to organize a West Side Ibsen Prohibition
Club and make you honary president. I wish therefor you will write the
club a letter or better if you will write a sequil to the movie play
_Ghosts_ we will put it on at the club. I know how hard it is to have
movie plays accepted because I have done some myself but if you don’t
write the sequil I will write it and send it to the Mutual people who
put the first part on. I am certain they will take it because I will
make it just so strong and powerful a sermon against the evils of drink
as what you did. With best regards and hopes for your future success, I
am your friend,

Mobbie Mag.

[2] P.S. For the reader: The wet nurses who minister to the mob
have put our old friend Ibsen into diapers and give him to their
patients to play with. The cherubic little fellow is kicking up
his dimpled heels and thriving well in all the movie houses.

Death

I have always wished to know of death. I have always wondered what
became of me when I went back to earth. Today I know.

I have watched a soul die and have heard its pain. Beside it I have
stood and listened to its cries. I have watched it sicken and have noted
how it struggled.

Life was beautiful to it. There never was so exquisite a soul. It
leaped, and burned and danced when it was born. It was so radiant the
dark world into which it came grew light.

I have always wished to know of death. Today I know.

It was raining softly and we sat within a room with pictures all about—a
woman, fresh and young, and I—and trembled. The beauty and the
loveliness of her were dawning in me. And something of myself that had
not been took being. I loved. There was nothing as beautiful as her
lips. There was nothing as beautiful as her eyes. There was nothing then
in all the world as beautiful as she I loved. It was my soul. Restless
as a song it reached from day to day to light new moments with its
melody. Ever and forever it went singing, “I will live beyond the stars.
I will live beyond the mystery of flesh. When the woman who awakened me
is turned to dust I will live as now and sing as now.”

I have always wondered what became of me when I went back to earth.
Today I know.

It was so precious and so fierce. I loved so. I had but to look on her
and taste of immortality.

Beside it I have stood and listened to its cries. I have noted how it
struggled. In the night I have repeated its brave words, “Ever and
forever.” I have nursed it from her lips. I have given it to feed upon
her breast.

It would not live. I loved so, I loved so—and yet I ceased to love.

There is one thing in the world that will not live. There is one thing
mortal more than life. It is the beauty of which poets sing. Beauty dies
in every moment. It is mortal with the hours. It flashes and it dies. It
leaps and dies. It sings and dies.

I loved so and yet I ceased to love.

Her eyes became as nothing. Her lips became as nothing. Her voice became
as nothing. Her laughter and her tears, the movement of her body when
she walked, the strangeness of her face, the mysteries that made her one
apart and glorified her and the radiance that burned in me at her
approach—all became as nothing.

Miserable God. False Promiser. I have wished to know of death. I have
wondered what became of me when I went back to earth. Today I know.

“The Scavenger.”

Children’s Poems

Alice Oliver Henderson, eight-year-old poet, wrote the following five
poems when she was only seven. Her method is to chant them to her
mother, Alice Corbin Henderson, who takes them down exactly as they are
dictated. Mrs. Henderson thinks their interest lies in the fact that
they are the expression of a child’s mind, and so she refuses to change
or “improve” them. Besides, it might be difficult to “improve” such
lines as “The moon shines against my heart”.... The other poems in the
group were written by Percy Mackaye’s children—Arvia’s at the age of
ten, and Robin’s at twelve. Mr. Mackaye says that his daughter’s were
done while it was still difficult for her to read or write, but that she
has always been read aloud to and has learned considerable poetry by
heart.

A Mountain of Fire

There was a mountain made of fire,
Far in the sea—
It was very nice to everybody that lived in that world.
Right over in Japan, it was.
Where there are very good fighters and painters,
And very good little children,
And very good minders in that world.

Kathleen

(after seeing _Kathleen ni Houlihan_)

She looked very, very old when she came in.
The mother and the father that were in the house.
Had one brother in the house,
The other one had gone out
And got all the England people away
For Kathleen,
For Kathleen,
And then said, _He shall be remembered forever_.
She was a young woman when she went out,
And she sang when she went out the door.

The moon shines at night
When all are in bed,
And the dear little birdies sing for you
In the morning time to wake you sure.

How lovely the day is—
The moon shines against my heart—
I love the sweetness of the sky.
The beautiful day comes every morning true.

Miss Ungerich’s Japanese Play

Eyes all blackened, lips made beautiful,
Lavender under, then red over for the costume,
Acted wonderfully with her hands fixed all the time,
Bare feet, then on to the floor,
She made a thing that was beautiful.

Next was a man with a sword,
He acted the same way with her face.
Brown—gold costume, then a hat she wore,
Then a sort of stick-sword;
Then she did moving of hands and killing.
She was pretending, but there was only one actor,
Miss Ungerich.

The Snow Flakes

In the winter I saw the loveliest sky that you ever saw.
It was blue and pink and yellow and orange and white and black and grey.
That was the colors of the sky.
It pleased me so that I went and sat down.
You must think of life and the poor that war makes.

_Done by Alice Oliver Henderson, Miss._

Fire Castles

Fast falling rain and every hill in mist
Make even my very saddest thoughts grow sadder,
And every sad thought lengthens my long list,
As, moaning over old things that make me madder,
I sit and sulk over some unkind word
And weep as if I had not wept before,
And think of words about me I have heard,
And with old thoughts grieve over them some more.
But soon, if I get up, or sit and gaze,
Telling myself stories of joyous thought
Before the warm and cheery, singing blaze,
Now all my bad thoughts in a trap are caught;
And if I gaze at castles in the fire,
Then all the while to gladness I grow nigher.

The Unknown Race

O dream, what are you?—
A fairy or a sprite,
A goddess in the air,
Or just a flash of light?

A sudden flash of joy
That brightens up my mind,
Till wonders I see now
Where first I was so blind.

Zephyr

Zephyr—Zephyr—Zephyr! Blow on, blow hard
Over hill and over dale!
O play in the green trees, leave nothing marred:
O blow—O blow—O blow a gale!

Zephyr—Zephyr—Zephyr! Play on, play long!
Play and sing in tops of trees,
And brush the valley’s airy green hair strong;
Dip your head, diving down the leas!

Zephyr—Zephyr—Zephyr,
Like a little heifer,
Frolic and lie
In the field of the sky!

Good-bye, good-bye!
Frolic and turn and lie!

_Arvia Mackaye._

The Swimming Pool

O! crystal-clear, transparent water,
The cool wind is thy joyous daughter.
As I glide through thee, quick and sleek—
Oh thou so quiet and so meek!—
I feel thy ripples lapping free,
And thou dost lie so near to me
I see my figure on thy face,
Entwined in shadows, linked like lace.

Oh! what art thou? what canst thou be,
That dost reflect my visage unto me?
I know not what thou seemest to another,
But thou to me art as a brother.

To a Turtle

O gallant knight in armour black
Blotched with grey and yellow squares,
A horny motto’s on thy breast:
_Bravery_ it bears.

O turtle, paddling through the grass
That skirts the cobwebbed shining lawn!
Come tell me true: where journey you
This dewy dawn?

I smell a pond, and in it are
Young tadpoles, newly hatched and fresh,
And larvas of mosquitoes plump
And sweet of flesh;

And whirligigs, that streak and dart
Like water-lightning underneath
The greenish cat-tail spears, that shade
The frogspit heath.

And there is oozy, deep, soft mud
For me to lie and bask upon,
And dine on lizards fat, and sleek
Chameleon.

And there the bright-green, freckled frog
My only friend will always be.
To him I haste:—To you I bend
My jointless knee.

_Robin Mackaye._

Book Discussion

The Books of Poetry

_Irradiations: Sand and Spray, by John Gould Fletcher. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Company._

There is considerable diversity in Mr. Fletcher’s _Irradiations_, but
one soon discovers that he has not encrimsoned himself with the standard
passions of poetry. He does not display the usual contortions of love,
hate, grief, and fear. Some persons have, therefore, found him aloof,
oversubtle, and lacking in emotional force. This intimation that Mr.
Fletcher’s art is etiolated is an admission of the reader’s
incompleteness. Vitality does not depend on subject; nor is subtlety
necessarily weakness. But the notion strangely persists that a poet must
clothe his emotions in samite and dance with them around a blood-red
fire to the plangent accompaniment of drums and trumpets.

To say that Mr. Fletcher has entwined himself with nature would unfairly
give an impression of Wordsworthian insipidity. Yet Mr. Fletcher in many
of his poems is a part of the rain, of the sand and wind, of the clouds
and sky. But he is never merely descriptive. He has the power of
conveying a mood in the terms of nature without intruding himself upon
the reader. Let me illustrate with one of the best of his poems which
has been much quoted elsewhere:

Flickering of incessant rain
On flashing pavements;
Sudden scurry of umbrellas;
Bending recurved blossoms of the storm.

The winds came clanging and clattering
From long white highroads whipping in ribbons up summits;
They strew upon the city gusty wafts of apple-blossom,
And the rustling of innumerable translucent leaves.

Uneven tinkling, the lazy rain
Dripping from the eaves.

Our tread-mill versifiers will shrink and mumble in the presence of Mr.
Fletcher’s clean new poetry. They who have inherited the dead mottled
skin of old poetic form with its incrustation of ancient allusions,
symbols, and yellowed figures, will not feel the alluring freshness of a
poem such as this:

It is evening, and the earth
Wraps her shoulders in an old blue shawl.
Afar there clink the polychrome points of the stars,
Indefatigable after all these years!
Here upon earth there is life, and then death,
Dawn, and later nightfall,
Fire, and the quenching of embers:
But why should I not remember that my night is dawn in another part
of the world,
If the idea fits my fancy?
Dawns of marvellous light, wakeful, sleepy, weary, dancing dawns;
You are rose petals settling through the blue of my evening;
I light my pipe to salute you,
And sit puffing smoke in the air and never say a word.

In his preface Mr. Fletcher says the use of rhyme is in its essence
barbarous; yet he himself uses it not infrequently together with such
devices as assonance, onomatopoeia, and alliteration. He is not
inconsistent, however, for he admits that rhyme used intelligently will
add to the richness of effect. It does:

The wind that drives the fine dry sand
Across the strand:
The sad wind spinning arabesques
With a wrinkled hand.

Labyrinths of shifting sand,
The dancing dunes!

I will arise and run with the sand,
And gather it greedily in my hand:
I will wriggle like a long yellow snake over the beaches.
I will lie curled up, sleeping,
And the wind shall chase me
Far inland.

My breath is the music of the mad wind;
Shrill piping, stamping of drunken feet,
The fluttering, tattered broidery flung
Over the dunes’ steep escarpments.

The fine dry sand that whistles
Down the long low beaches.

_Sand and Spray: A Sea-Symphony_ comprises the second part of Mr.
Fletcher’s volume. This symphony has much of the movement and variety of
music. In manner it resembles many of the “Irradiations,” and it is just
as well worth reading.

Certainly there will be many who will not like Mr. Fletcher’s work. Dogs
will always bark at a new fragrance.

_Japanese Lyrics, translated by Lafcadio Hearn. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Company._

Readers of Lafcadio Hearn will recall the many translations of Japanese
_haikai_ poetry which are scattered through his writings. Those
translations have been collected in the present volume. They are
delicate whisps of thought, tantalizingly suggestive, most of them
confined to a sentence. Here are some of them:

If with my sleeve I hide the faint fair color of the dawning
sun,—
then, perhaps, in the morning, my lord will remain.

Perched upon the temple-bell, the butterfly sleeps:
Even while sleeping, its dream is of play—ah, the butterfly of the
grass!

Many insects there are that call from the dawn to evening,
Crying “I love! I love!”—but the Firefly’s silent passion,
Making its body burn, is deeper than all their longing.
Even such is my love ....

The following poem, says the editor, was written more than eleven
hundred years ago on the death of the poet’s little son:

As he is so young, he cannot know the way.
.... To the messenger of the Underworld I will give a bribe,
and entreat him, saying: “Do thou kindly take the little one upon thy
back along the road.”

Some discerning persons have asserted that “Imagism” is derived from
_haikai_ or _hokku_ poetry. We shall leave to them the pleasant futility
of discussing that theory. They may eventually discover that they are
building on the shaky premise that “Imagism” exists other than as a
clever word.

_The Winnowing Fan, by Laurance Binyon. Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Company._

My dears, we will tie _vers libre_ in the garden. Then let us go into
the parlor where Mr. Laurence Binyon will pour tea; it will have sugar
in it. Mr. Binyon will read to you from his latest book _The Winnowing
Fan_. He is a gentleman of taste and culture who is vexed at the
Germans. He is meticulously metrical and counts his syllables. He will
say nothing unexpected.... If _vers libre_ howls in the garden, you may
throw rhymes at him.

_Mitchell Dawson._

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._)

Shadows of Revolt, by Inez Haynes Gilmore. _The Masses_, July.

Redemption and Dostoevsky, by Rebecca West. _The New Republic_, July 12.

The State of the War, by Arthur Bullard. _The Masses_, August.

Serbia Between Battles, by John Reed. _The Metropolitan_, August.

Richard Aldington’s lucid account of the Imagists and their history in
_Greenwich Village_, July 15.

Almost any of the editorials in _Harper’s Weekly_.

Can You Read—?

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

The reactions of the two Chestertons in _The New Witness_.

Midsummer fiction issues of _The Century_ or _Scribner’s_ or _Harper’s_.

_The Continent_ on Edgar Lee Masters’ _Spoon River Anthology_: “Each
poem is in the nature of a confession, philosophical or satirical,
telling secrets of human nature, good or bad—mostly bad. Because of its
novelty and originality the book has attracted attention far and
wide.... His attitude toward religious believers is a wrong one, and
readers may well wonder at the scarcity of sincere, sensible Christians
in Spoon River.”

The Reader Critic

_Lee J. Smits, Detroit_:

We are disgusted and impatient with “peo-pul” just to the extent that
our realization of superiority fails us. That impatient attitude reminds
me of the ordinary attitude of the white toward the black. The white man
is not sure of himself; history and biology do not give him sufficient
support. So he bullies negroes at every opportunity. Some men even are
impelled to contend for their superiority by abusing dogs.

The sense of superiority abides in all living things of necessity, else
no form of life would stand out against any other. Wild creatures never
need argue, each with himself, as to his place in the world. His right
to exist and to express himself is paramount in the animal’s soul. Only
man ever doubts.

Really “peo-pul” do not doubt. They with the artist’s mark on them do
the doubting. When it is very faint, their doubting asserts itself in
strange ways and the crude egoism thereof revolts us. “Peo-pul” crawl
along self-satisfied.

And why do you ask so much of artists? Why is it so important that they
should use their strength in vain strivings to make butterflies of worms
never destined to be butterflies or to amuse other artists who should be
able to amuse themselves? If they get joy out of creating and preaching,
let them preach and create—let them soar. If they get joy out of being,
out of exultant living and watching, let them live, and do not scold.

The most beautiful butterfly I ever saw (some kind of “Emperor”) merely
rested on a lump of mud in the forest shade and very languidly moved his
wings. That is all he did while I looked at him. He knew that he could
fly, I knew that he could fly, and he either knew that I knew or else he
didn’t care.

We all know what impatience with “peo-pul” is. In the hush of a great
flash of dramatic power from the stage, they giggle, and it would be
good to fasten your fingers in the pulpy throat of one. They applaud
idiotic vaudeville, and it would be glorious to arise, automatic in
hand, and slay and slay.

That is your distrust of yourself—we all have it as much as we deserve
it.

“So I belong to this species!” you say.

I do not hate my dog when he seeks out carrion. I wash him with strong
soap and try to explain him. I feel quite sure—most of the time—that I
have come a little further than he has.

“Peo-pul” are even more interesting than dogs, when taken individually.
We even have more in common with them than with other animals.

Some of them are beautiful in their simplicity, like children—unspoiled
in their loves and hates, and it is entertainment to behold them; to be
with them, yet not of them; to be the arch-snob, of such perfect
snobbishness that it is indistinguishable from perfect humility, perfect
democracy.

All the mighty ones have been artists in life; like unto children they
have walked their ways, so everlastingly sure of themselves that rarely
have they been betrayed into petulance by the wobbling of their sense of
superiority.

_Susan Quackenbush, Portage, Wisconsin_:

May one who has read your every issue with joy and enthusiasm be
permitted to enter protest against that gross libel on the human race
labeled _The Artist in Life_, in your June number?

Please—oh please—_be_ an artist-in-life, in human life, as well as in
sunsets and Paderewskis and Imagism, and see for one creative moment, in
“terms of truth and beauty,” the wonderful, aspiring, suffering, loving,
smouldering, flaming beautiful souls of that great living, growing,
winged group of creations you have called—may the great human God
forgive the phrase—a “mass of caterpillars!” Come and see how its soul,
and the souls of its separate creations “spring from the rock” just as
truly as the brook’s or your own. If they can not _yet_ spring as far,
it is because the weight above them is as yet too heavy.

When all the humans look like caterpillars to any one human, the trouble
is with that one’s viewpoint. From an aeroplane, even the Himalayas look
like anthills. Come down from your remote altitude and lose yourself in
the beautiful, glorious psychic of the crowd—be one of them, and see
what you will find!

THE LITTLE REVIEW proclaims itself bent on the adventure of beauty. Is
there any beauty like that of the “sad, sweet music of humanity?” What
is the glow of the most gorgeous sunset ever splashed against the
western skies beside the glow of the divine in the human which hurls
itself upon you—and _into_ you if you will let it—in a thousand
beseeching, inviting, intoxicating flames from the midst of any crowd?

But only, of course, if you are _in_ the midst.

Is there any adventure like the “adventure of being human”—and _with_
humans? and _of_ them? Go with Whitman into the heart of
humanity—struggle _with_ them—not from far above them—to lift from off
their backs the crushing weight of wealth and masters and idle snobs and
false gods so that they may get _room_ to spread their wings—for they
_have_ wings, and then you will know them as they are, and yourself but
as one of them.

If some of them still try to clip the wings of those who have struggled
free from the crushing pressure, it is because of the maddening agony of
their own atrophying wings. If a few seem even to be unaware of the need
for wings, it is because the clamor of more insistent needs—the cries of
hungry children, of bruised and broken and unsatisfied men and of
suffering and degraded women—has silenced for every shame their own
soul’s wing-cry.

But I think that you will find that those who perform the wing-clipping
are the other butterflies whom money or position or callousness has set
above the people—not those who are really of the crowd. They of the
crowd _love_ wings, and those who truly use them.

I am not daring to attempt reply to the statement which inflames me
most, lest I become profane and entirely incoherent. I mean, of course,
the statement that the estimate of four or five thousand living artists
would be too optimistic because that would mean four or five thousand
who “have nothing in common with caterpillars.” That’s a worse libel on
artists than the rest of it is on people. But I’ll try to stop with one
remark and one question. The estimate is entirely too pessimistic; I
positively refuse to believe there are four thousand persons alive who
have or even who think they have “nothing in common” with the great
splendid mass of folks; if there are, the gods have pity on them!
And—has there ever been one single real and great artist, whether of
brush or pen or tone, whose art and whose very greatness was not
absolutely dependent upon and because of the fact that he had, and knew
he had, _everything_ in common with, and indeed included in his being,
the beings of these whom you term “caterpillars”?—these whose life and
living are and always have been and through ages will continue to be the
most worth while content of all art? Of course you reply: _Nietzsche_;
but he was an intellectual and spiritual Rockefeller—not an
artist-in-life.

And Individualism? When _all_ have been set free to use their wings,
then the few may feel free to strive toward the super-butterfly. And
when they arrive, perhaps,—oh, just perhaps—they will find all the other
“caterpillars” there too, and with quite wonderful wings. There are
wings, and wings, and if they but serve to bear us free of the disaster
of meanness and cruelty and snobbishness and injustice, who shall say
they are not super-wings?

_Witter Bynner, Windsor, Vermont_:

I wish I could honor the Imagists as you do. Hueffer wrote _On Heaven_
(not imagistic); and Pound wrote well before he affected a school ...
Pound has a rhythm he can’t kill. But none of them, except Hueffer, says
anything worth mentioning. They build poems around phrases, usually
around adjectives. George Meredith has thousands of imagist poems
incidental to each of his novels. But he knows their use and their
beauty. These people wring tiny beauties dry. I can imagine a good poet
using their methods on occasion, but he wouldn’t be so damn conscious
about it. On the whole, the Imagists strike me as being purveyors of
more or less potent cosmetics, their whole interest being in the
cosmetic itself, not even in its application. Poetry gave signs of
becoming poetry again and of touching life—when these fellows showed up,
to make us all ridiculous.

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THE
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Professional man or woman, dealing with social, criminal, medical
and religious matters will find this book of immediate value.
Without doubt the most complete and authoritative as well as the
most amazing book ever written on sexual matters. Subject treated
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The chapter on “Love and Other Irradiations of the Sexual
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and love of America is depicted for you and you go away
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“The Melting Pot” is alight with patriotism of the frank sort
that will find echo in American hearts.—Tribune.

The glory of America inspired by “The Melting Pot” should
recommend the play to every one.—American.

“The Melting Pot” is a gripping story told in a masterly
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Poetry

A Magazine of Verse

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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.

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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 Unbroken Chain, by Romain Rolland. _The New Republic._

Dostoievsky and Tolstoy, by James Huneker. _The Forum_, August.

Nietzsche, by Anna Strunsky Walling. _The New Review_, August 1.

The Uninteresting War, by Max Eastman. _The Masses_, September.

Our Friend, the Enemy, by Alice Corbin Henderson. _Poetry_,
August.

Books and Things, by Walter Lippman. _The New Republic_, August
7.

Morality and the Movies, by Floyd Dell. _The New Review_, August
15.

Nearly everything in _The Egoist_, August 1.

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._)

The Meaning of It, by H. C. _The New Republic_, August 7.

Bryant and “The New Poetry,” by John L. Hervey. _The Dial_, Aug.
15.

The “Free” Poets, by Michael Monahan. _The Phoenix_, September.

Pearls from _The Outlook_ for August 11, in regard to the Becker
trial:

What can we learn from this story of trust betrayed, of dishonor
in high places, and of a three years’ legal battle over a crime
which demanded immediate retribution? Certainly the law did not
come out unscathed from this controversy. It is a familiar story,
but it will bear repetition until it is remedied—we are very much
behind England in our administration of criminal law. The
efficiency of punishment as a deterrent to crime is largely based
upon the swiftness and sureness of justice rather than the
severity of the penalty inflicted. Becker is dead; but who can
deny that whatever social effect may result from his execution
would have been trebled had his death come within a reasonable
interval after the commission of his crime? The case is
significant, not because it is an exception, but because it is
typical of the process of American law.

Statement of Ownership, Management,
Circulation, Etc., required by the Act of
August 24, 1912

of _THE LITTLE REVIEW_ published monthly at
_Chicago, Ill._ for _April 1st, 1914_.

Editor, _Margaret C. Anderson, 834 Fine Arts
Building, Chicago_

Managing Editor, _Same_

Business Manager, _Same_

Publisher, _Same_

Owners: (If a corporation, give its name and
the names and addresses of stockholders holding
1 per cent or more of total amount of stock. If
not a corporation, give names and addresses of
individual owners.)

_Margaret C. Anderson
834 Fine Arts Building, Chicago_

Known bondholders, mortgagees, and other
security holders, holding 1 per cent or more of
total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other
securities: _None_

_MARGARET C. ANDERSON_,

Sworn to and subscribed before me this _10th_
day of _April, 1915_.

_MITCHELL DAWSON, Notary Public._
(My commission expires _December 20, 1917_.)

THE EGOIST

An Individualist Review

Subscribe to THE EGOIST and hear what you will get:

Editorials containing the most notable creative and critical
philosophic matter appearing in England today.

Some of the newest and best experimental English and American
poetry.

A page of current French poetry.

Reviews of only those books which are worth praise.

News of modern music, of new painting, of French literary and
artistic life.

A series of impartial studies in modern German poetry (began June
1st).

Translations and parodies.

A serial novel by James Joyce, a young Irishman of great talent—a
novel no one else would print—it was too good.

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Transcriber’s Notes

Advertisements were collected at the end of the text. Duplicate
advertisements were removed.

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

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

[p. 4]:
... scandal-monging newspapers, out of the malicious after-dinner
gossip of ...
... scandal-mongering newspapers, out of the malicious
after-dinner gossip of ...

[p. 7]:
... For the sun shifts through the shade. ...
... For the sun sifts through the shade. ...

[p. 13]:
... affects his own pocket. And the masses of labor who do feel
themselve and ...
... affects his own pocket. And the masses of labor who do feel
themselves and ...

[p. 20]:
... Sappho, Sappho, long ago the dust of earth mingled with the
dust of they dear limbs, ...
... Sappho, Sappho, long ago the dust of earth mingled with the
dust of thy dear limbs, ...

[p. 29]:
... Unquestioning our desserts; ...
... Unquestioning our deserts; ...

[p. 32]:
... said Zarathustra, with a brazen voice, “thou are the
murderer of God!... ...
... said Zarathustra, with a brazen voice, “thou art the
murderer of God!... ...

*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Little Review, August 1915 (Vol. 2, No. 5)" ***

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