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Title: The Little Review, April 1916 (Vol. 3, No. 2)
Author: Various
Language: English
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THE LITTLE REVIEW
Literature Drama Music Art
MARGARET C. ANDERSON
EDITOR
APRIL, 1916
Four Poems: Carl Sandburg
Gone
Graves
Choices
Child of the Romans
Portrait of Carl Sandburg by Elizabeth Buehrmann
Dreiser Sherwood Anderson
To John Cowper Powys Arthur Davison Ficke
A Letter from London Ezra Pound
A Sorrowful Demon Alexander S. Kaun
The Poet Speaks Margaret C. Anderson
Poems: Elizabeth Gibson Cheyne
The Cry
The Excuse
The Cross
What Then—? R. G.
German Poetry William Saphier
An Isaiah Without a Christ Charles Zwaska
Announcements
Flamingo Dreams Lupo de Braila
New York Letter Allan Ross Macdougall
The Theatre
Book Discussion
The Reader Critic
Vers Libre Prize Contest
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. III
APRIL, 1916
NO. 2
Copyright, 1916, by Margaret C. Anderson
Four Poems
CARL SANDBURG
Gone
Everybody loved Chick Lorimer in our town.
Far off
Everybody loved her.
So we all love a wild girl keeping a hold
On a dream she wants.
Nobody knows now where Chick Lorimer went.
Nobody knows why she packed her trunk: a few old things
And is gone....
Gone with her little chin
Thrust ahead of her
And her soft hair blowing careless
From under a wide hat,
Dancer, singer, a laughing passionate lover.
Were there ten men or a hundred hunting Chick?
Were there five men or fifty with aching hearts?
Everybody loved Chick Lorimer.
Nobody knows where she’s gone.
Graves
I dreamed one man stood against a thousand,
One man damned as a wrongheaded fool.
One year and another he walked the streets,
And a thousand shrugs and hoots
Met him in the shoulders and mouths he passed.
He died alone
And only the undertaker came to his funeral.
Flowers grow over his grave anod in the wind,
And over the graves of the thousand, too,
The flowers grow anod in the wind.
Flowers and the wind,
Flowers anod over the graves of the dead,
Petals of red, leaves of yellow, streaks of white,
Masses of purple sagging ...
I love you and your great way of forgetting.
Choices
They offer you many things,
I a few.
Moonlight on the play of fountains at night
With water sparkling a drowsy monotone,
Bare-shouldered, smiling women and talk
And a cross-play of loves and adulteries
And a fear of death
and a remembering of regrets:
All this they offer you.
I come with:
salt and bread
a terrible job of work
and tireless war;
Come and have now:
hunger
danger
and hate.
[Illustration: Carl Sandburg
_From a silhouette photograph by Elizabeth Buehrmann_]
Child of the Romans
The dago shovelman sits by the railroad track
Eating a noon meal of bread and bologna.
A train whirls by and men and women at tables
Alive with red roses and yellow jonquils,
Eat steaks running with brown gravy,
Strawberries and cream, eclairs and coffee.
The dago shovelman finishes the dry bread and bologna,
Washes it down with a dipper from the water-boy
And goes back to the second half of a ten-hour day’s work,
Keeping the road-bed so the roses and jonquils
Shake hardly at all in the cut glass vases
Standing slender on the tables in the dining cars.
Dreiser
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
_Heavy, heavy, hangs over thy head._
_Fine, or superfine._
Theodore Dreiser is old—he is very, very old. I do not know how many
years he has lived, perhaps thirty, perhaps fifty, but he is very old.
Something gray and bleak and hurtful that has been in the world almost
forever is personified in him.
When Dreiser is gone we shall write books, many of them. In the books we
write there will be all of the qualities Dreiser lacks. We shall have a
sense of humor, and everyone knows Dreiser has no sense of humor. More
than that we shall have grace, lightness of touch, dreams of beauty
bursting through the husks of life.
Oh, we who follow him shall have many things that Dreiser does not have.
That is a part of the wonder and the beauty of Dreiser, the things that
others will have because of Dreiser.
When he was editor of _The Delineator_, Dreiser went one day, with a
woman friend, to visit an orphans’ asylum. The woman told me the story
of that afternoon in the big, gray building with Dreiser, heavy and
lumpy and old, sitting on a platform and watching the children—the
terrible children—all in their little uniforms, trooping in.
“The tears ran down his cheeks and he shook his head,” the woman said.
That is a good picture of Dreiser. He is old and he does not know what
to do with life, so he just tells about it as he sees it, simply and
honestly. The tears run down his cheeks and he shakes his head.
Heavy, heavy, the feet of Theodore. How easy to pick his books to
pieces, to laugh at him. Thump, thump, thump, here he comes, Dreiser,
heavy and old.
The feet of Dreiser are making a path for us, the brutal heavy feet.
They are tramping through the wilderness, making a path. Presently the
path will be a street, with great arches overhead and delicately carved
spires piercing the sky. Along the street will run children, shouting
“Look at me”—forgetting the heavy feet of Dreiser.
The men who follow Dreiser will have much to do. Their road is long. But
because of Dreiser, we, in America, will never have to face the road
through the wilderness, the road that Dreiser faced.
_Heavy, heavy, hangs over thy head._
_Fine, or superfine._
To John Cowper Powys, on His “Confessions”
ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE
I.
Old salamander basking in the fire,
Winking your lean tongue at a coal or two,
Lolling amid the maelstroms of desire,
And envying the lot of none or few—
Old serpent alien to the human race,
Immune to poison, apples, and the rest,
Examining like a microbe each new face
And pawing, passionless, each novel breast—
Admirer of God and of the Devil,
Hater of Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell,
Skeptic of good, more skeptic yet of evil—
Knowing the sick soul sounder than the well—
We mortals send you greeting from afar—
How very like a human being you are!
II.
Impenetrably isolate you stand,
Tickling the world with a long-jointed straw.
Lazy as Behemoth, your thoughts demand
No cosmic plan to satisfy your maw;
But as the little shining gnats buzz by
You eat the brightest and spit out the rest,
Then streak your front with ochre carefully
And dance, a Malay with a tattooed breast.
There are no sins, no virtues left for you,
No strength, no weakness, no apostasy.
You know the world, now old, was never new,
And that its wisdom is a shameless lie.
So in the dusk you sit you down to plan
Some fresh confusion for the heart of man.
III.
Lover of Chaos and the Sacred Seven!
Scorner of Midas and St. Francis, too!
Wearied of earth, yet dubious of Heaven,
Fain of old follies and of pastures new—
Why should the great, whose spirits haunt the void
Between Orion and the Northern Wain,
Make you their mouthpiece? Why have they employed
So brassed a trumpet for so high a strain?
Perhaps, like you, they count it little worth
To pipe save for the piping; so they take
You weak, infirm, uncertain as the earth,
And down your tubes the thrill of music wake.
Well, God preserve you!—and the Devil damn!—
And nettles strew the bosom of Abraham!
A Letter from London
EZRA POUND
I should be very glad if someone in America could be made to realize the
sinister bearing of the import duty on books. I have tried in vain to
get some of my other correspondents to understand the effect of this
iniquity ... but apparently without success. It means insularity,
stupidity, backing the printer against literature, commerce and
obstruction against intelligence. I have spent myself on the topic so
many times that I am not minded to write an elaborate denunciation until
I know I am writing to someone capable of understanding and willing to
take up the battle. Incidentally the life of a critical review depends a
good deal on controversy and on having some issue worth fighting. Henry
IV. did away with the black mediaevalism of an octroi on books, and the
position of Paris is not without its debt to that intelligent act. No
country that needs artificial aid in its competition with external
intelligence is fit for any creature above the status of pig.
The tariff should be abolished not only for itself but because dishonest
booksellers shelter themselves behind it and treble the price of foreign
books, and because it keeps up the price of printing.
If there is one thing that we are all agreed upon: It is that the canned
goods of Curtis and Company and Harper and Company and all the business
firms should be set apart from the art of letters, and the artist helped
against the tradesman.
As a matter of fact a removal of the tariff wouldn’t much hurt even
publishers, as the foreign books we really want in America are the sort
which the greed of American business publishers forbids their publishing
... but that is no matter.
It affects every young writer in America, and every reader whether he
wish merely to train his perceptions or whether he train them with a
purpose, of, say, learning what has been done, what need not be
repeated, what is worthy of repetition. There is now the hideous
difficulty of getting a foreign book, and the prohibitive price of both
foreign and domestic publications. I don’t know that I need to go on
with it.
Again and yet again it is preposterous that our generation of writers
shouldn’t have the facility in getting at contemporary work, which one
would have in Paris or Moscow. It’s bad enough for the American to
struggle against the dead-hand of the past generation composed of clerks
and parasites and against our appalling _decentralization_, i. e., lack
of metropoles and centers, having full publishing facilities and
communication with the outer world—(which last is being slowly
repaired)—also our scarcity of people who know.
When all the world goes mad, one must accept madness as sanity,
since sanity is, in the last analysis, nothing but the madness on
which the whole world happens to agree.—_Bernard Shaw_, 1916.
A Sorrowful Demon[1]
ALEXANDER S. KAUN
How he hates us, ordinary mortals! No, he seldom hates; he reserves his
hatred for God, for life, for the universe. For us, weak bubbles driven
on the surface by uncontrollable forces, he has only contempt. Yet,
though hating and despising, he is infinitely dear to us: the thick
melancholy vein that bulges across his wildcat forehead makes him almost
human; the taut string of his remote harp vibrates at times with such
yearning and pain that we feel nearly at home with that alien-on-earth,
Mikhail Lermontov. We are glad with a petty gladness whenever we
discover in him this weakness, his humaneness; we chuckle at the
comfortable feeling of being able to observe him on the level plane,
freed from the necessity of throwing our heads far back in order to
perceive him on the lonely peak. He is our brother, we boast; and we
inflict on him the severest punishment for a genius—forgiveness.
But his contemporaries could not forgive him. A general sigh of relief
echoed the official announcement of his death “in a fearful storm
accompanied by thunder and lightning on the Beshta mountain in the
Caucasus”. “Bon voyage”, exclaimed Nicholas I, rubbing his hands in glee
over the departure of one of his most undesirable subjects, the
uncompromising mutineer. The church refused to bury the arrogant denier.
Society applauded Major Martinov whose bullet snapped the life of the
unapproachable aristocrat, the mocker of customs and conventions, the
maimer of feminine hearts, the careless, fearless duellist who played
with life, his own or that of others, as with a valueless toy. The
people—there was not such a thing in Russia of 1841.
Society organism cannot digest a foreign element. We are too local in
our terrestrial standards to tolerate an individual who is made not of
the same stuff that we are made of. Lermontov was a child of a different
planet who fell upon our earth by some crude mistake, doomed to chafe
twenty-six years among humans. As a child he protested against the fatal
misplacement; he discharged his venom in demolishing flower-beds, in
torturing animals with tears in his eyes, in brandishing his tiny fists
against his grandmother, when he observed her mistreating the serfs.
When he grew up—and he grew up early: at ten he loved a girl; at fifteen
he conceived his greatest poems, _Mtzyri_ and _Demon_—his protest had
calmed down. He no longer wept or raged—he hated God and despised
mankind. His contemporaries tell us that no one could stand his heavy
penetrating look. Men hated and feared him; women hated and loved him,
as they always do extraordinary things. Lermontov took revenge for his
accidental association with mankind; he left behind him a long row of
broken hearts and wounded ambitions. His rebellious spirit sought rest
in chaos, in torturing others and himself, in creating around him an
atmosphere of tragedy, in reckless fighting with the wild Caucasian
mountaineers.
And he, the mutinous, seeks storm,
As if in storm he may find peace.
Pechorin, the hero of his autobiographical sketches collected in _A Hero
of Our Time_, is the first Nietzschean in literature. His terse,
unpretentious maxims and paradoxes have been re-echoed by Dostoevsky,
Nietzsche, Przybyszewski, and other writers of the superman-literature.
As always is the case with deliberate or unconscious commentators, they
liquefy the original. One carelessly dropped sentence of Lermontov is
elaborated in tons of Dostoevsky’s gallous psychology, in mountains of
Nietzsche’s brain-splittering philosophy, in cognac-oceans of the
vivisectionist-Przybyszewski. Pechorin does not talk much; he is too
aristocratic for extravagance in words. Pechorin does not compromise; he
is not made of that stuff. He neither repents nor seeks atonement; in
his hatred for reality he does not erect a consoling phantom in the
image of a Superman; he would dismiss with a contemptible shrug Falk’s
matrimonial and sexual tribulations. Pechorin is eternally alone. Those
who approach him are scorched with his unhuman flame. Alone, in the
steppe, after a mad ride which kills his horse, Pechorin hugs the soil
and weeps “like a child”. Like a child pressing to its mother’s bosom,
plaintively demanding the Why and the Wherefore of existence among
strangers. Shall we chuckle at the suddenly-discovered weakness of our
enemy? Or shall we modestly turn away our eyes from the stolen sight of
a god in his nudity?
I once called Lermontov a sorrowful demon. Not a Lucifer, not a
Mephistopheles, but a Russian demon, as the sculptor Antokolsky
conceived him. Lermontov-Demon-Pechorin, a quaint superman, neither god
nor devil, a pluralistic being, a combination of cruelty and compassion,
of contempt and sympathy, of cynicism and sentimentalism, of the
loftiest and the basest, of the unhuman and of the human-all-too-human.
Dostoevsky?
----------
[1] A Hero of Our Time, by M. Y. Lermontov. New York, Alfred A.
Knopf.
The Poet Speaks
MARGARET C. ANDERSON
There are people in the world who like poetry if they know the poet.
There are a good many people in Chicago just now who understand and
enjoy Amy Lowell’s poetry because she read it to them at the Little
Theatre.
I know a poet who could make nothing of Vachel Lindsay’s things until
Lindsay chanted them to him one day. And I know another who said to me,
when I remarked that I didn’t like Alfred Kreymborg’s verse, “Oh, but
you would if you knew him.” I am puzzled, because I know this man to be
an intelligent being. And somehow I have always been under the naive
impression that poetry was a matter of art.
But there are worse things. There is one type of person we always eject
promptly from the office of THE LITTLE REVIEW. He is the person who says
that Amy Lowell’s poetry has no feeling in it. Now please listen: I want
to quote you something. It is called _Vernal Equinox_, it was written by
Miss Lowell, and it appeared in the September issue of _Poetry_; but I
want to see it put down in these pages so that we may actually know it
has been in THE LITTLE REVIEW:
The scent of hyacinths, like a pale mist, lies between me and
my book;
And the South Wind, washing through the room,
Makes the candles quiver;
My nerves sting at a spatter of rain on the shutter,
And I am uneasy at the bursting of green shoots
Outside, in the night.
Why are you not here to overpower me with your tense and
urgent love?
A poet whose new book will soon be talked of said to me, when I showed
this to him, “Yes, it’s very clever, but it has no feeling.” He left the
office gladly in three minutes.
Still there are worse things. _The Chicago Tribune_ sent a reporter to
the Little Theatre to hear Miss Lowell read and to record his impression
of her work and personality for those who still peruse the newspapers.
You may have seen the reporter’s article....
And still worse?... Lots of people have been splitting hairs over Amy
Lowell’s work, but no human being has been heard to remark: “A beautiful
thing is happening in America. Amy Lowell is writing poetry for us.”
Poems[2]
ELIZABETH GIBSON CHEYNE
The Cry
Whenever there is silence around me,
By day or by night,
I am startled by the cry
“Take me down from the cross!”
The first time I heard it
I went out and searched
Till I found a man in the throes of crucifixion,
And I said, “I will take you down,”
And I tried to take the nails out of his feet,
But he said “Let be;
For I cannot be taken down
Till every man, every woman, and every child
Come together to take me down.”
And I said, “But I cannot bear your cry—
What can I do?”
And he said “Go about the world,
Telling everyone you meet
‘There is a man upon the cross.’”
The Excuse
I go about the world
Telling all the rich,
And all the happy, and all the comfortable,
“There is a man upon the cross.”
But they all say
“We are sure you are mistaken;
There was a man upon the cross
Two thousand years ago;
But he died, and was taken down
And was decently buried;
And a miracle happened,
So that he rose again
And ascended into Heaven,
And is happy evermore.”
Still I go about the world saying
“There is a man upon the cross.”
The Cross
Any groveller
May be straightened by a cross
If he lies down upon it at night,
And sleeps upon it with outstretched arms;
If he rises in the morning,
And shoulders it bravely,
Neither resenting it
Nor being ashamed of it,
He will find that he can bring his eyes
To look upon life
Instead of upon the grave,
And that he will even be able
To lift them to the stars;
And that he can live
On the levels he is able to look upon.
----------
[2] I do not know whether these poems have been published
elsewhere or not. They were read by Ellen Gates Starr in a mass
meeting in Kent Theatre on the University of Chicago campus—a
mass meeting in protest against police brutality during the
garment strike.
What Then—?
R. G.
There are signs of life at the Art Institute. In throwing out Charles
Kinney, it stated the case against itself more emphatically than Kinney
ever could have done. When an “institution” becomes violent over
criticism there is too much work for one reformer.
This seems to have been a season for things Art to be stating the case
against themselves. At the last meeting of the Chicago Society of
Artists, when there was a slight murmur of dissatisfaction with the
management of the Institute, one of the older men quickly reminded the
painters that they were but guests of the Institute—and there was
silence. Art has come by hard ways, but never to worse than this:—the
guest of the Corn Exchange Bank!
Again at a meeting for the formation of the new Arts Club, before the
matter of the Club could be discussed there had to be a speech assuring
the Art Institute that the artists would never, in any way, _ever_ do
anything on their own, but would always conform to the ideas of the
directors of the Institute. But where they really proved themselves was
at the annual dinner, at the opening of the Chicago Artists’ Exhibition.
Herded into a room they meekly submitted to oyster stew and a speech by
a minister of the Gospel. Artists! That is their case as stated by
themselves.
Kinney blames the directors pro tem., and the Dean, for the “factory
system” in the school. Knowing that all the small towns in the West and
Middle West having any kind of an Art School pattern after the Art
Institute, he is excited and fears the factory system will prevail
everywhere. But he might have hope that here and there accidentally a
few artists may get mixed up among the other students and frustrate this
plan.
It would be interesting to know whether the administration by its
methods has so completely discouraged artists that they no longer seek
the Art Institute as a place of study, or whether the administration is
simply changing its methods to meet the demands of the kind of student
now attending the Institute.
This much is certain: no administration could take away every ancient
prerogative of art students; lead them gently into organization; impose
discipline upon them; and appoint God a chaperone over their play—in
fact make a crêche of the school—if there were any of the stuff in them
of which artists are made.
There always has been a fight on the part of the school to get what it
wanted from the directors; but things can be done. Read the list of
“illustrious names” of visiting instructors, years ago, and then compare
the student roll of the same time. Once the Art Institute was an art
school with art students, who were artists, who in spite of everything
led the life of artists, knew the analogy between painting and the other
Arts, swarmed to concerts and the theatres, and created their own
atmosphere. That was the time when Bernhardt came to the school in her
yellow-wheeled carriage and walked down a double line of quaking,
adoring art students. And when Calvé came to sing.... How many students
there now know these names, know anything beyond fashion drawing?
They have indicted themselves. If there were artists the Art Institute
could seek exhibitions. If there were art students we could have an art
school, not a “factory.” And if the directors of the Art Institute and
its patrons really wanted Art, and the directors would throw the
Institute open to all kinds of exhibitions, we might even in time find
Art.
German Poetry
WILLIAM SAPHIER
Learned essays on this or that poetry make little red devils dance in my
brain and my right hand reach for a Japanese sword. They are invariably
inferior to the spirit, and occupy only a small section of the horizon
of their subject. I have translated these three poems because I felt
that they were as good or better than the best things published in this
country, and because so little is known of this kind of German poetry
here. The first is by Julius Berstl and the second two are by Fritz
Schnack. I know of many more, but I am unable to get their work just
now. As you perhaps know, they are engaged at present in a different
direction.
Highland
(_From the German of Julius Berstl_)
Early light reflexes climb with rose fingers up the cliffs.
The chilly valley slumbers and cowers in its white fog bed,
But nude and cool, unearthly fine and clear,
Glitter the glacier chains.
The morning wind faint-heartedly plays a lyre,
No bird strikes screaming through the distance;
It is as if the sound of a timid harp
Spreads with bird-like wings
Along the stone cliffs and over the valley.
And now, as if breathed by the fragrance and dew,
Out of fog blossoms a wreath of meadows;
Behind them blooms a crystal glacier blue,
And a dream-laden delicate purple grey
Plays all around the giant mountains.
Young Days
(_From the German of Fritz Schnack_)
Soft, delicate morning air ripplings
Sway between the willow bushes
Rustling, as if a woman in silk ruchings
Passes over the meadows ...
Without end and blessedly far
Purls the cajoling sweetness.
O! how anxiously do I bear this air.
Like chords from the cloudland
Fall the deep shining days
Resounding in my trembling hand.
One Morning
(_From the German of Fritz Schnack_)
The light,
Flows spring-like out of the night,
And the big splashing wave
Spreads over the earth’s surface ...
White villas glisten in the light
Glowing all around with red roses;
Laughing young beauty blooms
On every threshold ...
At a distance I stand and watch
And think: whoever thus can build ...
And longingly go my way.
An Isaiah Without A Christ
_And the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Son of Man, prophesy,
and say thou unto them that prophesy out of their own hearts, hear ye
the word of the Lord; thus sayeth the Lord God: woe unto the foolish
prophets that follow their own spirit and have seen nothing. O Israel,
thy prophets are like foxes in the desert.—Ezekiel 13:1-4._
CHARLES ZWASKA
I.
And the youth returned to his village and found it vile. In the City he
had seen visions of what a town might be.... Nicholas Vachel Lindsay had
been studying Art in Chicago and on his return to Springfield published,
in the fall of 1910, _The Village Magazine_: a scattering of verse,
prose, sketches, and ornamental designs and propaganda. “Talent for
poetry, deftness in inscribing, and skill in mural painting were
probably gifts of the same person”, he tells us later, in speaking of
the ancient Egyptians. “Let us go back”—the village must be redeemed.
The first editorial in the magazine was _On Conversion_. The people of
Springfield “should build them altars to the unknown God, the radiant
one; He whom they radiantly worship should be declared unto them in His
fullness.” The next was _An Editorial on Beauty for the Village
Pastor_—it expressed the belief that the Sunday-school, the Christian
Endeavor Society, the Brotherhood, Anti-Saloon League, and the Woman’s
Aid were the forces that were to bring about beauty. Springfield was to
be the new Athens! A broadside was distributed throughout the village:
_The Soul of the City receives the gift of the Holy Spirit_:
Builders, toil on,
Make all complete.
Make Springfield wonderful
Make her renown
Worthy this day,
Till, at God’s feet—
(_Etc., the poetry of the thing will not be spoiled by
omitting some lines here._)
Heaven come down
City, dead city,
Arise from the dead.
Verses like the above aside, here was revealed to us a poet; the
foundations were laid, it seemed, for a future. But the youth did dream
and see visions. Much was said about Utopias and the New Jerusalem, and
poetry languished in the youth that he might materialize some ultimate
world state. The most inexcusable optimism of them all—“Rome was not
built in a day.” True, but it _was built_: not merely talked about or
prophesied. And the youth remembered not that it hath been said in
Isaiah: “For, behold, I create a new heaven and a new earth: and the
former shall not be remembered nor come into mind.” Yet the youth
remembered the former still and did say much about the recoming of those
civilizations which had been, at last to stay forever! His day, or the
great poet who proceeded him by but a few years, he seemed to notice
not:
What do you think endures?
Do you think a great city endures? ...
Away! these are not to be cherished in themselves,
They fill their hour, the dancers dance, the musicians play for them,
The show passes, all does well enough of course,
All does very well till one flash of defiance ...
A great city is that which has the greatest men and women;
If it be a few ragged huts it is still the greatest city in the whole
world.
But the youth was at heart the poet, the dreamer, attempting to convince
by arguments, similes, rhymes; not as the great Poet, by mere presence!
Nor could he stand the offer of rough new prizes, preferring the smooth
old prizes. He clung to the organizations of the day, and to augment
their “influence toward the Millennium” he published _The Village
Magazine_. That, gentle reader, was in 1910.
II.
In the year 1912 there went forth from Springfield this same lad. Into
the West he went—through Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and into New
Mexico. He went preaching a gospel,—his own “Gospel of Beauty.” His
sustenance he earned by reciting his own rhymes to those who were
willing, in exchange, to give him bread. Thus did he make us
uncomfortably imagine him a new John the Baptist, François Villon, or
even Saint Francis of Assisi.... In the year 1914 his account of this
adventure was published. Three rhymes, he claims, contained his “theory
of American civilization.” This is from one of them:
O you who lose the art of hope,
. . . . . .
Turn to the little prairie towns,
Your high hope shall yet begin.
On every side awaits you there
Some gate where glory enters in.
And “At the end of the Road”—by faith and a study of the signs—he
proclaimed the New Jerusalem for America, particularly for his
home-village.... Now, there is a peculiar value attached to this
journey—the influence on the poet, not the preacher’s influence on the
people. It was after this trip that we got _The Santa Fé Trail_, _The
Fireman’s Ball_, written in a style in which were later written _The
Chinese Nightingale_ and _The Congo_. And, because of the relation of
its style to these, we even judge _I heard Emmanuel Singing_ a good
thing. This, then, is Lindsay’s importance among us; his contribution of
this style of vaudeville chanting. This is the poet. He does not count
when writing _Galahad_, _Knight Who Perished_, _King Arthur’s Men Have
Come Again_, _Incense_, _Springfield Magical_, or declaring “by faith
and a study of the signs.”
III.
On November first, 1915, at Springfield, Illinois, Vachel Lindsay signed
a book on _The Art of the Moving Picture_. The last chapter was called
“The Acceptable Year of the Lord.” From having seen forecastings in
photoplay hieroglyphics the children in times-to-come can rise and say:
“This day is the scripture fulfilled in your ears”:
Scenario writers, producers, photoplay actors, endowers of
exquisite films, sects using special motion pictures for a
predetermined end, all you who are taking the work as a sacred
trust, I bid you God-speed. Consider what it will do to your
souls, if you are true to your trust.... The record of your
ripeness will be found in your craftsmanship. You will be God’s
thoroughbreds.
It has come then, this new weapon of men, and the face of the
whole earth changes. In after centuries its beginning will be
indeed remembered.
It has come, this new weapon of men, and by faith and a study of
the signs we proclaim that it will go on and on in immemorial
wonder.
This, then, is the prophecy, and thus has he proclaimed it: “By my
hypothesis, Action Pictures are sculpture-in-motion, Intimate
Pictures are paintings-in-motion, Splendour Pictures are
architecture-in-motion.... The rest of the work is a series of after
thoughts and speculations not brought forward so dogmatically.”
Now, the Arts are complete in themselves; they contain all. The moving
picture has come to be a parasite on them.
Sculpture has become a vital thing to this age because of August Rodin.
Meunier has moved us too. Also Monolo and Fagi. Now comes Lindsay: “I
desire for the moving picture not the stillness but the majesty of
sculpture.... Not the mood of Venus de Milo, but let us turn to that
sister of hers—the great Victory of Samothrace”.
... I have seen much of Lindsay’s advice followed word for word since
this book of his was published. Tyrone Power in _The Dream of Eugene
Aram_. Power’s face and figure were more majestic on the stage than in
this picture. There was a “sculpture-group,” as you would call it, in
this picture—a farmer and two squires on a hilltop. It was in
silhouette, a _sketch_ and not sculpture. The nearest I have seen to the
majesty and immobility of sculpture, marble or otherwise, was the head
of William S. Hart in _The Aryan_. The picture was shadowed so as to
center on his poetic face, the fascination of which none but Forbes
Robertson’s has. Hart’s face on the screen, his eyes looking into the
eyes of you, at his throat a handkerchief of white—a bust by an artist
indeed! But the shadows parted, and the hieroglyphic-crowded background
came into view. Hart’s head moved, became part of a _moving picture_ and
sculpture was no more. The moment was worth it—but it _moved_....
“Moving pictures are pictures and not sculpture”, says Lorado Taft in a
public statement, objecting to Lindsay’s phrase. “To a sculptor the one
thing cherished as most essential to his art is its static quality, its
look of absolute quiescence. It is the hint of eternity which marks and
makes all monumental art”.... Has Lindsay no feeling for sculpture?
Frank Lloyd Wright has models in plaster of some of his
buildings—“modern” skyscrapers, hotels, and homes, growing, rising
upward, white and beautiful. It was these works of architecture which
called forth the phrase “flowers in stone”. He alone, it seems, has made
art of architecture in our day. He objects to Lindsay saying his art can
be that of moving pictures; its very literalness, its actualness being
the very negation of the soul and constitution of art. In _The Dumb Girl
of Portici_ the Smalleys, as inspired as any of the producers, used the
entire Field Museum in Jackson Park, Chicago, as a background for a
pageant of Italian royalty, of the middle ages. Insisting on
architecture can spoil pictures. It did this one.
Painting-in-motion—rhythm. Rhythm seems alien to the application of the
theory of jerky fade-away close-ups. “Intimate Dutch interior” scenes
fading into the close-up and then back into the entire scene again.
Intimate, friendly, and moving, but lacking in rhythm and the flow of
naturalness. Some think that “moving lines”, made an art in themselves,
will be an achievement of the moving film. Have you ever been struck
dumb by the lines made by a dancer across the stage, the moving of life
across life? I have seen it in the moving-picture only in the flight of
gulls (unconscious actors) or in pictures of rivers and trees and the
sea; in short—nature. But nature is nature. The painter’s art!
Botticelli’s _Spring_, or _The Birth of Venus_—pictures containing the
essence of rhythmic natural movement. Never yet have the movies given us
this. If Lindsay must prophesy and “take the masses back to art” there
_are_ artists living today—who are for today. Lindsay seems to know
nothing of them. His knowledge of painting seems to have stopped with
his art school days. The later work of Jerome Blum, for example, has
this movement, this rhythm, not only in composition and line but in the
_color_ as well. Reds and greens and blues that vibrate, paintings that
live.
The rest of this might be entitled: “An open letter to Vachel Lindsay”,
for it is “not so dogmatically set forth” and is mere man-to-man talk.
I have seen most of your suggestions swallowed whole by moving-picture
makers.... Your hieroglyphics idea—well, James Oppenheim was an
accomplice in that. “On Coming Forth by Day” or your suggestion to use
the Book of the Dead—a Chicago woman, the patient, too-patient,
beautifully reverent Lou Wall Moore has been working for years on an
adaptation of one of the books which, when it does appear on the stage,
will have more rhythm and terrible swiftness than ever your moving
picture could, the splendor of color, space, height, distance, and most
magical of all, the voice:
Priest: Men pass away since the time of Ra
And the youths come in their stead.
As Ra reappears every morning
And Tum sets in the west,
Men are begetting and women conceiving;
Each nostril inhales once the breeze of the dawn;
But all born of women go down to their places.
As for your “too ruthless a theory” of having silence in the theatre, or
rather just the hum of conversation, let me tell you of the
“midnight-movies” in our town: Can you imagine a crowd of people
standing in line outside a theatre at one or a quarter after in the
morning? And inside an audience—or optience?!—which for interest and
variety can equal any of the moving-pictures shown or yet to be shown. I
wish you could hear the ludicrous, cutting, knowing remarks made by
these people about your pictures, when, after twelve-thirty the piano
stops, and the oppressive silence outweighs the interest of the picture.
(The piano formerly stopped at eleven, but the management decided that
the only way to maintain order was to keep the piano going.) Well, the
silence never lasts: snoring, wheezing, roaring, shouting and laughing
and calls for “Silence”, “Wake up, the rest of us wanna sleep”, “You’re
off key”, or “What time shall I call, sir?” These people are here:
business men; newsboys, hobos, drunks, who sleep here all night;
salesmen; night clerks; telegraphers; bell-boys; hotel and restaurant
maids; scrub-women; actors; vaudevillians; cabaret singers; pressmen;
newspapermen; chauffeurs, teamsters; traveling men; gentlemen of
leisure; painted youths and scented women. They “get” the psychology of
the pictures. Helen’s hazards call forth telegraph tappings to each
other; close-ups showing jealousy, rage, or overdone emotion get
“woof-woofs” and howls and hoots; the murder prevented “just in time”
gets its sarcasms; and “immoral situations” their due appreciation.
But—this, which seemed on the way to become our most individual phase of
night-life, is passing. The jolly manager, who passed up and down the
aisle like a hen among her brood, keeping us awake until one o’clock,
has been replaced by a uniformed policeman; the council has legislated
women out after two o’clock; and a “ride in the wagon” or ejection faces
the one who would “get gay”. Now, as a place of interest, it is passing
in this day of short-lived gayety and censored originality. The Law,
Lindsay, will not allow your plan to work. In the neighborhoods?—the
audiences themselves do not know why they are there. Why disturb them?
Your educational film also I have seen applied. _Saved From the Flames_
worked out in co-operation with the New York Fire department. It teaches
a lesson. So does _The Human Cauldron_—your own phrase, I believe, taken
from the first line of page forty-two, your book. This picture was done
with the aid of the New York Police department. Both were stupid, inane
in story and treatment, and on the whole a bore. Even Walthall couldn’t
save _The Raven_ from cardboard clouds and angels and “visions”.
Your scenario, the “second cousin to the dream that will one day come
forth”, seems quite symbolic of your prophecies. Pallas Athena, Jeanne
D’Arc, and Our Lady Springfield; a treeless hill top in Washington Park:
this then is the rank of the Goddesses. Springfield is to have secular
priests and her patriots are irresolute! “Without prophecy there can be
no fulfillment. Without Isaiah there can be no Christ”.—A truly
Christian interpretation of the Hebrew’s great Isaiah, to whom Christ
was but a disciple! But so you will have it.... We need Isaiahs and John
the Baptists, but they were prophets and fore-runners of a Christ, a
personality—not a Utopia, World State or International Brotherhood. If
you appear before us as an Isaiah we demand to hear of your Christ. You
recognize the demand of Confucius for rectification of names. Do you
realize Nietzsche’s transvaluations for our day? Faith as opposed to
affirmation! Zarathustra has spoken! There is now the mountain peak—and
you are still rhyming about a hill top.
Announcements
“_The Weavers_”
Gerhardt Hauptmann’s Weavers is coming to Chicago! It begins a limited
engagement at the Princess Theatre Sunday night, April 2. If you don’t
go—well, we will pray for you.
It is to be the same production with which Emanuel Reicher stirred New
York this winter. Mr. Reicher is no longer with the company, having
finally given up the struggle of trying to make a financial success of
art and truth. His stage director, Augustin Duncan, who is a man of
vision and ability, has formed the actors into a co-operative company,
and they have been struggling through various cities where their efforts
have been intensely though not largely appreciated. This is to be
expected; but surely in Chicago they ought to find an audience.
P. S.—Since I wrote the above _The Weavers_ has opened, and I have heard
how the first-night audience laughed where it should have applauded and
guffawed when it should have recognized something fine.
_Margaret Sanger in Chicago_
There is an announcement on the cover page of two of Margaret Sanger’s
lectures in Chicago, and others may be arranged after she gets here. We
have got into the habit of looking upon birth control as a thing in
which everybody believes, and which almost everybody practices whether
they believe in it or not. It seems quite superfluous to keep on talking
about it. But then you remember that Emma Goldman has been arrested for
talking about it, and that when her trial comes up—some time this month
or in May—it is quite within the possibilities that she may spend a year
in prison for her crime. That is something none of us could face without
a kind of insanity. So please don’t be content with merely abusing the
government: send your protests to the District Attorney and it may help
a great deal.
Any one who wishes to arrange for further lectures by Mrs. Sanger may
write to Fania Mindell, care THE LITTLE REVIEW.
_The Rupert Brooke Memorial_
It has been decided to set up in Rugby Chapel, England, a memorial of
Rupert Brooke in the form of a portrait-medallion in marble. The
medallion will be the work of Professor J. Havard Thomas, and is to be
based on the portrait by Schell. Contributions not exceeding five
dollars may be sent to Maurice Browne, Chicago Treasurer, Rupert Brooke
Memorial Fund, 434 Fine Arts Building, Michigan Avenue, and will be sent
to England without deduction. Money left over after the completion of
the medallion will be given to the Royal Literary Fund. Mr. Browne adds
that the nickels and dimes of those who wish to make their offering, but
cannot afford the larger sum, will be welcomed in the spirit of their
giving; also that he believes there are many admirers of Rupert Brooke
and his work in Chicago who will welcome the opportunity to pay in some
measure their debt to the poet, particularly remembering that this city
stimulated and interested him more than any other in America.
_Jerome Blum’s New Work_
Beginning April 15 Mr. Blum will have a two-weeks’ exhibit of paintings
done on a recent trip through China and Japan, at O’Brien’s Art
Galleries, 334 South Michigan Avenue. At the same time Mrs. Blum will
exhibit some Chinese and Japanese figures—and there is one especially
that we prophesy will be talked of. It is of a weary-eyed Chinese
philosopher, the art of which has been put into words by a painter: “He
has seen everything, so he doesn’t look any more; he has done
everything—so he folds his hands.”
_The Vers Libre Prize Contest_
Two of the judges for our contest have been chosen. They will be Helen
Hoyt and Zoë Akins. The third will be announced in the next issue, and
the contest will be continued until August 15, as it seems wiser not to
close it before it has been fully heralded. All details will be found on
page 40.
“_A Lost Tune_”
Between April 25 and May 7 Mr. Stanislaw Saukalski will give our soft
teeth a chance to crack a hard nut at the Art Institute. The “Lost Tune”
will lead the flaming lava of this young volcano. Will the readers of
THE LITTLE REVIEW send in their impressions of this sculptor’s work? We
may print some of them.—_L. de B._
_When You Buy Books_—
Won’t readers remember to order their books through the Gotham Book
Society? You can get any book you want from them, whether it is listed
in their advertisement or not, and THE LITTLE REVIEW makes a percentage
on the sales. Our margin of profit per book is small, but it all helps
very much and the continuation of the magazine depends upon just such
co-operation. We have two thousand subscribers. If each one of them
would order one dollar’s worth of books a month we should make about two
hundred dollars out of it,—which would pay for two issues of the
magazine and enable us to eat regularly besides. Will you please
remember?
_The Russian Literature Group_
Alexander Kaun’s next lecture on Russian Literature will be on
Dostoevsky, and will be given April 16, at 8:30 P. M., in 612 Fine Arts
Building. Mr. Kaun is becoming more interesting with each lecture—by
which I mean that he is revealing more of Kaun the artist, and less of
Kaun the professor.
_Independent Society of Artists_
The first international exhibition of this new organization will be held
on April 4 in the Ohio Building, Wabash Avenue and Congress Street, from
three to seven P. M.
“_Because of the War_”—
Paper is going up. We can’t help looking ugly this month.
The Beautiful and the Terrible. Which is which will never be put
into words. But I am free to tell myself; and let me but preserve
the senses—my eyes, my ears, my touch, and all shall be well—all
shall seem far more beautiful than terrible—_Gordon Craig._
Only fanaticism is possible for phlegmatic natures.—_Nietzsche._
Flamingo Dreams
LUPO DE BRAILA
A burst of passion in a pagan god’s eye was the sunrise as I saw it from
the top of Mount Rose one morning last summer. Trembling and with
squinting eyes I looked at the grand spectacle, fearing to go blind if I
opened my eyes.
The sun stretched its arms and with flaming fingers lifted the
bluish-grey blanket from the Nevada hills and the Truckee Valley.
Feeling that the beauty of this moment could not be surpassed, I turned
my face toward California and ran down the western side of Mount Rose.
One day last week when the massive shoulders of Jerome Blum stepped in
between me and a canvas that had transformed his studio into a strange
land for me, I wanted to hold his hands for fear the next canvas would
take the joy produced by the one in front of me. He came back from an
eight-months’ trip through Japan and China recently, and he brought with
him over twenty paintings with pulsating nature and unrestrained joy in
every one of them. The rhythmic lines dance through the curling roofs
and weird trees—and all of them are bathed in sunshine. At the same time
they are a close study of this strange land, its people and their
habits, by a forceful and unusual artist—a man who says “yes” to nature
in no uncertain terms. His bold colors are handled in a most sensitive
manner, and when I wanted to place him among the Chicago artists I found
that he belongs to an entirely different class and could not even be
compared to some of the vacillating and doubtful men who paint in this
town.
He has a portrait of a Chinese girl in a green gown, and some scenes
along a canal and in a Chinese garden, that have tempted my usually
honest mind to some queer contemplations. I have found myself wandering
to the windows and other unusual entrances to his studio, figuring out
how one might find access to that place without a key and at a certain
dark hour. I have only one hope left now of owning one in a figurative
way, and it is that the trustees of the Art Institute may see the light
and....
I hope Jerome Blum will not be compelled, like some of the best men this
country has produced, to go to other shores to gain the recognition due
a man of his ability. A few weeks ago I saw one of the older trustees
spend considerable time before a canvas by a Boston painter that lacked
all that goes to make a work of art,—a canvas on which the artist, with
the aid of a pointed stick, had tried to prod his dead and colorless
paint into some kind of motion. In spite of this I still believe that
they will rise to the high intellectual and artistic understanding that
they are supposed to possess, but which they have failed to display up
to the present, as far as modern art is concerned.
It is impossible for me to describe any of Blum’s canvases except to say
that they tear you away from the dirty grey and ill-smelling Chicago, to
a country you have seen in your dreams as a child. We will have a chance
to see this artist’s work, beginning April fifteenth, at O’Brien’s, on
Michigan Boulevard.
Lucille Swan Blum will exhibit at the same time and place some very
graceful Japanese dancers, Chinese children, Corean, Chinese, and
Japanese mothers with their babies and other far-eastern types. Best of
all is a Chinese philosopher, reduced almost to design to emphasize the
idea of the age and wisdom of this people—folded hands, an emotionless
face, all seeing eyes....
In the end one experienceth nothing but himself.—_Nietzsche._
New York Letter
(_A scattering of words anent Washington Square, “Henry VIII”,
Yvette Guilbert, “The Merry Wives of Windsor”, and sundry other
things and people, as far as space and time allow._)
ALLAN ROSS MACDOUGALL
From my garret window I look out on Washington Square. Snow and ice
still lie there, and the trees are black and mean.
On the first page of his new book, “_Moby Lane and Thereabouts_”, Neil
Lyons says: “Spring has many ushers, and is heralded by divers signs.
Some people look for these signs among the hedgerows; others seek them
in the sky, or listen for them in the night, whilst other people neither
look or listen, but go smelling about, or stand upon hill-tops,
tasting.” My sign shall be, I think, the grimy trees of the Square. And
sometimes as I sit here looking out on the icy barrenness I wonder if,
when Spring’s breath does touch the earth, whether flowers will come
up—flowers that I long to see: crocuses, anemones, daffodils. It’s all
very well to see them in shop windows, but God! to see them come up out
of the earth and unfold! But I fear our Square is too sophisticated. I
know a man will come—a common tobacco-chewing man with a stunted soul
who belongs to a Union and gets paid so much coin by the hour—and he
will arrange squares, and oblongs, and diamond shaped plots of earth.
Then will he proceed laboriously and without joy to stick tulips or some
other straight official flower into these geometrical, soulless
patterns. And throughout the year in the Square, nature will be kept in
bounds and orders.
“_Henry VIII_”
It seems scarcely possible that Sir Herbert Tree would have the calm
artistic audacity to come to this country and present his production of
“Henry VIII” in the moth-eaten scenery and costumes that were used in
the London production in the year 1910. Yet he did, and oh! the
wearisome drab antiquity of it all! But the “People” liked it and gave
the beknighted actor-manager “one of the greatest premieres that New
York has witnessed these many years”.
Mention is made in the programme of “the inspiring aerchiological
advice” of Percy Macquoid, R. I. The advice may have been quite
inspiring. I do not doubt it. But the results of that advice! That
medley of costumes! Those photo scenes of Windsor Castle and Blackfriars
Hall and Westminster Abbey! They were bad when first conceived and
painted, and five years in a London storeroom has not improved them to
any degree compatible with their presentation to an audience that has
looked upon the work of Bakst, Urban, Jones, Sime, and Rothenstein.
And what can be said of the lighting? There was one comic spotlight that
followed Sir Herbert (or ought I to say Wolsey? I hardly know; they were
never quite distinct) around the stage like a little motherless puppy.
Sometimes it went before, sometimes it frisked after, on the tail of his
magnificent scarlet gown. It had a grand time! But it never seemed to be
doing the thing it ought to be doing.
But let me not bore you as these things bored me. Pass we now to the
acting. In London the honors of the play were carried off by Arthur
Bouchier as Henry, and his wife, Violet Vanburgh, as Katherine. A
repetition was performed here. Lyn Harding as Henry, and Edith Wynne
Matheson as Katherine, carried every one before them. And Tree? Well, he
had his moments. There was his superb entrance with the look he flashed
at Buckingham: fine too was the acting in the scene of his downfall.
Between these two highlights such ordinary acting has seldom been seen
in a man of Tree’s reputation. In a cold classic way Miss Matheson was
splendid. I liked her much, and but for her some of the scenes in the
play would have been colourless. There was the usual mob of supers who
got caught in doorways and tripped over furniture, but on the whole they
behaved as well as an ordinary stage manager can make such people
behave.
_Yvette Guilbert_
Five years ago I saw Yvette Guilbert in London. I loved her all. Her red
hair; the skinny arms of her, clothed in long black gloves; and her
Gallic body with the low-necked white crinoline that gowned it. And how
she sang!! And her acting! For five years I have carried the memory of
her around with me, matching other people up with her but never finding
her equal. On Sunday, March nineteenth, I saw her again. The black
gloves and the white crinoline were gone, and she had grown a little
stouter. The red hair was there, and the smile. Her voice had changed a
bit and her personality had mellowed. She sang songs that were grave and
moving, like Fiona Macleod’s _Prayer of Women_, and others that were gay
and jocular, like _The Curé Servant_. But whatever she sang—and I didn’t
know a word of what she sang—carried me away completely. Not a mood did
I miss—not a suggestion of a mood. Perfect is her art. She has my
adoration.
“_The Merry Wives of Windsor_”
The latest addition to the Shakespeare Festival that is being thrust
upon the apathetic people of this place is the Hackett-Allen production
of _The Merry Wives of Windsor_. Three things can be said without any
further comment. Joseph Urban did the stage settings. Richard Ordynski
directed the production. Willy Pogany designed the costumes. Gordon
Craig says somewhere that any medium is easier to work in than human
beings. After seeing the work expended on _The Merry Wives of Windsor_
by three geniuses, and watching the actors in that play, we understand
completely.
_Soulless New York_
Witter Bynner, grown somber and blase,—the effect of living in soulless
New York, he says—has become a sort of Greek Chorus to me. In various
strophes with divers variations, in sundry public and private places, he
chants the dismal fact that New York is soulless and that there is a
danger of it robbing me of my joy in life. Not while its streets remain
as they are will I lose the joy I possess! I cannot remember any city
that I have been in where my sense of the comic has been tickled so
often by happenings in the streets. So many comedies are enacted by the
curbstone, so many quaintly funny things happen every hour on the
streets, that it would be impossible for me to forget how jolly life
really is. Of course I see tragedies too, but they seem to be there only
for the purpose of balance!
For some time to come I’ll Dalcroze down the avenues and numerical
by-ways of this “soulless” city. And my smile will always be handy; and
my whistle wet, ready to pipe _Gathering Peascods_ or _The Parson’s
Farewell_ or anything merry and bright to dance to.
To save the theatre, the theatre must be destroyed, the actors
and actresses must all die of the plague. They poison the air,
they make art impossible. It is not drama they play, but pieces
for the theatre. We should return to the Greeks, play in the open
air; the drama dies of stalls and boxes and evening dress, and
people who come to digest their dinner.—_Eleonora Duse._
The Theatre
“Overtones”
Alice Gerstenberg, who dramatized _Alice in Wonderland_, wrote
_Overtones_, evidently as an experiment, and had it produced in New
York. Now it is crowding vaudeville houses. As an experiment only is it
important. Cyril Harcourt intends collaborating with Miss Gerstenberg to
produce a three-act play on the same lines: characters being followed by
their “real selves”, veiled, with voices confused. A Shaw play might be
done this way—it is a method effective for moralizing and bringing home
a point. But why would Darling Dora need an overtone or an undertone; or
Blanco Posnet or Fanny’s Father? If there is any reason for the dramatic
presentation of characters at all it is the drama of themselves—their
actions and their thoughts as opposed to those of others.... Imagine
Rebecca West being followed through three acts by a “real self”; or
Ulric Brendel—“... I am homesick for the mighty nothingness”.
“The New Manner”
(_Vague Questionings_)
It evidently means—this phrase—“that which is _accepted_ as new”....
There are signs of our dangerously settling down to flat brilliant
backgrounds, spots of vivid color, and much _mention_ of “important as
decoration”. It seems an unhealthy acquiescence.... “Is desire a thing
of nothing, that a five-years’ quest can make a parody of it? Your whole
life is not too long, and then only at the very end will some small atom
of what you have desired come to you.”—Gordon Craig in his _Art of the
Theatre_. It looks as if we are due for a period of the old, old,
three-walled room with the new, new, “new” color.... I don’t believe we
will find the future in Michael Carr’s butterfly proscenium and
moving-picture screen shadows; but, surely, it is not _The Man Who
Married a Dumb Wife_, or _Androcles and the Lion_, although Barker’s
_Midsummer Night’s Dream_ costumes are the most far-reaching
originalities yet seen. Nor will it be like _A Pair of Silk Stockings_,
_The Sabine Women_, _Overtones_, _The Charity that Began at Home_, _The
Taming of the Shrew_, nor Urban and his present enormous New York output
of “designs” and “follies”. Our only light seems to come from Gordon
Craig’s work in Florence. “In his work is the incalculable element; the
element that comes of itself and cannot be coaxed into coming”. Or from
Sam Hume’s enthusiasm over the “Dome”; Reinhardt, of course, has almost
acquired his permanent “angle of repose”—the newness of the American
stage being, in fact, the Reinhardt of yesterday. If I had my way, I’d
destroy all books about the theatre excepting those of Gordon Craig, for
inspiration, or those of Arthur Symons for appreciation.... Then,
perhaps, we should begin to understand the Theatre.
Bernhardt on Reinhardt
Sarah Bernhardt has been playing a patriotic play, _Les Cathedrales_, in
London. “It is such a great play I intend taking it into the provinces
and then back to London again”, she says. We have said it is a patriotic
play; nothing more need be said. Bernhardt plays one of the seven
cathedrals, _Strasburg_. In the interview, quoted above, given to the
London magazine, _Drawing_, Bernhardt has also this to say: “And now, it
seems to me that artists in the Allied Countries, and also authors,
painters, composers, and all those concerned in the theatre have to bind
themselves into a league for removing all traces of German nature and
influence from our plays and theatres.... Now the German showman
Reinhardt flooded Paris and London with the Berliner deluge of the
spectacular. He claims artistic superiority on the grounds of having
introduced several novel trivialities. But to trace the real curve of
truth I must say that he did nothing of the kind. He merely revived, in
_Sumurun_ and _Oedipus Rex_, certain outworn conventions which existed
before his time! But he has not the honesty to acknowledge it.” Later
she does say something worth thinking over: “What he has done is to use
Eastern methods for Western ideas when he should have used Eastern ideas
for Western methods.” Plagiarism is an irrelevant charge to bring
against an artist, but acknowledging an artistic right to adaptation
means expansion and, despite nationalism, a universal one-ness.
Book Discussion
“And Lesser Things”
_“—— and Other Poets”, by Louis Untermeyer. New York: Henry Holt
and Company._
Very, very clever. The ultimate emptiness of cleverness. These parodies
are “not a piece of buffoonery so much as a critical exposition”,—the
poet expects them to approach this “elevated and illuminating” standard;
but they never reach satire, which is really the thing that is covered
by the above quotation from Isaac Disraeli.
Untermeyer’s verse, including _Challenge_ and that so quantitatively
published in the magazines,—still speaking comparatively,—has the same
relation to poetry as Urban’s scenery for _The Follies_ has to his
Boston Opera settings; or of all of Urban’s work to that of the numerous
German poster school of five or eight years ago. Untermeyer is lenient
in parodying poets of his own ilk—but it is easy to determine which of
those he does not respect by his obvious, spiteful absurdities.
For years now newspaper paragraphers, “poets”, and editors have been
saying such things as “It is time we are getting ourselves talked about”
when mentioning Ezra Pound. Untermeyer stoops to it; he is still the
“once born” when being “critical” about Amy Lowell: “A blue herring
sings”. What he is really parodying here is his colleague Walt Mason’s
prose-printed jingles which are syndicated throughout newspaperdom; he
is not giving a “critical exposition” of polyphonic prose. It will need
a keener critic or poet than he to do it—or to produce a parody or
satire whose art equals that of the thing satired—Masters’s things for
example. By ambling through thirty-seven lines Untermeyer imagines that
he is being master of the situation as regards Masters. And the last
line of the parody on James Oppenheim might very well have been written
by Untermeyer himself as one of his own: “Clad in the dazzling splendor
of my awakened self”.... No matter what may have been your attitude
toward the poets parodied these things leave your feelings
unchanged—except that he makes more definite your attitude towards him.
Impartial and Otherwise
_The Making of Germany, by Ferdinand Schevill. Chicago: A. C.
McClurg and Company._
_Great Russia, by Charles Sarolea. New York: Alfred A. Knopf._
_Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution, by Thorstein
Veblen. New York: Macmillan._
These books are not war-literature—a compliment not often deserved in
these days of ink-war demoralization. The lay, unbiased reader, who is
inclined to learn facts rather than to find interpretations
substantiating his prejudices, will enjoy the three books as a rare
treat. They are very much unlike. Mr. Schevill is a historian par
excellence, and lends a broad perspective to the related facts. He also
lends a rich romantic flavor to his narrative, an emotional
undercurrent—so unfrequent a feature with academic writers. His point of
view may not be universally acceptable; even in history there are events
and phenomena which belong to the autonomous region of taste and
opinion. The scene of the triumphant Prussians solemnizing their victory
in Versailles, for example, may arouse differing emotions and
reflections. Mr. Schevill bows in reverence before the three heroic
figures of Emperor William (“not unlike the legendary Barbarossa”),
Bismarck, and Moltke. We may likewise not share his enthusiasm for the
German idea of State, as superior to Anglo-Saxon individualism. But we
cannot help admiring the general brilliancy of the treatment of the
gigantic subject, and if we are capable of getting instructed, our
reading of the book will amply reward us.
M. Sarolea is a Belgian, hence pro-Ally and anti-German, hence
unreservedly Russophil, hence not wholly impartial. It is a poor service
to Russia, the unqualified praise of all her institutions and traits on
the part of her friends. Exaggerated eulogy is apt to arouse suspicion.
If M. Sarolea had interchanged his Mercurian sprightliness for Professor
Veblen’s solidity, both would have gained considerably. Mr. Veblen takes
us as far back as the pre-historic Baltic tribes in order to prove his
point of the peculiar aptitude of the Prussians for borrowing. He
certainly succeeds in his attempt, but at the expense of the reader’s
patience and eye-sight which is subjected to the perusal of endless
pages of miniature type. His scientific style is surcharged with
profound sarcasm, and if you are fond of delicate subtleties the book
will afford you “great sport.” Schevill, historian; Sarolea, publicist;
Veblen, economist—the common feature of the three, particularly of the
first and of the last, is respect for the reader who is treated with
facts and not with phantoms for the sake of argument.
K.
The Reader Critic
“SPIRITUAL ADVENTURES”
_Anonymous_:
At your suggestion I have begun to read Arthur Symons’s “Spiritual
Adventures.”
“Christian Trevelga” strikes me, as you predicted, most strongly so far.
Symons is one of the subtlest of minds; everything he writes is worth
reading. This is of his best certainly. What is one to make of him? I
don’t know. I don’t know whether his kind of subtlety is of any earthly
value, or whether it is as valuable as Shelley’s. I can never give up
faith in the human race quite as completely as he does, nor adopt his
attitude of autocratic detachment; yet I never seem to have any real
faith, either.—_Vae victis!_
He is removed from all sense of human values, and lost, always, in
abstract patterns. This particular story is an extraordinary expression
of him—of the prizes and peril of such a state. Oh, hell! what an insult
is put upon us when we are invited to live, and to make such a choice.
Perhaps one makes it: then he is not happy until he has lost himself in
an art that is “something more than an audible dramatization of human
life.” Perhaps he is right. But—
But—but—
Sometimes I _know_ that for the greatest artist there would be no chasm
between what the heart desires and what the mind constructs. Tell me how
to do that in poetry and I’ll give you a dollar. Perhaps it can be done
in music—I don’t know. But in poetry the human heart and the
mathematical soul are always fighting—and so far as I know they have not
yet come to an agreement—not in English poetry, at least. The artist and
the human being never get to be bedfellows. It’s either sickening
humanitarianism or stark designing—the second is the less painful.
Well!—I loathe the world, including Symons and all the arts.
_Ezra Pound, London_:
Thanks for the January-February issue. Your magazine seems to be looking
up. A touch of light in Dawson and Seiffert—though THE LITTLE REVIEW
seems to me rather scrappy and unselective. I thought you started out to
prove Ficke’s belief that the sonnet is “Gawd’s own city.” However, he
seems to have abandoned that church. I still don’t know whether you send
me the magazine in order to encourage me in believing that my camp stool
by Helicon is to be left free from tacks, or whether the paper is sent
to convert me from error.
I am glad to see in it some mention of Eliot, who is really of interest.
_The Egoist_ is about to publish Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man” in volume form (since no grab-the-cash firm will take it) and
do Lewis’s “Tarr” as a serial. I think you will be interested in the two
novels, and I hope you will draw attention to them, and to the sporting
endeavor of _The Egoist_ to do in this dark isle what the _Mercure_ has
so long done in France, i. e., publish books as well as a magazine.
Incidentally, Chicago should not depend on New York for its books.
_Anonymous_:
Will you ask that Lollipop Vender man, in the March issue, what happened
to his little dirigible? He was sailing along dropping bombs, hitting
the mark every time, when something seemed to happen and he came limply
wobbling down to—nothing.
I hope the last half of that article was not meant to be satire or wit
or anything like that. He speaks with too much authority to have much
sense of humor, and—ye gods!—the situation is far too desperate for
wit—of that kind. Now there’s Bartlett—read what he says of Bartlett!
Haven’t we answered all attacks for years with “There’s Bartlett”? It
was only intuition and self-preservation on our part at first,
perhaps—but now hasn’t Bartlett proved that he is a “real artist”? He is
off to New York to live.
How he does wobble when he comes to his list of “able and honest”.
Poor Parker! that he should have to go into the list of best men,
too—that list! The man _can_ paint—technic seems to be only a
superstition now but it once had a place in Art. Parker has that at
least. Wendt, Buehr, Ravlin, and Davis should be rescued from the “able
and honest” before your critic collapses completely in referring to
Clarkson and Oliver Dennet Grover as some of “their best men.” Ask him
anyway—what happened?
_Alice Groff, Philadelphia_:
Why did not Sherwood Anderson write up “Vibrant Life” clean and true?
Why did he not have the courage to paint every one of those emotions in
clear color—to outline every one of those actions in the beauty of
naturalness? Why does he artificialize everything? Is he afraid of the
crouching tigers of conventional morality?
Why should not vibrant life assert itself after its kind, even in the
presence of death? What desecration was there in this man and woman
coming together in such presence, drawn by the invincible magnetism of
sex? What of falsity to life was there in the lawyer’s giving and
answering the call of life as to this woman, even though he had a wife
whom he loved?
Why conjure up an atmosphere of guilt that neither man nor woman felt?
Why suggest such hair-bristling horror as to the accidental overturning
of a dead man’s body, any more than over the accidental upsetting of a
vase, or a statue, in the course of a dance? Why such strained effort to
make that specialized expression of vibrant life which is the very
pivotal centre of all life appear as the degradation of degradation,
degrading everything else, even death?
Will you answer that there is an eternal and universal sense of the
fitness of things with which every soul may be lightened that cometh
into the world? Shall I not reply to you that this is a lie against
life—that life is sacrificed every day to this lie? Shall I not say to
you that vibrant life must not allow itself to be sacrificed to such
lies—that vibrant life must create anew continually a sense of the
fitness of things for itself and for its every new expression—that it
must do this with authority, shaking itself bravely free from the clutch
of the dead hand, whether as to traditions, standards, customs, morals,
ideals or love even? Shall I not say to you that Life must assert its
right to Live? Shall we not organize life on such basis?
REVIEWING “THE LITTLE REVIEW”
_Virginia York in “The Richmond Evening Journal”_:
As we said a couple of months ago, THE LITTLE REVIEW, published in windy
Chicago, is claimed by its editors and readers to be the very, very last
word in prose and poetry. Also, it is the organ, the mouth organ,
perhaps, of that unsustained tune known as “vers libre.” In a criticism
of some of the Review’s lurid, foolish contents we poked a good deal of
fun at the publication in general and one piece of loose, or free, verse
in particular. This gem, entitled, “Cafe Sketches,” by Arthur Davison
Ficke, said, in part:
Presently persons will come out
And shake legs.
I do not want legs shaken.
I want immortal souls shaken unreasonably.
I want to see dawn spilled across the blackness
Like a scrambled egg on a skillet;
I want miracles, wonders.
Tidings out of deeps I do not know, ...
But I have a horrible suspicion
That neither you
Nor your esteemed consort
Nor I myself
Can ever provide these simple things
For which I am so patiently waiting
Base people.
How I dislike you!
As we said a couple of months ago, “Maybe you think this is funny, but
certainly it is not intended to be. Seriousness, thick, black, dense
seriousness is the keynote of THE LITTLE REVIEW.” However, the current
issue of said magazine carries our editorial remarks in full, and with
our hand on our heart we make a deep courtesy for the honor conferred
upon us. Though we distinctly deplore the fact that absolutely no
comment is made upon our criticism of THE LITTLE REVIEW and Mr. Ficke’s
remarkable “pome.” It is as if we were taken by the editorial legs and
shaken. And we do not want legs shaken. We are a lady. We would far
rather have our immortal editorial soul shaken unreasonably and spilled
across the literary blackness and blankness “like a scrambled egg on the
skillet.” Yet, we have a horrible idea “that neither you,” nor our
esteemed contemporary, “nor I myself,” know what it is all about; but we
do wish that Margaret Anderson and the other editors of “Le Revue
Petite” had made a few caustic remarks on our feeble attempts to be
funny. “Base people! How I dislike you!”
But to show that we can be generous and heap coals of fire upon the
heads of our enemies, we propose to reproduce two short, sweet poems
from this month’s (beg pardon, the January-February issue, lately out,
“on account of having no funds during January,” as the Review editors
admit) issue of THE LITTLE REVIEW. The first selection on our program,
ladies and gentlemen, is by Harriet Dean and is called “The Pillar,”
though much more effectively it might have been headed “The Pillow” or
“The Hitching-Post.” Here goes:
When your house grows too close for you,
When the ceilings lower themselves, crushing you,
There on the porch I shall wait,
Outside your house.
You shall lean against my straightness,
And let night surge over you.
Now if it were only a nice slim lamp-post of a man giving such an
invitation we should pray that the ceilings would descend, and should
hasten to the porch—strangely enough on the outside of the house—and we
should love to lean, and lean, and lean, surge what may.
The second, an “Asperity,” by Mitchell Dawson, is labeled “Teresa,” and
madly singeth as follows:
“Do you remember Antonio—
Swift-winged, green in the sun?
Into the snap-dragon throat of desire
Flew Antonio.
Snap!...
The skeleton of Antonio has made
A good husband, a good provider.”
La, la, la! At first we thought “Antonio” was a green dragon fly, but,
finally, by exercising a bit of common sense, we know that Tony is a
locust and left his “skeleton,” or “shell,” behind; and that Mrs. Tony
must have subsisted on the “leavings.”
Oh, this nut sundae, chocolate fudge, marshmallow whip vers libre
poetry! Isn’t it just too lovely? Snap! “Into the snap-dragon throat of
desire, Flew Antonio.” Honestly now, Tony, don’t you wish the lady had
kept her mouth shut?
We should like to comment upon these remarks, but surely they are too
good to spoil.
_A Boy, Chicago_:
I am a boy sixteen years old, and one could not expect me to know much
about poetry—especially free verse. But I have heard of your magazine as
a magazine that was ready to print what all kinds of people thought. So
I have written a little verse—it is not a poem—telling you something
about what is going on inside my mind, for these matters trouble every
boy’s mind, although you may think that we are light-minded at my age.
BLINDNESS
I suppose I must be blind.
People say continually that the world is a wicked place;
I hear them talking about it all the time.
They say our city streets reek
With sin and sorrow
And all manner of misery and filth,
And yet I do not see any of it.
I go up and down these streets every day
And I see that they are ugly and that many people
Are deformed and sick and hungry;
But I close my eyes to it.
I suppose somebody will call me cowardly, but what shall I do?
I have no money to give the poor, and perhaps
That is not getting at their real trouble anyway.
I cannot heal the sick and deformed.
I cannot make the streets cleaner.
So I just think of other things.
Of my books at home, or the tennis courts in the park,
Or my pretty sister or anything.
There is nothing wrong in my own world.
I am happy. I like my school well enough.
I have my boy friends, and they are healthy athletic boys.
All the girls I know are good girls,
With charming and high minds.
And yet it is true that many boys lie and steal,
And girls run away and are dragged into lives of shame.
Why do I not see it? Why do I not do anything?
Why am I so helpless, if I have any duty to others?
FROM “THE INTERSTATE MEDICAL JOURNAL”
A case in point showing how little has been achieved by our medical men
who have gone among the people, torch in hand, to lead them to the
Promised Land of happiness and content and physical and mental health
has been well illustrated in a poem, recently published in THE LITTLE
REVIEW (Chicago), wherein the authoress, Mary Aldis, unwittingly indicts
the whole medical profession for still allowing the sale of a patent
medicine to reduce obesity. The strange title of the poem in homely and
unadorned “free verse” is “Ellie: The Tragic Tale of An Obese Girl.”
Mrs. Aldis—thus runs the poem—had a manicurist who was “a great big
lummox of a girl—a continent,” with “silly bulging cheeks and puffy
forehead,” and who one day said to the poetess, weeping and distraught:
“I’m so fat, so awful, awful fat! The boys won’t look at me.” She asked
Mrs. Aldis for help and Mrs. Aldis suggested, “A doctor’s vague advice
to bant and exercise,” and “Ellie and her woes passed from my mind.
Until, as summer dawned again, I heard that she was dead.” Mrs. Aldis
went to the funeral and saw Ellie lying in her coffin and was told by
Ellie’s mother, “She must a made it [the dress] by herself. It’s queer
it fitted perfectly, An’ her all thin like that.” Later in the evening
Mrs. Aldis received the following confidences from Ellie’s mother:
“’Twas the stuff she took that did it, I never knew till after she was
dead. The bottles in the woodshed, hundreds of ’em, All labelled
‘Caldwell’s Great Obesity Cure Warranted Safe and Rapid.’”
To sermonize here, we have Mrs. Aldis, who we know to be a highly
intelligent woman and one not only interested in the uplift of the drama
but also in the uplift of the common (?) people, merely saying to a
girl, who is wretchedly unhappy about her elephantine size: All that I
can give you is a doctor’s vague advice to bant and exercise. She might
have given her Vance Thompson’s epoch-making book “Eat and Grow Thin,”
or read chapters from it to the unhappy girl, thereby convincing her
that starvation is unnecessary and also a patent medicine. But with a
coldness that is most reprehensive, she gave “a doctor’s vague advice to
bant and exercise,” and evidently Ellie would none of this. She might
also have consulted the hundred and one doctors in Chicago or elsewhere
who specialize in the reduction of fat, and who could have given her for
“the continent” a diet chart or perhaps a pill to effect the desired
change. But she did not think this necessary; she did not feel it her
duty. But if we have only adverse criticism for Mrs. Aldis’ uncharitable
act, what direful words of commination should we not visit on the doctor
who gave the “vague advice.” In an age when the cult of slimness is
uppermost in everybody’s mind, is it possible that the doctor consulted
by Mrs. Aldis was so untrue to his mission as a public benefactor that
he gave only “vague advice,” or is Mrs. Aldis maligning the whole
medical profession and trying to show that by his “vague advice” the
doctor was really responsible for Ellie’s death by driving her into
taking “the bottles in the woodshed, hundreds of ’em. All labelled
‘Caldwell’s Great Obesity Cure Warranted Safe and Rapid.’”?
The lesson contained in the poetic lines of Mrs. Aldis’ little tragedy
is a bitter one for all those medical men who have made strenuous
efforts to let the public share their deep and vast knowledge without so
much as asking for the slightest compensation. It shows beyond a doubt
that not only are the Ellies of this world unwilling to imbibe science
in a popular form, but also the Aldises of a much higher intelligence.
It shows that the lure of patent medicine is a very strong one and that
a doctor’s “vague advice” cannot offset it. Strange, indeed, that a
doctor’s “vague advice” should be so inconsequential opposite so
patently fraudulent a preparation as “Caldwell’s Great Obesity Cure,”
but stranger still is what we are about to record—namely, the failure of
our medical propagandists to combat in an intelligent way that most
simple of all our metabolic disturbances—obesity!
A Vers Libre Prize Contest
Through the generosity of a friend, THE LITTLE REVIEW is enabled to
offer an unusual prize for poetry—possibly the first prize extended to
free verse. The giver is “interested in all experiments, and has
followed the poetry published in THE LITTLE REVIEW with keen
appreciation and a growing admiration for the poetic form known as _vers
libre_.”
The conditions are as follows:
Contributions must be received by August 15th.
They must not be longer than twenty-five lines.
They must be sent anonymously with stamps for return.
The name and address of the author must be fixed to the manuscript in a
sealed envelope.
It should be borne in mind that free verse is wanted—verse having beauty
of rhythm, not merely prose separated into lines.
There will be three judges, the appointing of whom has been left to the
editor of THE LITTLE REVIEW. (Their names will be given in the next
issue, as we are hurrying this announcement to press without having had
time to consult anyone.)
There will be two prizes of $25 each. They are offered not as a first
and second prize, but for “the two best short poems in free verse form.”
As there will probably be a large number of poems to read, we suggest
that contributors adhere closely to the conditions of the contest.
Margaret Sanger
Will speak at the Chicago Little Theatre
SUNDAY, APRIL 30, at 8:15
“The Child’s Right
Not to be Born”
Margaret Sanger
“Birth Control”
West Side Auditorium
TUESDAY, APRIL 25, at 8:15
MAURICE BROWN, CHAIRMAN
AUSPICES BIRTH CONTROL LEAGUE
Taylor and Racine Avenue Admission 25 cents
THE EGOIST
An Individualist Review
In the APRIL NUMBER of THE EGOIST our new Serial Story:
“_TARR_,” by MR. WYNDHAM LEWIS
opens with a long installment.
In the MAY NUMBER MISS DORA MARSDEN will resume her
Editorial Articles,
MR. EZRA POUND will start a series of translations of the
“_DIALOGUES of FONTENELLE_,”
and the first of a Series of
_LETTERS of a 20th CENTURY ENGLISHWOMAN_
will also appear. These Letters bear particularly upon the
interests
and education of modern women.
MADAME CIOLKOWSKA will continue the “_PARIS CHRONICLE_”
and her new series of articles on “_THE FRENCH
WORD IN MODERN PROSE_.”
Further prose contributors will include: H. S. WEAVER, RICHARD
ALDINGTON (also poetry), A. W. G. RANDALL (studies in modern
German poetry), JOHN COURNOS, F. S. FLINT,
LEIGH HENRY (studies in contemporary
music), M. MONTAGU-NATHAN,
HUNTLY CARTER, MARGARET
STORM
JAMESON
and others.
_THE EGOIST_ will also continue to publish regularly the work
of _Young
English and American Poets_, and poems (in French)
by _Modern French Poets_.
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THE RAT-PIT. By Patrick MacGill. A novel by the navvy-poet who
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JERUSALEM. By Selma Lagerlof. Translated by Velma Swanston. The
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RUSSIAN SILHOUETTES. By Anton Tchekoff. Translated by Marian
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THE STAR ROVER. By Jack London. Frontispiece in colors by Jay
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THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT. By H. G. Wells. Tells the story of the
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Degeneracy exposed. Birth control discussed. Should be in the
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Painful childbirth in this age of scientific progress is
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FREUD’S THEORIES OF THE NEUROSES. By Dr. E. Hitschmann. A brief
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PLAIN FACTS ABOUT A GREAT EVIL. By Christobel Pankhurst. One of
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KRAFFT-EBING’S PSYCHOPATHIA SEXUALIS. Only authorized English
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MAN AND WOMAN. By Dr. Havelock Ellis, the foremost authority on
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THE BOOK OF MUSICAL KNOWLEDGE. By Arthur Elson. Illustrated.
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MODERN PAINTING: ITS TENDENCY AND MEANING. By Willard Huntington
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THE ROMANCE OF LEONARDO DA VINCI. By A. J. Anderson. Photogravure
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THE COLOUR OF PARIS. By Lucien Descaves. Large 8vo. New edition,
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CAUSES AND CURES OF CRIME. A popular study of criminology from
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THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELAXATION. By G. T. W. Patrick. A notable and
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PSYCHOLOGY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS. By Dr. C. G. Jung, of the
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SOCIALIZED GERMANY. By Frederic C. Howe, author of “The Modern
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SCIENTIFIC INVENTIONS OF TODAY. Illustrated. By T. W. Corbin. The
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SCHOOLS OF TOMORROW. By John Dewey and Evelyn Dewey. Illustrated.
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THE RHYTHM OF LIFE. By Charles Brodie Patterson. A discussion of
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THE FAITHFUL. By John Masefield. A three-act tragedy founded on a
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INCOME. By Scott Nearing. An economic value is created amounting
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issues to which it leads are presented. Send $1.25.
THE STOIC PHILOSOPHY. By Gilbert Murray. An account of the
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himself clear and interesting. Send 82c.
A MESSAGE TO THE MIDDLE CLASS. By Seymour Deming. A clarion call
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DRIFT AND MASTERY. An attempt to diagnose the current unrest. By
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FIRST AND LAST THINGS. By H. G. Wells. A confession of Faith and
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THE SOCIALISTS AND THE WAR. By William English Walling. No
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that this remarkable new book holds. 512 pages. Complete
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DREAMS AND MYTHS. By Dr. Karl Abraham. A lucid presentation of
Freud’s theory of dreams. A study in comparative mythology from
the standpoint of dream psychology. Price, $1.25.
WHAT WOMEN WANT. By Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale. $1.35 net;
postage, 10c.
ARE WOMEN PEOPLE? A collection of clever woman suffrage verses.
The best since Mrs. Gilman. Geo. H. Doran Co. Send 75c.
HOW IT FEELS TO BE THE HUSBAND OF A SUFFRAGETTE. By “Him.”
Illustrated by Mary Wilson Preston. Send 60c.
ON DREAMS. By Prof. Sigmund Freud. Authorized English translation
by Dr. M. D. Eder. Introduction by Prof. W. Leslie Mackenzie.
This classic now obtainable for $1.10.
MODERN WOMEN. By Gustav Kobbe. Terse, pithy, highly dramatic
studies in the overwrought feminism of the day. A clever book.
Send $1.10.
GOTHAM BOOK SOCIETY
Marlen E. Pew, Gen. Mgr., Dept. K, 142 West 23rd St., New York
“You Can Get Any Book on Any Subject”
Transcriber’s Notes
Advertisements were collected at the end of the text.
The table of contents on the title page was adjusted in order to reflect
correctly the headings in this issue of THE LITTLE REVIEW.
The original spelling was mostly preserved. A few obvious typographical
errors were silently corrected. All other changes are shown here
(before/after):
[p. 5]:
... Fine, or Superfine. ...
... Fine, or superfine. ...
[p. 20]:
... of Eugene Araam. Power’s face and figure were more majestic
on the ...
... of Eugene Aram. Power’s face and figure were more majestic
on the ...
[p. 22]:
... hotel and restaurant maids; scrub-women; actors;
vaudevillains; cabaret ...
... hotel and restaurant maids; scrub-women; actors;
vaudevillians; cabaret ...
[p. 25]:
... be Helen Hoyt and Zöe Aikens. The third will be announced ...
... be Helen Hoyt and Zoë Akins. The third will be announced ...
[p. 30]:
... the work of Baskt, Urban, Jones, Sime, and Rothenstein. ...
... the work of Bakst, Urban, Jones, Sime, and Rothenstein. ...
[p. 31]:
... who come to digest their dinner.—Elenora ...
... who come to digest their dinner.—Eleonora ...
[p. 36]:
... The man can paint—technic seems to be only a superstitian
now but it once had a ...
... The man can paint—technic seems to be only a superstition
now but it once had a ...
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Little Review, April 1916 (Vol. 3, No. 2)" ***
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