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+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #66217 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/66217)
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-The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Little Review, June-July 1915 (Vol. 2,
-No. 4), by Margaret C. Anderson
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
-most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
-of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
-www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
-will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
-using this eBook.
-
-Title: The Little Review, June-July 1915 (Vol. 2, No. 4)
-
-Author: Lucien Cary, Richard Aldington, Will Levington Comfort, Alexander S. Kaun, Margaret C. Anderson, Clara Shanafelt, Ben Hecht, Florence Kiper Frank, Arthur Davison Ficke, Eunice Tietjens and Witter Bynner
-
-Editor: Margaret C. Anderson
-
-Release Date: September 4, 2021 [eBook #66217]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
-Produced by: Jens Sadowski and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
- http://www.pgdp.net. This book was produced from images made
- available by the Modernist Journal Project, Brown and Tulsa
- Universities.
-
-*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LITTLE REVIEW, JUNE-JULY 1915
-(VOL. 2, NO. 4) ***
-
-
-
-
- THE LITTLE REVIEW
-
-
- _Literature_ _Drama_ _Music_ _Art_
-
- MARGARET C. ANDERSON
- EDITOR
-
- JUNE-JULY, 1915
-
- Literary Journalism in Chicago Lucien Cary
- Epigrams Richard Aldington
- Education by Children Will Levington Comfort
- Notes of a Cosmopolite Alexander S. Kaun
- “The Artist in Life” Margaret C. Anderson
- Poems Clara Shanafelt
- Slobberdom, Sneerdom, and Boredom Ben Hecht
- The Death of Anton Tarasovitch Florence Kiper Frank
- Rupert Brooke (A Memory) Arthur Davison Ficke
- A Photograph of Rupert Brooke by Eugene Hutchinson
- To a West Indian Alligator Eunice Tietjens
- Epitaphs Witter Bynner
- Editorials and Announcements
- The Submarine (from the Italian of Luciano Folgore by Anne Simon)
- Blaa-Blaa-Blaa “The Scavenger”
- The Nine!—Exhibit!
- Book Discussion
- The Reader Critic
-
- Published Monthly
-
- 15 cents a copy
-
- MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Publisher
- Fine Arts Building
- CHICAGO
-
- $1.50 a year
-
- Entered as second-class matter at Postoffice, Chicago
-
-
-
-
- THE LITTLE REVIEW
-
-
- Vol. II
-
- JUNE-JULY, 1915
-
- No. 4
-
-
-
-
- Literary Journalism in Chicago
-
-
- LUCIAN CARY
-
-Nothing succeeds like an indiscretion. I was indiscreet enough last
-winter to speak my mind (a little of it) about THE LITTLE REVIEW, _The
-Dial_, _Poetry_, _The Drama_, and the audience to which these papers
-appeal. The result is that I have been flattered or intimidated into
-speaking it ever since. In the present instance both methods have been
-used most charmingly—and shamelessly. You see, Miss Anderson and I live
-in the same village. And yet I said nothing, and have nothing to say
-about any paper except what everybody knows.
-
-Everybody knows that _The Friday Literary Review_ of _The Chicago
-Evening Post_ under Mr. Francis Hackett and, later, under Mr. Floyd Dell
-gave us the most alert, the most eager, the most intelligent, and the
-best-written discussion of literature in the United States. That
-eight-page supplement did what had hardly been done west of England
-before: it made book reviews worth reading. There was almost as much
-difference between the _Friday Review_ and _The Dial_ as there is
-between Mr. George Bernard Shaw and Mr. Nicholas Murray Butler, almost
-as much difference between the _Friday Review_ and _The New York Times
-Literary Supplement_ as there is between M. Anatole France and Mr. Henry
-Van Dyke. There was good writing in the _Friday Review_ and good
-thinking behind it. It was almost never dull; and if it was young it was
-not wholly unsophisticated; and if it was sometimes dead wrong it was
-not stupid. If there were half as many persons interested in the
-discussion of ideas as most of us like to believe the _Friday Review_
-would inevitably have continued. It would, that’s all. But as things are
-it was fated. Neither the mechanics nor the economics of daily
-journalism permitted it. The _Post_ could not continue to give us—it
-quite literally gave us—eight pages of what so few of us wanted so much.
-
-Everybody knows that if a weekly paper dealing not only with literature
-but with all the other arts in the spirit and with the journalistic
-competence of the _Friday Review_ were established in Chicago everybody
-would have to read it.
-
-That is the point I wished to make. It is perfectly obvious that THE
-LITTLE REVIEW is not the kind of newspaper of the arts I have in mind.
-THE LITTLE REVIEW is published only once a month. It is therefore not a
-newspaper, but a magazine. It is three times as good as _The Drama_,
-which is published only once a quarter. But my point is that we ought to
-have something four times as good as THE LITTLE REVIEW: in short, a
-weekly. It may be that THE LITTLE REVIEW has other failings than its
-infrequency. But why consider these lesser matters? THE LITTLE REVIEW
-has one virtue in addition to its eagerness. It is informal. Informality
-is the breath of life to journalism. Nobody can write anything the way
-people want him to unless he feels perfectly free to write the way he
-wants to. It is far more a matter of manners than a matter of truth. A
-journal which insists on formality almost never has any good writing in
-it. Good writing is nothing but the artistic expression of a
-personality. Scientifically speaking, it can be nothing else. Not that
-one must be thinking about expressing his personality in order to write
-well. The very point is that he must not be thinking about it. He has
-got to be thinking about what he has to say and nothing else. Take the
-use of “I” as an apparently trivial but actually significant example. If
-the paper for which he is writing regards the use of “I” as a breach of
-good form a man will find that one finger of his left hand is
-mysteriously drawn to the shift key and one finger of his right hand to
-the key between the “u” and the “o” in order to make an “I” all the time
-he is punching his typewriter. The least excusable riot of “I’s” I ever
-saw in print was in a journal of literary discussion which believes in
-the reality of that invention of the old-fashioned logician, “objective
-criticism,” and which regards the use of “I” by any but elderly
-gentlemen of the walnuts and wine school as impossible. I did it myself
-in the absence of the editor. In a paper which does not in the least
-object to the use of “I” writers soon forget all about it, and when they
-do that they begin to use it only when it is effective. It is the virtue
-of THE LITTLE REVIEW that it permits its contributors to use “I” as
-often as they please; that it permits them to make fools of themselves
-occasionally. This means that it is not impossible to write well for THE
-LITTLE REVIEW. I do not say that it is not possible to write badly for
-THE LITTLE REVIEW. Perfect freedom to be idiotic does not inevitably
-eliminate idiocy.
-
-But I have no more compliments for THE LITTLE REVIEW.
-
-_Poetry_ is another matter. Miss Monroe’s magazine has printed some bad
-verse. But this is not, as its most envious critics imagine, its
-distinction. Every magazine prints bad verse. _Poetry_ has printed
-poetry that nobody else dared to print. _Poetry_ has boldly discussed
-the poetic controversy when everybody else hid behind language. _Poetry_
-introduced us to Rabindranath Tagore, to Vachel Lindsay, in a way, to
-Edgar Lee Masters. _Poetry_ printed Ford Hueffer’s poem _On Heaven_.
-_Poetry_ has heard of Remy de Gourmont and the _Mercure de France_—an
-incredible achievement for a Chicago literary journal. _Poetry_ has done
-more than any other paper to furnish a meeting ground for writers in
-Chicago. If _Poetry_ were concerned about novels it would not decide two
-or three years after intelligent people had discovered _Jean Christophe_
-that M. Romain Rolland is a successor to Tolstoi and, for the first
-time, print a few paragraphs about him. If _Poetry_ were interested in
-psychology it would not ignore Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. But _Poetry_
-is not interested in these things. Its great wealth is devoted only to
-poetry and it comes out only once a month.
-
-It is a pity. For the spirit of _Poetry_ is nearer to the spirit of the
-old _Friday Literary Review_ than anything else in Chicago. That is the
-spirit I like, that seems suited to the place and the occasion. But it
-needs a weekly paper of wide scope to express itself.
-
-
- A man is an artist to the extent to which he regards everything
- that inartistic people call “form” as the actual substance, as
- the “principal” thing.—_Nietzsche._
-
-
-
-
- Epigrams
-
-
- RICHARD ALDINGTON
-
-
- Blue
-
- (_A Conceit_)
-
- The noon sky, a distended vast blue sail;
- The sea, a parquet of coloured wood;
- The rock-flowers, sinister indigo sponges;
- Lavender leaping up, scented sulphur flames;
- Little butterflies, resting shut-winged, fluttering,
- Eyelids winking over watchet eyes.
-
-
- The Retort Discourteous
-
- They say we like London—O Hell!—
- They tell
- Us we shall never sell
- Our works (as if we cared).
- We’re “high brow” and long-haired
- Because we don’t
- Cheat and cant.
- We can’t rhythm; we can’t rhyme,
- Just because their rag-time
- Bores us.
-
- These twangling lyrists are too pure for sense;
- So they chime,
- Rhyme
- And time,
- And Slime,
- All praise their virtuous impotence.
-
-
- Christine
-
- I know a woman who is natural
- As any simple cannibal;
- This is a great misfortune, for her lot
- Is to reside with people who are not.
-
-
-
-
- Education by Children
-
-
- WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT
-
-A little girl of eleven was working here in the study through the long
-forenoon. In the midst of it, we each looked up and out through the
-barred window to the nearest elm, where a song-sparrow had just finished
-a perfect expression of the thing as he felt it. The song was more
-elaborate, perhaps, because the morning was lofty and glorious. Old
-Mother Nature smelled like a tea-rose that morning; one would know from
-that without the sense of direction that the wind was from the south.
-The song from the sunlight among the new elm leaves was so joyous that
-it choked us. It stood out from all the songs of the morning, because it
-was so near, and we had each been called by it from the pleasant mystery
-of our tasks.
-
-The little girl leaned toward the window. We heard the other bird answer
-from the distance, and then _ours_ sang again—and again. We sipped the
-ecstacy in the hushes. Like a flicker the little bird was gone—a leaning
-forward on the branch, and then a blur ... and presently the words in
-the room:
-
- “... sang four songs and flew away.”
-
-It was a word-portrait, and told me much that I wanted. The number, of
-course, was not mental, clearly a part of the inner impression. However,
-no explanation will help if the art of the saying is not apparent. I
-told the thing as it is here, to a class later in the day, and a woman
-said:
-
-“Why, those six words make a Japanese poem.”
-
-I wonder if it is oriental? Rather I think it belongs especially to our
-new generation, the elect of which seems to know innately that an
-expression of truth in itself is a master-stroke. Somehow the
-prison-house has not closed altogether upon the elect of the new
-generation. There are lines in the new poetry that could come forth, and
-have their being, only from the inner giant that heretofore has been
-asleep except in the hearts of the rarest few whose mothers mated with
-Gods, merely using men for a symbol and the gift of matter....
-
-As I believe that the literary generation which has the floor in America
-today is the weakest and the bleakest that ever made semi-darkness of
-good sunlight, so I believe that the elect of the new generation
-contains individuals who are true heaven-borns; that they bring their
-own light with them and do not stand about stretched for reflection;
-that they refuse to allow the world-lie to shut the passages of power
-within them, between the zone of dreams and the more temperate zones of
-matter. They have refused to accept us—that is the splendid truth.
-
-The new generation does not argue with us. They are not a race of
-talkers. They do not accept what they find and begin to build upon that,
-as all but the masters have done heretofore. They are making even their
-own footings and abutments. And to such clean and sure beginnings magic
-strength has come. The fashions and the mannerisms which we knew and
-thought of as the heart of things; the artfulness of speech and written
-word, the age of advertising which twisted its lie into the very
-physical structure of our brains; the countless reserves and covers to
-hide our want of inspiration (for light cannot pass through a twisted
-passage)—all these, the new age has put away. It meets life face to
-face—and a more subtle and formidable devil is required for its workers
-than that which seduced us.
-
-The few great workmen heretofore have come up in the lie, and in
-midlife, the sutures closing—they were warned because they had labored
-like men. For their work’s sake and for their religion, which is the
-same to great men, they perceived that they must tear the lie out of
-their hearts, even if they bled to death. We call it their illumination,
-but it was a very deep and dark passage for them. _Except that ye become
-as little children_—that was all they knew, perhaps, but quite
-enough.... And the old masters invariably put their story down for us to
-read: Rodin, Puvis de Chavannes, Whitman, Balzac, Tolstoi—only to
-mention a little group of the nearer names—all have told the story. In
-their later years they told no other story.
-
-In the beginning they served men, as they fancied men wanted to be
-served, but after they confronted the lie of it, they dared to listen to
-reality from their own nature. They fought the fight for that cosmic
-simplicity which is the natural flowering of the child mind, and which
-modern education patronizingly dresses down at every appearance. The
-masters wrenched open with all their remaining strength the doors of the
-prison-house, and become more and more like children unto the end.
-
- * * * * *
-
-... I do not ask a finer fate than to write about the _New Age_ and
-_Children_ and _Education by Children_ for THE LITTLE REVIEW. I think of
-_you_ as one of its throbbing centers. I can say it better than that—I
-think of you as a brown Arabian tent in which the world’s desire is just
-rousing from sleep. I would like to be one of the larks of the morning,
-whose song makes it impossible for you to doze again. I would not come
-too near—lest you find me old, the brandings of past upon me. Yet
-because of the years, I think I know what will be that “more formidable
-and subtle devil” waiting to make you forget your way.
-
-He is not a stranger. He is always near when people dare to be simple.
-There are many who call him a God still, but they do not use their eyes.
-You who see so directly must never forget that bad curve of him below
-the shoulders. Forever, the artists lying to themselves have tried to
-cover that bad curve of Pan as it sweeps down into the haunches of a
-goat. Pan is the first devil you meet when you reach that rectitude of
-heart which dares to be naked and unashamed.
-
-Whole races of artists have lied about Pan because they listened to the
-haunting music of his pipes. It calls sweetly, but does not satisfy. How
-many Pan has called—and left them sitting among the rocks with mindless
-eyes and hands that fiddle with emptiness!... Pan is so sad and
-level-eyed. He does not explain. He does not promise—too wise for that.
-He lures and enchants. He makes you pity him with a pity that is red as
-the lusts of flesh.
-
-You know that red in the breast! It is the red that drives away the
-dream of peace, yet the pity of him deludes you. You look again and
-again, and the curve of his back does not break the dream, as before.
-You think that because you pity him, you cannot fall; and all the pull
-of the ground tells you that your _very thought of falling_ is a breath
-from the old shames—your dead, but as yet unburied heritage, from
-generations that learned the lie to itself.
-
-You touch the hair of the goat, and say it is Nature. But Pan is not
-Nature—a hybrid, half of man’s making, rather. Your eyes fall to the
-cloven hoof, but return to the level steady eye, smiling with such soft
-sadness that your heart quickens for him, and you listen, as he says:
-“All Gods have animal bodies and cloven hoofs, but I alone have dared to
-reveal mine.” ... “How brave you are!” Your heart answers, and the throb
-of him bewilders you with passion.... You who are so high must fall far,
-when you let go.
-
-... And many of you will want to fall. Pan has come to you because you
-_dare_.... You have murdered the old shames, you have torn down the
-ancient and mouldering churches. You do not require the blood, the
-thorn, the spikes, but I wonder if even you of a glorious generation, do
-not still require the Cross?... It is because you see so surely and are
-level-eyed that Pan is back in the world for you; and it is very strange
-but true that you must first meet Pan and pass him by, before you can
-enter into the woodlands with that valid God of Nature, whose back is a
-challenge to aspiration, and whose feet are of the purity of the saints.
-
-
- To M.
-
- Beautiful slave,
- I kiss your lips abloom—
- Do you not hear the surging voices
- Beyond the tomb
- Wherein you guard the candles of the dead?
-
- Do you not hear the winds that crown
- The towers with clouds
- Dancing up and down,
- Fluttering your shrouds?
- Do you not hear the music of the dawn,
- The strong exultant voices swelling,
- Welling like the sweep of eager birds
- Beyond your somber dwelling
- Where each somber wall enclosing flings
- Back in your ear
- The moaning passion of dead things?
-
- Beautiful slave,
- I kiss your parted lips abloom.
- O the splendor of the voids beyond
- The stifling tomb
- Wherein you keep your vigil by the dead.
- You are too weary-spirited
- To look at dawn, too tired-eyed to look upon the sun,
- Too weak to stand against the winds.
- What then? Farewell? No, let me—
- I will find the face of God
- With you among the worms.
-
- ANON.
-
-
-
-
- Notes of a Cosmopolite
-
-
- ALEXANDER S. KAUN
-
-Mit dem Nationalhaß ist es ein eigenes Ding. Auf den untersten Stufen
-der Kultur wird man ihn immer am stärksten und heftigsten finden. Es
-giebt aber eine Stufe, wo er ganz verschwindet, wo man gewissermaßen
-über den Nationen steht und man ein Glück oder Weh seines Nachbarvolkes
-fühlt, als wärs dem eigenen Volk begegnet.—_Goethe._
-
-
- _Uncle Sam vs. Onkel Michel_
-
-You remember the story of the king parading every morning before his
-meek subjects who expressed their great admiration for the sovereign’s
-gorgeous raiment, until a certain simpleton shouted: “Why, the king is
-nude!” I do not recall the end of the story, nor how the impudent
-sceptic was punished; but the part I do remember recurs to me every time
-some elemental power comes along and sweeps away the ephemeral figments
-from the body of mankind. Mars has more than once played the part of the
-rude simpleton; this god has neither tact nor manners; with his heavy
-boot he dots the i’s and compels us to name pigs pigs. His first victim
-falls the frail web of diplomatic niceties. Talleyrand’s cynicism about
-the function of the diplomat’s tongue to conceal truth has become
-bankrupt: who takes seriously nowadays the casuistry of the manicolored
-Books issued by the belligerents? Even Tartuffian England has had to
-doff the robe of idealism and to admit through the _Times_ that it would
-have fought regardless of whether the neutrality of Belgium had been
-infringed upon or not. Good. One of the salutary results of the war (let
-us hope there will be more than one good result) has already been
-realized in the wholesale unmasquing of international politics; it will
-do immense good for mankind-Caliban to see his real image.
-
-The United States holds fast to its tradition of lagging behind the rest
-of the world. Messrs. Wilson and Bryan still employ the rusty weapon of
-“putting one over” through transparent bluff. “Too proud to fight” has
-become a classic _mot_ the world over, to the sheer delight of European
-humorists and cartoonists after their wits had been exhausted over the
-memorable “Watchful Waiting.” The admirable English of the President has
-demonstrated its effectiveness time and again: nearly each eloquent Note
-has been responded to by a German torpedo. “America asks nothing for
-herself but what she has a right to ask for humanity itself”—what
-obsolete verbosity! Who is this Mme. Humanity in whose name we demand
-the right to send shells to Europe unhampered by the intended victims of
-those shells? An American weekly, outspokenly pro-British, has cynically
-summed up the situation: “The British government will not allow a German
-woman to obtain food from the United States with which to feed her
-children, in spite of the fact that it is buying rifles in the United
-States with which to kill her husband.” We can neither blame England for
-her practical purposes, nor reproach the United States for her desire to
-accommodate a good customer: business is business; but why these appeals
-in the name of humanity? Why the indignant outcries against Germany’s
-successful attempts to check the supply of ammunition for her enemies?
-The brutal Lusitania affair has merely proved the consistent and
-consequential policy of Germany; had she not carried out her threats she
-would have found herself in the ridiculous position of our government
-which seldom goes beyond threats. Talk about the murder of women and
-children in time of war! I heard of a polite Frenchman who hurled
-himself from the top story of the Masonic Temple and removed his hat to
-apologize before a lady on one of the balconies whose hat he happened to
-brush on his downward flight. Well, the Germans are not polite.
-
-What is the significance of Mr. Bryan’s resignation? Let us hope it is
-of no import; let us hope it may cause a change in tone, but not in
-action. For this country to be dragged into the whirlpool of the world
-war would be a more unpardonable folly than the puerile Vera Cruz
-affair. Our entrance into the war would change the actual situation of
-the fighting powers as much as the solemn declaration of war by the
-Liliputian San Marino has changed it; in the absence of an army
-deserving mention we could depend solely upon our navy which would be
-able to accomplish nothing more than joining in some calm bay the
-invincible fleet of the Ruler of the Waves and indulge in philosophical
-watchful waiting. On the other hand official war against Germany will
-doubtless produce internal friction of the gravest importance. I say
-_official_, for unofficially we have been on the side of the Allies for
-many months despite our theoretical neutrality. Think of the sentiments
-of the German soldiers when they are showered upon with shells bearing
-the labels of American manufacturers. Had we not supplied England and
-France with ammunition, who knows but that they would have found
-themselves in the same predicament as Russia, that is, in the position
-of an orchestra without instruments? When we shall have declared war
-against Germany we shall hardly be in power to harm her more than we
-have done heretofore; the Allies will do the killing, and we, the
-manufacturing. But the cat’s-paw-game is ungentlemanly, especially when
-it is done officially. To be sure, Mr. Wilson is a gentleman; hence our
-firm hope that he will do nothing more grave than enriching English
-literature with exemplary Notography.
-
-
- _Vincisti, Teutonia!_
-
-In his Frankfurt letters Heine wrote:
-
- I have never felt inclined to repose confidence in Prussia. I
- have rather been filled with anxiety as I gazed upon this
- Prussian eagle, and while others boasted of the bold way in which
- he glared at the sun my attention was drawn more and more to his
- claws. I never trusted this Prussian, this tall canting hero in
- gaiters, with his big paunch and his large jaws, and his
- corporal’s stick, which he dips in holy water before he lays it
- about your back. I am not overfond of this philosophical
- Christian militarism, this hodge-podge of thin beer, lies, and
- sand. I utterly loathe this Prussia, this stiff, hypocritical,
- sanctimonious Prussia, this Tartuffe among the nations.
-
-Can you blame Wilhelm for opposing the erection of a Heine monument in
-Düsseldorf? Those lines were written nearly four scores of years ago, a
-time sufficient for turning epithets obsolete. No longer is Prussia
-labeled hypocritical and sanctimonious; it is rather accused of rude
-frankness and insulting tactlessness. Yet the hatred for Prussia has not
-abated, but has been greatly enhanced. Heine died before the planting of
-the atrocious Sieges-Allee, that symbol of the triumphant pig; it is in
-the last forty years that the world has witnessed the development of
-Prussian forbearance, narrowness, machine-like preciseness, and
-soullessness. We have always preferred to distinguish Germany from
-Prussia; we have found delight in the thought that there is a Munich as
-well as a Berlin, a Nietzsche as well as a Haeckel, a Rheinhard as well
-as a Bernhardi.... Today we witness the hegemony of Prussia, a hegemony
-political as well as spiritual, for the great war has crowned with
-triumph not only the Krupp guns but also the Prussian idea of efficiency
-and preciseness. Our amazement at the achievements of the lightning-like
-army that has been almost invariably victorious during the eleven months
-of fighting and has held in its iron grip two hostile fronts, and our
-astonishment at the diabolical accomplishment of the submarines which
-have driven the English fleet to rest in North Scotland and have become
-the Flying Dutchmen of the seas, pale before our admiration for the
-wonderful spirit displayed by the German people within their country.
-Read their press; you find nothing bombastic or boasting, but calm
-reserve, set teeth, clenched fists, and deadly determination to fight
-for life, even if it be a fight against the whole world. “_Weder
-Schlafpulver noch Tonics!_” admonishes Maximilian Harden against
-drumming up illusionary hopes. “_Stirb und werde_,” he closes up one of
-his terse articles in the most virile publication I know of, the
-_Zukunft_. Bernhardi’s alternative—a World Power or Downfall—is not any
-longer a mere jingo-rocket but an imperative axiom uniting all Germans
-in a desperate decision to preserve their national existence in face of
-a universal hatred and complete isolation. They are not geniuses, those
-perseverant Teutons; rather are they the reverse of geniuses. They do
-not rise above reality; they adapt themselves to facts. They refuse to
-be Quixotic knights; they prefer to emulate Mahomet who went to the
-mountain when the mountain declined to go unto him; not to ride on the
-back of conditions and circumstances, but to hold tight their tail and
-be dragged after them. Herein lies the Teutonic victory, the victory of
-Blond Beast over Superman, the triumph of mediocrity over uniqueness, of
-fact over idea, of efficiency over idealism, of state over individual.
-
-
- _The Prophecy of Rimbaud_
-
-Arthur Rimbaud, the close friend of Verlaine, the “ruffian,” according
-to Mr. Powys (this I shall never forgive him), was capable not only of
-perceiving the color of vowels but also of foreseeing the political
-situation forty-five years ahead. _L’Eclaireur de Nice_ prints an
-interesting statement made by Rimbaud in 1871, a few lines of which I
-shall reluctantly attempt to translate:
-
- The Germans are by far our inferiors, for the vainer a people is
- the closer it approaches decadence—history proves it.... They are
- our inferiors because victory has besotted them. Our chauvinism
- has received a blow from which it will not recover. The defeat
- has freed us from stupid prejudice, has transformed and saved us.
- Yes, they will pay dearly for their victory! In fifty years
- envious and restless Europe will prepare for them a bold
- unexpected stroke, and will whip them. I can foresee the
- administration of iron and folly that will stifle German society
- and German thought, in the end to be crushed by some coalition!
-
-
- _George Brandes’ Neutrality_
-
-There has been a good deal of misapprehension concerning Brandes’
-attitude towards the war. His refusal to answer the interpellation of
-his friend Clemenceau, his condemnation of the Russian policy in Finland
-and of the cowardly and treacherous treatment of the Jews by the Poles,
-have given cause for suspecting him of pro-German sentiments. In a
-recent interview with the correspondent of the Paris _Journal_ the
-Danish critic avows his full sympathy for France. Although his statement
-is reserved and plausibly neutral, one easily discerns his dislike for
-Germany, in whose _Deutschland über Alles_ motto he sees a Jesuitic
-excuse for all means that may lead to her end. “German brutality is not
-instinctive; it is a scientific one, a theory.” The cause of the war he
-epitomizes in the _mot_ of Pascal: “Pourquoi voulez vous tuer cette
-homme?”—“Il est mon ennemi: il habite de l’autre côté du fleuve.”
-Brandes expresses himself more frankly in the Danish _Tilskueren_, where
-he interprets the war as the struggle between liberalism and personal
-government, between civil spirit and militarism, between a people
-(England) which accords others commercial freedom and self-government
-and a country overridden with economic protectionism, junkers, and
-bureaucracy. “England has an independent press and a government which
-voices the parliament and public opinion; in Germany the press is
-semi-official, the government is responsible solely before the Kaiser,
-and the Kaiser only before God.”
-
-
- _Germanophobia ad Absurdum_
-
-The French Immortals, too old for actual participation in the war, have
-found an outlet for their patriotism in shedding red ink of ridiculous
-chauvinism. It has become a matter of course to meet a name of some
-“Membre de l’Academie” signed under such outbursts as this: “Nothing of
-the Barbarians, nothing of their literature, of their music, of their
-art, of their science, nothing of their culture, of anything Made in
-Germany!” Another Academic gives vent to his ire against those Frenchmen
-who still find certain German things worth admiring, and he vehemently
-advocates the prohibition of the Barbarian music and art “by law, by
-persuasion, by force, by violence if necessary!” The octogenarian
-Saint-Saens has written a series of articles venomously attacking
-Wagnerian music, labeling traitor any Frenchman who favors the art of
-the arch-foe of his country. Even the semi-official _Le Temps_ was
-shocked by the violent tone of the old composer; it quoted Saint-Saens’s
-articles of the year 1876, in which the author appeared to be an ardent
-Wagnerite and appealed to his compatriots for broad-mindedness and
-toleration for “the greatest genius of our times.” As a substitute for
-the atrocious Wagner Saint-Saens recommends the return to Haydn and
-Mozart, even to Meyerbeer; Schumann’s Lieder he would ban for Gounod and
-Massenet; he favors even Dussek, for he is “only a Bohemian.” Patriotic
-as he is, he refuses to sanction the modern French composers, since
-Debussy, Fauré, D’Indy, and the rest are Wagnerians in his estimation.
-It is a case of “senile reactionarism,” as the _Mercure de France_
-rightly observes.
-
-
- _Comparative Morale_
-
-It is very interesting to compare the barometer of public morale in the
-European capitals, judging from their amusements. Here is one day’s bill
-taken from the London _Daily News_, the Petrograd _Ryech_, the _Berliner
-Tageblatt_, the Vienna _Neue Freie Presse_, and the Paris _Figaro_; I
-have omitted the movies, which bear for the most part ultra-patriotic
-titles, and the vaudevilles. The London bill is quite poor: _Veronique_,
-a comic opera; _Mme. Sans-Gene_; Gaby Deslys in _Rosy Rapture_,
-presented by Charles Frohman; _The Girl in the Taxi_; Frondai’s _The
-Right to Kill_; _For England, Home, and Beauty_; and our old friends,
-the Irish Players, in the Little Theatre. Still more meager is the Paris
-bill: outside of _Cavalleria Rusticana_ (the chairman of the Walt
-Whitman dinner pronounces it Keyveleeria Rohstikeyna), it abounds with
-such tit-bits as _La Petite Fonctionaire_, _Mam’zelle Boy Scout_,
-_Mariage de Pepeta_, and so forth. Berlin has on that day three
-operas—_Don Juan_, _Elektra_, _Lohengrin_; three dramas—_Faust_, _Peer
-Gynt_, _Schluck und Jau_ (the last one in Rheinhard’s Deutsches
-Theater), not counting the minor affairs. Vienna’s bill took away my
-breath: a Schönberg-Mahler Abend, a Schubert-Strauss Abend, a
-Beethoven-Brahms Abend, a Brahms Kammermusik Abend, a concert under
-Sevcik; _Carmen_; a play by Fulda after Molière; Ibsen’s _Master
-Builder_ and _Ghosts_; Kleist’s _Kätchen von Heilbronn_. As for the
-Petrograd bill, I had better not say what emotions it has aroused in me.
-Judge for yourselves: five operas—_Traviata_, _Faust_, _Pagliacci_,
-_Ruslan and Ludmilla_, _Eugene Onegin_; a ballet by Mlle. Krzesinsky;
-two ballets by Fokin’s company; plays by Ibsen, Mirbo, Andreyev, beside
-_Potash and Perlmutter_ and other importations; an exhibition of
-paintings by Lancerè and Dobuzhinsky; a Poeso-Evening by Futurist poets
-with Igor Severyanin as leader; an Evening of Poetry under K. R. (Grand
-Duke Konstantine, whose play _King of the Jews_ recently appeared in an
-English translation); public lectures on _The Blue Bird_ in Our Days, on
-Dostoevsky and Nietzsche.... Allow me to stop. Are you inclined to draw
-conclusions and comparisons between the stage of war-ridden Europe and
-that of peacefully complacent America? I beg to be excused.
-
-
- _Edmond Rostand on the Lusitania_
-
-Rostand is a member of the Academy; perhaps this affliction is
-responsible for his growing hoarseness as a Chantecler. Yet as of all
-recent war poems his is the best, I feel justified in citing it:
-
-
- Les Condoléances
-
- Bernstorff, pour aller à la Maison Blanche,
- S’est mis tout en noir.
- (L’onde a pris, là-bas, la dernière planche
- Dans son entonnoir.)
-
- Il entre, affigé, refuse une chaise
- D’un geste contrit.
- (Des femmes, là-bas, heurtent la falaise
- De leur sein meurtri.)
-
- Il tousse une toux de condoléance.
- Il s’essuie un oeil.
- (Les enfants noyés tournent en silence
- Autour d’un écueil.)
-
- Il se mouche. Il dit—son mouchoir embaume:—
- “Je viens de la part
- De Sa Majesté l’Empereur Guillaume
- Vous dire la part....”
-
- Derrière Wilson, dont on aime à croire
- Que tout le sang bout,
- Lincoln, la Vertu,—Washington, la Gloire,
- Se tiennent débout.
-
- Le comte Bernstorff ne peut les connaître.
- Il ne les voit pas.
- S’il pouvait les voir, il aurait peut-être
- Reculé d’un pas.
-
- “... Vous dire la part....”—O mornes allures!
- Touchant trémolo!
- (Les pêcheurs, là-bas, voient des chevelures
- Ouvertes sur l’eau.)
-
- “... Vous dire la part que nous daignons prendre
- A votre malheur.”
- (Les flots verts ont-ils d’autres morts à rendre?
- Demandez-le-leur!)
-
- Bernstorff pleure et dit: “J’ai su ce naufrage
- Et je suis venu.
- Ils n’ont pas souffert. Ayez du courage.
- Ils en ont bien eu.
-
- “Je n’insiste pas. Je suis venu vite,
- Et puis je m’en vais.
- Mais vous sentez bien que, cette visite,
- Je vous la devais.
-
- “Nous plaignons le sort des enfants, des femmes,
- Cela va de soi....
- Ah si vous voyiez tous les télégrammes
- Que Tirpitz reçoit!
-
- “C’est un grand succès pour notre marine.
- Je suis désolé.
- Veuillez constater que sur ma marine
- Ce pleur a coulé.
-
- “Un pleur magnifique, en cristal de roche.
- Voyez, c’est exact.
- Je ne comprends pas que l’on nous reproche
- De manquer de tact.
-
- “Berlin se pavoise.—Hélas!—On décore
- Le moindre faubourg.
- Ah je le disais tout à l’heure encore
- A Monsieur Dernburg.
-
- “Si notre avenir—souffrez que je cache
- Quelques pleurs amers—
- N’est plus sur les mers, il faut que l’on sache
- Qu’il est sous les mers.
-
- “Ceux qui malgré nous voyagent sur l’onde
- Sont les agresseurs.”
- (Là-bas, l’eau rapporte une vierge blonde
- Avec ses trois soeurs.)
-
- “Les _Tipperary_ que chez vous on siffle
- Nous ont agacés,
- Et quand Roosevelt joue avec son rifle
- Nous disons: Assez.
-
- “Qu’allaient donc chercher en cette aventure
- Vos Princes de l’Or?”
- (Là-bas, pour avoir donné sa ceinture,
- Vanderbilt est mort.)
-
- “Il ne faudra pas que ça recommence.
- Ils sont bien punis.
- Veuillez exprimer ma douleur immense
- Aux Etats-Unis.”
-
- (Il se fait, là-bas, d’horribles trouvailles
- Qu’on met sous un drap.)
- Et Bernstorff reprend: “Pour les funérailles,
- On me préviendra.
-
- “Ce désastre a fait, en Bourse allemande,
- Monteur les valeurs.
- On me préviendra pour que je commande
- Les plus belles fleurs.”
-
- Et comme Wilson dit, d’une voix sombre:
- “Nous verrons demain,”
- Et sent Washington et Lincoln, dans l’ombre,
- Lui prendre la main,
-
- Bernstorff, en pleurant, regagne la porte ...
- (Il y a, là-bas,
- Deux petits enfants qu’une femme morte
- Serre entre ses bras.)
-
-
- _The Downfall of the International_
-
-Another result of the war, already sufficiently crystallized, is the
-bankruptcy of the illusionary spirit of internationalism. In his
-remarkable book[1] Mr. Walling has taken the trouble of quoting
-resolutions of national sections of the Socialist party the world over,
-before and during the war. With a few significant exceptions the
-Socialists of the warring nations have had to exchange their erstwhile
-slogan “Workers of the world, be united!” for the less noble motto
-“Defend your country!” Even when the European armies had already been
-mobilized the Socialists held protest meetings at which they threatened
-to call a general strike if war should be declared. But with the first
-cannon boom the theoretic brotherhood evaporated and gave way to
-patriotic sentiments. The workers declared that they were Germans,
-Russians, etc., first, then Socialists. True, in the beginning the
-German Socialists claimed that they were fighting against the
-reactionary Czardom, while the Socialists of the Allies tried to justify
-the international carnage as the struggle against Prussian militarism;
-but ultimately such clear-headed thinkers as Kautsky and some of the
-English Socialists came to see the futility of endeavoring to discover
-idealistic causes for the mutual slaughter. The country is in danger,
-consequently we must defend it, regardless of the rightness or wrongness
-of its policy—this is the prevailing sentiment among the workers. The
-grandiose structure of the International has fallen in ruins; the
-“scientific” theories and calculations of the Marxians have received a
-blow by the underestimated imponderabilia, that of primitive patriotism.
-On the other hand, “applied” Socialism has won a considerable victory
-with the development of the war. Nearly all the belligerent countries
-have adopted State-Socialism in such measures as the nationalization of
-railways and means of production. The capitalists are evidently shrewd
-enough to utilize the doctrines of their opponents in time of need and
-thus to neutralize the sting of that very opposition. What will become
-of Socialism when at least its minimum-program is accepted and put into
-practice by the _capitalistic_ order without the aid of a social
-revolution, the inevitability of which has been scientifically proven by
-Marx and his disciples?
-
- [1] _The Socialists and the War, by William English Walling. New
- York: Henry Holt and Company._
-
-
- Artists should not see things as they are; they should see them
- fuller, simpler, stronger: to this end, however, a kind of
- youthfulness, of vernality, a sort of perpetual elation, must be
- peculiar to their lives.—_Nietzsche._
-
-
-
-
- “The Artist in Life”
-
-
- MARGARET C. ANDERSON
-
-“People” has become to me a word that—crawls. If you have ever heard Mr.
-Bryan pronounce it you will know what I mean. He says it “peo-pul”....
-
-And that is the way they act. Sometimes I see peo-pul in this kind of
-picture: a cosmic squirming mass of black caterpillars moving first one
-way and then the other, slowly and vaguely, not like measuring worms who
-cover the ground or like ants who have their definite business, but
-heavily, blindly, in the stunned manner peculiar to caterpillar
-organisms. They peer and poke and nod and ponder and creep and crawl and
-scramble and grow dizzy and turn around and around, wondering whether
-they shall go on the way they started or go back the way they came or
-refuse to go at all. Once in a hundred years one of the caterpillars
-breaks his skin and flies away—a butterfly through the unfriendly air.
-Then the black mass writhes in protest and arranges that the next
-butterfly shall have his wings well clipped. I know my metaphor is not
-scientifically intact, but what does it matter? It satisfies my
-impulse—which is simply to call names. So I might as well say “People
-are caterpillars” and be done with it.
-
- * * * * *
-
-I have a painter artist friend who says that to talk about the artist in
-life is simply to repeat one of those silly phrases that mean nothing.
-But it means entirely too much, I think—which is the reason there are so
-many of the species in evidence: about two in a million perhaps—and I
-know that is far too optimistic. That would mean some four or five
-thousand people in the living world who have nothing in common with
-caterpillars. The count is too high!
-
-For really there are no artists among us. Living picturesquely,
-artistically, has nothing to do with being an artist in life; and even
-living with the poise that marks a good piece of art hasn’t necessarily
-anything to do with it. If you ask me to choose a type of the real
-artist in life I shall say Nietzsche rather than Goethe. For the artist
-in life has inevitably to do with prophecy rather than with holding up
-the mirror; and that means chiefly—to have strength!
-
-Now where are the strong people? Of course “strength” is an indefinite
-term. Sometimes it seems a matter of dominating the superfluous;
-sometimes it seems the power “to meet fate with an equal gaze”; and
-sometimes the resource or the daring to push one’s fate to a farther
-goal. But these are beginnings! If you pick up what is known as your
-soul from a wreckage and make it march on you think you are very strong.
-If you manage to make it march with pride and joy you think you are a
-Superman. But this is easily within the effort of Everyman. I am talking
-of artists now and of the radiant possibility that such beings may
-develop in this uninspired land; and, in these terms, to be strong is to
-help create the farther goal!
-
-It’s disgusting to realize that the people we know are not this sort.
-Take any twenty of your friends and classify them briefly as types.
-Perhaps there are five who have “personality”: but one of them has no
-energy, one no will, one no brains, one no imagination, and the other no
-“spirit;” there are five who have “intellect”: one of them has no
-“character,” one no strength, one can’t see or hear or feel, one sees so
-inclusively that he has no goal, and one sees so “straight” that he
-misses the road on both sides; there are five who have a capacity for
-art: one is lazy, one is ignorant, one is afraid, one is vain, one has a
-lie in him; and there are five who have a capacity for living: one can’t
-think, one can’t work, one can’t persevere, one can’t stand alone, one
-wastes his gift on others and never realizes himself. You can work out
-such combinations _ad infinitum_ and you can excuse them to the same
-distance by calling it all a matter of having the defects of your
-qualities. Why not call it a matter of having the complacency of your
-defects?
-
-If you’ve not got imagination you can’t help it; if you’ve not got
-strength you can get it. It won’t make you an artist but it will make it
-impossible for you to be confused with the caterpillars. If you’ve got a
-vision—an Idea—and can find the strength to fly toward it you’ll be an
-artist in life. This is not to confuse the artist with the prophet. You
-can’t very well do that because the terms are so interdependent. There
-has never been an artist without the prophet in him, and there has never
-been a prophet who was not an artist. It’s a different thing if you’re
-talking about priests or about inferior artists. And then of course you
-have to remember that there are no such things as inferior artists.
-Priest and demagogue are the names for those who fail as prophets or as
-artists.
-
-And what is the use of such a harangue? There is very little use. People
-won’t be artists. Peo-pul don’t change. But the individual changes, and
-that is the hope. Individuals are persons who can stand alone. There
-ought to be Individuals coming out of a generation brought up on
-Nietzsche. Such an upbringing has taught us at least two things: first
-that he who goes forward goes alone, and second that it is weakness
-rather than nobility to succumb to the caterpillars. Yes, and something
-else: that it is from superabundance rather than from hunger that
-creation comes. We start out fortified with all this. We don’t need to
-wrestle with our gods every time the old laws threaten to submerge us;
-our universe doesn’t totter when the caterpillars groan that we will be
-lonely if we go alone or hurt if we are misunderstood or tragic if we
-don’t compromise. We don’t mind these things.
-
-It really all comes to one end: Life for Art’s sake. We believe in that
-because it is the only way to get more Life—a finer quality, a higher
-vibration. This bigger concept doesn’t mean merely more Beauty. It means
-more Intensity. In short, it means the _New_ Hellenism. And that is a
-step beyond the old Greek ideal of proportion and moderation. It pushes
-forward to the superabundance that dares abandonment.
-
-
- Art and nothing else! Art is the great means of making life
- possible, the great seducer to life, the great stimulus of
- life.—_Nietzsche._
-
-
- The tree that grows to a great height wins to solitude even in a
- forest; its highest outshoots find no companions save the winds
- and the stars.—_Frank Harris._
-
-
-
-
- Poems
-
-
- CLARA SHANAFELT
-
-
- Fantastic
-
- I have no thoughts, no more desires—
- It is green and gray like a garden
- Stirred by apple-scented wind,
- Quick with the sense of cool and silver joys
- That come in a rainy dance
- When soft hands of clouds have pushed away
- The round red stupid face of the sun.
-
- In one day, I think, the wind
- Will not have had his will of the gleaming rain—
- They run about with tossed hair,
- The garden is silvered with their pleasure,
- Cool and sweet, shining
- As with arch laughter a beloved face.
- The musing pool
- Shattered in glancing flight by a sudden wing—
- This, which no words can name,
- This is my heart’s delight,
- Winging I know not whither;
- It has no measure.
-
-
- Interlude
-
- To sink deeper yet
- In the green flood of twilight—
- I grope for the rich chord of the full darkness
- That drowns the piping cries of light,
- For silence fretted by cadent rain
- And the monotonous cries of insects
- That lull the tortured sense in drowsy veils.
- I am weary of lights dancing
- In limpid streets,
- Lemon and gold and amethyst,
- The jewelled laughter and the scent,
- Weaving of uneasy colors.
-
- I would rest now in green and gray
- Of an abandoned garden
- Where no more flowers are,
- Only grass and crabbed trees,
- Night—
- And the bitter aroma of herbs
- Trod out by myriad, whispering feet of the rain—
- Night and no stars.
-
-
-
-
- Slobberdom, Sneerdom, and Boredom
-
-
- BEN HECHT
-
-It is the custom of inspired opinion to pay little attention to
-mediocrities, to dismiss them with a shudder. I understand THE LITTLE
-REVIEW to be an embodiment of inspired opinion, an abandonment of mental
-emotion—Youth. Like some of the people who read it and even some of them
-who write for it, it flies at the throats of contemporary Chimeras and
-leaps upon the Pegasi of the moment. It slashes and roars, hates and
-loves. It never considers the right and never considers the wrong. It
-does not endeavor to be just and fair. This is at once a great crime and
-a great virtue. It is criminal to be unjust and it is virtuous to be
-truthful. To me THE LITTLE REVIEW is always both. I sympathize with its
-spirit and share it. Leave justice to the greybeards. Why should a soul
-which has the capacity for inspiration quibble in prejudices?
-
-I think, however, that shuddering at mediocrities is a grave error. Evil
-is the monopoly of the few as well as genius. Hating and loving them are
-luxuries. Therefore it is that this writing is not composed in the
-luxurious spirit of THE LITTLE REVIEW. My opinion is not an inspired
-one, my emotion is not an abandonment. I write with a photographic
-dispassion of the three great divisions of mediocrity—Slobberdom,
-Sneerdom, and Boredom.
-
-Slobbering is not an art and it is not an evil. It is not even important
-except as an object of analysis. True, if encountered in print or in the
-flesh it is likely to have a nauseous effect upon sensitive souls; but
-then one can easily avoid encountering it. One does not, for instance,
-have to attend a Walt Whitman dinner. When one hears that a Walt Whitman
-dinner is to be given on a certain night in the Grand Pacific Hotel all
-one has to do to remain happy and free from suffering is to stay at
-home. My friend K—— and I went to a Walt Whitman dinner because we were
-young and curious and hungry, and because Walt, after all, is a great
-artist.
-
-The dinner proved to be like most dinners of its kind—a glorious
-opportunity for saccharine drool at the expense of a great name.
-Appreciation and love of an artist—a poet—are highly commendable
-qualities if practiced in private, if put into proper print. It is the
-same as with love of a woman. But to stand up in a public place, to shed
-tears of ecstasy, wave one’s arms, pull at one’s hair and strike at
-one’s bosom—these are, as they always have been, the slobbering methods
-of egotistical mediocrity. It is simply a prostituting of the emotions.
-
-Mediocrity is not insensible to art. It is very probable that the Rev.
-Preston Bradley, who insists he is a reformed clergyman, really likes
-Walt Whitman, feels thrilled with the reading of him. But the joy the
-Rev. Bradley derives from reading Walt in his library is not enough for
-him. In fact, it is not a joy at all. It is an irritation. Give the Rev.
-Bradley an opportunity to show what he thinks of Walt Whitman, to stand
-up on his feet before three hundred and fifty sympathetic souls and
-prove what a keen sense of taste and an advanced instinct of culture he
-(Rev. Bradley) possesses by yawping:
-
-“I love Whitman, I adore Whitman. He is this to me. He is that to me—”
-
-—then and not till then does the Rev. Bradley feel the real joy of
-appreciation for “good old, dear old, wonderful old Walt.” Give the Rev.
-Bradley a decent chance to platitudinize, attitudinize, and
-blatitudinize, and the love he bears old Walt oozes from him in dewy
-sighs and briny words.
-
-Do not imagine that I am violently indignant with the Rev. Bradley, or
-wish the reader to be, for his insincerity. It is indeed one of his best
-qualities. By being insincere, by having no actual ground for his
-ecstacy, the Rev. Bradley must, perforce, pay a great deal of attention
-to what he says. He is free to pick out the best words, the best pose,
-the most arresting and perhaps enlightening point of view. I say he is
-free to do this, but of course he doesn’t. It is not the fault of his
-insincerity, however. If the Rev. Bradley were an artist he would profit
-by it and be great. But why all this talk about such a person as the
-Rev. Bradley? Surely not because he is deserving of careful censure. The
-reason is that there were at least three hundred male and female Rev.
-Bradleys listening to him, slobbering in silence.
-
-And now the next division of mediocrity. Mr. Clarence Darrow was another
-of the talkers. Mr. Darrow sneered. Mr. Darrow sneered at Homer,
-Euripides, Shakespeare, Dante, Landor, Whittier, Tennyson, Milton,
-Kipling, and Heine because they didn’t write as good old Walt wrote.
-Because they wore fetters in their art and insisted on making the last
-word in the first line rhyme with the last word in the third line. They
-were weak, ignoble creatures, these copybook writers, said Mr. Darrow;
-they insisted on using a singular subject with a singular predicate and
-believed that a violation of such procedure was a sin. One of the things
-you learn in your school text books on physics is that a gentleman by
-imposing a pencil-point before his eye can obscure his vision of the
-Colossus. The idea seems apropos in the case of Mr. Darrow. Mr. Darrow
-by imposing his soul upon the figures of the world’s big men can obscure
-them entirely for himself and evidently his sympathizers. After he had
-concluded three hundred and fifty persons, every one present so far as I
-could see except my friend K—— and myself, stood up and sneered with Mr.
-Darrow. They passed him a rising resolution of love and cheered him
-three times, omitting, however, the customary tiger.
-
-The greatest trouble with Mr. Darrow was his sincerity. He didn’t
-slobber any more than a public speaker has to in order to have a public
-to speak to. But his sneers were deep and earnest. They were entirely
-intellectual, the intellectual essence of mediocrity. All of us sneer,
-of course. The sneer is the one great American characteristic. When I
-told a man in the office in which I work that I had attended a Walt
-Whitman dinner he sneered at me.
-
-“Fourflushers,” he said. “I can’t see how you put that highbrow stuff
-over. A lot of long-haired, flea-ridden radicals, ain’t I right? I
-wouldn’t let my wife associate with a bunch like that.”
-
-(This is my office friend’s highest conception of manly virtue,—a
-thoroughly American one,—being careful of whom his wife associates
-with.)
-
-Then my office friend went on to assert that Whitman was undoubtedly an
-immoral, not to say degenerate, party, that he “got by with his stuff
-because it was raw,” and that everybody who professed any admiration for
-him was a suspicious character and one he “would think twice about
-before inviting to his home” (where his wife is).
-
-It is rather a complicated matter, this sneering business; and after
-attending a Walt Whitman dinner I don’t know whose sneers disgust me
-more, Mr. Darrow’s or my friend’s. They are both, however, identical in
-spirit, the spirit of mediocrity and sincerity when sincerity becomes,
-as it most always does, the cloak for ignorant convictions and bigoted
-fanaticism.
-
-And now we come to the third and last condition—boredom. Among the
-speakers at this memorable dinner was Mr. Llewellyn Jones. Mr. Jones is
-a critic of literature by profession if not qualification—although I do
-not say it, really. Of all the orators at good old Walt’s memorial
-gabfest Mr. Jones was the least offensive. He said nothing that shocked
-the taste or violated one’s innerself or harrowed one’s soul. I don’t,
-of course, remember what Mr. Jones did say. One never does, not only in
-the case of Mr. Jones but in the thousands like him. They occupy time
-and space and leave them empty. Not for them the sneer or the slobber.
-Mr. Jones wouldn’t sneer for the world. And as for slobbering Mr. Jones
-has too much good taste and discretion for that. Not that he is above
-them. His fear of them, his apparent uncertainty in distinguishing
-between these two characteristics and the characteristics of inspired
-opinion, indicate this plainly enough.
-
-So to be safe Mr. Jones resorts to the time-honored entrenchment of
-mediocrity. He barricades himself behind the bulwarks of boredom. He
-discharges no cannon, he commits no sins, he makes no false steps or
-takes no false flights. He is boredom incarnate, the eternal convention
-in the arts whether he deals with Nihilism, radicalism, or stands pat on
-the isms of the past. Mr. Jones never gets anywhere, I repeat. I speak
-of all the Joneses. Nobody derives anything from him—from them—except
-ennui. He, they, never offend, never elate. He, they, are always Mr.
-Jones.
-
-Listening to the Joneses is as elevating an experience as watching the
-water blop-blop out of the kitchen hydrant. And this idea leads me back
-to where I started—THE LITTLE REVIEW.
-
-Can you imagine what a thorough contempt a kitchen hydrant would have
-for a fountain rising from the rocks, for a brook gurgling down the
-hillside, or a strong river capering to sea? It wouldn’t exactly sneer
-at them. Mr. Jones doesn’t. But it would feel moved to spirited reproof.
-How juvenile it is to gurgle, the hydrant would say, how vain and
-foolish it is to rise from the rocks, how upsetting it is to be
-continually capering to sea. I do not claim any super-intelligence in
-the matter of hydrants. But Mr. Jones and all the Joneses do say, and I
-have enough intelligence to understand them if not to sympathize with
-them, that THE LITTLE REVIEW is young and idiotic and given to
-unnecessary emotions and so forth. All of which is true, looked at from
-the elevation of a kitchen sink. “Why don’t you,” remonstrates the
-hydrant to the brook, “blop blop with me?”
-
-An afterthought: at this Whitman dinner there was one among the speakers
-who sustained a dying faith in Walt, humanity, and _vers libre_ in
-general. He was Carl Sandburg who read a free verse poem of his own on
-Billy Sunday.
-
-
- It is provided in the essence of things that from any fruition of
- success, no matter what, shall come forth something to make a
- greater struggle necessary.—_Whitman._
-
-
-
-
- The Death of Anton Tarasovitch
-
-
- A Short Story of the Present War
-
- FLORENCE KIPER FRANK
-
-Anton Tarasovitch lay dying. He lay in a pleasant cornfield whither he
-had dragged himself in the heat of the afternoon, for a shelter against
-the merciless sun. But now it was evening and the stars were out, and
-dying was not now so bad an affair as it had been in the dust and the
-blinding sunlight. True, the pain was at times terrible, but at other
-times it made one only light-headed, so that oneself or the part that
-was Anton Tarasovitch seemed to be a different thing altogether from the
-body of Anton Tarasovitch which lay beneath It shot to pieces, while It
-fluttered and hovered above.
-
-He had not been lying for many hours in the Austrian cornfield. He knew
-that by the progress of the sun downward—downward until it made the long
-summer shadows that he loved in the fields at home; downward until it
-brought a breath of coolness and a gray light that had brushed out the
-clear distinction of shadows and sunlight; downward until it was gone
-forever and a few stars burned quietly in the sky overhead. It was the
-last sunset that Anton Tarasovitch was to see in this world. But time
-had no longer any meaning for Anton Tarasovitch. Lying on one’s back,
-so, and waiting to die, a minute can seem all there is of the world, and
-then an hour can be burned up like a minute, while one faints into
-unconsciousness, before one is slowly dragged back again to the thought,
-“I am I”—the thought that makes the world for each man, that creates for
-him the stars and the shadows and the sun sinking downward.
-
-Yes, Anton Tarasovitch knew that now—that it was this thought that made
-the world. And when he stopped thinking it, the world would again be
-nothing. Down! down! down! one would plunge, and then the world would be
-nothing. But it would exist still for other men. Yet how could that be?
-Tomorrow the sun would come up again into the sky just as every day it
-had come up in the fields at home, making the long shadows that he had
-so loved in the mornings and in the evenings. Tomorrow other men would
-see the sun—many other men would see it. But if Anton Tarasovitch did
-not see it——! In vain he struggled to create for himself a universe in
-which there would be no Anton Tarasovitch. Well, he was not clever
-enough to understand such matters. Men in universities and men who wrote
-books had figured them out and knew all about them. But how was he, who
-had never been to a University, who had not been to school even, to
-understand!
-
-Yet this much he understood—that he was dying for his country. This the
-general had told them, and he had known always, since a boy, that it was
-a brave and fine thing to fight for one’s country and to die if need be.
-Anton Tarasovitch was dying that his country might be saved.
-
-Yet it was strange that the big Russia had need of him, just one common
-peasant. The great Russia had so many men that were strong and powerful,
-men with uniforms that glittered—men that were much cleverer and braver
-than Anton. Why should the country have need of him? Sasha needed him,
-and the children. Sasha needed him in the fields and she needed him in
-her heart too. She had often called him the light of her heart, in the
-strange words—so different from the words of other women—that Sasha
-often used. And he knew by her face that she needed him. She didn’t have
-to tell him so. He knew by the kindling of her face, as of a curtain
-behind which suddenly a candle appears. So her face would light up when
-she saw him. Sasha would mind greatly if she never saw him again.
-
-He was dying because it was a glorious thing to die for one’s
-country—for the White Tsar, the little Father. You died to protect your
-country, so that your great country might live forever. But if you
-weren’t there to know that it lived forever!—now why couldn’t he think
-of the world without Anton Tarasovitch in it? Why did he land against a
-black wall every time he tried to think of tomorrow without Anton
-Tarasovitch?
-
-It was needful that he die to save his country. What if, to the general,
-he _were_ only one of thousands and to Sasha and the children all of
-life—nevertheless, if every man should think that, then there would be
-no one at all to save the country. It was rather clever of him to figure
-it out so, especially with the fire in his side that made his head so
-light and his thoughts fly off from it and refuse to anchor down for
-more than a minute. It was clever of him to reason it out—Anton
-Tarasovitch who had never been to a University—that if every man should
-say to himself, “O, I don’t count. Just one more or less!”—then there
-would be no army at all to fight the Tsar’s battles.
-
-Yet he was not fighting or dying now to save Sasha. Nor was he dying to
-save his children even in the years to come. That wouldn’t be bad—to die
-so that years afterwards, even though it might be many years afterwards,
-one’s children would prosper and would live more happily. That would be
-a sort of living when one was dead, because one’s children were in a way
-oneself in different bodies. But he couldn’t see how Maxim and Ignat and
-Sofya and Tatya would at any time be better off because he was dying
-right now. He couldn’t see but that the land would be poorer and that
-they would have to work harder because he and the other peasants were
-dying for the Little Father and for their country.
-
-But if he couldn’t figure out just what people he was saving, at least
-he knew against what men he was fighting. He was fighting against the
-Austrians. The Austrians were a horrible people who spoke a language one
-couldn’t understand at all. When you tried to understand them, you
-couldn’t understand a word they were saying. He had known an Austrian
-once—a big blonde fellow who had stayed a few days at their little
-village. One day Anton had been walking with the tiny Tatya on the road
-that led to the market and they had met the Austrian, who had stopped
-and had given Tatya a flower out of his button-hole. Anton remembered
-Tatya’s crows of delight. The Austrian had smiled at her, a nice,
-friendly smile, and Tatya had grabbed for his hand as children will,
-even when the people they grab at are Austrians.
-
-Tatya had seemed to like the Austrian. And Anton had had to confess to
-himself that he wasn’t a bad fellow. But he must have been pleasant only
-because of Tatya. No one could help being pleasant to Tatya. The
-Austrian had been for a moment friendly because of her. At heart he was
-a hateful fellow. All Austrians were hateful. They all hated the Tsar
-and the Fatherland and they all hated him, Anton, because he was a
-Russian.
-
-There must be some Austrians lying in this cornfield now, wounded as he
-was wounded. But he could see no one. Flat on his back, he could see
-only the stars which were thick now against the sky. And he began to
-think that this was a cruel thing—that a man should be alone when he was
-dying. Even when a chap was just ill, he wanted someone to take care of
-him. Once when Anton had been ill of a fever he had been just like a
-baby, so weak and helpless. He had cried then because the milk that
-Sasha had brought him had been too hot for his tongue and had burned
-him. It was silly for a big man to cry, but that was the way you became
-when you were sick—weak and silly. He had never in his life cried when
-he was well. When men were well they were never silly.
-
-Women—women were different! Five times had Sasha been so ill that it was
-terrible—four times for the children that were living and once for the
-little one that had died. Sasha had almost died too that time. She had
-been so white and so hopeless looking for weeks after! But in all the
-times she was ill she had not complained as much as he had, that one
-month that he was sick with the fever. That must be because women were
-used to pain. The good God had so ordained it. For every life that they
-brought into the world they had to suffer, not only at the time, but for
-months before and then for years afterward.
-
-They were strange creatures, were women. If a child became ill or died,
-its mother suffered again, just as the day she had borne him. At least
-so Sasha had suffered when the baby had died—and other women that he had
-seen in the village.
-
-Birth was a strange thing now! He had never really thought of it before,
-but wasn’t it a strange thing that each time a person was born into the
-world, there should be pain and the long months of waiting. Then in one
-second an Austrian shell could blow away the body that some woman had
-waited for and had carried in her own body. In one second—why, so he had
-been waited for—he, Anton Tarasovitch. Now wasn’t that wonderful!—and he
-had never until this minute really thought of it. He, Anton Tarasovitch,
-had been carried in the body of his mother and had been born in pain and
-in rejoicing. Why, it was like a miracle! And he had thought so lightly
-of it, had just taken it for granted that he should be born and that she
-should love him.
-
-He would like to make it up to her in some way now. But it was too late.
-She had been dead for very many years now and he also was dying. Well,
-he could tell her about it when he saw her with the saints in Heaven.
-
-Heaven! He would go there, of course, because he had always, since a
-boy, been obedient and had done just what the priests had told him. He
-ought to think now about Heaven. But somehow he did not care to think
-about it, and the strange part was that it did not trouble him that he
-did not care. Even if he woke tomorrow in Heaven, he would not be the
-same Anton. He might live forever, but that wouldn’t be the same thing
-as waking up in the morning with Sasha at his side. He tried to think
-what “forever” meant, and he fetched up against the same black wall that
-he had when he had tried to think of a world without Anton Tarasovitch
-to know himself in it. Forever! ever! ever! No stopping! On and on! But
-that would be horrible. No! no! he couldn’t bear that. One could do
-nothing, nothing, to get out of it. Even if one could be blown to pieces
-with a gun, say a thousand years from now, in Heaven, one’s soul would
-gather itself together again and go on and on, forever and forever.
-
-No, he mustn’t think about it. If he thought about it any more, he would
-lift his hands and strangle himself, so as to be able to stop thinking
-about it. Now he would think about Sasha. When he thought about her, he
-could feel her right next to him. He couldn’t see her face exactly, nor
-could he see her standing there. And yet it was as if she really _were_
-there, and he _could_ see her. That was the way it was when you loved a
-person. She was, as it were, in you, or at least right next to you, and
-yet she was separate from you, too.
-
-He had liked life with Sasha. He didn’t know until now how much he had
-liked it. True, it was a hard life they had lived together. One was on
-the go every minute—in bad weather when the frost stung and to walk even
-a mile became an agony; and in good weather one was constantly on the
-go, when it might perhaps have been pleasant to sit under the trees and
-play with the children. But life was good, for all that. Of course, if
-they could have saved money—only a little money—it would have been
-better. But the little money they could save had had to go for the
-taxes. The taxes were for the Fatherland, the priest had told him. The
-taxes were paid so that when the need came, Anton would be able to die
-for his country. But there was something confusing about that. Life
-would be better if it were not for the taxes, and the taxes were paid so
-that he might—no, that was bewildering. With the fire in one’s side and
-in one’s brain, how could one think clearly about so difficult a matter?
-Besides, there were many matters of that sort that he, Anton
-Tarasovitch, was not clever enough to think about. One left such things
-to the priests, who were good men, and to the clever men at the
-universities.
-
-The stars were sometimes a long way off now and sometimes very near to
-him. But neither near nor far away did they seem to care about him. They
-were the only things he could see in the world and they did not seem to
-care about him. Undoubtedly they had seen many men dying. He knew about
-the stars! A young teacher who had come to the village when he was a boy
-had talked about them and Anton had never forgotten.
-
-The young teacher had not stayed long in the village. He was
-“dangerous,” they said, and Anton heard afterwards that he had gone to
-America. It gave one many thoughts to listen to the teacher. He had said
-that the stars were worlds, just like our own earth—the earth that Anton
-knew the good Christ had come down to save. Anton, who was just a boy,
-had wanted to ask him if Christ had had to save all these worlds that
-were stars. But that was only one of the many confusing thoughts one had
-in listening to the young teacher. One felt strange in listening to him,
-as if the world weren’t solid at all, but were flowing like a river. * *
-*
-
-Anton felt very sorry for himself, lying there under the stars that did
-not care for him. He began to cry—silly, weak tears that tasted of salt
-as they touched his mouth. It was only at times that he knew that he was
-crying. At other times the soul of him entirely left his body and went
-shooting up and up, to be recaptured only with a struggle.
-
-The two of them—the burning body and the light soul—would have held
-together better, he knew, if someone could grip his hand tightly. At
-least that was the way they had done in the fever. When Sasha had
-gripped his hand, as if by a miracle he had been restored for a moment
-to a complete man, and was no longer two pieces—a body below and a soul
-that went fluttering above it.
-
-If only he could touch someone’s hand now—anyone’s hand—the hand of a
-human being! To be all alone with the cruel, flickering stars up above,
-that was no way to die—snuffed out into the darkness. That was no way
-for any man to go, even though he _were_ just a peasant. But Anton knew
-himself important now, almost as important as a general. He knew himself
-important, with a strange, tremendous importance. He was as important as
-almost anyone in the world, and he was dying alone in the darkness.
-
-Then he remembered that there must be other men in the cornfield. He had
-thought of that before, and afterwards he had forgotten. If there were
-other men here—even one other man, an enemy—he would find that comrade
-and they would die together.
-
-Slowly, painfully, inch by inch he dragged himself. The stalks were like
-an impenetrable thicket. They entangled him as snares or a forest of
-swords set about him. He dragged himself on his palms, inch by inch,
-butting away the cornstalks.
-
-An Austrian was lying on his back, gazing upward. He was dead now, but
-Anton did not know it. There was a wound in his neck, and the flies had
-begun to gather.
-
-Anton gave a sob as he saw the Austrian. One more effort and he would be
-near enough to touch him. Perhaps the Austrian would grip his
-hand—hard—as Sasha had gripped it.
-
-The hand of the Austrian did not grip hard when Anton touched it. It
-fluttered a little, however—Anton was sure of that. So Anton covered the
-hand with his own, and with his own hand gripped hard, as Sasha had
-gripped the hand of Anton.
-
-And so died Anton Tarasovitch, looking up at the stars.
-
-
- Art as it appears without the artist, i. e., as a body, an
- organization (the Prussian Officers’ Corps, the Order of the
- Jesuits). To what extent is the artist merely a preliminary
- stage? The world regarded as a self-generating work of
- art.—_Nietzsche._
-
-
-
-
- Rupert Brooke
-
-
- (_A Memory_)
-
- ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE
-
- One night—the last we were to have of you—
- High up above the city’s giant roar
- We sat around you on the generous floor—
- Since chairs were lame or stony or too few—
- And as you read, and the low music grew
- In exquisite tendrils twining the heart’s core,
- All the conjecture we had felt before
- Flashed into torch-flame, and at last we knew.
-
- And Maurice, who in silence long has hidden
- A voice like yours, became a wreck of joy
- To inarticulate ecstasies beguiled.
- And you, as from some secret world now bidden
- To make return, stared up, and like a boy
- Blushed suddenly, and looked at us, and smiled.
-
- [Illustration: RUPERT BROOKE, MCMXIV]
-
-
-
-
- To a West Indian Alligator
-
-
- (_Estimated age, 1957 years_)[2]
-
- EUNICE TIETJENS
-
- Greetings, my brother, strange and uncouth beast,
- Flat-bellied, wrinkled, broad of nose!
- You are not beautiful—and yet at least
- Contentment spreads your scaley toes.
-
- The keeper thwacks you and you grunt at me,
- Two hundred pounds of sleepy spleen.
- He tells me that your cranial cavity
- Will just contain a lima bean.
-
- How seems it, brother, you who are so old,
- To lie and squint with curtained eye
- At these ephemera, born in the cold,
- These human things so soon to die?
-
- You were scarce grown, a paltry eighty years,
- Too young to think of breeding yet,
- When Christ the Nazarene loosed the salt tears
- Which on man’s cheeks today are wet.
-
- Mohammed rose and died—you churned the mud
- And watched your female laying eggs.
- Columbus passed you—with an oozy thud
- You scrambled sunward on your legs.
-
- So now you doze at ease for all to view
- And bat a sleepy lid at me,
- You eat a little every year or two
- And count time in eternity.
-
- So, brother, which is wiser of us twain
- When words are said and meals are past?
- I think, and pass—you sleep, yet you remain,
- And where shall be the end at last?
-
- [2] _I cannot vouch for the science of this. It is “Alligator
- Joe’s” estimate._
-
-
-
-
- Villon’s Epitaph[3]
-
-
- WITTER BYNNER
-
- I who have lived and have not thought
- But gone with nature as I ought,
- Letting good things occur,
- And now amazed and cannot see
- Why death should care so much for me.
- I never cared for her.
-
-
-
-
- Scarron’s Epitaph[3]
-
-
- WITTER BYNNER
-
- He who now lies here asleep
- None would envy, few would weep:
- A man whom death had mortified
- A thousand times before he died.
-
- Peaceful be the step you take,
- You who pass him—lest he wake.
- For his first good night is due.
- Let poor Scarron sleep it through.
-
- [3] From the French of François Villon.
-
-
-
-
- Editorials and Announcements
-
-
- _Our Credo_
-
-I have lost patience: people are still asking “What does THE LITTLE
-REVIEW stand for?” Since we have been so obscure—or is it that people
-have been so dull?—I shall try to answer all these plaintive queries in
-a sentence. May it be sufficient: I cannot “explain” every day why the
-sunrise seems worth while or, as Mr. Hecht would say, why the brook
-rises from the rocks.
-
-THE LITTLE REVIEW is a magazine that believes in Life for Art’s sake, in
-the Individual rather than in Incomplete people, in an age of
-Imagination rather than of Reasonableness; a magazine that believes in
-Ideas even if they are not Ultimate Conclusions, and values its Ideals
-so greatly as to live them; a magazine interested in Past, Present, and
-Future, but particularly in the New Hellenism; a magazine written for
-Intelligent people who can Feel; whose philosophy is Applied Anarchism,
-whose policy is a Will to Splendor of Life, and whose function is—to
-express itself.
-
-
- _Mr. Comstock’s Dismissal_
-
-This great blessing comes sooner than we could have expected, and yet,
-as _The Chicago Tribune_ remarks, it is belated by about forty years.
-Mr. Comstock has been Post Office Inspector all that time. I remember a
-few years ago in New York hearing an interesting woman send a group of
-people into paroxysms by the passionate childish seriousness with which
-she said, “I wish Anthony Comstock would die!” Now that the government
-has accomplished this desideratum, it is almost time for it to be
-congratulated. I wonder how long it will be before this same government
-can “see its way clear” to suppressing the agent provocateur and letting
-his victims go free, or—well, never mind: it is beyond hoping.
-
-
- “_Succession_”
-
-When one of my friends fails to like Ethel Sidgwick’s _Succession_ I am
-left in a predicament: on what basis are we henceforth to understand
-each other? Succession goes so deep into music, into personality, into
-life that has its foundations in art.... You can explain all the
-subtleties of your most difficult emotions by referring to how Antoine
-felt on page so and so. How does one live without Antoine?
-
-
- _The Strike_
-
-And God said: “Let there be!” And there was.
-
-And when the modern god, the omnipotent Proletariat, says: “Let there
-not be!” ...
-
-You say the strike of the Chicago car men is of purely local
-significance. You crack jokes about the pleasure of walking and about
-the adventure of jitney-rides. You are calm and complacent, you blind
-and deaf men and women dancing on a dormant volcano.
-
-You are right. Your complacency is justified. Why fear the
-million-headed mule who has borne his yoke for centuries? He
-grumbles?—Oh, it’s a trifle: just fill his flesh-pot, and he will take
-up anew with bestial delight his eternal task of enriching the few at
-the expense of his blood and marrow.
-
-But fear the eruption of the volcano! For it will not remain dormant
-forever. Have we not witnessed the spasmodic awakenings of the giant?
-Recall the achievement of the Russian proletariat in 1905. Did it not
-wrest concessions from the obstinate Czar by means of a passive
-revolution? Recall the general strike in Belgium. Did it not cripple its
-commerce and industry for months?
-
-The strike of the Chicago car men is pregnant with potentialities. It is
-a symptom of a refreshing storm. Those who produce everything and
-possess nothing have slept long in ignorance of their power. But they
-are slowly awakening. And when they become aware of the magic wand in
-their hand, whose passive motion can stop the wheels of the universe....
-Take heed, O merrymakers at Belshazzar’s feast. Behold the MENE, TEKEL,
-PERES on the wall.
-
- K.
-
-
- “_The Country Walk_”
-
-A young Englishman by the name of Edward Storer—I am assuming that he is
-young and that he is English—has protested effectively against the
-condition which decrees that a piece of writing, a painting, a sculpture
-has to be judged as a commodity _before_ it can be judged as a work of
-art by issuing little four-page leaflets containing portions of his work
-denied publication by the commercialism of the times. The first, which
-is called _The Country Walk_, has some quite uninspired though rather
-charming prose poems in it. _The Lark_, for instance:
-
- Out of the young grass and silence you arise, frail bird,
- spinning upwards to the sky. Faster beat the wings, and shriller
- is the voice, and soon you are lost in the high blue, so that
- scarcely can I hear your voice or see the maddened flutterings of
- your wings.
-
- Then suddenly all is silent, and softly you drop to earth again
- to rest your aching body against the good brown earth.
-
-
- _The June-July Issue_
-
-On account of being so late with our May number we have decided to
-combine the June and July and thus come out promptly again on the first
-of the month. Subscriptions will be extended accordingly.
-
-
- _Edgar Lee Masters_
-
-In the August issue there will be a new poem by Edgar Lee Masters,
-author of _The Spoon River Anthology_, and also a photogravure portrait
-of the poet which has just been taken by Eugene Hutchinson.
-
-
-
-
- The Submarine
-
-
- (_Translated from the Italian of Luciano Folgore by Anne Simon_)
-
- It sinks. In the twilight of the water
- the conquered submarine
- falls straight to the bottom
- and seems like a black corpse
- thrown to the coral below,
- thrown to the tomb that devours
- with liquid joy
- the refuse and remains of the old world.
- The propellers, devourers of motion,
- buzz no more,
- the rudder has ceased turning,
- the prow no longer points its sharp beak,
- but the submarine extends itself
- on the viscid bed,
- and a multitude of unknown
- fish, coral and sea-nettles
- try to enter the closed apertures.
-
- And yet once you leaped in the sun
- like a sentinel of burnished steel
- shining in the distance,
- and then rapidly returned to the green gorge
- where the sun never reaches,
- but where you find
- the tremendous task
- that is always with you and that whispers courage
- in the void of your soul.
- And once with your agile metallic prow
- you agitated the green water
- all around your shining body,
- and you did not feel the torments
- of the winds nor the black
- clouds of the hurricane
- that remained like spiteful women
- in a corner of the horizon,
- with hair dishevelled and the eye eager
- to spy below, from the firmament,
- the lost, the shipwrecked, the unknown
- that have no pilot.
-
- Once from your sonorous sides,
- quietly, but vigilant and mad,
- the torpedo shot out,
- making its track in silence,
- and carrying
- within its thin body
- death, and the infinite
- power of dynamite.
- As you passed the sharks fled,
- as you passed the corals
- suspended their tenacious and clumsy work,
- and the fish with rapid movement
- swam away.
- You seemed like an enormous monster
- of a fantastic destiny
- and yet you are only a light submarine,
- a slender ship
- that the blow of a beam
- could sink, that a whirlpool could submerge
- in the abyss.
-
- I do not know your story,
- but I will sing your glory
- that is part of the desire
- of audacious men.
- Submarine, Destiny may have willed
- you to sink silently,
- and remain lost forever in the viscid bed of the sea-weed,
- (O submarine, able to challenge the unconsciousness of the seas
- and the impotence of the lighthouses,)
- but you are alive and strong;
- there is no death, but only an appearance
- of death that remains. Destiny
- newly moulds you
- in a long phantom
- and you are run, submarine,
- by the courage of men
- who, in the unfathomable silence of the water,
- are piloted
- by the will of the strong.
-
- New brothers will arise
- and pursue you
- because your shining back
- carries a banner, not tri-colored,
- nor French,
- but the only color
- that dazzles;
- the banner of the battle
- that amidst disasters combats
- with this ferocious mystery
- that is foolishly determined to shut us out
- from the doors of Nature.
-
-
-
-
- Blaa-Blaa-Blaa
-
-
-I am sick of words—spoken words—verbal refuse thrown off by the mental
-hypochondriacs who imagine themselves suffering from thought and
-afflicted with ideas.
-
-I am sick of the artificial inanities of the drawingroom—the polite
-poppycock, the meaningless, emotionless enthusiasms. I often have
-entered a room where male and female husks sat, their faces wreathed in
-empty grimaces—animated masks discharging automatic phrases—and wished
-to God I was dumb and could be forgiven for silence. Listening is not so
-bad because one doesn’t have to listen.
-
-I am sick of the salon-like groups who gather for the purpose of
-thinking aloud and then forget to think and make up for it in noises.
-Monotonous varieties, dropping pop-bottle gems from their lips, each
-individual amusing and delighting himself beyond all understanding with
-his sterile loquaciousness. Here in the salon groups, the discursive
-congregations which come together in all manner of odd places and all
-manner of regular places, garrulity approaches torture. Here the
-professional discourser flops and waddles about in his own Utopia. He
-doesn’t crave understanding but attention. As for truth, as for taking
-the pains to express his innermost reactions to a subject, this is
-impossible. The discourser doesn’t know what he thinks, doesn’t know
-what the truth is until he starts discoursing. And then he discourses
-himself into a state of mind. I have heard him discourse himself into
-the most startling convictions; into matrimony and out of it into
-religion and out of it, into and out of every variety of
-damn-foolishness imaginable.
-
-Persons who use written words instead of spoken words as the parents of
-their thought suffer from the same hypnosis. But in writing this is
-commendable. It is commendable for a writer to be insincere if he can be
-more logical and enlightening as a result. The result may be _De
-Profundis_ or _Alice in Wonderland_. It is my notion that men are
-sincere only in their appetites. A man craves food and woman and other
-stimulants with unquestionable sincerity. But in the realm of thought I
-have arrived at the conclusion that sincerity is an inspired and not
-inspiring condition of the mind.
-
-I am sick of the blaa-blaaing hordes, from the smirking “supes” of the
-let’s-adjourn-to-the-other-room species to the simpering cacophonists of
-the Schöngeist nobility.
-
-I am sick of the open mouths, the trailing sentences dying from
-weakness, the painstaking use of wrong words and the painstaking use of
-correct words; of the stagnated humor of deodorous sallies.
-
-I am sick of the Argumentatives, people with an irritating command of
-phrases, who balance paradoxes on their noses and talk backwards or
-upside down with equal lucidity; who must be contradicted or they
-suffer; who rumble bizarrely from the depths of every philosophical
-sub-cellar they can ferret out in order to be startling; who shriek and
-howl and wail and protest and—the Devil take them—tell the truth and
-make it impossible to believe. Their only reason for talking is to
-impress. They are as noisy as cannon and as effective as firecrackers.
-
-I am sick of the delicate, searching souls who prick themselves with
-their own words, who operate on fly specks, who grope and search and
-struggle for fine and truthful things, who deal in verbal shadings
-intelligible only to themselves—and then not for what they said but for
-what they meant to say or desired to say or wouldn’t say for the world.
-
-I am sick of their kinsmen, of the surgical tongues who dissect, who
-vivisect and auto-sect.
-
-I am sick most of all of my own talk. But I continue to talk. I talk out
-of boredom and manage only to increase it. I talk out of vanity and
-spread disillusionment. I talk out of love and have to apologize. A
-victim of habit, I continue speaking, although I know the spoken word is
-the true medium of misunderstanding. Words, words, they keep tumbling
-out of my mouth and blowing away like dust before the wind. A pock on
-them.
-
-There have been revolutions in literature, authors have changed the size
-and construction of the novel, publishers have changed the color of
-their bindings, poets have changed the form of their poetry and the
-essence of its style, thinkers even have altered slightly the trend of
-their thought. Music, painting, decorating, carving—everything changes
-with time except talk, which only increases. What a staggering
-illustration of the theory that it is only the weak things which
-survive. For talk is the commonest of weaknesses. Blaa, blaa, blaa—why
-not a revolution? What ails the radicals? Do they not realize that the
-time is ripe? They have changed the moral forms, the literary forms, why
-not the spoken forms? Why not a substitution of expressive grunts and
-whoops and growls and chuckles and groans and gurgles and whees and
-wows? Or is this matter one not for the radical but for
-
- “The Scavenger.”
-
-
-
-
- The Nine!—Exhibit!
-
-
-Sometime in the winter a rumor got about that nine artists of Chicago
-were to form themselves into a group and hold an independent exhibition.
-
-At once the other artists were divided into two factions, those who
-jeered and those who applauded, those who said unpleasant things and
-those who had the enduring hope that at last something better was to be
-done in our exhibitions.
-
-The Great Nine, as the group began to be called—whether by themselves or
-by others, it matters not: the phrase is a handicap—consists of Frederic
-C. Bartlett, William Penhallow Henderson, Lawton Parker, Karl Albert
-Buehr, Louis Betts, Charles Francis Browne, Ralph Clarkson, Wilson
-Irvine, and Oliver Dennett Grover. They were too generous in their
-number. Five, and there would have been no comment; nine, and there was
-aroused indignation, criticism, and a “show us” spirit which should have
-put the Nine on their mettle and made them give a stunning and silencing
-show.
-
-On May thirteenth, after one postponement when expectation was tense,
-the exhibition opened. What had we? A new setting and old stuff!
-
-One of the East Galleries had been chosen. William P. Henderson designed
-and executed the room. He made a piece of work having faults but being
-the best thing about the exhibition, a contribution in itself. The walls
-with their subtle color, divided into spaces by pilasters of deep
-wistaria, red, and gold, rising on slender stems and blossoming out
-above; the screen of red at one end with the Zettler torso against
-it—they complimented themselves upon using this; the beautiful vases;
-and the green of the trees made a room too obtrusive for pictures, or
-one in which pictures are intrusive.
-
-Were the setting less self-sufficient, still there are many things to be
-said. The sophisticated, almost exotic, color of the walls, emphasizing
-in the work of some all that is crude and materialistic in execution or
-interpretation, makes their work appear to less advantage than would the
-usual bleak gallery. And why so many pictures? Why not one picture in
-each space and that the best each artist could offer? How much more
-satisfactory the room would then be. Anyone who follows exhibitions will
-agree that each exhibitor has shown better work at other times.
-
-Frederic Bartlett’s group is in many ways the best, and holds its own in
-the room. Surpassingly beautiful in color are Mr. Henderson’s things.
-The little nude is exquisite, but he should not easily be forgiven his
-portrait of Florence Bradley, even if it is not meant as a character
-study. However, he is one of the artists who can do more than put paint
-on canvas. He can make Art in many ways, as men did in the “high white
-days” of art.
-
-The artists themselves have seen from this first effort wherein they
-have failed. This grouping must have been a very arbitrary one. Let us
-hope that a group founded on mutual endeavor and on equal ability will
-continue the effort to make our exhibitions comparable in some degree
-with the best European efforts.
-
-Chicago has now so many artists that it is impossible for them all to be
-gathered into the old Chicago Society. There should be many societies.
-Competition and co-operation among them would make the art life here
-less anemic and super-sensitive and bigoted.
-
- R.
-
-
-
-
- Book Discussion
-
-
- THE APOTHEOSIS OF PETTINESS
-
- _One Man, by Robert Steele. New York: Mitchell Kennerley._
-
-“There is nothing which reflects the smugness of a people so much as the
-manner and temperament of its vice. And the temperament of American vice
-is more distinctly and monotonously bourgeois than any of its
-virtues”—from Ben Hecht’s “Phosphorescent Gleams” in the May LITTLE
-REVIEW. I have pondered over this maxim while reading Mr. Steele’s novel
-which is hailed by the critics as “the essence of America.” The hero is
-essentially American, horribly so. If the “average” type of any nation
-is repulsive, the American “Average” is a thousandfold more so. For he
-is more petty than vicious. The “one man” gives a confession of his
-life, full of puny deeds, from committing petty larceny to “picking up”
-a girl in the street and taking her to a “swell” hotel. The nauseating
-details have the flavor of the adventure stories which you may hear at a
-gathering of travelling salesmen in a provincial hotel lobby. What makes
-the boring Odyssey intolerably loathsome is its note of syrupy Christian
-penitence which the hero expresses after each penny-crime by falling on
-his knees and praying to his convenient god for forgiveness.
-
-The book has been hailed as a masterpiece. It is as far from a
-masterpiece as a lewd “photo” is from art. The facts may be true, even
-autobiographical, as some critics presume; the confessions will furnish
-good material for Billy Sunday and his lesser brethren. But photography,
-even if it be pornography, is not art. Let me quote the ever-new Edgar
-Poe: “Art is the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature
-through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of
-what _is_ in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of ‘Artist.’ ...
-We can, at any time, double the true beauty of an actual landscape by
-half closing our eyes as we look at it. The naked Senses sometimes see
-too little—but then _always_ they see too much.” I blush at the
-necessity of digging up ancient truths, but, my dear friends, read the
-reviews of Mr. Steele’s novel and you will admit with me the crying need
-of teaching the American critics the A-B-C of art.
-
-
- ICY OLYMPUS AND THE BURNING BUSH
-
- _The Need for Art in Life, by I. B. Stoughton Holborn. New York:
- G. Albert Shaw._
-
- _The Spirit of Japanese Art, by Yone Noguchi. New York: E. P.
- Dutton and Company._
-
-The complete man must consist of three essential fundamentals—the
-Artistic, the Intellectual, the Moral (mark the initials: aim!); man’s
-aim should be the full expression of his tripartite nature; he must not
-leave out any of the three sides, nor develop any one at the expense of
-the rest. Unfortunately our age has achieved only two-thirds of the
-diagram, the I and the M, remaining wretchedly poor in the A part. When
-we look back we find that in the Renaissance period the A and I were
-overdeveloped, with the total lack of the M side. The Middle Ages
-present the presence of A and M and the absence of I. It is the Greek
-ideal we must look for in our endeavor for the complete expression of
-man. The Greek gentleman, the καλος κάγαθος, the reserved, the
-moderately good, the not excessively just, the harmonious, the
-symmetrical—he shall be our standard, our criterion for the completeness
-of being. Is not Mr. Holborn clever and Olympian and icy-cold?
-
-Now listen:
-
- The evening had already passed when I returned home with that
- hanging of Koyetsu’s chirography under my arm. “Put all the
- gaslights out! Do you hear me? All the gaslights out! And light
- all the candles you have!” I cried. The little hanging was
- properly hanged at the “togonoma” when the candles were lighted,
- whose world-old soft flame (wasn’t it singing the old song of
- world-wearied heart?) allured my mind back, perhaps, to Koyetsu’s
- age of four hundred years ago—to imagine myself to be a waif of
- greyness like a famous tea-master, Rikiu or Enshu or, again,
- Koyetsu, burying me in a little Abode of Fancy with a boiling
- tea-kettle; through that smoke of candles hurrying like our
- ephemeral lives, the characters of Koyetsu’s writing loomed with
- the haunting charm of a ghost.
-
-It is painful for me to stop quoting the religious ravings of dear
-Noguchi. And all this pathos is about a bit of old Japanese writing! I
-can see the indignant Mr. Holborn’s moderate condemnation of the
-Oriental’s unreserved passion, canting the cold-beautiful Μηδὲν ἄγαν
-(nothing in excess). But, O forgive me, Olympian gods, I must come back
-to the Burning Bush where Yone Noguchi worships Hashimoro, Hiroshige,
-Kyosai, Tsukioka, Utamaro, and other such rhythmical names; I am aware
-of the abyss of excess that yawns before me, but the exotic wine is so
-luring, so intoxicating, the call of the Orient is so irresistible—I
-plunge:
-
- I will lay me down whenever I want to beautifully admire Utamaro
- and spend half an hour with his lady (“Today I am with her in
- silence of twilight eve, and am afraid she may vanish into the
- mist”), in the room darkened by the candle-light (it is the
- candle-light that darkens rather than lights); every book or
- picture of Western origin (perhaps except a few reprints from
- Rossetti or Whistler, which would not break the atmosphere
- altogether) should be put aside. How can you place together in
- the same room Utamaro’s women, for instance, with Millet’s
- pictures or Carpenter’s _Towards Democracy_? The atmosphere I
- want to create should be most impersonal, not touched or scarred
- by the sharpness of modern individualism or personality, but
- eternally soft and grey; under the soft grey atmosphere you would
- expect to see the sudden swift emotion of love, pain or joy of
- life, that may come any moment or may not come at all.
-
-I recall an evening at “The Vagabonds,” where some ultra-modern
-paintings were exhibited and bravely discussed. An idiotic friend of
-mine suggested that the Vagabonds pass an evening in contemplating the
-canvasses in absolute silence. The obliging chairman, who is a fair
-parliamentarian, had the suggestion voted upon with the result of one
-vote in favor of it. I recall that evening in connection with Noguchi’s
-lines about Koyetsu:
-
- What need there be but prayer and silence? There is nothing more
- petty, even vulgar, in the grey world of art and poetry, than to
- have a too-close attachment to life and physical surroundings; if
- our Orientalism may not tell you anything much, I think it will
- teach you at least to soar out of your trivialism.
-
-I refuse to say any more about the book, for I am tempted to quote him
-all the way through. If you wish to forget yourself and your
-environment, to melt away in the unreal atmosphere of Japanese
-prints—read Yone Noguchi’s little book.
-
- K.
-
-
- THE SLAV IN CONRAD
-
- _Victory, by Joseph Conrad. New York: Doubleday, Page and
- Company._
-
-The Slavs are not adventurous people in the Western sense of the word;
-for the most part an inland race spread over the great monotonous Plain,
-they are inclined for melancholy introspective searchings and spiritual
-struggles rather than for actual physical adventures. Their writers need
-not create for their heroes an atmosphere of dizzying stunts and
-elemental cataclysms; they find sufficient dramatic “plot” in the soul
-experiences of the restless yearning men and women who dwell not on a
-South Sea island but in ordinary cities and villages, fighting their
-human fights, wrestling with God and man, gaining their ephemeral
-victories, but more often suffering defeats. Yet, despite their lack of
-adventurousness, the stories of the Russian and Polish writers, from
-Dostoevsky to Kuprin and from Orzezsko to Zeromsky, have seldom caused a
-yawn in their reader.
-
-The checkered life of Conrad has placed a distinct stamp upon his works,
-distinct from both the writers of his race and from the Western writers.
-We observe a dualism in his art, an eternal collision between fact and
-fiction, between realism and symbolism. His inborn Slavic mysticism is
-weighed down by the ballast of his rich experiences, and he continually
-wavers between the Scylla of lyric melancholy and the Charybdis of
-picturesque plot, preserving the equilibrium at times more and at times
-less skilfully. The reader thus finds in Conrad that which he is after.
-For my part, I am rather distracted by the over-complex plot of
-_Victory_; I should much prefer to meet Heyst and Lena in less dizzy
-surroundings, for then the interesting psychology of the quaint lovers
-would appear accentuated, like the flame of a candle, and would not be
-blurred by a pyrotechnic mass of startling coincidences and marvellous
-adventures. The atmosphere of Doom that breathes throughout the story is
-reduced in the end to a sensational Eugène Sue-like climax—a heap of
-dead bodies.
-
- K.
-
-
- SICK IDEALISM
-
- _Erdgeist (Earth-Spirit): A Tragedy in Four Acts; Pandora’s Box, by
- Frank Wedekind. New York: Albert and Charles Boni._
-
-Poor, foolish Frank Wedekind. Hapless Idealist. Luckless dreamer. Have
-you read _Der Erdgeist_ and _Pandora’s Box_? He wrote them—this
-enfevered fancier. In two kindred flashes of madness he illuminated
-several hundred sheets of paper and out of them—out of their blood-shot
-words and illegitimate truths—a new figure is born for the bookshelf.
-Not an old figure in new binding and fresh rouge. Not a Lescaut or a
-Thaïs or a Nana. This mocking idealist of virtue removes indeed the
-eighth veil from Salome. He hurls into the midst of the twittering
-parlor thinkers and sex chatterers a most disturbing answer to the
-eternal question, “What is woman?” It didn’t disturb me because I don’t
-believe it. And anyway, I don’t mean that kind of disturbance. I mean,
-virtuous reader, it is impossible to consume Wedekind without blushing.
-If you were disappointed in Shakespeare and Balzac and Casanova and
-Jacques Tournebrouche and could find nothing to blush at in them, do not
-despair. Here is a fellow, this Wedekind, who will daub a real blush out
-of a rouge pot, a miserable fellow whom you can condemn and ostracize
-and, having relegated him to his proper place, enjoy thoroughly or
-secretly or not at all.
-
-It was Wedekind who first made people blush by a tasteless dissertation
-on the ignorant smugness recognized by society as the proper state for a
-young woman’s mind. He called it _Spring’s Awakening_. It was chiefly
-instrumental in awakening theatrical writers and managers. They spread
-the blush at $2 a head and waxed fat. But how did they spread the blush?
-Did they talk like Wedekind did? Did the mawkish plagiarist Cosmo
-Hamilton talk like Wedekind—tastelessly, vilely, brutally,
-and—horrors!—indelicately? Not he. Mr. Hamilton and the other
-get-rich-quick propagandists wouldn’t talk that way for the world. They
-are nice gentlemen. Not for them the idealist’s leer. Rather the
-bathroom wink. They will reveal a delicious girl in her delicious
-boudoir wearing a delicious nightie. They will make her out a virtuous
-girl, charmingly endowed but utterly stainless.
-
-Having established this fact they roguishly introduce into her boudoir
-an estimable young man and permit him to caress her dramatically. But
-the whole proceeding is stainless. It is drolly suggestive of
-unspeakable things—see box office receipts. But suggestiveness is
-necessary to bring home to people the blindness of virtue and the
-dangers that beset the underpaid young women who ignorantly make it its
-own reward—(if that means anything). Anyway, when the audience leaves it
-has been enlightened. Its taste has not been offended. Virtue has been
-shown to be a dangerous thing—that is, uneducated virtue has. Everyone
-agrees. And if not they disagree. In either case the discussion properly
-conducted (under the auspices of the “Amalgamated Virgins of the 21st
-and 22nd Wards”) is pleasing and improving. The press argues delicately
-and in good taste about sex hygiene. A new physiology is placed in the
-public schools containing information on the most effective way of
-brushing the teeth of the young and preserving the hair of the old.
-
-And last week Coroner Hoffman told me that it was impossible to estimate
-how many girls were killed annually in Chicago by abortive operations.
-He put the number in the hundreds. Hooray! Death is the wages of sin.
-
-But all quibbling aside, what does this low fellow Wedekind whom I
-started out by calling an idealist (I will prove it shortly) do? To
-begin with, he talks about sex. Not about stockings and undergarments
-and perfumed kisses, ankles, asterisks and anomalies. Everyone knows
-that this kind of talk, particularly when produced in drama form, is in
-the first place inexcusable, and in the second place unnecessary, and in
-the third place vulgar. And in the fourth place, instead of making the
-best of a bad job—that is, making his contributions a mental stimulus
-for snickering roués and ladies sensitive of their status—he insists
-upon being nasty without being covert. Is there anything more
-unpardonable? Nobody can enjoy nastiness. The argument is an endless
-one. It leads to nothing except blows or blushes.
-
-As for the plays—I almost forgot I was reviewing them—Wedekind explodes
-volcanically on the subject he treats, and blows the question mark out
-of woman. He takes all the crimes a policeman ever heard of, rolls them
-up in a package of soft warm flesh and labels it “Woman.” He cracks his
-showman’s whip and calls attention to the texture of her skin and the
-white meat of her body. And then he sends her forth to ruin, to sweep
-like a polluted and wreck-strewn wave through life, breaking at last in
-a dirty crest on a foreign shore and leaving a scum behind her. Are
-these the worst things Wedekind could find to label woman—incest,
-butchery, lecherous animalism, bloody business and abandonment? Who but
-a sick idealist would pick a careless and care-free prostitute as a
-flaming example of woman at her worst? And is the power to destroy the
-most terrible power woman possesses?
-
-Wedekind imagines that people idealize sex and hold it a beautiful
-force. Poor Wedekind, where did he get such an idea? And then he
-imagines that in reality sex passion is a smashing force that knocks
-people into each other’s arms, tumbles their heavens, smears their
-lives. He imagines that men and women love without thought, mate with
-the irresponsibility of hyenas. And imagining all this Wedekind creates
-a sort of droll fiend to prove it. Behold her—a creature to confound
-saints and sinners, to tear the beauty out of men’s souls and dance with
-muddied feet upon the finery of life. He dangles her before our eyes,
-naked and glorious—the diseased siren of the ages. And he calls her
-Lulu, the earth spirit.
-
-He introduces her fresh and joyous and vibrating with tabooed emotions.
-She is in love with her own beauty. Her body thrills her with its
-whiteness and its movement. She already has felt its power. Were I in
-these plays I would as soon think of kissing Lulu as biting a stick of
-dynamite. But I am not an ideal conception. There are other men—Wedekind
-digs them up from every corner of life—who fall at her feet and who
-shoot each other and themselves for the sake of being contaminated by
-her caresses. Queer men, idealists. They tumble about her, whining,
-cursing, chanting, forswearing their Gods, their souls and their
-vanities.
-
-And she tumbles with them, from one precipice down to another, faithful
-only to her nervous system. Her only virtue is a complete absence of the
-quality. If only Wedekind had invested her with a single human moral
-conviction—merely for the sake of completing her diabolically. If only
-he had made it possible for her to sin against something. But she hasn’t
-anything to sin against—not a conviction, not a moral. In this country
-she would be tried for her murders and treasons and sent to an asylum
-for incomplete people. What she does she does simply. When this hussy
-kills the father who owned her in order to save herself from his threats
-and then throws herself laughingly into the arms of the son, she does it
-all without malice. It is all natural, spontaneous. When she rebukes her
-own father for making love to her (she tells him he’s getting too old
-for such tricks), when she murders, deceives and pollutes she hasn’t any
-feeling of doing wrong, any reaction except one of satisfaction. If this
-isn’t an ideal I’d like to know what is. If everybody was like she is
-there would be no sorrow or suffering in the world. We would all be
-simple animals dashing around, biting each other, drinking from each
-other’s throats, feeling pain only when our nerves were touched and joy
-only when our nerves were touched. Wedekind imagines that this state is
-the true reflection of today. He exaggerates what according to his
-experience may be a logical prejudice and hurls it brutally behind the
-footlights and into the bookcase.
-
-Lulu, bedraggled, walking the streets of London in the rain, looking for
-prey, Lulu wheedling quarters out of ragged sensualists, hiding her
-father and her lover and the woman who desires her while she
-“entertains” her victims, Lulu spreading disease, and then Lulu running
-wildly around the dirty garret in her chemise pursued and killed by a
-red-eyed, nail-bitten Jack the Ripper—that is the end of woman. Poor
-Wedekind. What an exaggerated opinion of virtue he must have,—an
-idealist’s. There is but one more thing. It is Wedekind’s master stroke.
-
-He introduces a note of unselfishness and poetry as a climax. Lulu lies
-stabbed by the delighted and enthusiastic Ripper. And kneeling before
-the picture of her in her hey-dey is the “Countess,” the woman who loved
-her—a homo-sexualist—an irritating creature.
-
-“I love you, you are the star in my heavens,” she cries purely. I don’t
-remember whether the Ripper kills her or not. _What a mess!_
-
- B. H.
-
-
-
- _Rabindranath Tagore: A Biographical Study, by Ernest Rhys._ _New
- York: The Macmillan Company._
-
-Shrill Chicago and thousands of similar examples of Western civilization
-have more to learn from a book of this sort than can be readily
-explained. Taking Chicago as fairly representative of the swiftest
-modernity, one must blush for the city of “I Will” whenever he picks up
-Ernest Rhys’s keen and quiet study of the talked-about Hindu. The
-blushes are for the vast herds whose only ventures upon new paths are to
-trample and set back, whose only ideals center in or near the stomach.
-In the white light of this book—reflected radiance from a
-first-magnitude luminary—Chicago and her kind appear as blundering
-heedless egotists who never listen. Their ears have not developed, their
-eyes are turned to the ground. “I Will”—what? To grow strong,
-high-minded, clean of heart, and wise of soul? Anything but this.
-
-Tagore, by his very tolerance and avoidance of condemnation, seems
-vehemently to remind the thinker of all this—by force of the law of
-contrast. The clear-eyed Easterner even points out a scant virtue or two
-in Western civilization, such as the value of mastering materials, which
-the Westerner himself overlooks when in self-defense; and no blame is
-placed on the feverish civilizees. Tagore moves in a state of peace
-which is the very essence of activity, and has no part in the fanatics’
-plan which begins with lassitude and ends in stagnation. He is a man of
-action, forceful, definite, wasting no energy nor sparing the use of it.
-Modern methods of doing things and “getting there” become mere feeble
-noises by comparison. This is not the tragedy, that Westerners blunder
-and fail,—the East has its failures,—but it lies in the fact that
-America arrogantly chooses not to listen, not to see and learn. A few
-scattered listeners must catch the harmonies intended for a whole
-nation, the majority having been sophisticated to extinction. The herds
-in Chicago and elsewhere will go on indefinitely in their own swaggering
-way, blind and deaf, sure beyond correction that the chief desirability
-lies in digestion, decoration, and diversion ... while Rabindranath
-Tagore and the beautiful element he personifies are ever-present,
-waiting within reach of all, working out the biggest things in the
-world, and living the last word of true joy.
-
-Ernest Rhys is very gentle and sparing in making comparisons. He leaves
-this to his reader, and is mainly occupied with the re-creation of the
-steady magnetic atmosphere which is a natural attribute of Tagore. The
-paragraphs devoted to the boys’ school at Bolpur give one a feeling of
-something lost, at least to those who thirsted through the schools of
-the U. S. Rhys is successful in giving out an excellent idea of the
-great man and his works.
-
- HERMAN SCHUCHERT.
-
-
- Militarism is the German spirit.
-
- Militarism is the self-revelation of German heroism.
-
- Militarism is the heroic spirit raised to the spirit of war. It
- is Potsdam and Weimar in their highest combination. It is _Faust_
- and _Zarathustra_ and Beethoven’s score in the trenches.
-
- For even the _Eroica_ and the _Egmont_ Overture are nothing but
- the truest militarism. And just because all virtues which lend
- such a high value to militarism are revealed to the fullest
- extent in war, we are filled with militarism, regarding it as
- something holy—as the holiest thing on earth—_Werner Zombart_.
-
-
-
-
- Have You Read——?
-
-
- (_In this column will be given each month a list of current
- magazine articles which, as an intelligent being, you will not
- want to miss._)
-
-The Imagist Number of _The Egoist_, May 1.
-
-H. D. and Imagism, by May Sinclair. _The Egoist_, June 1.
-
-Redemption and Dostoevsky, by Rebecca West. _The New Republic_, June 5.
-
-Back of Billy Sunday, by John Reed. _The Metropolitan_, May.
-
-The Old Woman’s Money, by James Stephens. _The Century_, May.
-
-Quack Novels and Democracy, by Owen Wister. _The Atlantic_, June.
-
-
-
-
- Can You Read——?
-
-
- (_In this column will be given each month a resumé of current
- cant which, as an intelligent being, you will go far to avoid._)
-
-Fiction reviews by Llewellyn Jones in _The Chicago Evening Post_.
-
-A typical literary judgment from _The Dial_: “But, in the main, his
-wholesomely harsh utterances ought to be, and must be, in some degree,
-tonic and bracing and curative.”
-
-An editorial from _The New Republic_, a journal of opinion whose
-function, we believe, is to circulate ideas:
-
- During the past ten months the German Ambassador at Washington
- has done nothing to promote a better understanding between his
- own government and nation and the American government and nation.
- He is consequently all the more to be congratulated upon his
- behavior at a moment of acute and dangerous contention between
- the United States and Germany. He has on his own initiative and
- perhaps at his own risk intervened on behalf of a possibly
- peaceful solution of the differences between the two governments.
- He has sought by means of a frank talk with President Wilson to
- break through the barrier of misunderstanding which the exchange
- of notes was building up between the two governments and to
- re-establish a genuine vehicle of communication. The conversation
- may not lead to agreement, but at the top of a peculiarly
- forbidding crisis it has at least made an agreement seem not
- impossible. Everybody who detests war, everybody who hopes that
- the friendship between the United States and Germany will not be
- involved in the wreckage of the hideous conflict, will be
- grateful to Count von Bernstorff for his enterprise.
-
-
-
-
- The Reader Critic
-
-
-_Mrs. Jean Cowdrey Norton, Hempstead, Long Island_:
-
-Since coming in contact with THE LITTLE REVIEW last December, I have
-more than enjoyed each issue with your own impulsive, warm-hearted,
-dauntless personality coming through its pages; and it is for that
-reason I do not hesitate to ask you for an explanation of a sentence
-that you wrote in the April number, which led me to subscribe for that
-horrible output, viz., _The Masses_. You pronounced it indispensable to
-intelligent living. On that I sent in a subscription, and whereas I am
-not so awfully stupid I cannot understand how you, who are evidently an
-artist with high ideals, could possibly have such a magazine on your
-desk. The cartoons are so untrue, so damnably vulgar,—which good art
-never is,—the insistent harping on the shadows of life, the exaggerated
-outlook which tinges the whole paper—quite as one-sided on its side as
-other papers are on theirs; all of which I know must be in complete
-contradiction to your self. It fills me with astonishment. We
-acknowledge with our ever-increasing complex civilization that we must
-more than ever perhaps help each other; but I don’t just understand
-which class this perfectly rotten sheet is intended to reach. If it’s
-the so-called down trodden, they are apt to have so much unhappiness any
-way I should say a good brace up does more good than harping on
-injustice in general; as for the class that “does not think,” its
-inartistic drawings alone would be enough to queer it. When I am down
-and out—I happen to be a working woman too—I most decidedly _do not_
-want to be made more down and out by more woes, that often spring from
-lack of intelligence, that both rich and poor suffer alike from. You
-will see I believe in the responsibility of the individual, that you
-Socialists rather avoid. I do not expect you to answer this letter, but
-I shall look in THE LITTLE REVIEW for a stray line that will give me
-some idea of your outlook.
-
- [I have so much to say in answer to this letter, and so little
- time to say it that I have asked someone who shares my view to do
- it for me. Mr. Davis says it much better than I could, anyhow.
- And I must add that I am not a Socialist. I am an Anarchist—which
- means, an Individualist; which means everything that people
- think it doesn’t mean.—_The Editor._]
-
-_F. Guy Davis, Chicago_:
-
-I will try to indicate very briefly why I think so much of _The Masses_.
-The group that is getting it out are real students who know the crowd
-with all its hope and despair, much better than the crowd knows itself.
-They are interpreting the crowd. The mass would never like _The Masses_.
-It is too true. It is not got up for them. _The Cosmopolitan_ is the
-ideal of the mass. _The Masses_ is for the few brave spirits who want to
-know life as it is, the shadows as well as the flights up into the
-sunshine. _The Masses_ to my mind has as broad a range of feeling
-reflected in its pages as any magazine I know of. Humor, tragedy, light,
-shade, drama, color, yes, and mud too, as you say. But isn’t mud a part
-of life? In some respects mud is the condition of life. The great need
-of the sensitive mind of today is contact with the vital life-giving
-things and ideas which come from the earth. The life of such a mind is
-like the life of a plant. Its roots must go down beneath the surface or
-it will die. _The Masses_ to my mind is the spirit of the earth put into
-magazine form, and to read it understandingly is to put the roots of the
-soul down into the earth where they should be if a healthy growth is
-desired. One could get too much of that contact of course, but that is
-another matter.
-
-
- _FREE POETS v. FREE VERSE._
-
- [As Mr. Carter suggests in the following letter, reprinted from
- _The Egoist_, I hope THE LITTLE REVIEW agree with Mr. Aldington’s
- point of view. I hope the latter may be induced to answer Mr.
- Carter at length in the same issue.—_The Editor._]
-
-_To the Editor, The Egoist_
-
-Madam,—I notice that in his contribution to the Imagist number of _The
-Egoist_ Mr. Harold Monro, writing on the history of the Imagist
-movement, states that the movement owes its origin to the large
-discovery of “Poetry as _an_ art” [my italics]. He then proceeds to
-point out that the Imagist verse fails as poetry not because the writers
-love poetry less, but because they love expression more. Being what it
-is it would be no better if Tennyson had written it, and no worse if it
-proved to be by, say, Mr. Rudyard Kipling. Indeed, it is not poetry any
-more than little Congreve’s tiresome stream of depreciation is comedy,
-despite what certain hopeless apprentice play critics assert to the
-contrary. Poetry, I suppose Mr. Monro would say, is not expression but
-the thing expressed. All this is good and true. But Mr. Monro fails to
-make one thing quite clear. The Imagists have been mistaken in their
-very conception of poetry which lives alone by the power to see it as
-Art and not as “_an art_.” I am convinced that some at least of the
-Imagists are not without the secret of this power, and if they will be
-guided by the vision they gain thereby, to the extent of forgetting
-their literary erudition, it will transform their conception of poetry.
-The strict literature at which they aim is not proper poetry. In fact,
-literary technicians do not, as a rule, write poetry for the simple
-reason that even if they dream the poet’s dream of reality they at once
-proceed to smother it under literary form. We must look to those rich in
-poetical experience, and free to express it, for the true expression of
-poetry. In plain words, “Poetry as _an_ art” (that is, as expression or
-form) is not the same as Poetry as Art (that is, the thing expressed).
-The distinction is so big and vital and so necessary to be maintained at
-this moment, that I propose to consider it in an article in THE LITTLE
-REVIEW. I hope to prove that what poetry needs nowadays is free poets,
-not free verse.
-
- HUNTLY CARTER.
-
- [As the nearest available Imagist, perhaps I may be permitted to
- comment (without prejudice to the other Imagists) on Mr. Carter’s
- letter. I am not quite sure that I know what Mr. Carter means,
- but I think he means that it is useless for a man to study
- classic quantity and mediaeval rhyme and modern free verse, if he
- has no particular impulse or mood to make those studies valuable
- as a means of expression. If that is what Mr. Carter means I
- agree with him. I will also agree that it is useless to try and
- teach a dumb man to lecture or a lame man to break the hundred yards
- record. If a man is to lecture, if he is to be an athlete, we take
- for granted that in the first case he has ideas and a certain
- eloquence, and in the second a good physique and an aptitude for
- sprinting. Mr. Carter would be a rotten trainer if he didn’t make
- his man diet, take cold baths and long walks and an occasional
- sprint; he ought even to make him do a little boxing. I feel,
- somehow, that Mr. Carter never went in for violent exercise or
- that he relied upon his “Soul-Flow” or “Art-Ebb” to get him
- through.
-
- Now poetry is not so very unlike athletics. You may have no aptitude
- for it, and then all the training in the world won’t get you in
- first; you may shape very well, but if you don’t train you will
- be an “also ran.” I believe in having an aptitude and in training
- it; Mr. Carter believes in having an aptitude and not training it.
-
- I object to Mr. Carter informing us of the existence of our “of
- courses.” We take for granted that a man is sincere, that he has
- lots of impulses and that he is “free.” All that is the stuff out
- of which poetry is made. The making of it, the “training” is what
- we are immediately interested in. We take for granted that we
- have the essentials of poetry in us or we should not attempt to
- write it. We are now after clarity of form, precision of
- expression. Mr. Carter, like the majority of our fellow citizens,
- does not value these things; we find them present in every work of
- art which is beautiful and permanently interesting; hence our
- anxiety to attain by practice that clarity and that precision
- which practice alone can give.]
-
- RICHARD ALDINGTON.
-
-
- If only every Celt will refuse to fight for anything but the
- freedom of his own country, the English will soon destroy
- themselves altogether, and we shall inherit their language, the
- only worthy thing they have, and which their newspapers have not
- yet succeeded in debauching and degrading beyond repair. There
- are still universities in England. However, they have made it a
- crime in England to write good English—for style itself is a form
- of truth, being beauty; and truth and beauty are as welcome in
- England as detectives in a thieves’ kitchen.—Aleister Crowley in
- _The International_.
-
-
-
-
- THE DRAMA
-
-
- for May Contained This Interesting Material
-
- THE CLASSICAL STAGE OF JAPAN Ernest Fenollosa’s Work on the
- Japanese “Noh.” Edited by Ezra Pound.
-
- “Noh” Dramas (from the Fenollosa Manuscript).
-
- Sotoba Komachi.
- Kayoi Komachi.
- Suma Genji.
- Kumasaka.
- Shojo.
- Tamura.
- Tsunemasa.
- Kunasaka.
-
- THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF THE CENSORSHIP, by _Thomas H.
- Dickinson_
-
- MAURICE MAETERLINCK by _Remy de Gourmont_ Authorized
- translation by Richard Aldington.
-
- THE “BOOK OF THE PAGEANT,” AND ITS DEVELOPMENT by _Frank
- Chouteau Brown_
-
- ON THE READING OF PLAYS by _Elizabeth R. Hunt_
-
- A PYRAMUS-AND-THISBE PLAY OF SHAKESPEARE’S TIME, with notes
- by _Eleanor Prescott Hammond_
-
- THE PUBLISHED PLAY by _Archibald Henderson_
-
- THE THEATRE TODAY—AND TOMORROW, a review, by _Alice Corbin
- Henderson_
-
- THE GERMAN STAGE AND ITS ORGANIZATION—Part III, Private
- Theatres by _Frank E. Washburn Freund_
-
- ASPECTS OF MODERN DRAMA, a review, by _Lander MacClintock_
-
- THE JAPANESE PLAY OF THE CENTURIES by _Gertrude Emerson_
-
- A SELECTIVE LIST OF ESSAYS AND BOOKS ABOUT THE THEATRE AND
- OF PLAYS, published during the first quarter of 1915
- compiled by _Frank Chouteau Brown_
-
- THE DRAMA for August will contain Augier’s _Mariage d’Olympe_,
- with a foreword by Eugene Brieux; an amusing account of his
- experiences with Parsee drama, by George Cecil; a paper on the
- _Evolution of the Actor_, by Arthur Pollock; a discussion of
- Frank Wedekind, by Frances Fay; a review of the work of the
- recent Drama League Convention; a plan for an autumn community
- festival; an outline of the nation-wide celebration of the
- Shakespeare tercentenary, and an article entitled
- _Depersonalizing the Instruments of the Drama_, by Huntly Carter.
-
- _The Drama, a Quarterly_
- _$3.00 per year_
-
- _736 Marquette Building_
- _Chicago_
-
- The most difficult business in life is to get advertisements for
- an “artistic” magazine—particularly for one that has the added
- stigma of being a free lance. We will give a commission of $5.00
- to every one who secures a full-page “ad” for THE LITTLE REVIEW.
- Write for particulars.
-
- On the following pages you will find the “ads” we might have had
- in this issue, but haven’t.
-
- Mandel Brothers might have taken this page to feature their
- library furnishings, desk sets, and accessories—of which they are
- supposed to have the most interesting assortment in town. I
- learned that on the authority of some one who referred to
- Mandel’s as “the most original and artistic store in Chicago.” If
- they should advertise those things here I have no doubt the 1,000
- Chicago subscribers to THE LITTLE REVIEW would overflow their
- store.
-
- Marshall Field and Company might have used this page—but they
- wouldn’t. I have been to see them at least six times. They have a
- book department where you can actually find Nietzsche when you
- want him without having the clerk say, “We’ll be glad to order
- it.” Such a phenomenon ought to be heralded.
-
- Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company ought to advertise something,
- though I don’t know just what. The man I interviewed made such a
- face when I told him we were “radical” that I haven’t had the
- courage to go back and pester him for the desired full-page. The
- Carson-Pirie attitude toward change of any sort is well-known—I
- think they resent even having to keep pace with the change in
- fashions.
-
- A. C. McClurg and Company could have used this page to advantage.
- They have lots of books to advertise and they ought to want to
- advertise them in a Chicago magazine. I am willing to wager that
- they will: I plan to interview them once a week until they
- succumb.
-
- There is least excuse of all for the Cable Piano Company. They
- know what we think of the Mason and Hamlin Piano and they know,
- whether they advertise or not, that we will keep on talking about
- it whenever we feel like appreciating a beautiful thing—which is
- rather often.
-
- This page might have been used very profitably by Mr. Mitchell
- Kennerley to announce the publication of a book of poems by
- Florence Kiper Frank. I think it is to be out this summer—though
- of course I can’t pretend to give the details accurately, not
- having been provided with the “ad.” But THE LITTLE REVIEW readers
- will want the book nevertheless.
-
-
- Poetry
-
-
- A Magazine of Verse
-
- 543 Cass Street
- Chicago
-
- PADRAIC COLUM, the distinguished Irish poet and lecturer, says:
- “POETRY is the best magazine, by far, in the English language. We
- have nothing in England or Ireland to compare with it.”
-
- William Marion Reedy, Editor of the St. Louis _Mirror_, says:
- “POETRY has been responsible for the Renaissance in that art. You
- have done a great service to the children of light in this
- country.”
-
- CAN YOU AFFORD TO DO WITHOUT SO IMPORTANT A MAGAZINE?
-
- POETRY publishes the best verse now being written in English, and
- its prose section contains brief articles on subjects connected
- with the art, also reviews of the new verse.
-
- POETRY has introduced more new poets of importance than all the
- other American magazines combined, besides publishing the work of
- poets already distinguished.
-
- THE ONLY MAGAZINE DEVOTED EXCLUSIVELY TO THIS ART.
-
- SUBSCRIBE AT ONCE. A subscription to POETRY is the best way of
- paying interest on your huge debt to the great poets of the past.
- It encourages living poets to do for the future what dead poets
- have done for modern civilization, for you.
-
- One year—12 numbers—U. S. A., $1.50; Canada, $1.65; foreign,
- $1.75 (7 shillings).
-
- POETRY
- 543 Cass Street, Chicago.
-
- Send POETRY for one year ($1.50 enclosed) beginning .........
- .......................................................... to
- Name ........................................................
- Address .....................................................
-
-
-
-
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-
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-
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- isn’t it time for you to listen to the message of Anarchy?
-
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-
- By Emma Goldman
-
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-
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-
- By Emma Goldman
-
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-
- Transcriber’s Notes
-
-
-Advertisements were collected at the end of the text.
-
-The table of contents on the title page was adjusted in order to reflect
-correctly the headings in this issue of THE LITTLE REVIEW.
-
-In the poem _Les Condoléances_, the line _Qu’il est sous les mers_ was
-moved from the end of the stanza beginning with _“Je n’insiste pas. Je
-suis venu vite,_ to the end of the stanza beginning with _“Si notre
-avenir—souffrez que je cache_ where it most likely belongs.
-
-The original spelling was mostly preserved. A few obvious typographical
-errors were silently corrected. All other changes are shown here
-(before/after):
-
- [p. 9]:
- ... seines Nachbarvolkes fühlt, als würs dem eigenen Volk ...
- ... seines Nachbarvolkes fühlt, als wärs dem eigenen Volk ...
-
- [p. 11]:
- ... for life, even if it be a fight against the whole world.
- “Veder Schlafpulver ...
- ... for life, even if it be a fight against the whole world.
- “Weder Schlafpulver ...
-
- [p. 34]:
- ... And where shall be the end at last. ...
- ... And where shall be the end at last? ...
-
- [p. 41]:
- ... I am such of the artificial inanities of the
- drawingroom—the polite ...
- ... I am sick of the artificial inanities of the
- drawingroom—the polite ...
-
- [p. 42]:
- ... Schoengist nobility. ...
- ... Schöngeist nobility. ...
-
- [p. 42]:
- ... rumble bizarrely from the depths of every philosophical
- sub-celler they can ...
- ... rumble bizarrely from the depths of every philosophical
- sub-cellar they can ...
-
- [p. 42]:
- ... I am sick of their kinsmen, of the surgical tongues who
- dissect, who who ...
- ... I am sick of their kinsmen, of the surgical tongues who
- dissect, who ...
-
- [p. 54]:
- ... Huntley Carter. ...
- ... Huntly Carter. ...
-
-
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-
-<div style='text-align:center; font-size:1.2em; font-weight:bold'>The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Little Review, June-July 1915 (Vol. 2, No. 4), by Margaret C. Anderson</div>
-
-<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
-most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
-of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
-at <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a>. If you
-are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the
-country where you are located before using this eBook.
-</div>
-
-<p style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: The Little Review, June-July 1915 (Vol. 2, No. 4)</p>
-
-<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: Lucien Cary, Richard Aldington, Will Levington Comfort, Alexander S. Kaun, Margaret C. Anderson, Clara Shanafelt, Ben Hecht, Florence Kiper Frank, Arthur Davison Ficke, Eunice Tietjens and Witter Bynner</div>
-
-<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Editor: Margaret C. Anderson</div>
-
-<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Release Date: September 4, 2021 [eBook #66217]</div>
-
-<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Language: English</div>
-
-<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Character set encoding: UTF-8</div>
-
-<div style='display:block; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Produced by: Jens Sadowski and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net. This book was produced from images made available by the Modernist Journal Project, Brown and Tulsa Universities.</div>
-
-<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LITTLE REVIEW, JUNE-JULY 1915 (VOL. 2, NO. 4) ***</div>
-
-<div class="frontmatter chapter">
-<h1 class="title">
-<span class="smallcaps">The Little Review</span>
-</h1>
-
-<p class="subt">
-<em>Literature</em> <em>Drama</em> <em>Music</em> <em>Art</em>
-</p>
-
-<p class="ed">
-<span class="line1">MARGARET C. ANDERSON</span><br />
-<span class="line2">EDITOR</span>
-</p>
-
-<p class="issue">
-JUNE-JULY, 1915
-</p>
-
- <div class="table">
-<table class="tocn" summary="TOC">
-<tbody>
- <tr>
- <td class="col1"><a href="#LITERARYJOURNALISMINCHICAGO">Literary Journalism in Chicago</a></td>
- <td class="col2"><em>Lucien Cary</em></td>
- </tr>
- <tr>
- <td class="col1"><a href="#EPIGRAMS">Epigrams</a></td>
- <td class="col2"><em>Richard Aldington</em></td>
- </tr>
- <tr>
- <td class="col1"><a href="#EDUCATIONBYCHILDREN">Education by Children</a></td>
- <td class="col2"><em>Will Levington Comfort</em></td>
- </tr>
- <tr>
- <td class="col1"><a href="#NOTESOFACOSMOPOLITE">Notes of a Cosmopolite</a></td>
- <td class="col2"><em>Alexander S. Kaun</em></td>
- </tr>
- <tr>
- <td class="col1"><a href="#THEARTISTINLIFE">“The Artist in Life”</a></td>
- <td class="col2"><em>Margaret C. Anderson</em></td>
- </tr>
- <tr>
- <td class="col1"><a href="#POEMS">Poems</a></td>
- <td class="col2"><em>Clara Shanafelt</em></td>
- </tr>
- <tr>
- <td class="col1"><a href="#SLOBBERDOMSNEERDOMANDBOREDOM">Slobberdom, Sneerdom, and Boredom</a></td>
- <td class="col2"><em>Ben Hecht</em></td>
- </tr>
- <tr>
- <td class="col1"><a href="#THEDEATHOFANTONTARASOVITCH">The Death of Anton Tarasovitch</a></td>
- <td class="col2"><em>Florence Kiper Frank</em></td>
- </tr>
- <tr>
- <td class="col1"><a href="#RUPERTBROOKE">Rupert Brooke (A Memory)</a></td>
- <td class="col2"><em>Arthur Davison Ficke</em></td>
- </tr>
- <tr class="m">
- <td class="col1" colspan="2"><a href="#PHOTO033">A Photograph of Rupert Brooke by Eugene Hutchinson</a></td>
- </tr>
- <tr>
- <td class="col1"><a href="#TOAWESTINDIANALLIGATOR">To a West Indian Alligator</a></td>
- <td class="col2"><em>Eunice Tietjens</em></td>
- </tr>
- <tr>
- <td class="col1"><a href="#EPITAPHS">Epitaphs</a></td>
- <td class="col2"><em>Witter Bynner</em></td>
- </tr>
- <tr>
- <td class="col1"><a href="#EDITORIALSANDANNOUNCEMENTS">Editorials and Announcements</a></td>
- <td class="col2">&nbsp;</td>
- </tr>
- <tr class="m">
- <td class="col1" colspan="2"><a href="#THESUBMARINE">The Submarine (from the Italian of Luciano Folgore by Anne Simon)</a></td>
- </tr>
- <tr>
- <td class="col1"><a href="#BLAABLAABLAA">Blaa-Blaa-Blaa</a></td>
- <td class="col2">“<em>The Scavenger</em>”</td>
- </tr>
- <tr>
- <td class="col1"><a href="#THENINEEXHIBIT">The Nine!—Exhibit!</a></td>
- <td class="col2">&nbsp;</td>
- </tr>
- <tr>
- <td class="col1"><a href="#BOOKDISCUSSION">Book Discussion</a></td>
- <td class="col2">&nbsp;</td>
- </tr>
- <tr>
- <td class="col1"><a href="#THEREADERCRITIC">The Reader Critic</a></td>
- <td class="col2">&nbsp;</td>
- </tr>
-</tbody>
-</table>
- </div>
-<p class="monthly">
-Published Monthly
-</p>
-
- <div class="table">
- <div class="footer">
-<p class="pricel">
-15 cents a copy
-</p>
-
-<p class="pub">
-MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Publisher<br />
-Fine Arts Building<br />
-CHICAGO
-</p>
-
-<p class="pricer">
-$1.50 a year
-</p>
-
- </div>
- </div>
-<p class="postoffice">
-Entered as second-class matter at Postoffice, Chicago
-</p>
-
-</div>
-
-<div class="frontmatter chapter">
-<a id="page-1" class="pagenum" title="1"></a>
-<p class="tit">
-<span class="smallcaps">The Little Review</span>
-</p>
-
- <div class="table">
- <div class="issue">
-<p class="vol">
-Vol. II
-</p>
-
-<p class="issue">
-JUNE-JULY, 1915
-</p>
-
-<p class="number">
-No. 4
-</p>
-
- </div>
- </div>
-</div>
-
-<h2 class="article1" id="LITERARYJOURNALISMINCHICAGO">
-Literary Journalism in Chicago
-</h2>
-
-<p class="aut">
-<span class="smallcaps">Lucian Cary</span>
-</p>
-
-<p class="first">
-<span class="firstchar">N</span><span class="postfirstchar">othing</span> succeeds like an indiscretion. I was indiscreet enough last
-winter to speak my mind (a little of it) about <span class="smallcaps">The Little Review</span>, <em>The
-Dial</em>, <em>Poetry</em>, <em>The Drama</em>, and the audience to which these papers appeal.
-The result is that I have been flattered or intimidated into speaking it ever
-since. In the present instance both methods have been used most charmingly—and
-shamelessly. You see, Miss Anderson and I live in the same village.
-And yet I said nothing, and have nothing to say about any paper except what
-everybody knows.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-Everybody knows that <em>The Friday Literary Review</em> of <em>The Chicago
-Evening Post</em> under Mr. Francis Hackett and, later, under Mr. Floyd Dell
-gave us the most alert, the most eager, the most intelligent, and the best-written
-discussion of literature in the United States. That eight-page supplement
-did what had hardly been done west of England before: it made book
-reviews worth reading. There was almost as much difference between the
-<em>Friday Review</em> and <em>The Dial</em> as there is between Mr. George Bernard Shaw
-and Mr. Nicholas Murray Butler, almost as much difference between the
-<em>Friday Review</em> and <em>The New York Times Literary Supplement</em> as there is
-between M. Anatole France and Mr. Henry Van Dyke. There was good
-writing in the <em>Friday Review</em> and good thinking behind it. It was almost
-never dull; and if it was young it was not wholly unsophisticated; and if it
-was sometimes dead wrong it was not stupid. If there were half as many
-persons interested in the discussion of ideas as most of us like to believe
-the <em>Friday Review</em> would inevitably have continued. It would, that’s all.
-But as things are it was fated. Neither the mechanics nor the economics
-of daily journalism permitted it. The <em>Post</em> could not continue to give us—it
-quite literally gave us—eight pages of what so few of us wanted so much.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-Everybody knows that if a weekly paper dealing not only with literature
-but with all the other arts in the spirit and with the journalistic competence
-of the <em>Friday Review</em> were established in Chicago everybody would have
-to read it.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-<a id="page-2" class="pagenum" title="2"></a>
-That is the point I wished to make. It is perfectly obvious that <span class="smallcaps">The
-Little Review</span> is not the kind of newspaper of the arts I have in mind.
-<span class="smallcaps">The Little Review</span> is published only once a month. It is therefore not a
-newspaper, but a magazine. It is three times as good as <em>The Drama</em>, which
-is published only once a quarter. But my point is that we ought to have
-something four times as good as <span class="smallcaps">The Little Review</span>: in short, a weekly.
-It may be that <span class="smallcaps">The Little Review</span> has other failings than its infrequency.
-But why consider these lesser matters? <span class="smallcaps">The Little Review</span> has one virtue
-in addition to its eagerness. It is informal. Informality is the breath of
-life to journalism. Nobody can write anything the way people want him
-to unless he feels perfectly free to write the way he wants to. It is far
-more a matter of manners than a matter of truth. A journal which insists
-on formality almost never has any good writing in it. Good writing is
-nothing but the artistic expression of a personality. Scientifically speaking,
-it can be nothing else. Not that one must be thinking about expressing his
-personality in order to write well. The very point is that he must not be
-thinking about it. He has got to be thinking about what he has to say and
-nothing else. Take the use of “I” as an apparently trivial but actually significant
-example. If the paper for which he is writing regards the use of
-“I” as a breach of good form a man will find that one finger of his left
-hand is mysteriously drawn to the shift key and one finger of his right hand
-to the key between the “u” and the “o” in order to make an “I” all the time
-he is punching his typewriter. The least excusable riot of “I’s” I ever saw
-in print was in a journal of literary discussion which believes in the reality
-of that invention of the old-fashioned logician, “objective criticism,” and
-which regards the use of “I” by any but elderly gentlemen of the walnuts
-and wine school as impossible. I did it myself in the absence of the editor.
-In a paper which does not in the least object to the use of “I” writers soon
-forget all about it, and when they do that they begin to use it only when it
-is effective. It is the virtue of <span class="smallcaps">The Little Review</span> that it permits its contributors
-to use “I” as often as they please; that it permits them to make
-fools of themselves occasionally. This means that it is not impossible to
-write well for <span class="smallcaps">The Little Review</span>. I do not say that it is not possible to
-write badly for <span class="smallcaps">The Little Review</span>. Perfect freedom to be idiotic does not
-inevitably eliminate idiocy.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-But I have no more compliments for <span class="smallcaps">The Little Review</span>.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-<em>Poetry</em> is another matter. Miss Monroe’s magazine has printed some
-bad verse. But this is not, as its most envious critics imagine, its distinction.
-Every magazine prints bad verse. <em>Poetry</em> has printed poetry that nobody
-else dared to print. <em>Poetry</em> has boldly discussed the poetic controversy when
-everybody else hid behind language. <em>Poetry</em> introduced us to Rabindranath
-Tagore, to Vachel Lindsay, in a way, to Edgar Lee Masters. <em>Poetry</em>
-printed Ford Hueffer’s poem <em>On Heaven</em>. <em>Poetry</em> has heard of Remy de
-Gourmont and the <em>Mercure de France</em>—an incredible achievement for a Chicago
-<a id="page-3" class="pagenum" title="3"></a>
-literary journal. <em>Poetry</em> has done more than any other paper to furnish
-a meeting ground for writers in Chicago. If <em>Poetry</em> were concerned
-about novels it would not decide two or three years after intelligent people
-had discovered <em>Jean Christophe</em> that M. Romain Rolland is a successor to
-Tolstoi and, for the first time, print a few paragraphs about him. If <em>Poetry</em>
-were interested in psychology it would not ignore Sigmund Freud and Carl
-Jung. But <em>Poetry</em> is not interested in these things. Its great wealth is
-devoted only to poetry and it comes out only once a month.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-It is a pity. For the spirit of <em>Poetry</em> is nearer to the spirit of the old
-<em>Friday Literary Review</em> than anything else in Chicago. That is the spirit
-I like, that seems suited to the place and the occasion. But it needs a weekly
-paper of wide scope to express itself.
-</p>
-
-<div class="filler">
-<p class="noindent">
-A man is an artist to the extent to which he
-regards everything that inartistic people call
-“form” as the actual substance, as the “principal”
-thing.—<em>Nietzsche.</em>
-</p>
-
-</div>
-
-<div class="chapter">
-
-<h2 class="article" id="EPIGRAMS">
-<a id="page-4" class="pagenum" title="4"></a>
-Epigrams
-</h2>
-
-</div>
-
-<p class="aut">
-<span class="smallcaps">Richard Aldington</span>
-</p>
-
-<h3 class="section" id="BLUE">
-Blue
-</h3>
-
-<p class="subt">
-(<em>A Conceit</em>)
-</p>
-
-<div class="poem-container">
- <div class="poem">
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">The noon sky, a distended vast blue sail;</p>
- <p class="verse">The sea, a parquet of coloured wood;</p>
- <p class="verse">The rock-flowers, sinister indigo sponges;</p>
- <p class="verse">Lavender leaping up, scented sulphur flames;</p>
- <p class="verse">Little butterflies, resting shut-winged, fluttering,</p>
- <p class="verse">Eyelids winking over watchet eyes.</p>
- </div>
- </div>
-</div>
-
-<h3 class="section" id="THERETORTDISCOURTEOUS">
-The Retort Discourteous
-</h3>
-
-<div class="poem-container">
- <div class="poem">
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">They say we like London—O Hell!—</p>
- <p class="verse">They tell</p>
- <p class="verse">Us we shall never sell</p>
- <p class="verse">Our works (as if we cared).</p>
- <p class="verse">We’re “high brow” and long-haired</p>
- <p class="verse">Because we don’t</p>
- <p class="verse">Cheat and cant.</p>
- <p class="verse">We can’t rhythm; we can’t rhyme,</p>
- <p class="verse">Just because their rag-time</p>
- <p class="verse">Bores us.</p>
- </div>
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">These twangling lyrists are too pure for sense;</p>
- <p class="verse">So they chime,</p>
- <p class="verse">Rhyme</p>
- <p class="verse">And time,</p>
- <p class="verse">And Slime,</p>
- <p class="verse">All praise their virtuous impotence.</p>
- </div>
- </div>
-</div>
-
-<h3 class="section" id="CHRISTINE">
-<a id="page-5" class="pagenum" title="5"></a>
-Christine
-</h3>
-
-<div class="poem-container">
- <div class="poem">
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">I know a woman who is natural</p>
- <p class="verse">As any simple cannibal;</p>
- <p class="verse">This is a great misfortune, for her lot</p>
- <p class="verse">Is to reside with people who are not.</p>
- </div>
- </div>
-</div>
-
-<div class="chapter">
-
-<h2 class="article" id="EDUCATIONBYCHILDREN">
-Education by Children
-</h2>
-
-</div>
-
-<p class="aut">
-<span class="smallcaps">Will Levington Comfort</span>
-</p>
-
-<p class="first">
-<span class="firstchar">A</span> little girl of eleven was working here in the study through the long
-forenoon. In the midst of it, we each looked up and out through the
-barred window to the nearest elm, where a song-sparrow had just finished a
-perfect expression of the thing as he felt it. The song was more elaborate,
-perhaps, because the morning was lofty and glorious. Old Mother Nature
-smelled like a tea-rose that morning; one would know from that without
-the sense of direction that the wind was from the south. The song from
-the sunlight among the new elm leaves was so joyous that it choked us. It
-stood out from all the songs of the morning, because it was so near, and
-we had each been called by it from the pleasant mystery of our tasks.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-The little girl leaned toward the window. We heard the other bird
-answer from the distance, and then <em>ours</em> sang again—and again. We sipped
-the ecstacy in the hushes. Like a flicker the little bird was gone—a leaning
-forward on the branch, and then a blur ... and presently the words
-in the room:
-</p>
-
-<div class="poem-container">
- <div class="poem">
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">“... sang four songs and flew away.”</p>
- </div>
- </div>
-</div>
-
-<p class="noindent">
-It was a word-portrait, and told me much that I wanted. The number,
-of course, was not mental, clearly a part of the inner impression. However,
-no explanation will help if the art of the saying is not apparent. I
-told the thing as it is here, to a class later in the day, and a woman said:
-</p>
-
-<p>
-“Why, those six words make a Japanese poem.”
-</p>
-
-<p>
-I wonder if it is oriental? Rather I think it belongs especially to our
-new generation, the elect of which seems to know innately that an expression
-of truth in itself is a master-stroke. Somehow the prison-house has not
-closed altogether upon the elect of the new generation. There are lines in
-the new poetry that could come forth, and have their being, only from the
-<a id="page-6" class="pagenum" title="6"></a>
-inner giant that heretofore has been asleep except in the hearts of the rarest
-few whose mothers mated with Gods, merely using men for a symbol and
-the gift of matter....
-</p>
-
-<p>
-As I believe that the literary generation which has the floor in America
-today is the weakest and the bleakest that ever made semi-darkness of good
-sunlight, so I believe that the elect of the new generation contains individuals
-who are true heaven-borns; that they bring their own light with
-them and do not stand about stretched for reflection; that they refuse to
-allow the world-lie to shut the passages of power within them, between the
-zone of dreams and the more temperate zones of matter. They have refused
-to accept us—that is the splendid truth.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-The new generation does not argue with us. They are not a race of
-talkers. They do not accept what they find and begin to build upon that,
-as all but the masters have done heretofore. They are making even their
-own footings and abutments. And to such clean and sure beginnings magic
-strength has come. The fashions and the mannerisms which we knew and
-thought of as the heart of things; the artfulness of speech and written word,
-the age of advertising which twisted its lie into the very physical structure
-of our brains; the countless reserves and covers to hide our want of inspiration
-(for light cannot pass through a twisted passage)—all these, the new
-age has put away. It meets life face to face—and a more subtle and formidable
-devil is required for its workers than that which seduced us.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-The few great workmen heretofore have come up in the lie, and in
-midlife, the sutures closing—they were warned because they had labored like
-men. For their work’s sake and for their religion, which is the same to
-great men, they perceived that they must tear the lie out of their hearts,
-even if they bled to death. We call it their illumination, but it was a very
-deep and dark passage for them. <em>Except that ye become as little children</em>—that
-was all they knew, perhaps, but quite enough.... And the old
-masters invariably put their story down for us to read: Rodin, Puvis de
-Chavannes, Whitman, Balzac, Tolstoi—only to mention a little group of
-the nearer names—all have told the story. In their later years they told
-no other story.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-In the beginning they served men, as they fancied men wanted to be
-served, but after they confronted the lie of it, they dared to listen to reality
-from their own nature. They fought the fight for that cosmic simplicity
-which is the natural flowering of the child mind, and which modern education
-patronizingly dresses down at every appearance. The masters wrenched
-open with all their remaining strength the doors of the prison-house, and
-become more and more like children unto the end.
-</p>
-
-<hr class="tb" />
-
-<p class="noindent">
-... I do not ask a finer fate than to write about the <em>New Age</em>
-and <em>Children</em> and <em>Education by Children</em> for <span class="smallcaps">The Little Review</span>. I think
-of <em>you</em> as one of its throbbing centers. I can say it better than that—I
-<a id="page-7" class="pagenum" title="7"></a>
-think of you as a brown Arabian tent in which the world’s desire is just
-rousing from sleep. I would like to be one of the larks of the morning,
-whose song makes it impossible for you to doze again. I would not come
-too near—lest you find me old, the brandings of past upon me. Yet because
-of the years, I think I know what will be that “more formidable
-and subtle devil” waiting to make you forget your way.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-He is not a stranger. He is always near when people dare to be simple.
-There are many who call him a God still, but they do not use their eyes.
-You who see so directly must never forget that bad curve of him below
-the shoulders. Forever, the artists lying to themselves have tried to cover
-that bad curve of Pan as it sweeps down into the haunches of a goat. Pan
-is the first devil you meet when you reach that rectitude of heart which
-dares to be naked and unashamed.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-Whole races of artists have lied about Pan because they listened to the
-haunting music of his pipes. It calls sweetly, but does not satisfy. How
-many Pan has called—and left them sitting among the rocks with mindless
-eyes and hands that fiddle with emptiness!... Pan is so sad and level-eyed.
-He does not explain. He does not promise—too wise for that. He
-lures and enchants. He makes you pity him with a pity that is red as the
-lusts of flesh.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-You know that red in the breast! It is the red that drives away the
-dream of peace, yet the pity of him deludes you. You look again and again,
-and the curve of his back does not break the dream, as before. You think
-that because you pity him, you cannot fall; and all the pull of the ground
-tells you that your <em>very thought of falling</em> is a breath from the old shames—your
-dead, but as yet unburied heritage, from generations that learned the
-lie to itself.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-You touch the hair of the goat, and say it is Nature. But Pan is not
-Nature—a hybrid, half of man’s making, rather. Your eyes fall to the
-cloven hoof, but return to the level steady eye, smiling with such soft sadness
-that your heart quickens for him, and you listen, as he says: “All
-Gods have animal bodies and cloven hoofs, but I alone have dared to reveal
-mine.” ... “How brave you are!” Your heart answers, and the throb
-of him bewilders you with passion.... You who are so high must
-fall far, when you let go.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-... And many of you will want to fall. Pan has come to you
-because you <em>dare</em>.... You have murdered the old shames, you have
-torn down the ancient and mouldering churches. You do not require the
-blood, the thorn, the spikes, but I wonder if even you of a glorious generation,
-do not still require the Cross?... It is because you see so surely
-and are level-eyed that Pan is back in the world for you; and it is very
-strange but true that you must first meet Pan and pass him by, before you
-can enter into the woodlands with that valid God of Nature, whose back
-is a challenge to aspiration, and whose feet are of the purity of the saints.
-</p>
-
-<h3 class="section" id="TOM">
-<a id="page-8" class="pagenum" title="8"></a>
-To M.
-</h3>
-
-<div class="poem-container">
- <div class="poem">
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">Beautiful slave,</p>
- <p class="verse">I kiss your lips abloom—</p>
- <p class="verse">Do you not hear the surging voices</p>
- <p class="verse">Beyond the tomb</p>
- <p class="verse">Wherein you guard the candles of the dead?</p>
- </div>
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">Do you not hear the winds that crown</p>
- <p class="verse">The towers with clouds</p>
- <p class="verse">Dancing up and down,</p>
- <p class="verse">Fluttering your shrouds?</p>
- <p class="verse">Do you not hear the music of the dawn,</p>
- <p class="verse">The strong exultant voices swelling,</p>
- <p class="verse">Welling like the sweep of eager birds</p>
- <p class="verse">Beyond your somber dwelling</p>
- <p class="verse">Where each somber wall enclosing flings</p>
- <p class="verse">Back in your ear</p>
- <p class="verse">The moaning passion of dead things?</p>
- </div>
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">Beautiful slave,</p>
- <p class="verse">I kiss your parted lips abloom.</p>
- <p class="verse">O the splendor of the voids beyond</p>
- <p class="verse">The stifling tomb</p>
- <p class="verse">Wherein you keep your vigil by the dead.</p>
- <p class="verse">You are too weary-spirited</p>
- <p class="verse">To look at dawn, too tired-eyed to look upon the sun,</p>
- <p class="verse">Too weak to stand against the winds.</p>
- <p class="verse">What then? Farewell? No, let me—</p>
- <p class="verse">I will find the face of God</p>
- <p class="verse">With you among the worms.</p>
- </div>
- <div class="stanza attr">
- <p class="verse"><span class="smallcaps">Anon.</span></p>
- </div>
- </div>
-</div>
-
-<div class="chapter">
-
-<h2 class="article" id="NOTESOFACOSMOPOLITE">
-<a id="page-9" class="pagenum" title="9"></a>
-Notes of a Cosmopolite
-</h2>
-
-</div>
-
-<p class="aut">
-<span class="smallcaps">Alexander S. Kaun</span>
-</p>
-
-<div class="epi">
-<p>
-Mit dem Nationalhaß ist es ein eigenes Ding. Auf
-den untersten Stufen der Kultur wird man ihn immer
-am stärksten und heftigsten finden. Es giebt aber eine
-Stufe, wo er ganz verschwindet, wo man gewissermaßen
-über den Nationen steht und man ein Glück oder Weh
-seines Nachbarvolkes fühlt, als <a id="corr-2"></a>wärs dem eigenen Volk
-begegnet.—<em>Goethe.</em>
-</p>
-
-</div>
-
-<h3 class="section" id="UNCLESAMVSONKELMICHEL">
-<em>Uncle Sam vs. Onkel Michel</em>
-</h3>
-
-<p class="noindent">
-You remember the story of the king parading every morning before
-his meek subjects who expressed their great admiration for the sovereign’s
-gorgeous raiment, until a certain simpleton shouted: “Why, the king is
-nude!” I do not recall the end of the story, nor how the impudent sceptic
-was punished; but the part I do remember recurs to me every time
-some elemental power comes along and sweeps away the ephemeral figments
-from the body of mankind. Mars has more than once played the part of
-the rude simpleton; this god has neither tact nor manners; with his heavy
-boot he dots the i’s and compels us to name pigs pigs. His first victim falls
-the frail web of diplomatic niceties. Talleyrand’s cynicism about the function
-of the diplomat’s tongue to conceal truth has become bankrupt: who
-takes seriously nowadays the casuistry of the manicolored Books issued by
-the belligerents? Even Tartuffian England has had to doff the robe of
-idealism and to admit through the <em>Times</em> that it would have fought regardless
-of whether the neutrality of Belgium had been infringed upon or
-not. Good. One of the salutary results of the war (let us hope there will
-be more than one good result) has already been realized in the wholesale unmasquing
-of international politics; it will do immense good for mankind-Caliban
-to see his real image.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-The United States holds fast to its tradition of lagging behind the rest
-of the world. Messrs. Wilson and Bryan still employ the rusty weapon of
-“putting one over” through transparent bluff. “Too proud to fight” has
-become a classic <em>mot</em> the world over, to the sheer delight of European
-humorists and cartoonists after their wits had been exhausted over the
-memorable “Watchful Waiting.” The admirable English of the President
-has demonstrated its effectiveness time and again: nearly each eloquent
-Note has been responded to by a German torpedo. “America asks nothing
-for herself but what she has a right to ask for humanity itself”—what
-obsolete verbosity! Who is this Mme. Humanity in whose name we demand
-the right to send shells to Europe unhampered by the intended victims of
-those shells? An American weekly, outspokenly pro-British, has cynically
-<a id="page-10" class="pagenum" title="10"></a>
-summed up the situation: “The British government will not allow a German
-woman to obtain food from the United States with which to feed her children,
-in spite of the fact that it is buying rifles in the United States with
-which to kill her husband.” We can neither blame England for her practical
-purposes, nor reproach the United States for her desire to accommodate a
-good customer: business is business; but why these appeals in the name
-of humanity? Why the indignant outcries against Germany’s successful
-attempts to check the supply of ammunition for her enemies? The brutal
-Lusitania affair has merely proved the consistent and consequential policy
-of Germany; had she not carried out her threats she would have found
-herself in the ridiculous position of our government which seldom goes
-beyond threats. Talk about the murder of women and children in time
-of war! I heard of a polite Frenchman who hurled himself from the top
-story of the Masonic Temple and removed his hat to apologize before a
-lady on one of the balconies whose hat he happened to brush on his downward
-flight. Well, the Germans are not polite.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-What is the significance of Mr. Bryan’s resignation? Let us hope it
-is of no import; let us hope it may cause a change in tone, but not in action.
-For this country to be dragged into the whirlpool of the world war would
-be a more unpardonable folly than the puerile Vera Cruz affair. Our entrance
-into the war would change the actual situation of the fighting powers
-as much as the solemn declaration of war by the Liliputian San Marino
-has changed it; in the absence of an army deserving mention we could depend
-solely upon our navy which would be able to accomplish nothing more
-than joining in some calm bay the invincible fleet of the Ruler of the Waves
-and indulge in philosophical watchful waiting. On the other hand official
-war against Germany will doubtless produce internal friction of the gravest
-importance. I say <em>official</em>, for unofficially we have been on the side of the
-Allies for many months despite our theoretical neutrality. Think of the
-sentiments of the German soldiers when they are showered upon with shells
-bearing the labels of American manufacturers. Had we not supplied England
-and France with ammunition, who knows but that they would have
-found themselves in the same predicament as Russia, that is, in the position
-of an orchestra without instruments? When we shall have declared war
-against Germany we shall hardly be in power to harm her more than we
-have done heretofore; the Allies will do the killing, and we, the manufacturing.
-But the cat’s-paw-game is ungentlemanly, especially when it is done
-officially. To be sure, Mr. Wilson is a gentleman; hence our firm hope that
-he will do nothing more grave than enriching English literature with exemplary
-Notography.
-</p>
-
-<h3 class="section" id="VINCISTITEUTONIA">
-<em>Vincisti, Teutonia!</em>
-</h3>
-
-<p class="noindent">
-In his Frankfurt letters Heine wrote:
-</p>
-
-<div class="excerpt">
-<p class="noindent">
-I have never felt inclined to repose confidence in Prussia.
-I have rather been filled with anxiety as I gazed upon this Prussian
-eagle, and while others boasted of the bold way in which he glared
-<a id="page-11" class="pagenum" title="11"></a>
-at the sun my attention was drawn more and more to his claws.
-I never trusted this Prussian, this tall canting hero in gaiters, with
-his big paunch and his large jaws, and his corporal’s stick, which
-he dips in holy water before he lays it about your back. I am not
-overfond of this philosophical Christian militarism, this hodge-podge
-of thin beer, lies, and sand. I utterly loathe this Prussia,
-this stiff, hypocritical, sanctimonious Prussia, this Tartuffe among
-the nations.
-</p>
-
-</div>
-
-<p class="noindent">
-Can you blame Wilhelm for opposing the erection of a Heine monument
-in Düsseldorf? Those lines were written nearly four scores of years
-ago, a time sufficient for turning epithets obsolete. No longer is Prussia
-labeled hypocritical and sanctimonious; it is rather accused of rude frankness
-and insulting tactlessness. Yet the hatred for Prussia has not abated,
-but has been greatly enhanced. Heine died before the planting of the
-atrocious Sieges-Allee, that symbol of the triumphant pig; it is in the last
-forty years that the world has witnessed the development of Prussian forbearance,
-narrowness, machine-like preciseness, and soullessness. We have
-always preferred to distinguish Germany from Prussia; we have found
-delight in the thought that there is a Munich as well as a Berlin, a Nietzsche
-as well as a Haeckel, a Rheinhard as well as a Bernhardi.... Today we
-witness the hegemony of Prussia, a hegemony political as well as spiritual,
-for the great war has crowned with triumph not only the Krupp guns but
-also the Prussian idea of efficiency and preciseness. Our amazement at the
-achievements of the lightning-like army that has been almost invariably victorious
-during the eleven months of fighting and has held in its iron grip
-two hostile fronts, and our astonishment at the diabolical accomplishment
-of the submarines which have driven the English fleet to rest in North
-Scotland and have become the Flying Dutchmen of the seas, pale before our
-admiration for the wonderful spirit displayed by the German people within
-their country. Read their press; you find nothing bombastic or boasting,
-but calm reserve, set teeth, clenched fists, and deadly determination to fight
-for life, even if it be a fight against the whole world. “<em><a id="corr-4"></a>Weder Schlafpulver
-noch Tonics!</em>” admonishes Maximilian Harden against drumming up illusionary
-hopes. “<em>Stirb und werde</em>,” he closes up one of his terse articles in the
-most virile publication I know of, the <em>Zukunft</em>. Bernhardi’s alternative—a
-World Power or Downfall—is not any longer a mere jingo-rocket but an
-imperative axiom uniting all Germans in a desperate decision to preserve
-their national existence in face of a universal hatred and complete isolation.
-They are not geniuses, those perseverant Teutons; rather are they the reverse
-of geniuses. They do not rise above reality; they adapt themselves to
-facts. They refuse to be Quixotic knights; they prefer to emulate Mahomet
-who went to the mountain when the mountain declined to go unto him; not
-to ride on the back of conditions and circumstances, but to hold tight their
-tail and be dragged after them. Herein lies the Teutonic victory, the victory
-of Blond Beast over Superman, the triumph of mediocrity over uniqueness,
-of fact over idea, of efficiency over idealism, of state over individual.
-</p>
-
-<h3 class="section" id="THEPROPHECYOFRIMBAUD">
-<a id="page-12" class="pagenum" title="12"></a>
-<em>The Prophecy of Rimbaud</em>
-</h3>
-
-<p class="noindent">
-Arthur Rimbaud, the close friend of Verlaine, the “ruffian,” according
-to Mr. Powys (this I shall never forgive him), was capable not only of
-perceiving the color of vowels but also of foreseeing the political situation
-forty-five years ahead. <em>L’Eclaireur de Nice</em> prints an interesting statement
-made by Rimbaud in 1871, a few lines of which I shall reluctantly attempt
-to translate:
-</p>
-
-<div class="excerpt">
-<p class="noindent">
-The Germans are by far our inferiors, for the vainer a people
-is the closer it approaches decadence—history proves it.... They
-are our inferiors because victory has besotted them. Our chauvinism
-has received a blow from which it will not recover. The defeat
-has freed us from stupid prejudice, has transformed and saved us.
-Yes, they will pay dearly for their victory! In fifty years envious
-and restless Europe will prepare for them a bold unexpected stroke,
-and will whip them. I can foresee the administration of iron and
-folly that will stifle German society and German thought, in the
-end to be crushed by some coalition!
-</p>
-
-</div>
-
-<h3 class="section" id="GEORGEBRANDESNEUTRALITY">
-<em>George Brandes’ Neutrality</em>
-</h3>
-
-<p class="noindent">
-There has been a good deal of misapprehension concerning Brandes’
-attitude towards the war. His refusal to answer the interpellation of his
-friend Clemenceau, his condemnation of the Russian policy in Finland and
-of the cowardly and treacherous treatment of the Jews by the Poles, have
-given cause for suspecting him of pro-German sentiments. In a recent interview
-with the correspondent of the Paris <em>Journal</em> the Danish critic avows his
-full sympathy for France. Although his statement is reserved and plausibly
-neutral, one easily discerns his dislike for Germany, in whose <em>Deutschland
-über Alles</em> motto he sees a Jesuitic excuse for all means that may lead to
-her end. “German brutality is not instinctive; it is a scientific one, a theory.”
-The cause of the war he epitomizes in the <em>mot</em> of Pascal: “Pourquoi voulez
-vous tuer cette homme?”—“Il est mon ennemi: il habite de l’autre côté du
-fleuve.” Brandes expresses himself more frankly in the Danish <em>Tilskueren</em>,
-where he interprets the war as the struggle between liberalism and personal
-government, between civil spirit and militarism, between a people (England)
-which accords others commercial freedom and self-government and a country
-overridden with economic protectionism, junkers, and bureaucracy.
-“England has an independent press and a government which voices the
-parliament and public opinion; in Germany the press is semi-official, the
-government is responsible solely before the Kaiser, and the Kaiser only
-before God.”
-</p>
-
-<h3 class="section" id="GERMANOPHOBIAADABSURDUM">
-<em>Germanophobia ad Absurdum</em>
-</h3>
-
-<p class="noindent">
-The French Immortals, too old for actual participation in the war,
-have found an outlet for their patriotism in shedding red ink of ridiculous
-<a id="page-13" class="pagenum" title="13"></a>
-chauvinism. It has become a matter of course to meet a name of some
-“Membre de l’Academie” signed under such outbursts as this: “Nothing
-of the Barbarians, nothing of their literature, of their music, of their art,
-of their science, nothing of their culture, of anything Made in Germany!”
-Another Academic gives vent to his ire against those Frenchmen who still
-find certain German things worth admiring, and he vehemently advocates the
-prohibition of the Barbarian music and art “by law, by persuasion, by force,
-by violence if necessary!” The octogenarian Saint-Saens has written a
-series of articles venomously attacking Wagnerian music, labeling traitor
-any Frenchman who favors the art of the arch-foe of his country. Even
-the semi-official <em>Le Temps</em> was shocked by the violent tone of the old composer;
-it quoted Saint-Saens’s articles of the year 1876, in which the author
-appeared to be an ardent Wagnerite and appealed to his compatriots for
-broad-mindedness and toleration for “the greatest genius of our times.”
-As a substitute for the atrocious Wagner Saint-Saens recommends the
-return to Haydn and Mozart, even to Meyerbeer; Schumann’s Lieder he
-would ban for Gounod and Massenet; he favors even Dussek, for he is
-“only a Bohemian.” Patriotic as he is, he refuses to sanction the modern
-French composers, since Debussy, Fauré, D’Indy, and the rest are Wagnerians
-in his estimation. It is a case of “senile reactionarism,” as the <em>Mercure
-de France</em> rightly observes.
-</p>
-
-<h3 class="section" id="COMPARATIVEMORALE">
-<em>Comparative Morale</em>
-</h3>
-
-<p class="noindent">
-It is very interesting to compare the barometer of public morale in
-the European capitals, judging from their amusements. Here is one day’s
-bill taken from the London <em>Daily News</em>, the Petrograd <em>Ryech</em>, the <em>Berliner
-Tageblatt</em>, the Vienna <em>Neue Freie Presse</em>, and the Paris <em>Figaro</em>; I have
-omitted the movies, which bear for the most part ultra-patriotic titles, and
-the vaudevilles. The London bill is quite poor: <em>Veronique</em>, a comic opera;
-<em>Mme. Sans-Gene</em>; Gaby Deslys in <em>Rosy Rapture</em>, presented by Charles
-Frohman; <em>The Girl in the Taxi</em>; Frondai’s <em>The Right to Kill</em>; <em>For England,
-Home, and Beauty</em>; and our old friends, the Irish Players, in the Little
-Theatre. Still more meager is the Paris bill: outside of <em>Cavalleria Rusticana</em>
-(the chairman of the Walt Whitman dinner pronounces it Keyveleeria
-Rohstikeyna), it abounds with such tit-bits as <em>La Petite Fonctionaire</em>,
-<em>Mam’zelle Boy Scout</em>, <em>Mariage de Pepeta</em>, and so forth. Berlin has on that
-day three operas—<em>Don Juan</em>, <em>Elektra</em>, <em>Lohengrin</em>; three dramas—<em>Faust</em>,
-<em>Peer Gynt</em>, <em>Schluck und Jau</em> (the last one in Rheinhard’s Deutsches Theater),
-not counting the minor affairs. Vienna’s bill took away my breath: a Schönberg-Mahler
-Abend, a Schubert-Strauss Abend, a Beethoven-Brahms Abend,
-a Brahms Kammermusik Abend, a concert under Sevcik; <em>Carmen</em>; a play by
-Fulda after Molière; Ibsen’s <em>Master Builder</em> and <em>Ghosts</em>; Kleist’s <em>Kätchen
-von Heilbronn</em>. As for the Petrograd bill, I had better not say what emotions
-it has aroused in me. Judge for yourselves: five operas—<em>Traviata</em>,
-<em>Faust</em>, <em>Pagliacci</em>, <em>Ruslan and Ludmilla</em>, <em>Eugene Onegin</em>; a ballet by Mlle.
-<a id="page-14" class="pagenum" title="14"></a>
-Krzesinsky; two ballets by Fokin’s company; plays by Ibsen, Mirbo, Andreyev,
-beside <em>Potash and Perlmutter</em> and other importations; an exhibition of
-paintings by Lancerè and Dobuzhinsky; a Poeso-Evening by Futurist poets
-with Igor Severyanin as leader; an Evening of Poetry under K. R. (Grand
-Duke Konstantine, whose play <em>King of the Jews</em> recently appeared in an
-English translation); public lectures on <em>The Blue Bird</em> in Our Days, on
-Dostoevsky and Nietzsche.... Allow me to stop. Are you inclined
-to draw conclusions and comparisons between the stage of war-ridden
-Europe and that of peacefully complacent America? I beg to be excused.
-</p>
-
-<h3 class="section" id="EDMONDROSTANDONTHELUSITANIA">
-<em>Edmond Rostand on the Lusitania</em>
-</h3>
-
-<p class="noindent">
-Rostand is a member of the Academy; perhaps this affliction is responsible
-for his growing hoarseness as a Chantecler. Yet as of all recent war
-poems his is the best, I feel justified in citing it:
-</p>
-
-<div class="excerpt" lang="fr">
-<h4 class="excerpt" id="LESCONDOLYYANCES">
-Les Condoléances
-</h4>
-
- <div class="poem-container">
- <div class="poem">
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">Bernstorff, pour aller à la Maison Blanche,</p>
- <p class="verse1">S’est mis tout en noir.</p>
- <p class="verse">(L’onde a pris, là-bas, la dernière planche</p>
- <p class="verse1">Dans son entonnoir.)</p>
- </div>
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">Il entre, affigé, refuse une chaise</p>
- <p class="verse1">D’un geste contrit.</p>
- <p class="verse">(Des femmes, là-bas, heurtent la falaise</p>
- <p class="verse1">De leur sein meurtri.)</p>
- </div>
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">Il tousse une toux de condoléance.</p>
- <p class="verse1">Il s’essuie un oeil.</p>
- <p class="verse">(Les enfants noyés tournent en silence</p>
- <p class="verse1">Autour d’un écueil.)</p>
- </div>
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">Il se mouche. Il dit—son mouchoir embaume:—</p>
- <p class="verse1">“Je viens de la part</p>
- <p class="verse">De Sa Majesté l’Empereur Guillaume</p>
- <p class="verse1">Vous dire la part....”</p>
- </div>
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">Derrière Wilson, dont on aime à croire</p>
- <p class="verse1">Que tout le sang bout,</p>
- <p class="verse">Lincoln, la Vertu,—Washington, la Gloire,</p>
- <p class="verse1">Se tiennent débout.</p>
- </div>
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">Le comte Bernstorff ne peut les connaître.</p>
- <p class="verse1">Il ne les voit pas.</p>
- <p class="verse">S’il pouvait les voir, il aurait peut-être</p>
- <p class="verse1">Reculé d’un pas.</p>
- </div>
- <div class="stanza">
-<a id="page-15" class="pagenum" title="15"></a>
- <p class="verse">“... Vous dire la part....”—O mornes allures!</p>
- <p class="verse1">Touchant trémolo!</p>
- <p class="verse">(Les pêcheurs, là-bas, voient des chevelures</p>
- <p class="verse1">Ouvertes sur l’eau.)</p>
- </div>
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">“... Vous dire la part que nous daignons prendre</p>
- <p class="verse1">A votre malheur.”</p>
- <p class="verse">(Les flots verts ont-ils d’autres morts à rendre?</p>
- <p class="verse1">Demandez-le-leur!)</p>
- </div>
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">Bernstorff pleure et dit: “J’ai su ce naufrage</p>
- <p class="verse1">Et je suis venu.</p>
- <p class="verse">Ils n’ont pas souffert. Ayez du courage.</p>
- <p class="verse1">Ils en ont bien eu.</p>
- </div>
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse"><a id="stanza1"></a>“Je n’insiste pas. Je suis venu vite,</p>
- <p class="verse1">Et puis je m’en vais.</p>
- <p class="verse">Mais vous sentez bien que, cette visite,</p>
- <p class="verse1">Je vous la devais.</p>
- <p class="verse1"></p>
- </div>
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">“Nous plaignons le sort des enfants, des femmes,</p>
- <p class="verse1">Cela va de soi....</p>
- <p class="verse">Ah si vous voyiez tous les télégrammes</p>
- <p class="verse1">Que Tirpitz reçoit!</p>
- </div>
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">“C’est un grand succès pour notre marine.</p>
- <p class="verse1">Je suis désolé.</p>
- <p class="verse">Veuillez constater que sur ma marine</p>
- <p class="verse1">Ce pleur a coulé.</p>
- </div>
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">“Un pleur magnifique, en cristal de roche.</p>
- <p class="verse1">Voyez, c’est exact.</p>
- <p class="verse">Je ne comprends pas que l’on nous reproche</p>
- <p class="verse1">De manquer de tact.</p>
- </div>
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">“Berlin se pavoise.—Hélas!—On décore</p>
- <p class="verse1">Le moindre faubourg.</p>
- <p class="verse">Ah je le disais tout à l’heure encore</p>
- <p class="verse1">A Monsieur Dernburg.</p>
- </div>
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse"><a id="stanza2"></a>“Si notre avenir—souffrez que je cache</p>
- <p class="verse1">Quelques pleurs amers—</p>
- <p class="verse">N’est plus sur les mers, il faut que l’on sache</p>
- <p class="verse1"><a id="line"></a>Qu’il est sous les mers.</p>
- </div>
- <div class="stanza">
-<a id="page-16" class="pagenum" title="16"></a>
- <p class="verse">“Ceux qui malgré nous voyagent sur l’onde</p>
- <p class="verse1">Sont les agresseurs.”</p>
- <p class="verse">(Là-bas, l’eau rapporte une vierge blonde</p>
- <p class="verse1">Avec ses trois soeurs.)</p>
- </div>
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">“Les <em>Tipperary</em> que chez vous on siffle</p>
- <p class="verse1">Nous ont agacés,</p>
- <p class="verse">Et quand Roosevelt joue avec son rifle</p>
- <p class="verse1">Nous disons: Assez.</p>
- </div>
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">“Qu’allaient donc chercher en cette aventure</p>
- <p class="verse1">Vos Princes de l’Or?”</p>
- <p class="verse">(Là-bas, pour avoir donné sa ceinture,</p>
- <p class="verse1">Vanderbilt est mort.)</p>
- </div>
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">“Il ne faudra pas que ça recommence.</p>
- <p class="verse1">Ils sont bien punis.</p>
- <p class="verse">Veuillez exprimer ma douleur immense</p>
- <p class="verse1">Aux Etats-Unis.”</p>
- </div>
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">(Il se fait, là-bas, d’horribles trouvailles</p>
- <p class="verse1">Qu’on met sous un drap.)</p>
- <p class="verse">Et Bernstorff reprend: “Pour les funérailles,</p>
- <p class="verse1">On me préviendra.</p>
- </div>
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">“Ce désastre a fait, en Bourse allemande,</p>
- <p class="verse1">Monteur les valeurs.</p>
- <p class="verse">On me préviendra pour que je commande</p>
- <p class="verse1">Les plus belles fleurs.”</p>
- </div>
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">Et comme Wilson dit, d’une voix sombre:</p>
- <p class="verse1">“Nous verrons demain,”</p>
- <p class="verse">Et sent Washington et Lincoln, dans l’ombre,</p>
- <p class="verse1">Lui prendre la main,</p>
- </div>
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">Bernstorff, en pleurant, regagne la porte ...</p>
- <p class="verse1">(Il y a, là-bas,</p>
- <p class="verse">Deux petits enfants qu’une femme morte</p>
- <p class="verse1">Serre entre ses bras.)</p>
- </div>
- </div>
- </div>
-</div>
-
-<h3 class="section" id="THEDOWNFALLOFTHEINTERNATIONAL">
-<em>The Downfall of the International</em>
-</h3>
-
-<p class="noindent">
-Another result of the war, already sufficiently crystallized, is the bankruptcy
-of the illusionary spirit of internationalism. In his remarkable book<a class="fnote" href="#footnote-1" id="fnote-1">[1]</a>
-Mr. Walling has taken the trouble of quoting resolutions of national sections
-of the Socialist party the world over, before and during the war.
-<a id="page-17" class="pagenum" title="17"></a>
-With a few significant exceptions the Socialists of the warring nations
-have had to exchange their erstwhile slogan “Workers of the world, be
-united!” for the less noble motto “Defend your country!” Even when the
-European armies had already been mobilized the Socialists held protest meetings
-at which they threatened to call a general strike if war should be
-declared. But with the first cannon boom the theoretic brotherhood evaporated
-and gave way to patriotic sentiments. The workers declared that
-they were Germans, Russians, etc., first, then Socialists. True, in the beginning
-the German Socialists claimed that they were fighting against the
-reactionary Czardom, while the Socialists of the Allies tried to justify the
-international carnage as the struggle against Prussian militarism; but ultimately
-such clear-headed thinkers as Kautsky and some of the English
-Socialists came to see the futility of endeavoring to discover idealistic
-causes for the mutual slaughter. The country is in danger, consequently
-we must defend it, regardless of the rightness or wrongness of its policy—this
-is the prevailing sentiment among the workers. The grandiose structure
-of the International has fallen in ruins; the “scientific” theories and
-calculations of the Marxians have received a blow by the underestimated
-imponderabilia, that of primitive patriotism. On the other hand, “applied”
-Socialism has won a considerable victory with the development of the war.
-Nearly all the belligerent countries have adopted State-Socialism in such
-measures as the nationalization of railways and means of production. The
-capitalists are evidently shrewd enough to utilize the doctrines of their
-opponents in time of need and thus to neutralize the sting of that very
-opposition. What will become of Socialism when at least its minimum-program
-is accepted and put into practice by the <em>capitalistic</em> order without
-the aid of a social revolution, the inevitability of which has been scientifically
-proven by Marx and his disciples?
-</p>
-
-<hr class="footnote" />
-
-<p class="footnote">
-<a class="footnote" href="#fnote-1" id="footnote-1">[1]</a> <em>The Socialists and the War, by William English Walling. New York:
-Henry Holt and Company.</em>
-</p>
-
-<div class="filler">
-<p class="noindent">
-Artists should not see things as they are; they
-should see them fuller, simpler, stronger: to this
-end, however, a kind of youthfulness, of vernality,
-a sort of perpetual elation, must be peculiar to
-their lives.—<em>Nietzsche.</em>
-</p>
-
-</div>
-
-<div class="chapter">
-
-<h2 class="article" id="THEARTISTINLIFE">
-<a id="page-18" class="pagenum" title="18"></a>
-“The Artist in Life”
-</h2>
-
-</div>
-
-<p class="aut">
-<span class="smallcaps">Margaret C. Anderson</span>
-</p>
-
-<p class="first">
-<span class="firstchar"><span class="prefirstchar">“</span>P</span><span class="postfirstchar">eople”</span> has become to me a word that—crawls. If you have ever
-heard Mr. Bryan pronounce it you will know what I mean. He
-says it “peo-pul”....
-</p>
-
-<p>
-And that is the way they act. Sometimes I see peo-pul in this kind of
-picture: a cosmic squirming mass of black caterpillars moving first one
-way and then the other, slowly and vaguely, not like measuring worms who
-cover the ground or like ants who have their definite business, but heavily,
-blindly, in the stunned manner peculiar to caterpillar organisms. They peer
-and poke and nod and ponder and creep and crawl and scramble and grow
-dizzy and turn around and around, wondering whether they shall go on
-the way they started or go back the way they came or refuse to go at all.
-Once in a hundred years one of the caterpillars breaks his skin and flies
-away—a butterfly through the unfriendly air. Then the black mass writhes
-in protest and arranges that the next butterfly shall have his wings well
-clipped. I know my metaphor is not scientifically intact, but what does it
-matter? It satisfies my impulse—which is simply to call names. So I might
-as well say “People are caterpillars” and be done with it.
-</p>
-
-<hr class="tb" />
-
-<p class="noindent">
-I have a painter artist friend who says that to talk about the artist in life
-is simply to repeat one of those silly phrases that mean nothing. But it means
-entirely too much, I think—which is the reason there are so many of the
-species in evidence: about two in a million perhaps—and I know that is
-far too optimistic. That would mean some four or five thousand people in
-the living world who have nothing in common with caterpillars. The count
-is too high!
-</p>
-
-<p>
-For really there are no artists among us. Living picturesquely, artistically,
-has nothing to do with being an artist in life; and even living with
-the poise that marks a good piece of art hasn’t necessarily anything to do
-with it. If you ask me to choose a type of the real artist in life I shall say
-Nietzsche rather than Goethe. For the artist in life has inevitably to do
-with prophecy rather than with holding up the mirror; and that means
-chiefly—to have strength!
-</p>
-
-<p>
-Now where are the strong people? Of course “strength” is an indefinite
-term. Sometimes it seems a matter of dominating the superfluous; sometimes
-it seems the power “to meet fate with an equal gaze”; and sometimes
-the resource or the daring to push one’s fate to a farther goal. But
-these are beginnings! If you pick up what is known as your soul from a
-<a id="page-19" class="pagenum" title="19"></a>
-wreckage and make it march on you think you are very strong. If you
-manage to make it march with pride and joy you think you are a Superman.
-But this is easily within the effort of Everyman. I am talking of artists
-now and of the radiant possibility that such beings may develop in this uninspired
-land; and, in these terms, to be strong is to help create the farther
-goal!
-</p>
-
-<p>
-It’s disgusting to realize that the people we know are not this sort.
-Take any twenty of your friends and classify them briefly as types. Perhaps
-there are five who have “personality”: but one of them has no energy,
-one no will, one no brains, one no imagination, and the other no “spirit;”
-there are five who have “intellect”: one of them has no “character,” one
-no strength, one can’t see or hear or feel, one sees so inclusively that he has
-no goal, and one sees so “straight” that he misses the road on both sides;
-there are five who have a capacity for art: one is lazy, one is ignorant, one
-is afraid, one is vain, one has a lie in him; and there are five who have a
-capacity for living: one can’t think, one can’t work, one can’t persevere, one
-can’t stand alone, one wastes his gift on others and never realizes himself.
-You can work out such combinations <em>ad infinitum</em> and you can excuse them to
-the same distance by calling it all a matter of having the defects of your
-qualities. Why not call it a matter of having the complacency of your
-defects?
-</p>
-
-<p>
-If you’ve not got imagination you can’t help it; if you’ve not got
-strength you can get it. It won’t make you an artist but it will make it
-impossible for you to be confused with the caterpillars. If you’ve got a
-vision—an Idea—and can find the strength to fly toward it you’ll be an
-artist in life. This is not to confuse the artist with the prophet. You can’t
-very well do that because the terms are so interdependent. There has never
-been an artist without the prophet in him, and there has never been a
-prophet who was not an artist. It’s a different thing if you’re talking about
-priests or about inferior artists. And then of course you have to remember
-that there are no such things as inferior artists. Priest and demagogue
-are the names for those who fail as prophets or as artists.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-And what is the use of such a harangue? There is very little use.
-People won’t be artists. Peo-pul don’t change. But the individual changes,
-and that is the hope. Individuals are persons who can stand alone. There
-ought to be Individuals coming out of a generation brought up on Nietzsche.
-Such an upbringing has taught us at least two things: first that he who
-goes forward goes alone, and second that it is weakness rather than nobility
-to succumb to the caterpillars. Yes, and something else: that it is
-from superabundance rather than from hunger that creation comes. We
-start out fortified with all this. We don’t need to wrestle with our gods
-every time the old laws threaten to submerge us; our universe doesn’t
-totter when the caterpillars groan that we will be lonely if we go alone or
-hurt if we are misunderstood or tragic if we don’t compromise. We don’t
-mind these things.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-<a id="page-20" class="pagenum" title="20"></a>
-It really all comes to one end: Life for Art’s sake. We believe in that
-because it is the only way to get more Life—a finer quality, a higher vibration.
-This bigger concept doesn’t mean merely more Beauty. It means
-more Intensity. In short, it means the <em>New</em> Hellenism. And that is a step
-beyond the old Greek ideal of proportion and moderation. It pushes forward
-to the superabundance that dares abandonment.
-</p>
-
-<div class="filler">
-<p class="noindent">
-Art and nothing else! Art is the great means
-of making life possible, the great seducer to life,
-the great stimulus of life.—<em>Nietzsche.</em>
-</p>
-
-</div>
-
-<div class="filler">
-<p class="noindent">
-The tree that grows to a great height wins to
-solitude even in a forest; its highest outshoots
-find no companions save the winds and the stars.—<em>Frank
-Harris.</em>
-</p>
-
-</div>
-
-<div class="chapter">
-
-<h2 class="article" id="POEMS">
-<a id="page-21" class="pagenum" title="21"></a>
-Poems
-</h2>
-
-</div>
-
-<p class="aut">
-<span class="smallcaps">Clara Shanafelt</span>
-</p>
-
-<h3 class="section" id="FANTASTIC">
-Fantastic
-</h3>
-
-<div class="poem-container">
- <div class="poem">
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">I have no thoughts, no more desires—</p>
- <p class="verse">It is green and gray like a garden</p>
- <p class="verse">Stirred by apple-scented wind,</p>
- <p class="verse">Quick with the sense of cool and silver joys</p>
- <p class="verse">That come in a rainy dance</p>
- <p class="verse">When soft hands of clouds have pushed away</p>
- <p class="verse">The round red stupid face of the sun.</p>
- </div>
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">In one day, I think, the wind</p>
- <p class="verse">Will not have had his will of the gleaming rain—</p>
- <p class="verse">They run about with tossed hair,</p>
- <p class="verse">The garden is silvered with their pleasure,</p>
- <p class="verse">Cool and sweet, shining</p>
- <p class="verse">As with arch laughter a beloved face.</p>
- <p class="verse">The musing pool</p>
- <p class="verse">Shattered in glancing flight by a sudden wing—</p>
- <p class="verse">This, which no words can name,</p>
- <p class="verse">This is my heart’s delight,</p>
- <p class="verse">Winging I know not whither;</p>
- <p class="verse">It has no measure.</p>
- </div>
- </div>
-</div>
-
-<h3 class="section" id="INTERLUDE">
-Interlude
-</h3>
-
-<div class="poem-container">
- <div class="poem">
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">To sink deeper yet</p>
- <p class="verse">In the green flood of twilight—</p>
- <p class="verse">I grope for the rich chord of the full darkness</p>
- <p class="verse">That drowns the piping cries of light,</p>
- <p class="verse">For silence fretted by cadent rain</p>
- <p class="verse">And the monotonous cries of insects</p>
- <p class="verse">That lull the tortured sense in drowsy veils.</p>
- <p class="verse">I am weary of lights dancing</p>
- <p class="verse">In limpid streets,</p>
- <p class="verse">Lemon and gold and amethyst,</p>
- <p class="verse">The jewelled laughter and the scent,</p>
- <p class="verse">Weaving of uneasy colors.</p>
- </div>
- <div class="stanza">
-<a id="page-22" class="pagenum" title="22"></a>
- <p class="verse">I would rest now in green and gray</p>
- <p class="verse">Of an abandoned garden</p>
- <p class="verse">Where no more flowers are,</p>
- <p class="verse">Only grass and crabbed trees,</p>
- <p class="verse">Night—</p>
- <p class="verse">And the bitter aroma of herbs</p>
- <p class="verse">Trod out by myriad, whispering feet of the rain—</p>
- <p class="verse">Night and no stars.</p>
- </div>
- </div>
-</div>
-
-<div class="chapter">
-
-<h2 class="article" id="SLOBBERDOMSNEERDOMANDBOREDOM">
-Slobberdom, Sneerdom, and Boredom
-</h2>
-
-</div>
-
-<p class="aut">
-<span class="smallcaps">Ben Hecht</span>
-</p>
-
-<p class="first">
-<span class="firstchar">I</span><span class="postfirstchar">t</span> is the custom of inspired opinion to pay little attention to mediocrities,
-to dismiss them with a shudder. I understand <span class="smallcaps">The Little Review</span> to be
-an embodiment of inspired opinion, an abandonment of mental emotion—Youth.
-Like some of the people who read it and even some of them who
-write for it, it flies at the throats of contemporary Chimeras and leaps upon
-the Pegasi of the moment. It slashes and roars, hates and loves. It never
-considers the right and never considers the wrong. It does not endeavor
-to be just and fair. This is at once a great crime and a great virtue. It is
-criminal to be unjust and it is virtuous to be truthful. To me <span class="smallcaps">The Little
-Review</span> is always both. I sympathize with its spirit and share it. Leave
-justice to the greybeards. Why should a soul which has the capacity for
-inspiration quibble in prejudices?
-</p>
-
-<p>
-I think, however, that shuddering at mediocrities is a grave error. Evil
-is the monopoly of the few as well as genius. Hating and loving them are
-luxuries. Therefore it is that this writing is not composed in the luxurious
-spirit of <span class="smallcaps">The Little Review</span>. My opinion is not an inspired one, my emotion
-is not an abandonment. I write with a photographic dispassion of the
-three great divisions of mediocrity—Slobberdom, Sneerdom, and Boredom.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-Slobbering is not an art and it is not an evil. It is not even important
-except as an object of analysis. True, if encountered in print or in the flesh
-it is likely to have a nauseous effect upon sensitive souls; but then one can
-easily avoid encountering it. One does not, for instance, have to attend a
-Walt Whitman dinner. When one hears that a Walt Whitman dinner is to
-be given on a certain night in the Grand Pacific Hotel all one has to do to
-remain happy and free from suffering is to stay at home. My friend K—— and
-I went to a Walt Whitman dinner because we were young and curious and
-hungry, and because Walt, after all, is a great artist.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-<a id="page-23" class="pagenum" title="23"></a>
-The dinner proved to be like most dinners of its kind—a glorious opportunity
-for saccharine drool at the expense of a great name. Appreciation
-and love of an artist—a poet—are highly commendable qualities if practiced
-in private, if put into proper print. It is the same as with love of a woman.
-But to stand up in a public place, to shed tears of ecstasy, wave one’s arms,
-pull at one’s hair and strike at one’s bosom—these are, as they always have
-been, the slobbering methods of egotistical mediocrity. It is simply a prostituting
-of the emotions.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-Mediocrity is not insensible to art. It is very probable that the Rev.
-Preston Bradley, who insists he is a reformed clergyman, really likes Walt
-Whitman, feels thrilled with the reading of him. But the joy the Rev. Bradley
-derives from reading Walt in his library is not enough for him. In fact,
-it is not a joy at all. It is an irritation. Give the Rev. Bradley an opportunity
-to show what he thinks of Walt Whitman, to stand up on his feet
-before three hundred and fifty sympathetic souls and prove what a keen
-sense of taste and an advanced instinct of culture he (Rev. Bradley) possesses
-by yawping:
-</p>
-
-<p>
-“I love Whitman, I adore Whitman. He is this to me. He is that to
-me—”
-</p>
-
-<p>
-—then and not till then does the Rev. Bradley feel the real joy of appreciation
-for “good old, dear old, wonderful old Walt.” Give the Rev. Bradley
-a decent chance to platitudinize, attitudinize, and blatitudinize, and the love
-he bears old Walt oozes from him in dewy sighs and briny words.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-Do not imagine that I am violently indignant with the Rev. Bradley, or
-wish the reader to be, for his insincerity. It is indeed one of his best qualities.
-By being insincere, by having no actual ground for his ecstacy, the
-Rev. Bradley must, perforce, pay a great deal of attention to what he says.
-He is free to pick out the best words, the best pose, the most arresting and
-perhaps enlightening point of view. I say he is free to do this, but of course
-he doesn’t. It is not the fault of his insincerity, however. If the Rev. Bradley
-were an artist he would profit by it and be great. But why all this talk about
-such a person as the Rev. Bradley? Surely not because he is deserving of
-careful censure. The reason is that there were at least three hundred male
-and female Rev. Bradleys listening to him, slobbering in silence.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-And now the next division of mediocrity. Mr. Clarence Darrow was
-another of the talkers. Mr. Darrow sneered. Mr. Darrow sneered at Homer,
-Euripides, Shakespeare, Dante, Landor, Whittier, Tennyson, Milton, Kipling,
-and Heine because they didn’t write as good old Walt wrote. Because they
-wore fetters in their art and insisted on making the last word in the first
-line rhyme with the last word in the third line. They were weak, ignoble
-creatures, these copybook writers, said Mr. Darrow; they insisted on using
-a singular subject with a singular predicate and believed that a violation of
-such procedure was a sin. One of the things you learn in your school text
-books on physics is that a gentleman by imposing a pencil-point before his
-eye can obscure his vision of the Colossus. The idea seems apropos in the
-<a id="page-24" class="pagenum" title="24"></a>
-case of Mr. Darrow. Mr. Darrow by imposing his soul upon the figures
-of the world’s big men can obscure them entirely for himself and evidently
-his sympathizers. After he had concluded three hundred and fifty persons,
-every one present so far as I could see except my friend K—— and myself,
-stood up and sneered with Mr. Darrow. They passed him a rising resolution
-of love and cheered him three times, omitting, however, the customary
-tiger.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-The greatest trouble with Mr. Darrow was his sincerity. He didn’t
-slobber any more than a public speaker has to in order to have a public to
-speak to. But his sneers were deep and earnest. They were entirely intellectual,
-the intellectual essence of mediocrity. All of us sneer, of course. The
-sneer is the one great American characteristic. When I told a man in the
-office in which I work that I had attended a Walt Whitman dinner he sneered
-at me.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-“Fourflushers,” he said. “I can’t see how you put that highbrow stuff
-over. A lot of long-haired, flea-ridden radicals, ain’t I right? I wouldn’t
-let my wife associate with a bunch like that.”
-</p>
-
-<p>
-(This is my office friend’s highest conception of manly virtue,—a thoroughly
-American one,—being careful of whom his wife associates with.)
-</p>
-
-<p>
-Then my office friend went on to assert that Whitman was undoubtedly
-an immoral, not to say degenerate, party, that he “got by with his stuff because
-it was raw,” and that everybody who professed any admiration for him
-was a suspicious character and one he “would think twice about before inviting
-to his home” (where his wife is).
-</p>
-
-<p>
-It is rather a complicated matter, this sneering business; and after attending
-a Walt Whitman dinner I don’t know whose sneers disgust me more,
-Mr. Darrow’s or my friend’s. They are both, however, identical in spirit,
-the spirit of mediocrity and sincerity when sincerity becomes, as it most
-always does, the cloak for ignorant convictions and bigoted fanaticism.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-And now we come to the third and last condition—boredom. Among
-the speakers at this memorable dinner was Mr. Llewellyn Jones. Mr. Jones
-is a critic of literature by profession if not qualification—although I do not
-say it, really. Of all the orators at good old Walt’s memorial gabfest Mr.
-Jones was the least offensive. He said nothing that shocked the taste or
-violated one’s innerself or harrowed one’s soul. I don’t, of course, remember
-what Mr. Jones did say. One never does, not only in the case of Mr. Jones
-but in the thousands like him. They occupy time and space and leave them
-empty. Not for them the sneer or the slobber. Mr. Jones wouldn’t sneer
-for the world. And as for slobbering Mr. Jones has too much good taste
-and discretion for that. Not that he is above them. His fear of them, his
-apparent uncertainty in distinguishing between these two characteristics and
-the characteristics of inspired opinion, indicate this plainly enough.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-So to be safe Mr. Jones resorts to the time-honored entrenchment of
-mediocrity. He barricades himself behind the bulwarks of boredom. He discharges
-no cannon, he commits no sins, he makes no false steps or takes no
-<a id="page-25" class="pagenum" title="25"></a>
-false flights. He is boredom incarnate, the eternal convention in the arts
-whether he deals with Nihilism, radicalism, or stands pat on the isms of the
-past. Mr. Jones never gets anywhere, I repeat. I speak of all the Joneses.
-Nobody derives anything from him—from them—except ennui. He, they,
-never offend, never elate. He, they, are always Mr. Jones.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-Listening to the Joneses is as elevating an experience as watching the
-water blop-blop out of the kitchen hydrant. And this idea leads me back to
-where I started—<span class="smallcaps">The Little Review</span>.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-Can you imagine what a thorough contempt a kitchen hydrant would
-have for a fountain rising from the rocks, for a brook gurgling down the
-hillside, or a strong river capering to sea? It wouldn’t exactly sneer at them.
-Mr. Jones doesn’t. But it would feel moved to spirited reproof. How juvenile
-it is to gurgle, the hydrant would say, how vain and foolish it is to rise
-from the rocks, how upsetting it is to be continually capering to sea. I do
-not claim any super-intelligence in the matter of hydrants. But Mr. Jones
-and all the Joneses do say, and I have enough intelligence to understand
-them if not to sympathize with them, that <span class="smallcaps">The Little Review</span> is young and
-idiotic and given to unnecessary emotions and so forth. All of which is true,
-looked at from the elevation of a kitchen sink. “Why don’t you,” remonstrates
-the hydrant to the brook, “blop blop with me?”
-</p>
-
-<p>
-An afterthought: at this Whitman dinner there was one among the
-speakers who sustained a dying faith in Walt, humanity, and <em>vers libre</em> in
-general. He was Carl Sandburg who read a free verse poem of his own on
-Billy Sunday.
-</p>
-
-<div class="filler">
-<p class="noindent">
-It is provided in the essence of things that
-from any fruition of success, no matter what,
-shall come forth something to make a greater
-struggle necessary.—<em>Whitman.</em>
-</p>
-
-</div>
-
-<div class="chapter">
-
-<h2 class="article" id="THEDEATHOFANTONTARASOVITCH">
-<a id="page-26" class="pagenum" title="26"></a>
-The Death of Anton Tarasovitch
-</h2>
-
-</div>
-
-<p class="subt">
-A Short Story of the Present War
-</p>
-
-<p class="aut">
-<span class="smallcaps">Florence Kiper Frank</span>
-</p>
-
-<p class="first">
-<span class="firstchar">A</span><span class="postfirstchar">nton</span> Tarasovitch lay dying. He lay in a pleasant cornfield
-whither he had dragged himself in the heat of the afternoon, for a
-shelter against the merciless sun. But now it was evening and the stars were
-out, and dying was not now so bad an affair as it had been in the dust and
-the blinding sunlight. True, the pain was at times terrible, but at other
-times it made one only light-headed, so that oneself or the part that was
-Anton Tarasovitch seemed to be a different thing altogether from the body
-of Anton Tarasovitch which lay beneath It shot to pieces, while It fluttered
-and hovered above.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-He had not been lying for many hours in the Austrian cornfield. He
-knew that by the progress of the sun downward—downward until it made
-the long summer shadows that he loved in the fields at home; downward until
-it brought a breath of coolness and a gray light that had brushed out the
-clear distinction of shadows and sunlight; downward until it was gone forever
-and a few stars burned quietly in the sky overhead. It was the last
-sunset that Anton Tarasovitch was to see in this world. But time had no
-longer any meaning for Anton Tarasovitch. Lying on one’s back, so, and
-waiting to die, a minute can seem all there is of the world, and then an hour
-can be burned up like a minute, while one faints into unconsciousness, before
-one is slowly dragged back again to the thought, “I am I”—the thought that
-makes the world for each man, that creates for him the stars and the shadows
-and the sun sinking downward.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-Yes, Anton Tarasovitch knew that now—that it was this thought that
-made the world. And when he stopped thinking it, the world would again
-be nothing. Down! down! down! one would plunge, and then the world
-would be nothing. But it would exist still for other men. Yet how could
-that be? Tomorrow the sun would come up again into the sky just as every
-day it had come up in the fields at home, making the long shadows that he
-had so loved in the mornings and in the evenings. Tomorrow other men
-would see the sun—many other men would see it. But if Anton Tarasovitch
-did not see it——! In vain he struggled to create for himself a universe in
-which there would be no Anton Tarasovitch. Well, he was not clever
-enough to understand such matters. Men in universities and men who wrote
-books had figured them out and knew all about them. But how was he, who
-had never been to a University, who had not been to school even, to understand!
-</p>
-
-<p>
-<a id="page-27" class="pagenum" title="27"></a>
-Yet this much he understood—that he was dying for his country. This
-the general had told them, and he had known always, since a boy, that it was
-a brave and fine thing to fight for one’s country and to die if need be. Anton
-Tarasovitch was dying that his country might be saved.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-Yet it was strange that the big Russia had need of him, just one common
-peasant. The great Russia had so many men that were strong and powerful,
-men with uniforms that glittered—men that were much cleverer and braver
-than Anton. Why should the country have need of him? Sasha needed him,
-and the children. Sasha needed him in the fields and she needed him in her
-heart too. She had often called him the light of her heart, in the strange
-words—so different from the words of other women—that Sasha often used.
-And he knew by her face that she needed him. She didn’t have to tell him
-so. He knew by the kindling of her face, as of a curtain behind which suddenly
-a candle appears. So her face would light up when she saw him. Sasha
-would mind greatly if she never saw him again.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-He was dying because it was a glorious thing to die for one’s country—for
-the White Tsar, the little Father. You died to protect your country, so
-that your great country might live forever. But if you weren’t there to
-know that it lived forever!—now why couldn’t he think of the world without
-Anton Tarasovitch in it? Why did he land against a black wall every time
-he tried to think of tomorrow without Anton Tarasovitch?
-</p>
-
-<p>
-It was needful that he die to save his country. What if, to the general,
-he <em>were</em> only one of thousands and to Sasha and the children all of life—nevertheless,
-if every man should think that, then there would be no one at all
-to save the country. It was rather clever of him to figure it out so, especially
-with the fire in his side that made his head so light and his thoughts fly off
-from it and refuse to anchor down for more than a minute. It was clever of
-him to reason it out—Anton Tarasovitch who had never been to a University—that
-if every man should say to himself, “O, I don’t count. Just one more
-or less!”—then there would be no army at all to fight the Tsar’s battles.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-Yet he was not fighting or dying now to save Sasha. Nor was he dying
-to save his children even in the years to come. That wouldn’t be bad—to
-die so that years afterwards, even though it might be many years afterwards,
-one’s children would prosper and would live more happily. That would be
-a sort of living when one was dead, because one’s children were in a way
-oneself in different bodies. But he couldn’t see how Maxim and Ignat and
-Sofya and Tatya would at any time be better off because he was dying right
-now. He couldn’t see but that the land would be poorer and that they would
-have to work harder because he and the other peasants were dying for the
-Little Father and for their country.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-But if he couldn’t figure out just what people he was saving, at least he
-knew against what men he was fighting. He was fighting against the Austrians.
-The Austrians were a horrible people who spoke a language one couldn’t
-understand at all. When you tried to understand them, you couldn’t understand
-a word they were saying. He had known an Austrian once—a big
-<a id="page-28" class="pagenum" title="28"></a>
-blonde fellow who had stayed a few days at their little village. One day
-Anton had been walking with the tiny Tatya on the road that led to the market
-and they had met the Austrian, who had stopped and had given Tatya
-a flower out of his button-hole. Anton remembered Tatya’s crows of delight.
-The Austrian had smiled at her, a nice, friendly smile, and Tatya had grabbed
-for his hand as children will, even when the people they grab at are
-Austrians.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-Tatya had seemed to like the Austrian. And Anton had had to confess
-to himself that he wasn’t a bad fellow. But he must have been pleasant only
-because of Tatya. No one could help being pleasant to Tatya. The Austrian
-had been for a moment friendly because of her. At heart he was a hateful
-fellow. All Austrians were hateful. They all hated the Tsar and the Fatherland
-and they all hated him, Anton, because he was a Russian.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-There must be some Austrians lying in this cornfield now, wounded as
-he was wounded. But he could see no one. Flat on his back, he could see
-only the stars which were thick now against the sky. And he began to
-think that this was a cruel thing—that a man should be alone when he was
-dying. Even when a chap was just ill, he wanted someone to take care of
-him. Once when Anton had been ill of a fever he had been just like a baby,
-so weak and helpless. He had cried then because the milk that Sasha had
-brought him had been too hot for his tongue and had burned him. It was
-silly for a big man to cry, but that was the way you became when you were
-sick—weak and silly. He had never in his life cried when he was well.
-When men were well they were never silly.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-Women—women were different! Five times had Sasha been so ill that
-it was terrible—four times for the children that were living and once for
-the little one that had died. Sasha had almost died too that time. She had
-been so white and so hopeless looking for weeks after! But in all the times
-she was ill she had not complained as much as he had, that one month that
-he was sick with the fever. That must be because women were used to pain.
-The good God had so ordained it. For every life that they brought into the
-world they had to suffer, not only at the time, but for months before and then
-for years afterward.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-They were strange creatures, were women. If a child became ill or died,
-its mother suffered again, just as the day she had borne him. At least so
-Sasha had suffered when the baby had died—and other women that he had
-seen in the village.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-Birth was a strange thing now! He had never really thought of it before,
-but wasn’t it a strange thing that each time a person was born into the world,
-there should be pain and the long months of waiting. Then in one second an
-Austrian shell could blow away the body that some woman had waited for and
-had carried in her own body. In one second—why, so he had been waited for—he,
-Anton Tarasovitch. Now wasn’t that wonderful!—and he had never
-until this minute really thought of it. He, Anton Tarasovitch, had been carried
-in the body of his mother and had been born in pain and in rejoicing.
-<a id="page-29" class="pagenum" title="29"></a>
-Why, it was like a miracle! And he had thought so lightly of it, had just taken
-it for granted that he should be born and that she should love him.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-He would like to make it up to her in some way now. But it was too
-late. She had been dead for very many years now and he also was dying.
-Well, he could tell her about it when he saw her with the saints in Heaven.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-Heaven! He would go there, of course, because he had always, since
-a boy, been obedient and had done just what the priests had told him. He
-ought to think now about Heaven. But somehow he did not care to think
-about it, and the strange part was that it did not trouble him that he did not
-care. Even if he woke tomorrow in Heaven, he would not be the same
-Anton. He might live forever, but that wouldn’t be the same thing as
-waking up in the morning with Sasha at his side. He tried to think what
-“forever” meant, and he fetched up against the same black wall that he
-had when he had tried to think of a world without Anton Tarasovitch to
-know himself in it. Forever! ever! ever! No stopping! On and on! But
-that would be horrible. No! no! he couldn’t bear that. One could do nothing,
-nothing, to get out of it. Even if one could be blown to pieces with a
-gun, say a thousand years from now, in Heaven, one’s soul would gather
-itself together again and go on and on, forever and forever.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-No, he mustn’t think about it. If he thought about it any more, he
-would lift his hands and strangle himself, so as to be able to stop thinking
-about it. Now he would think about Sasha. When he thought about her,
-he could feel her right next to him. He couldn’t see her face exactly, nor
-could he see her standing there. And yet it was as if she really <em>were</em> there,
-and he <em>could</em> see her. That was the way it was when you loved a person.
-She was, as it were, in you, or at least right next to you, and yet she was
-separate from you, too.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-He had liked life with Sasha. He didn’t know until now how much he
-had liked it. True, it was a hard life they had lived together. One was
-on the go every minute—in bad weather when the frost stung and to walk
-even a mile became an agony; and in good weather one was constantly on
-the go, when it might perhaps have been pleasant to sit under the trees and
-play with the children. But life was good, for all that. Of course, if they
-could have saved money—only a little money—it would have been better.
-But the little money they could save had had to go for the taxes. The taxes
-were for the Fatherland, the priest had told him. The taxes were paid
-so that when the need came, Anton would be able to die for his country.
-But there was something confusing about that. Life would be better if it
-were not for the taxes, and the taxes were paid so that he might—no,
-that was bewildering. With the fire in one’s side and in one’s brain, how
-could one think clearly about so difficult a matter? Besides, there were
-many matters of that sort that he, Anton Tarasovitch, was not clever enough
-to think about. One left such things to the priests, who were good men,
-and to the clever men at the universities.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-<a id="page-30" class="pagenum" title="30"></a>
-The stars were sometimes a long way off now and sometimes very
-near to him. But neither near nor far away did they seem to care about
-him. They were the only things he could see in the world and they did
-not seem to care about him. Undoubtedly they had seen many men dying.
-He knew about the stars! A young teacher who had come to the village
-when he was a boy had talked about them and Anton had never forgotten.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-The young teacher had not stayed long in the village. He was “dangerous,”
-they said, and Anton heard afterwards that he had gone to America.
-It gave one many thoughts to listen to the teacher. He had said that
-the stars were worlds, just like our own earth—the earth that Anton knew
-the good Christ had come down to save. Anton, who was just a boy, had
-wanted to ask him if Christ had had to save all these worlds that were
-stars. But that was only one of the many confusing thoughts one had
-in listening to the young teacher. One felt strange in listening to him, as
-if the world weren’t solid at all, but were flowing like a river. * * *
-</p>
-
-<p>
-Anton felt very sorry for himself, lying there under the stars that did
-not care for him. He began to cry—silly, weak tears that tasted of salt as
-they touched his mouth. It was only at times that he knew that he was
-crying. At other times the soul of him entirely left his body and went
-shooting up and up, to be recaptured only with a struggle.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-The two of them—the burning body and the light soul—would have
-held together better, he knew, if someone could grip his hand tightly. At
-least that was the way they had done in the fever. When Sasha had
-gripped his hand, as if by a miracle he had been restored for a moment
-to a complete man, and was no longer two pieces—a body below and a soul
-that went fluttering above it.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-If only he could touch someone’s hand now—anyone’s hand—the hand
-of a human being! To be all alone with the cruel, flickering stars up above,
-that was no way to die—snuffed out into the darkness. That was no way
-for any man to go, even though he <em>were</em> just a peasant. But Anton knew
-himself important now, almost as important as a general. He knew himself
-important, with a strange, tremendous importance. He was as important
-as almost anyone in the world, and he was dying alone in the darkness.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-Then he remembered that there must be other men in the cornfield.
-He had thought of that before, and afterwards he had forgotten. If there
-were other men here—even one other man, an enemy—he would find that
-comrade and they would die together.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-Slowly, painfully, inch by inch he dragged himself. The stalks were
-like an impenetrable thicket. They entangled him as snares or a forest of
-swords set about him. He dragged himself on his palms, inch by inch,
-butting away the cornstalks.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-An Austrian was lying on his back, gazing upward. He was dead now,
-but Anton did not know it. There was a wound in his neck, and the flies
-had begun to gather.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-<a id="page-31" class="pagenum" title="31"></a>
-Anton gave a sob as he saw the Austrian. One more effort and he
-would be near enough to touch him. Perhaps the Austrian would grip his
-hand—hard—as Sasha had gripped it.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-The hand of the Austrian did not grip hard when Anton touched it.
-It fluttered a little, however—Anton was sure of that. So Anton covered
-the hand with his own, and with his own hand gripped hard, as Sasha had
-gripped the hand of Anton.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-And so died Anton Tarasovitch, looking up at the stars.
-</p>
-
-<div class="filler">
-<p class="noindent">
-Art as it appears without the artist, i. e., as a
-body, an organization (the Prussian Officers’
-Corps, the Order of the Jesuits). To what extent
-is the artist merely a preliminary stage? The
-world regarded as a self-generating work of art.—<em>Nietzsche.</em>
-</p>
-
-</div>
-
-<div class="chapter">
-
-<h2 class="article" id="RUPERTBROOKE">
-<a id="page-32" class="pagenum" title="32"></a>
-Rupert Brooke
-</h2>
-
-</div>
-
-<p class="subt">
-(<em>A Memory</em>)
-</p>
-
-<p class="aut">
-<span class="smallcaps">Arthur Davison Ficke</span>
-</p>
-
-<div class="poem-container">
- <div class="poem">
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">One night—the last we were to have of you—</p>
- <p class="verse">High up above the city’s giant roar</p>
- <p class="verse">We sat around you on the generous floor—</p>
- <p class="verse">Since chairs were lame or stony or too few—</p>
- <p class="verse">And as you read, and the low music grew</p>
- <p class="verse">In exquisite tendrils twining the heart’s core,</p>
- <p class="verse">All the conjecture we had felt before</p>
- <p class="verse">Flashed into torch-flame, and at last we knew.</p>
- </div>
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">And Maurice, who in silence long has hidden</p>
- <p class="verse">A voice like yours, became a wreck of joy</p>
- <p class="verse">To inarticulate ecstasies beguiled.</p>
- <p class="verse">And you, as from some secret world now bidden</p>
- <p class="verse">To make return, stared up, and like a boy</p>
- <p class="verse">Blushed suddenly, and looked at us, and smiled.</p>
- </div>
- </div>
-</div>
-
-<div class="centerpic" id="PHOTO033">
-<a id="page-33" class="pagenum" title="33"></a><img src="images/i033.jpg" alt="" />
-<p class="cap">
-RUPERT BROOKE, MCMXIV
-</p>
-
-</div>
-
-<div class="chapter">
-
-<h2 class="article" id="TOAWESTINDIANALLIGATOR">
-<a id="page-34" class="pagenum" title="34"></a>
-To a West Indian Alligator
-</h2>
-
-</div>
-
-<p class="subt">
-(<em>Estimated age, 1957 years</em>)<a class="fnote" href="#footnote-2" id="fnote-2">[2]</a>
-</p>
-
-<p class="aut">
-<span class="smallcaps">Eunice Tietjens</span>
-</p>
-
-<div class="poem-container">
- <div class="poem">
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">Greetings, my brother, strange and uncouth beast,</p>
- <p class="verse2">Flat-bellied, wrinkled, broad of nose!</p>
- <p class="verse">You are not beautiful—and yet at least</p>
- <p class="verse2">Contentment spreads your scaley toes.</p>
- </div>
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">The keeper thwacks you and you grunt at me,</p>
- <p class="verse2">Two hundred pounds of sleepy spleen.</p>
- <p class="verse">He tells me that your cranial cavity</p>
- <p class="verse2">Will just contain a lima bean.</p>
- </div>
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">How seems it, brother, you who are so old,</p>
- <p class="verse2">To lie and squint with curtained eye</p>
- <p class="verse">At these ephemera, born in the cold,</p>
- <p class="verse2">These human things so soon to die?</p>
- </div>
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">You were scarce grown, a paltry eighty years,</p>
- <p class="verse2">Too young to think of breeding yet,</p>
- <p class="verse">When Christ the Nazarene loosed the salt tears</p>
- <p class="verse2">Which on man’s cheeks today are wet.</p>
- </div>
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">Mohammed rose and died—you churned the mud</p>
- <p class="verse2">And watched your female laying eggs.</p>
- <p class="verse">Columbus passed you—with an oozy thud</p>
- <p class="verse2">You scrambled sunward on your legs.</p>
- </div>
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">So now you doze at ease for all to view</p>
- <p class="verse2">And bat a sleepy lid at me,</p>
- <p class="verse">You eat a little every year or two</p>
- <p class="verse2">And count time in eternity.</p>
- </div>
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">So, brother, which is wiser of us twain</p>
- <p class="verse2">When words are said and meals are past?</p>
- <p class="verse">I think, and pass—you sleep, yet you remain,</p>
- <p class="verse2">And where shall be the end at last<a id="corr-14"></a>?</p>
- </div>
- </div>
-</div>
-
-<hr class="footnote" />
-
-<p class="footnote">
-<a class="footnote" href="#fnote-2" id="footnote-2">[2]</a> <em>I cannot vouch for the science of this. It is “Alligator Joe’s” estimate.</em>
-</p>
-
-<div class="chapter">
-
-<h2 class="article" id="EPITAPHS">
-<a id="page-35" class="pagenum" title="35"></a>
-Villon’s Epitaph<a class="fnote" href="#footnote-3" id="fnote-3">[3]</a>
-</h2>
-
-</div>
-
-<p class="aut">
-<span class="smallcaps">Witter Bynner</span>
-</p>
-
-<div class="poem-container">
- <div class="poem">
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">I who have lived and have not thought</p>
- <p class="verse">But gone with nature as I ought,</p>
- <p class="verse1">Letting good things occur,</p>
- <p class="verse">And now amazed and cannot see</p>
- <p class="verse">Why death should care so much for me.</p>
- <p class="verse1">I never cared for her.</p>
- </div>
- </div>
-</div>
-
-<div class="chapter">
-
-<h2 class="article" id="SCARRONSEPITAPHYFNNOID3Y">
-Scarron’s Epitaph<a class="fnote" href="#footnote-3">[3]</a>
-</h2>
-
-</div>
-
-<p class="aut">
-<span class="smallcaps">Witter Bynner</span>
-</p>
-
-<div class="poem-container">
- <div class="poem">
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">He who now lies here asleep</p>
- <p class="verse">None would envy, few would weep:</p>
- <p class="verse">A man whom death had mortified</p>
- <p class="verse">A thousand times before he died.</p>
- </div>
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">Peaceful be the step you take,</p>
- <p class="verse">You who pass him—lest he wake.</p>
- <p class="verse">For his first good night is due.</p>
- <p class="verse">Let poor Scarron sleep it through.</p>
- </div>
- </div>
-</div>
-
-<hr class="footnote" />
-
-<p class="footnote">
-<a class="footnote" href="#fnote-3" id="footnote-3">[3]</a> From the French of François Villon.
-</p>
-
-<div class="editorials chapter">
-<a id="page-36" class="pagenum" title="36"></a>
-<div class="chapter">
-
-<h2 class="editorials" id="EDITORIALSANDANNOUNCEMENTS">
-Editorials and Announcements
-</h2>
-
-</div>
-
-<h3 class="section" id="OURCREDO">
-<em>Our Credo</em>
-</h3>
-
-<p class="first">
-<span class="firstchar">I</span> have lost patience: people are still asking “What does <span class="smallcaps">The
-Little Review</span> stand for?” Since we have been so obscure—or
-is it that people have been so dull?—I shall try to answer all
-these plaintive queries in a sentence. May it be sufficient: I cannot
-“explain” every day why the sunrise seems worth while or, as
-Mr. Hecht would say, why the brook rises from the rocks.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-<span class="smallcaps">The Little Review</span> is a magazine that believes in Life for
-Art’s sake, in the Individual rather than in Incomplete people, in
-an age of Imagination rather than of Reasonableness; a magazine
-that believes in Ideas even if they are not Ultimate Conclusions, and
-values its Ideals so greatly as to live them; a magazine interested in
-Past, Present, and Future, but particularly in the New Hellenism;
-a magazine written for Intelligent people who can Feel; whose
-philosophy is Applied Anarchism, whose policy is a Will to Splendor
-of Life, and whose function is—to express itself.
-</p>
-
-<h3 class="section" id="MRCOMSTOCKSDISMISSAL">
-<em>Mr. Comstock’s Dismissal</em>
-</h3>
-
-<p class="first">
-<span class="firstchar">T</span><span class="postfirstchar">his</span> great blessing comes sooner than we could have expected,
-and yet, as <em>The Chicago Tribune</em> remarks, it is belated by
-about forty years. Mr. Comstock has been Post Office Inspector all
-that time. I remember a few years ago in New York hearing an
-interesting woman send a group of people into paroxysms by the
-passionate childish seriousness with which she said, “I wish Anthony
-Comstock would die!” Now that the government has accomplished
-this desideratum, it is almost time for it to be congratulated. I
-wonder how long it will be before this same government can “see
-its way clear” to suppressing the agent provocateur and letting his
-victims go free, or—well, never mind: it is beyond hoping.
-</p>
-
-<h3 class="section" id="SUCCESSION">
-<a id="page-37" class="pagenum" title="37"></a>
-“<em>Succession</em>”
-</h3>
-
-<p class="first">
-<span class="firstchar">W</span><span class="postfirstchar">hen</span> one of my friends fails to like Ethel Sidgwick’s <em>Succession</em>
-I am left in a predicament: on what basis are we
-henceforth to understand each other? Succession goes so deep into
-music, into personality, into life that has its foundations in art....
-You can explain all the subtleties of your most difficult emotions
-by referring to how Antoine felt on page so and so. How does one
-live without Antoine?
-</p>
-
-<h3 class="section" id="THESTRIKE">
-<em>The Strike</em>
-</h3>
-
-<p class="first">
-<span class="firstchar">A</span><span class="postfirstchar">nd</span> God said: “Let there be!” And there was.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-And when the modern god, the omnipotent Proletariat, says:
-“Let there not be!” ...
-</p>
-
-<p>
-You say the strike of the Chicago car men is of purely local significance.
-You crack jokes about the pleasure of walking and about
-the adventure of jitney-rides. You are calm and complacent, you
-blind and deaf men and women dancing on a dormant volcano.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-You are right. Your complacency is justified. Why fear the
-million-headed mule who has borne his yoke for centuries? He
-grumbles?—Oh, it’s a trifle: just fill his flesh-pot, and he will take
-up anew with bestial delight his eternal task of enriching the few
-at the expense of his blood and marrow.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-But fear the eruption of the volcano! For it will not remain
-dormant forever. Have we not witnessed the spasmodic awakenings
-of the giant? Recall the achievement of the Russian proletariat in
-1905. Did it not wrest concessions from the obstinate Czar by
-means of a passive revolution? Recall the general strike in Belgium.
-Did it not cripple its commerce and industry for months?
-</p>
-
-<p>
-The strike of the Chicago car men is pregnant with potentialities.
-It is a symptom of a refreshing storm. Those who produce everything
-and possess nothing have slept long in ignorance of their
-power. But they are slowly awakening. And when they become
-aware of the magic wand in their hand, whose passive motion can
-stop the wheels of the universe.... Take heed, O merrymakers
-at Belshazzar’s feast. Behold the <span class="smallcaps">Mene</span>, <span class="smallcaps">Tekel</span>, <span class="smallcaps">Peres</span> on the
-wall.
-</p>
-
-<p class="sign">
-<span class="smallcaps">K.</span>
-</p>
-
-<h3 class="section" id="THECOUNTRYWALK">
-<a id="page-38" class="pagenum" title="38"></a>
-“<em>The Country Walk</em>”
-</h3>
-
-<p class="first">
-<span class="firstchar">A</span> young Englishman by the name of Edward Storer—I am
-assuming that he is young and that he is English—has protested
-effectively against the condition which decrees that a piece
-of writing, a painting, a sculpture has to be judged as a commodity
-<em>before</em> it can be judged as a work of art by issuing little four-page
-leaflets containing portions of his work denied publication by the
-commercialism of the times. The first, which is called <em>The Country
-Walk</em>, has some quite uninspired though rather charming prose
-poems in it. <em>The Lark</em>, for instance:
-</p>
-
- <div class="excerpt">
-<p class="noindent">
-Out of the young grass and silence you arise, frail bird,
-spinning upwards to the sky. Faster beat the wings, and
-shriller is the voice, and soon you are lost in the high blue,
-so that scarcely can I hear your voice or see the maddened
-flutterings of your wings.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-Then suddenly all is silent, and softly you drop to earth
-again to rest your aching body against the good brown
-earth.
-</p>
-
- </div>
-<h3 class="section" id="THEJUNEJULYISSUE">
-<em>The June-July Issue</em>
-</h3>
-
-<p class="first">
-<span class="firstchar">O</span><span class="postfirstchar">n</span> account of being so late with our May number we have
-decided to combine the June and July and thus come out
-promptly again on the first of the month. Subscriptions will be
-extended accordingly.
-</p>
-
-<h3 class="section" id="EDGARLEEMASTERS">
-<em>Edgar Lee Masters</em>
-</h3>
-
-<p class="first">
-<span class="firstchar">I</span><span class="postfirstchar">n</span> the August issue there will be a new poem by Edgar Lee Masters,
-author of <em>The Spoon River Anthology</em>, and also a photogravure
-portrait of the poet which has just been taken by Eugene
-Hutchinson.
-</p>
-
-</div>
-
-<div class="chapter">
-
-<h2 class="article" id="THESUBMARINE">
-<a id="page-39" class="pagenum" title="39"></a>
-The Submarine
-</h2>
-
-</div>
-
-<p class="note">
-(<em>Translated from the Italian of Luciano Folgore by Anne Simon</em>)
-</p>
-
-<div class="poem-container">
- <div class="poem">
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">It sinks. In the twilight of the water</p>
- <p class="verse">the conquered submarine</p>
- <p class="verse">falls straight to the bottom</p>
- <p class="verse">and seems like a black corpse</p>
- <p class="verse">thrown to the coral below,</p>
- <p class="verse">thrown to the tomb that devours</p>
- <p class="verse">with liquid joy</p>
- <p class="verse">the refuse and remains of the old world.</p>
- <p class="verse">The propellers, devourers of motion,</p>
- <p class="verse">buzz no more,</p>
- <p class="verse">the rudder has ceased turning,</p>
- <p class="verse">the prow no longer points its sharp beak,</p>
- <p class="verse">but the submarine extends itself</p>
- <p class="verse">on the viscid bed,</p>
- <p class="verse">and a multitude of unknown</p>
- <p class="verse">fish, coral and sea-nettles</p>
- <p class="verse">try to enter the closed apertures.</p>
- </div>
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">And yet once you leaped in the sun</p>
- <p class="verse">like a sentinel of burnished steel</p>
- <p class="verse">shining in the distance,</p>
- <p class="verse">and then rapidly returned to the green gorge</p>
- <p class="verse">where the sun never reaches,</p>
- <p class="verse">but where you find</p>
- <p class="verse">the tremendous task</p>
- <p class="verse">that is always with you and that whispers courage</p>
- <p class="verse">in the void of your soul.</p>
- <p class="verse">And once with your agile metallic prow</p>
- <p class="verse">you agitated the green water</p>
- <p class="verse">all around your shining body,</p>
- <p class="verse">and you did not feel the torments</p>
- <p class="verse">of the winds nor the black</p>
- <p class="verse">clouds of the hurricane</p>
- <p class="verse">that remained like spiteful women</p>
- <p class="verse">in a corner of the horizon,</p>
- <p class="verse">with hair dishevelled and the eye eager</p>
- <p class="verse">to spy below, from the firmament,</p>
- <p class="verse">the lost, the shipwrecked, the unknown</p>
- <p class="verse">that have no pilot.</p>
- </div>
- <div class="stanza">
-<a id="page-40" class="pagenum" title="40"></a>
- <p class="verse">Once from your sonorous sides,</p>
- <p class="verse">quietly, but vigilant and mad,</p>
- <p class="verse">the torpedo shot out,</p>
- <p class="verse">making its track in silence,</p>
- <p class="verse">and carrying</p>
- <p class="verse">within its thin body</p>
- <p class="verse">death, and the infinite</p>
- <p class="verse">power of dynamite.</p>
- <p class="verse">As you passed the sharks fled,</p>
- <p class="verse">as you passed the corals</p>
- <p class="verse">suspended their tenacious and clumsy work,</p>
- <p class="verse">and the fish with rapid movement</p>
- <p class="verse">swam away.</p>
- <p class="verse">You seemed like an enormous monster</p>
- <p class="verse">of a fantastic destiny</p>
- <p class="verse">and yet you are only a light submarine,</p>
- <p class="verse">a slender ship</p>
- <p class="verse">that the blow of a beam</p>
- <p class="verse">could sink, that a whirlpool could submerge</p>
- <p class="verse">in the abyss.</p>
- </div>
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">I do not know your story,</p>
- <p class="verse">but I will sing your glory</p>
- <p class="verse">that is part of the desire</p>
- <p class="verse">of audacious men.</p>
- <p class="verse">Submarine, Destiny may have willed</p>
- <p class="verse">you to sink silently,</p>
- <p class="verse">and remain lost forever in the viscid bed of the sea-weed,</p>
- <p class="verse">(O submarine, able to challenge the unconsciousness of the seas</p>
- <p class="verse">and the impotence of the lighthouses,)</p>
- <p class="verse">but you are alive and strong;</p>
- <p class="verse">there is no death, but only an appearance</p>
- <p class="verse">of death that remains. Destiny</p>
- <p class="verse">newly moulds you</p>
- <p class="verse">in a long phantom</p>
- <p class="verse">and you are run, submarine,</p>
- <p class="verse">by the courage of men</p>
- <p class="verse">who, in the unfathomable silence of the water,</p>
- <p class="verse">are piloted</p>
- <p class="verse">by the will of the strong.</p>
- </div>
- <div class="stanza">
- <p class="verse">New brothers will arise</p>
- <p class="verse">and pursue you</p>
- <p class="verse">because your shining back</p>
- <p class="verse">carries a banner, not tri-colored,</p>
-<a id="page-41" class="pagenum" title="41"></a>
- <p class="verse">nor French,</p>
- <p class="verse">but the only color</p>
- <p class="verse">that dazzles;</p>
- <p class="verse">the banner of the battle</p>
- <p class="verse">that amidst disasters combats</p>
- <p class="verse">with this ferocious mystery</p>
- <p class="verse">that is foolishly determined to shut us out</p>
- <p class="verse">from the doors of Nature.</p>
- </div>
- </div>
-</div>
-
-<div class="chapter">
-
-<h2 class="article" id="BLAABLAABLAA">
-Blaa-Blaa-Blaa
-</h2>
-
-</div>
-
-<p class="first">
-<span class="firstchar">I</span> am sick of words—spoken words—verbal refuse thrown off by the mental
-hypochondriacs who imagine themselves suffering from thought and
-afflicted with ideas.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-I am <a id="corr-17"></a>sick of the artificial inanities of the drawingroom—the polite
-poppycock, the meaningless, emotionless enthusiasms. I often have entered
-a room where male and female husks sat, their faces wreathed in empty
-grimaces—animated masks discharging automatic phrases—and wished to
-God I was dumb and could be forgiven for silence. Listening is not so bad
-because one doesn’t have to listen.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-I am sick of the salon-like groups who gather for the purpose of thinking
-aloud and then forget to think and make up for it in noises. Monotonous
-varieties, dropping pop-bottle gems from their lips, each individual
-amusing and delighting himself beyond all understanding with his sterile
-loquaciousness. Here in the salon groups, the discursive congregations
-which come together in all manner of odd places and all manner of regular
-places, garrulity approaches torture. Here the professional discourser
-flops and waddles about in his own Utopia. He doesn’t crave understanding
-but attention. As for truth, as for taking the pains to express his innermost
-reactions to a subject, this is impossible. The discourser doesn’t know
-what he thinks, doesn’t know what the truth is until he starts discoursing.
-And then he discourses himself into a state of mind. I have heard him discourse
-himself into the most startling convictions; into matrimony and out
-of it into religion and out of it, into and out of every variety of damn-foolishness
-imaginable.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-Persons who use written words instead of spoken words as the parents
-of their thought suffer from the same hypnosis. But in writing this is commendable.
-It is commendable for a writer to be insincere if he can be more
-logical and enlightening as a result. The result may be <em>De Profundis</em>
-or <em>Alice in Wonderland</em>. It is my notion that men are sincere only in their
-<a id="page-42" class="pagenum" title="42"></a>
-appetites. A man craves food and woman and other stimulants with unquestionable
-sincerity. But in the realm of thought I have arrived at the
-conclusion that sincerity is an inspired and not inspiring condition of the
-mind.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-I am sick of the blaa-blaaing hordes, from the smirking “supes” of the
-let’s-adjourn-to-the-other-room species to the simpering cacophonists of the
-<a id="corr-18"></a>Schöngeist nobility.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-I am sick of the open mouths, the trailing sentences dying from weakness,
-the painstaking use of wrong words and the painstaking use of correct
-words; of the stagnated humor of deodorous sallies.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-I am sick of the Argumentatives, people with an irritating command of
-phrases, who balance paradoxes on their noses and talk backwards or upside
-down with equal lucidity; who must be contradicted or they suffer; who
-rumble bizarrely from the depths of every philosophical <a id="corr-19"></a>sub-cellar they can
-ferret out in order to be startling; who shriek and howl and wail and protest
-and—the Devil take them—tell the truth and make it impossible to believe.
-Their only reason for talking is to impress. They are as noisy as cannon
-and as effective as firecrackers.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-I am sick of the delicate, searching souls who prick themselves with
-their own words, who operate on fly specks, who grope and search and
-struggle for fine and truthful things, who deal in verbal shadings intelligible
-only to themselves—and then not for what they said but for what they meant
-to say or desired to say or wouldn’t say for the world.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-I am sick of their kinsmen, of the surgical tongues who dissect, <a id="corr-20"></a>who
-vivisect and auto-sect.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-I am sick most of all of my own talk. But I continue to talk. I talk
-out of boredom and manage only to increase it. I talk out of vanity and
-spread disillusionment. I talk out of love and have to apologize. A victim
-of habit, I continue speaking, although I know the spoken word is the
-true medium of misunderstanding. Words, words, they keep tumbling
-out of my mouth and blowing away like dust before the wind. A pock on
-them.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-There have been revolutions in literature, authors have changed the
-size and construction of the novel, publishers have changed the color of their
-bindings, poets have changed the form of their poetry and the essence of
-its style, thinkers even have altered slightly the trend of their thought.
-Music, painting, decorating, carving—everything changes with time except
-talk, which only increases. What a staggering illustration of the theory that
-it is only the weak things which survive. For talk is the commonest of
-weaknesses. Blaa, blaa, blaa—why not a revolution? What ails the radicals?
-Do they not realize that the time is ripe? They have changed the
-moral forms, the literary forms, why not the spoken forms? Why not a substitution
-of expressive grunts and whoops and growls and chuckles and
-groans and gurgles and whees and wows? Or is this matter one not for
-the radical but for
-</p>
-
-<p class="sign">
-“The Scavenger.”
-</p>
-
-<div class="chapter">
-
-<h2 class="article" id="THENINEEXHIBIT">
-<a id="page-43" class="pagenum" title="43"></a>
-The Nine!—Exhibit!
-</h2>
-
-</div>
-
-<p class="first">
-<span class="firstchar">S</span><span class="postfirstchar">ometime</span> in the winter a rumor got about that nine artists of Chicago
-were to form themselves into a group and hold an independent exhibition.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-At once the other artists were divided into two factions, those who
-jeered and those who applauded, those who said unpleasant things and those
-who had the enduring hope that at last something better was to be done in
-our exhibitions.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-The Great Nine, as the group began to be called—whether by themselves
-or by others, it matters not: the phrase is a handicap—consists of
-Frederic C. Bartlett, William Penhallow Henderson, Lawton Parker, Karl
-Albert Buehr, Louis Betts, Charles Francis Browne, Ralph Clarkson, Wilson
-Irvine, and Oliver Dennett Grover. They were too generous in their number.
-Five, and there would have been no comment; nine, and there was aroused
-indignation, criticism, and a “show us” spirit which should have put the
-Nine on their mettle and made them give a stunning and silencing show.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-On May thirteenth, after one postponement when expectation was tense,
-the exhibition opened. What had we? A new setting and old stuff!
-</p>
-
-<p>
-One of the East Galleries had been chosen. William P. Henderson
-designed and executed the room. He made a piece of work having faults
-but being the best thing about the exhibition, a contribution in itself. The
-walls with their subtle color, divided into spaces by pilasters of deep wistaria,
-red, and gold, rising on slender stems and blossoming out above; the
-screen of red at one end with the Zettler torso against it—they complimented
-themselves upon using this; the beautiful vases; and the green of the trees
-made a room too obtrusive for pictures, or one in which pictures are intrusive.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-Were the setting less self-sufficient, still there are many things to be
-said. The sophisticated, almost exotic, color of the walls, emphasizing in
-the work of some all that is crude and materialistic in execution or interpretation,
-makes their work appear to less advantage than would the usual
-bleak gallery. And why so many pictures? Why not one picture in each
-space and that the best each artist could offer? How much more satisfactory
-the room would then be. Anyone who follows exhibitions will agree
-that each exhibitor has shown better work at other times.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-Frederic Bartlett’s group is in many ways the best, and holds its own
-in the room. Surpassingly beautiful in color are Mr. Henderson’s things.
-The little nude is exquisite, but he should not easily be forgiven his portrait
-of Florence Bradley, even if it is not meant as a character study. However,
-he is one of the artists who can do more than put paint on canvas.
-He can make Art in many ways, as men did in the “high white days” of art.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-<a id="page-44" class="pagenum" title="44"></a>
-The artists themselves have seen from this first effort wherein they
-have failed. This grouping must have been a very arbitrary one. Let us
-hope that a group founded on mutual endeavor and on equal ability will
-continue the effort to make our exhibitions comparable in some degree with
-the best European efforts.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-Chicago has now so many artists that it is impossible for them all to
-be gathered into the old Chicago Society. There should be many societies.
-Competition and co-operation among them would make the art life here less
-anemic and super-sensitive and bigoted.
-</p>
-
-<p class="sign">
-<span class="smallcaps">R.</span>
-</p>
-
-<div class="chapter">
-
-<h2 class="article" id="BOOKDISCUSSION">
-Book Discussion
-</h2>
-
-</div>
-
-<h3 class="section" id="THEAPOTHEOSISOFPETTINESS">
-<span class="smallcaps">The Apotheosis of Pettiness</span>
-</h3>
-
-<p class="book">
-<em>One Man, by Robert Steele.
-New York: Mitchell Kennerley.</em>
-</p>
-
-<p class="first">
-<span class="firstchar"><span class="prefirstchar">“</span>T</span><span class="postfirstchar">here</span> is nothing which reflects the smugness of a people so much as
-the manner and temperament of its vice. And the temperament of American
-vice is more distinctly and monotonously bourgeois than any of its virtues”—from
-Ben Hecht’s “Phosphorescent Gleams” in the May <span class="smallcaps">Little Review</span>.
-I have pondered over this maxim while reading Mr. Steele’s novel which
-is hailed by the critics as “the essence of America.” The hero is essentially
-American, horribly so. If the “average” type of any nation is repulsive,
-the American “Average” is a thousandfold more so. For he is more petty
-than vicious. The “one man” gives a confession of his life, full of puny
-deeds, from committing petty larceny to “picking up” a girl in the street
-and taking her to a “swell” hotel. The nauseating details have the flavor
-of the adventure stories which you may hear at a gathering of travelling
-salesmen in a provincial hotel lobby. What makes the boring Odyssey intolerably
-loathsome is its note of syrupy Christian penitence which the hero
-expresses after each penny-crime by falling on his knees and praying to
-his convenient god for forgiveness.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-The book has been hailed as a masterpiece. It is as far from a masterpiece
-as a lewd “photo” is from art. The facts may be true, even autobiographical,
-as some critics presume; the confessions will furnish good
-material for Billy Sunday and his lesser brethren. But photography, even
-if it be pornography, is not art. Let me quote the ever-new Edgar Poe:
-“Art is the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the
-veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what <em>is</em> in Nature,
-<a id="page-45" class="pagenum" title="45"></a>
-entitles no man to the sacred name of ‘Artist.’ ... We can, at any
-time, double the true beauty of an actual landscape by half closing our
-eyes as we look at it. The naked Senses sometimes see too little—but then
-<em>always</em> they see too much.” I blush at the necessity of digging up ancient
-truths, but, my dear friends, read the reviews of Mr. Steele’s novel and you
-will admit with me the crying need of teaching the American critics the
-A-B-C of art.
-</p>
-
-<h3 class="section" id="ICYOLYMPUSANDTHEBURNINGBUSH">
-<span class="smallcaps">Icy Olympus and the Burning Bush</span>
-</h3>
-
-<p class="book">
-<em>The Need for Art in Life, by I. B. Stoughton Holborn.
-New York: G. Albert Shaw.</em>
-</p>
-
-<p class="book">
-<em>The Spirit of Japanese Art, by Yone Noguchi.
-New York: E. P. Dutton and Company.</em>
-</p>
-
-<p class="noindent">
-The complete man must consist of three essential fundamentals—the
-Artistic, the Intellectual, the Moral (mark the initials: aim!); man’s aim
-should be the full expression of his tripartite nature; he must not leave out
-any of the three sides, nor develop any one at the expense of the rest. Unfortunately
-our age has achieved only two-thirds of the diagram, the I and
-the M, remaining wretchedly poor in the A part. When we look back we
-find that in the Renaissance period the A and I were overdeveloped, with
-the total lack of the M side. The Middle Ages present the presence of A
-and M and the absence of I. It is the Greek ideal we must look for in our
-endeavor for the complete expression of man. The Greek gentleman, the
-καλος κάγαθος, the reserved, the moderately good, the not excessively just,
-the harmonious, the symmetrical—he shall be our standard, our criterion
-for the completeness of being. Is not Mr. Holborn clever and Olympian
-and icy-cold?
-</p>
-
-<p>
-Now listen:
-</p>
-
-<div class="excerpt">
-<p class="noindent">
-The evening had already passed when I returned home with
-that hanging of Koyetsu’s chirography under my arm. “Put all
-the gaslights out! Do you hear me? All the gaslights out! And
-light all the candles you have!” I cried. The little hanging was
-properly hanged at the “togonoma” when the candles were lighted,
-whose world-old soft flame (wasn’t it singing the old song of
-world-wearied heart?) allured my mind back, perhaps, to Koyetsu’s
-age of four hundred years ago—to imagine myself to be a
-waif of greyness like a famous tea-master, Rikiu or Enshu or,
-again, Koyetsu, burying me in a little Abode of Fancy with a boiling
-tea-kettle; through that smoke of candles hurrying like our
-ephemeral lives, the characters of Koyetsu’s writing loomed with
-the haunting charm of a ghost.
-</p>
-
-</div>
-
-<p class="noindent">
-It is painful for me to stop quoting the religious ravings of dear
-Noguchi. And all this pathos is about a bit of old Japanese writing! I can
-<a id="page-46" class="pagenum" title="46"></a>
-see the indignant Mr. Holborn’s moderate condemnation of the Oriental’s
-unreserved passion, canting the cold-beautiful Μηδὲν ἄγαν (nothing
-in excess). But, O forgive me, Olympian gods, I must come back to the
-Burning Bush where Yone Noguchi worships Hashimoro, Hiroshige,
-Kyosai, Tsukioka, Utamaro, and other such rhythmical names; I am aware
-of the abyss of excess that yawns before me, but the exotic wine is so luring,
-so intoxicating, the call of the Orient is so irresistible—I plunge:
-</p>
-
-<div class="excerpt">
-<p class="noindent">
-I will lay me down whenever I want to beautifully admire
-Utamaro and spend half an hour with his lady (“Today I am with
-her in silence of twilight eve, and am afraid she may vanish into
-the mist”), in the room darkened by the candle-light (it is the
-candle-light that darkens rather than lights); every book or picture
-of Western origin (perhaps except a few reprints from Rossetti or
-Whistler, which would not break the atmosphere altogether) should
-be put aside. How can you place together in the same room
-Utamaro’s women, for instance, with Millet’s pictures or Carpenter’s
-<em>Towards Democracy</em>? The atmosphere I want to create should
-be most impersonal, not touched or scarred by the sharpness of
-modern individualism or personality, but eternally soft and grey;
-under the soft grey atmosphere you would expect to see the sudden
-swift emotion of love, pain or joy of life, that may come any
-moment or may not come at all.
-</p>
-
-</div>
-
-<p class="noindent">
-I recall an evening at “The Vagabonds,” where some ultra-modern
-paintings were exhibited and bravely discussed. An idiotic friend of mine
-suggested that the Vagabonds pass an evening in contemplating the canvasses
-in absolute silence. The obliging chairman, who is a fair parliamentarian,
-had the suggestion voted upon with the result of one vote in favor
-of it. I recall that evening in connection with Noguchi’s lines about Koyetsu:
-</p>
-
-<div class="excerpt">
-<p class="noindent">
-What need there be but prayer and silence? There is nothing
-more petty, even vulgar, in the grey world of art and poetry,
-than to have a too-close attachment to life and physical surroundings;
-if our Orientalism may not tell you anything much, I think
-it will teach you at least to soar out of your trivialism.
-</p>
-
-</div>
-
-<p class="noindent">
-I refuse to say any more about the book, for I am tempted to quote him
-all the way through. If you wish to forget yourself and your environment,
-to melt away in the unreal atmosphere of Japanese prints—read Yone
-Noguchi’s little book.
-</p>
-
-<p class="sign">
-<span class="smallcaps">K.</span>
-</p>
-
-<h3 class="section" id="THESLAVINCONRAD">
-<span class="smallcaps">The Slav in Conrad</span>
-</h3>
-
-<p class="book">
-<em>Victory, by Joseph Conrad.
-New York: Doubleday, Page and Company.</em>
-</p>
-
-<p class="noindent">
-The Slavs are not adventurous people in the Western sense of the word;
-for the most part an inland race spread over the great monotonous Plain,
-<a id="page-47" class="pagenum" title="47"></a>
-they are inclined for melancholy introspective searchings and spiritual
-struggles rather than for actual physical adventures. Their writers need
-not create for their heroes an atmosphere of dizzying stunts and elemental
-cataclysms; they find sufficient dramatic “plot” in the soul experiences of
-the restless yearning men and women who dwell not on a South Sea island
-but in ordinary cities and villages, fighting their human fights, wrestling
-with God and man, gaining their ephemeral victories, but more often suffering
-defeats. Yet, despite their lack of adventurousness, the stories of the
-Russian and Polish writers, from Dostoevsky to Kuprin and from Orzezsko
-to Zeromsky, have seldom caused a yawn in their reader.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-The checkered life of Conrad has placed a distinct stamp upon his
-works, distinct from both the writers of his race and from the Western
-writers. We observe a dualism in his art, an eternal collision between fact
-and fiction, between realism and symbolism. His inborn Slavic mysticism
-is weighed down by the ballast of his rich experiences, and he continually
-wavers between the Scylla of lyric melancholy and the Charybdis of picturesque
-plot, preserving the equilibrium at times more and at times less skilfully.
-The reader thus finds in Conrad that which he is after. For my
-part, I am rather distracted by the over-complex plot of <em>Victory</em>; I should
-much prefer to meet Heyst and Lena in less dizzy surroundings, for then
-the interesting psychology of the quaint lovers would appear accentuated,
-like the flame of a candle, and would not be blurred by a pyrotechnic mass
-of startling coincidences and marvellous adventures. The atmosphere of
-Doom that breathes throughout the story is reduced in the end to a sensational
-Eugène Sue-like climax—a heap of dead bodies.
-</p>
-
-<p class="sign">
-<span class="smallcaps">K.</span>
-</p>
-
-<h3 class="section" id="SICKIDEALISM">
-SICK IDEALISM
-</h3>
-
-<p class="book">
-<em>Erdgeist (Earth-Spirit): A Tragedy in Four Acts; Pandora’s Box, by Frank
-Wedekind. New York: Albert and Charles Boni.</em>
-</p>
-
-<p class="noindent">
-Poor, foolish Frank Wedekind. Hapless Idealist. Luckless dreamer.
-Have you read <em>Der Erdgeist</em> and <em>Pandora’s Box</em>? He wrote them—this
-enfevered fancier. In two kindred flashes of madness he illuminated several
-hundred sheets of paper and out of them—out of their blood-shot words
-and illegitimate truths—a new figure is born for the bookshelf. Not an old
-figure in new binding and fresh rouge. Not a Lescaut or a Thaïs or a
-Nana. This mocking idealist of virtue removes indeed the eighth veil from
-Salome. He hurls into the midst of the twittering parlor thinkers and sex
-chatterers a most disturbing answer to the eternal question, “What is woman?”
-It didn’t disturb me because I don’t believe it. And anyway, I don’t
-mean that kind of disturbance. I mean, virtuous reader, it is impossible to
-consume Wedekind without blushing. If you were disappointed in Shakespeare
-and Balzac and Casanova and Jacques Tournebrouche and could find
-<a id="page-48" class="pagenum" title="48"></a>
-nothing to blush at in them, do not despair. Here is a fellow, this Wedekind,
-who will daub a real blush out of a rouge pot, a miserable fellow
-whom you can condemn and ostracize and, having relegated him to his
-proper place, enjoy thoroughly or secretly or not at all.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-It was Wedekind who first made people blush by a tasteless dissertation
-on the ignorant smugness recognized by society as the proper state
-for a young woman’s mind. He called it <em>Spring’s Awakening</em>. It was
-chiefly instrumental in awakening theatrical writers and managers. They
-spread the blush at $2 a head and waxed fat. But how did they spread
-the blush? Did they talk like Wedekind did? Did the mawkish plagiarist
-Cosmo Hamilton talk like Wedekind—tastelessly, vilely, brutally, and—horrors!—indelicately?
-Not he. Mr. Hamilton and the other get-rich-quick
-propagandists wouldn’t talk that way for the world. They are nice
-gentlemen. Not for them the idealist’s leer. Rather the bathroom wink.
-They will reveal a delicious girl in her delicious boudoir wearing a delicious
-nightie. They will make her out a virtuous girl, charmingly endowed but
-utterly stainless.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-Having established this fact they roguishly introduce into her boudoir
-an estimable young man and permit him to caress her dramatically. But
-the whole proceeding is stainless. It is drolly suggestive of unspeakable
-things—see box office receipts. But suggestiveness is necessary to bring
-home to people the blindness of virtue and the dangers that beset the underpaid
-young women who ignorantly make it its own reward—(if that means
-anything). Anyway, when the audience leaves it has been enlightened.
-Its taste has not been offended. Virtue has been shown to be a dangerous
-thing—that is, uneducated virtue has. Everyone agrees. And if not they
-disagree. In either case the discussion properly conducted (under the
-auspices of the “Amalgamated Virgins of the 21st and 22nd Wards”) is
-pleasing and improving. The press argues delicately and in good taste
-about sex hygiene. A new physiology is placed in the public schools containing
-information on the most effective way of brushing the teeth of the
-young and preserving the hair of the old.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-And last week Coroner Hoffman told me that it was impossible to estimate
-how many girls were killed annually in Chicago by abortive operations.
-He put the number in the hundreds. Hooray! Death is the wages
-of sin.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-But all quibbling aside, what does this low fellow Wedekind whom I
-started out by calling an idealist (I will prove it shortly) do? To begin
-with, he talks about sex. Not about stockings and undergarments and
-perfumed kisses, ankles, asterisks and anomalies. Everyone knows that
-this kind of talk, particularly when produced in drama form, is in the first
-place inexcusable, and in the second place unnecessary, and in the third
-place vulgar. And in the fourth place, instead of making the best of a bad
-job—that is, making his contributions a mental stimulus for snickering roués
-and ladies sensitive of their status—he insists upon being nasty without
-<a id="page-49" class="pagenum" title="49"></a>
-being covert. Is there anything more unpardonable? Nobody can enjoy
-nastiness. The argument is an endless one. It leads to nothing except
-blows or blushes.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-As for the plays—I almost forgot I was reviewing them—Wedekind
-explodes volcanically on the subject he treats, and blows the question mark
-out of woman. He takes all the crimes a policeman ever heard of, rolls
-them up in a package of soft warm flesh and labels it “Woman.” He
-cracks his showman’s whip and calls attention to the texture of her skin
-and the white meat of her body. And then he sends her forth to ruin, to
-sweep like a polluted and wreck-strewn wave through life, breaking at last
-in a dirty crest on a foreign shore and leaving a scum behind her. Are
-these the worst things Wedekind could find to label woman—incest, butchery,
-lecherous animalism, bloody business and abandonment? Who but a
-sick idealist would pick a careless and care-free prostitute as a flaming example
-of woman at her worst? And is the power to destroy the most terrible
-power woman possesses?
-</p>
-
-<p>
-Wedekind imagines that people idealize sex and hold it a beautiful
-force. Poor Wedekind, where did he get such an idea? And then he
-imagines that in reality sex passion is a smashing force that knocks people
-into each other’s arms, tumbles their heavens, smears their lives. He
-imagines that men and women love without thought, mate with the irresponsibility
-of hyenas. And imagining all this Wedekind creates a sort
-of droll fiend to prove it. Behold her—a creature to confound saints and
-sinners, to tear the beauty out of men’s souls and dance with muddied feet
-upon the finery of life. He dangles her before our eyes, naked and glorious—the
-diseased siren of the ages. And he calls her Lulu, the earth spirit.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-He introduces her fresh and joyous and vibrating with tabooed emotions.
-She is in love with her own beauty. Her body thrills her with its
-whiteness and its movement. She already has felt its power. Were I in
-these plays I would as soon think of kissing Lulu as biting a stick of dynamite.
-But I am not an ideal conception. There are other men—Wedekind
-digs them up from every corner of life—who fall at her feet and who shoot
-each other and themselves for the sake of being contaminated by her
-caresses. Queer men, idealists. They tumble about her, whining, cursing,
-chanting, forswearing their Gods, their souls and their vanities.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-And she tumbles with them, from one precipice down to another, faithful
-only to her nervous system. Her only virtue is a complete absence of
-the quality. If only Wedekind had invested her with a single human moral
-conviction—merely for the sake of completing her diabolically. If only
-he had made it possible for her to sin against something. But she hasn’t
-anything to sin against—not a conviction, not a moral. In this country
-she would be tried for her murders and treasons and sent to an asylum for
-incomplete people. What she does she does simply. When this hussy
-kills the father who owned her in order to save herself from his threats
-and then throws herself laughingly into the arms of the son, she does it all
-<a id="page-50" class="pagenum" title="50"></a>
-without malice. It is all natural, spontaneous. When she rebukes her own
-father for making love to her (she tells him he’s getting too old for such
-tricks), when she murders, deceives and pollutes she hasn’t any feeling of
-doing wrong, any reaction except one of satisfaction. If this isn’t an ideal
-I’d like to know what is. If everybody was like she is there would be no
-sorrow or suffering in the world. We would all be simple animals dashing
-around, biting each other, drinking from each other’s throats, feeling pain
-only when our nerves were touched and joy only when our nerves were
-touched. Wedekind imagines that this state is the true reflection of today.
-He exaggerates what according to his experience may be a logical prejudice
-and hurls it brutally behind the footlights and into the bookcase.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-Lulu, bedraggled, walking the streets of London in the rain, looking
-for prey, Lulu wheedling quarters out of ragged sensualists, hiding her
-father and her lover and the woman who desires her while she “entertains”
-her victims, Lulu spreading disease, and then Lulu running wildly around
-the dirty garret in her chemise pursued and killed by a red-eyed, nail-bitten
-Jack the Ripper—that is the end of woman. Poor Wedekind. What an
-exaggerated opinion of virtue he must have,—an idealist’s. There is but
-one more thing. It is Wedekind’s master stroke.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-He introduces a note of unselfishness and poetry as a climax. Lulu
-lies stabbed by the delighted and enthusiastic Ripper. And kneeling before
-the picture of her in her hey-dey is the “Countess,” the woman who loved
-her—a homo-sexualist—an irritating creature.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-“I love you, you are the star in my heavens,” she cries purely. I don’t
-remember whether the Ripper kills her or not. <em>What a mess!</em>
-</p>
-
-<p class="sign">
-<span class="smallcaps">B. H.</span>
-</p>
-
-<h3 class="section blank" id="subchap-0-0-1" title="Rabindranath Tagore: A Biographical Study, by Ernest Rhys">
-</h3>
-
-<p class="book">
-<em>Rabindranath Tagore: A Biographical Study, by Ernest Rhys.</em>
-<em>New York: The Macmillan Company.</em>
-</p>
-
-<p class="noindent">
-Shrill Chicago and thousands of similar examples of Western civilization
-have more to learn from a book of this sort than can be readily explained.
-Taking Chicago as fairly representative of the swiftest modernity, one
-must blush for the city of “I Will” whenever he picks up Ernest Rhys’s keen
-and quiet study of the talked-about Hindu. The blushes are for the vast
-herds whose only ventures upon new paths are to trample and set back,
-whose only ideals center in or near the stomach. In the white light of
-this book—reflected radiance from a first-magnitude luminary—Chicago
-and her kind appear as blundering heedless egotists who never listen. Their
-ears have not developed, their eyes are turned to the ground. “I Will”—what?
-To grow strong, high-minded, clean of heart, and wise of soul?
-Anything but this.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-<a id="page-51" class="pagenum" title="51"></a>
-Tagore, by his very tolerance and avoidance of condemnation, seems
-vehemently to remind the thinker of all this—by force of the law of contrast.
-The clear-eyed Easterner even points out a scant virtue or two in
-Western civilization, such as the value of mastering materials, which the
-Westerner himself overlooks when in self-defense; and no blame is placed
-on the feverish civilizees. Tagore moves in a state of peace which is the
-very essence of activity, and has no part in the fanatics’ plan which begins
-with lassitude and ends in stagnation. He is a man of action, forceful,
-definite, wasting no energy nor sparing the use of it. Modern methods of
-doing things and “getting there” become mere feeble noises by comparison.
-This is not the tragedy, that Westerners blunder and fail,—the East has
-its failures,—but it lies in the fact that America arrogantly chooses not to
-listen, not to see and learn. A few scattered listeners must catch the harmonies
-intended for a whole nation, the majority having been sophisticated
-to extinction. The herds in Chicago and elsewhere will go on indefinitely
-in their own swaggering way, blind and deaf, sure beyond correction that
-the chief desirability lies in digestion, decoration, and diversion ...
-while Rabindranath Tagore and the beautiful element he personifies are
-ever-present, waiting within reach of all, working out the biggest things in
-the world, and living the last word of true joy.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-Ernest Rhys is very gentle and sparing in making comparisons. He
-leaves this to his reader, and is mainly occupied with the re-creation of the
-steady magnetic atmosphere which is a natural attribute of Tagore. The
-paragraphs devoted to the boys’ school at Bolpur give one a feeling of
-something lost, at least to those who thirsted through the schools of the
-U. S. Rhys is successful in giving out an excellent idea of the great man
-and his works.
-</p>
-
-<p class="sign">
-<span class="smallcaps">Herman Schuchert.</span>
-</p>
-
-<div class="filler">
-<p class="noindent">
-Militarism is the German spirit.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-Militarism is the self-revelation of German heroism.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-Militarism is the heroic spirit raised to the spirit of
-war. It is Potsdam and Weimar in their highest combination.
-It is <em>Faust</em> and <em>Zarathustra</em> and Beethoven’s
-score in the trenches.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-For even the <em>Eroica</em> and the <em>Egmont</em> Overture are
-nothing but the truest militarism. And just because all
-virtues which lend such a high value to militarism are
-revealed to the fullest extent in war, we are filled with
-militarism, regarding it as something holy—as the holiest
-thing on earth—<em>Werner Zombart</em>.
-</p>
-
-</div>
-
-<div class="chapter">
-
-<h2 class="article" id="HAVEYOUREAD">
-<a id="page-52" class="pagenum" title="52"></a>
-Have You Read——?
-</h2>
-
-</div>
-
-<p class="note">
-(<em>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.</em>)
-</p>
-
-<p class="first">
-<span class="firstchar">T</span><span class="postfirstchar">he</span> Imagist Number of <em>The Egoist</em>, May 1.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-H. D. and Imagism, by May Sinclair. <em>The Egoist</em>, June 1.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-Redemption and Dostoevsky, by Rebecca West. <em>The New Republic</em>, June 5.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-Back of Billy Sunday, by John Reed. <em>The Metropolitan</em>, May.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-The Old Woman’s Money, by James Stephens. <em>The Century</em>, May.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-Quack Novels and Democracy, by Owen Wister. <em>The Atlantic</em>, June.
-</p>
-
-<div class="chapter">
-
-<h2 class="article" id="CANYOUREAD">
-Can You Read——?
-</h2>
-
-</div>
-
-<p class="note">
-(<em>In this column will be given each month a
-resumé of current cant which, as an intelligent
-being, you will go far to avoid.</em>)
-</p>
-
-<p class="first">
-<span class="firstchar">F</span><span class="postfirstchar">iction</span> reviews by Llewellyn Jones in <em>The Chicago Evening Post</em>.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-A typical literary judgment from <em>The Dial</em>: “But, in the main, his
-wholesomely harsh utterances ought to be, and must be, in some degree,
-tonic and bracing and curative.”
-</p>
-
-<p>
-An editorial from <em>The New Republic</em>, a journal of opinion whose function,
-we believe, is to circulate ideas:
-</p>
-
-<div class="excerpt">
-<p class="noindent">
-During the past ten months the German Ambassador
-at Washington has done nothing to promote a better
-understanding between his own government and nation
-and the American government and nation. He is consequently
-all the more to be congratulated upon his behavior
-at a moment of acute and dangerous contention
-between the United States and Germany. He has on his
-own initiative and perhaps at his own risk intervened on
-behalf of a possibly peaceful solution of the differences
-between the two governments. He has sought by means
-of a frank talk with President Wilson to break through
-the barrier of misunderstanding which the exchange of
-notes was building up between the two governments and
-to re-establish a genuine vehicle of communication. The
-conversation may not lead to agreement, but at the top
-of a peculiarly forbidding crisis it has at least made an
-agreement seem not impossible. Everybody who detests
-war, everybody who hopes that the friendship between
-the United States and Germany will not be involved
-in the wreckage of the hideous conflict, will be grateful
-to Count von Bernstorff for his enterprise.
-</p>
-
-</div>
-
-<div class="chapter">
-
-<h2 class="article" id="THEREADERCRITIC">
-<a id="page-53" class="pagenum" title="53"></a>
-The Reader Critic
-</h2>
-
-</div>
-
-<div class="letters">
-<p class="from">
-<em>Mrs. Jean Cowdrey Norton, Hempstead, Long Island</em>:
-</p>
-
-<p>
-Since coming in contact with <span class="smallcaps">The Little Review</span> last December, I have more than
-enjoyed each issue with your own impulsive, warm-hearted, dauntless personality
-coming through its pages; and it is for that reason I do not hesitate to ask you for
-an explanation of a sentence that you wrote in the April number, which led me to
-subscribe for that horrible output, viz., <em>The Masses</em>. You pronounced it indispensable
-to intelligent living. On that I sent in a subscription, and whereas I am not so awfully
-stupid I cannot understand how you, who are evidently an artist with high ideals,
-could possibly have such a magazine on your desk. The cartoons are so untrue, so
-damnably vulgar,—which good art never is,—the insistent harping on the shadows of
-life, the exaggerated outlook which tinges the whole paper—quite as one-sided on its
-side as other papers are on theirs; all of which I know must be in complete contradiction
-to your self. It fills me with astonishment. We acknowledge with our ever-increasing
-complex civilization that we must more than ever perhaps help each other;
-but I don’t just understand which class this perfectly rotten sheet is intended to reach.
-If it’s the so-called down trodden, they are apt to have so much unhappiness any way
-I should say a good brace up does more good than harping on injustice in general;
-as for the class that “does not think,” its inartistic drawings alone would be enough
-to queer it. When I am down and out—I happen to be a working woman too—I most
-decidedly <em>do not</em> want to be made more down and out by more woes, that often spring
-from lack of intelligence, that both rich and poor suffer alike from. You will see I
-believe in the responsibility of the individual, that you Socialists rather avoid. I do
-not expect you to answer this letter, but I shall look in <span class="smallcaps">The Little Review</span> for a
-stray line that will give me some idea of your outlook.
-</p>
-
-<p class="note">
-[I have so much to say in answer to this letter, and
-so little time to say it that I have asked someone who
-shares my view to do it for me. Mr. Davis says it
-much better than I could, anyhow. And I must add that
-I am not a Socialist. I am an Anarchist—which means,
-an Individualist; which means everything that people
-think it doesn’t mean.—<em>The Editor.</em>]
-</p>
-
-<p class="from">
-<em>F. Guy Davis, Chicago</em>:
-</p>
-
-<p>
-I will try to indicate very briefly why I think so much of <em>The Masses</em>. The group
-that is getting it out are real students who know the crowd with all its hope and
-despair, much better than the crowd knows itself. They are interpreting the crowd.
-The mass would never like <em>The Masses</em>. It is too true. It is not got up for them.
-<em>The Cosmopolitan</em> is the ideal of the mass. <em>The Masses</em> is for the few brave spirits
-who want to know life as it is, the shadows as well as the flights up into the sunshine.
-<em>The Masses</em> to my mind has as broad a range of feeling reflected in its pages as any
-magazine I know of. Humor, tragedy, light, shade, drama, color, yes, and mud too,
-as you say. But isn’t mud a part of life? In some respects mud is the condition of
-life. The great need of the sensitive mind of today is contact with the vital life-giving
-things and ideas which come from the earth. The life of such a mind is like
-the life of a plant. Its roots must go down beneath the surface or it will die. <em>The
-Masses</em> to my mind is the spirit of the earth put into magazine form, and to read it
-understandingly is to put the roots of the soul down into the earth where they should
-be if a healthy growth is desired. One could get too much of that contact of course,
-but that is another matter.
-</p>
-
-<h3 class="section" id="FREEPOETSVFREEVERSE">
-<a id="page-54" class="pagenum" title="54"></a>
-<em>FREE POETS v. FREE VERSE.</em>
-</h3>
-
-<p class="note">
-[As Mr. Carter suggests in the following letter, reprinted
-from <em>The Egoist</em>, I hope <span class="smallcaps">The Little Review</span>
-agree with Mr. Aldington’s point of view. I hope the latter
-may be induced to answer Mr. Carter at length in the
-same issue.—<em>The Editor.</em>]
-</p>
-
-<p class="from">
-<em>To the Editor, The Egoist</em>
-</p>
-
-<p>
-Madam,—I notice that in his contribution to the Imagist number of <em>The Egoist</em>
-Mr. Harold Monro, writing on the history of the Imagist movement, states that the
-movement owes its origin to the large discovery of “Poetry as <em>an</em> art” [my italics].
-He then proceeds to point out that the Imagist verse fails as poetry not because the
-writers love poetry less, but because they love expression more. Being what it is it
-would be no better if Tennyson had written it, and no worse if it proved to be by, say,
-Mr. Rudyard Kipling. Indeed, it is not poetry any more than little Congreve’s tiresome
-stream of depreciation is comedy, despite what certain hopeless apprentice play
-critics assert to the contrary. Poetry, I suppose Mr. Monro would say, is not expression
-but the thing expressed. All this is good and true. But Mr. Monro fails to
-make one thing quite clear. The Imagists have been mistaken in their very conception
-of poetry which lives alone by the power to see it as Art and not as “<em>an art</em>.” I am
-convinced that some at least of the Imagists are not without the secret of this power,
-and if they will be guided by the vision they gain thereby, to the extent of forgetting
-their literary erudition, it will transform their conception of poetry. The strict literature
-at which they aim is not proper poetry. In fact, literary technicians do not, as a
-rule, write poetry for the simple reason that even if they dream the poet’s dream of
-reality they at once proceed to smother it under literary form. We must look to those
-rich in poetical experience, and free to express it, for the true expression of poetry. In
-plain words, “Poetry as <em>an</em> art” (that is, as expression or form) is not the same as
-Poetry as Art (that is, the thing expressed). The distinction is so big and vital and
-so necessary to be maintained at this moment, that I propose to consider it in an article
-in <span class="smallcaps">The Little Review</span>. I hope to prove that what poetry needs nowadays is free
-poets, not free verse.
-</p>
-
-<p class="sign">
-<span class="smallcaps"><a id="corr-28"></a>Huntly Carter.</span>
-</p>
-
-<p class="note">
-[As the nearest available Imagist, perhaps I may be permitted to comment (without
-prejudice to the other Imagists) on Mr. Carter’s letter. I am not quite sure that I
-know what Mr. Carter means, but I think he means that it is useless for a man to
-study classic quantity and mediaeval rhyme and modern free verse, if he has no particular
-impulse or mood to make those studies valuable as a means of expression. If
-that is what Mr. Carter means I agree with him. I will also agree that it is useless
-to try and teach a dumb man to lecture or a lame man to break the hundred yards
-record. If a man is to lecture, if he is to be an athlete, we take for granted that in
-the first case he has ideas and a certain eloquence, and in the second a good physique
-and an aptitude for sprinting. Mr. Carter would be a rotten trainer if he didn’t make
-his man diet, take cold baths and long walks and an occasional sprint; he ought even
-to make him do a little boxing. I feel, somehow, that Mr. Carter never went in for
-violent exercise or that he relied upon his “Soul-Flow” or “Art-Ebb” to get him
-through.
-</p>
-
-<p class="note">
-Now poetry is not so very unlike athletics. You may have no aptitude for it,
-and then all the training in the world won’t get you in first; you may shape very well,
-but if you don’t train you will be an “also ran.” I believe in having an aptitude and
-in training it; Mr. Carter believes in having an aptitude and not training it.
-</p>
-
-<p class="note">
-<a id="page-55" class="pagenum" title="55"></a>
-I object to Mr. Carter informing us of the existence of our “of courses.” We
-take for granted that a man is sincere, that he has lots of impulses and that he is
-“free.” All that is the stuff out of which poetry is made. The making of it, the
-“training” is what we are immediately interested in. We take for granted that we
-have the essentials of poetry in us or we should not attempt to write it. We are now
-after clarity of form, precision of expression. Mr. Carter, like the majority of our
-fellow citizens, does not value these things; we find them present in every work of
-art which is beautiful and permanently interesting; hence our anxiety to attain by
-practice that clarity and that precision which practice alone can give.]
-</p>
-
-<p class="sign">
-<span class="smallcaps">Richard Aldington.</span>
-</p>
-
-</div>
-
-<div class="filler">
-<p class="noindent">
-If only every Celt will refuse to fight for anything
-but the freedom of his own country, the English will
-soon destroy themselves altogether, and we shall inherit
-their language, the only worthy thing they have, and
-which their newspapers have not yet succeeded in debauching
-and degrading beyond repair. There are still
-universities in England. However, they have made it a
-crime in England to write good English—for style itself
-is a form of truth, being beauty; and truth and beauty
-are as welcome in England as detectives in a thieves’
-kitchen.—Aleister Crowley in <em>The International</em>.
-</p>
-
-</div>
-
-<div class="ads chapter">
-<p class="h1 adh">
-THE DRAMA
-</p>
-
-<p class="h3 adh">
-for May Contained This Interesting Material
-</p>
-
-<p class="adb">
-THE CLASSICAL STAGE OF JAPAN
-Ernest Fenollosa’s Work on the Japanese “Noh.” Edited
-by Ezra Pound.
-</p>
-
-<p class="c">
-“Noh” Dramas (from the Fenollosa Manuscript).
-</p>
-
- <div class="c">
-<p class="ib u">
-Sotoba Komachi.<br />
-Kayoi Komachi.<br />
-Suma Genji.<br />
-Kumasaka.<br />
-Shojo.<br />
-Tamura.<br />
-Tsunemasa.<br />
-Kunasaka.
-</p>
-
- </div>
-<p class="adb">
-THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF THE CENSORSHIP, by <em>Thomas H. Dickinson</em>
-</p>
-
-<p class="adb">
-MAURICE MAETERLINCK by <em>Remy de Gourmont</em>
-Authorized translation by Richard Aldington.
-</p>
-
-<p class="adb">
-THE “BOOK OF THE PAGEANT,” AND ITS DEVELOPMENT by <em>Frank Chouteau Brown</em>
-</p>
-
-<p class="adb">
-ON THE READING OF PLAYS by <em>Elizabeth R. Hunt</em>
-</p>
-
-<p class="adb">
-A PYRAMUS-AND-THISBE PLAY OF SHAKESPEARE’S
-TIME, with notes by <em>Eleanor Prescott Hammond</em>
-</p>
-
-<p class="adb">
-THE PUBLISHED PLAY by <em>Archibald Henderson</em>
-</p>
-
-<p class="adb">
-THE THEATRE TODAY—AND TOMORROW, a review, by <em>Alice Corbin Henderson</em>
-</p>
-
-<p class="adb">
-THE GERMAN STAGE AND ITS ORGANIZATION—Part
-III, Private Theatres by <em>Frank E. Washburn Freund</em>
-</p>
-
-<p class="adb">
-ASPECTS OF MODERN DRAMA, a review, by <em>Lander MacClintock</em>
-</p>
-
-<p class="adb">
-THE JAPANESE PLAY OF THE CENTURIES by <em>Gertrude Emerson</em>
-</p>
-
-<p class="adb">
-A SELECTIVE LIST OF ESSAYS AND BOOKS ABOUT
-THE THEATRE AND OF PLAYS, published during the
-first quarter of 1915 compiled by <em>Frank Chouteau Brown</em>
-</p>
-
-<hr />
-
-<p>
-<span class="smallcaps">The Drama</span> for August will contain Augier’s <em>Mariage
-d’Olympe</em>, with a foreword by Eugene Brieux; an amusing account
-of his experiences with Parsee drama, by George Cecil; a
-paper on the <em>Evolution of the Actor</em>, by Arthur Pollock; a discussion
-of Frank Wedekind, by Frances Fay; a review of the
-work of the recent Drama League Convention; a plan for an
-autumn community festival; an outline of the nation-wide celebration
-of the Shakespeare tercentenary, and an article entitled
-<em>Depersonalizing the Instruments of the Drama</em>, by Huntly Carter.
-</p>
-
-<hr />
-
-<p class="u fl ade">
-<em>The Drama, a Quarterly</em><br />
-<em>$3.00 per year</em>
-</p>
-
-<p class="u fr ade">
-<em>736 Marquette Building</em><br />
-<em>Chicago</em>
-</p>
-
-<p class="cb vspace">
-&nbsp;
-</p>
-
-</div>
-
-<div class="ads chapter">
-<a id="page-56" class="pagenum" title="56"></a>
- <div class="smallbox">
-<p>
-The most difficult business in life is to
-get advertisements for an “artistic” magazine—particularly
-for one that has the added
-stigma of being a free lance. We will give
-a commission of $5.00 to every one who
-secures a full-page “ad” for <span class="smallcaps">The Little
-Review</span>. Write for particulars.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-On the following pages you will find the
-“ads” we might have had in this issue, but
-haven’t.
-</p>
-
- </div>
-</div>
-
-<div class="ads chapter">
-<a id="page-57" class="pagenum" title="57"></a>
- <div class="smallbox">
-<p>
-Mandel Brothers might have taken this
-page to feature their library furnishings,
-desk sets, and accessories—of which they
-are supposed to have the most interesting
-assortment in town. I learned that on the
-authority of some one who referred to
-Mandel’s as “the most original and artistic
-store in Chicago.” If they should advertise
-those things here I have no doubt the
-1,000 Chicago subscribers to <span class="smallcaps">The Little
-Review</span> would overflow their store.
-</p>
-
- </div>
-</div>
-
-<div class="ads chapter">
-<a id="page-58" class="pagenum" title="58"></a>
- <div class="smallbox">
-<p>
-Marshall Field and Company might have
-used this page—but they wouldn’t. I have
-been to see them at least six times. They
-have a book department where you can
-actually find Nietzsche when you want him
-without having the clerk say, “We’ll be glad
-to order it.” Such a phenomenon ought to
-be heralded.
-</p>
-
- </div>
-</div>
-
-<div class="ads chapter">
-<a id="page-59" class="pagenum" title="59"></a>
- <div class="smallbox">
-<p>
-Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company ought
-to advertise something, though I don’t know
-just what. The man I interviewed made
-such a face when I told him we were “radical”
-that I haven’t had the courage to go
-back and pester him for the desired full-page.
-The Carson-Pirie attitude toward
-change of any sort is well-known—I think
-they resent even having to keep pace with
-the change in fashions.
-</p>
-
- </div>
-</div>
-
-<div class="ads chapter">
-<a id="page-60" class="pagenum" title="60"></a>
- <div class="smallbox">
-<p>
-A. C. McClurg and Company could have
-used this page to advantage. They have lots
-of books to advertise and they ought to
-want to advertise them in a Chicago magazine.
-I am willing to wager that they will:
-I plan to interview them once a week until
-they succumb.
-</p>
-
- </div>
-</div>
-
-<div class="ads chapter">
-<a id="page-61" class="pagenum" title="61"></a>
- <div class="smallbox">
-<p>
-There is least excuse of all for the Cable
-Piano Company. They know what we
-think of the Mason and Hamlin Piano and
-they know, whether they advertise or not,
-that we will keep on talking about it whenever
-we feel like appreciating a beautiful
-thing—which is rather often.
-</p>
-
- </div>
-</div>
-
-<div class="ads chapter">
-<a id="page-62" class="pagenum" title="62"></a>
- <div class="smallbox">
-<p>
-This page might have been used very
-profitably by Mr. Mitchell Kennerley to announce
-the publication of a book of poems
-by Florence Kiper Frank. I think it is to
-be out this summer—though of course I
-can’t pretend to give the details accurately,
-not having been provided with the “ad.”
-But <span class="smallcaps">The Little Review</span> readers will want
-the book nevertheless.
-</p>
-
- </div>
-</div>
-
-<div class="ads chapter">
-<a id="page-63" class="pagenum" title="63"></a>
-<div class="centerpic poetry fl">
-<img src="images/poetry.jpg" alt="" /></div>
-
- <div class="hidden">
-<p class="h2 adh">
-Poetry
-</p>
-
-<p class="h3 adh">
-A Magazine of Verse
-</p>
-
- </div>
-<p class="u fr b c">
-543 Cass Street<br />
-Chicago
-</p>
-
-<p class="cb">
-<span class="smallcaps">Padraic Colum</span>, 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.”
-</p>
-
-<p>
-William Marion Reedy, Editor of the St. Louis <em>Mirror</em>, 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.”
-</p>
-
-<p>
-CAN YOU AFFORD TO DO WITHOUT SO IMPORTANT A MAGAZINE?
-</p>
-
-<p>
-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.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-POETRY has introduced more new poets of importance than all the other
-American magazines combined, besides publishing the work of poets already distinguished.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-THE ONLY MAGAZINE DEVOTED EXCLUSIVELY TO THIS ART.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-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.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-One year—12 numbers—U. S. A., $1.50; Canada, $1.65; foreign, $1.75
-(7 shillings).
-</p>
-
-<hr />
-
-<p class="u ade">
-POETRY<br />
-543 Cass Street, Chicago.
-</p>
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-<p class="u">
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-</p>
-
-</div>
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-<p>
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-</p>
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-<p class="cb">
-A critical analysis of the Modern Drama in its relation to the social and
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-</p>
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-</p>
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-</p>
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-20 East 125th Street, New York, New York
-</p>
-
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-
-<div class="ads chapter">
-<a id="page-66" class="pagenum" title="66"></a>
-<p class="h1 u adh">
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-</p>
-
- <div class="narrow">
-<hr />
-
-<p>
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-radical literature representing
-all phases of libertarian
-thought in religion, economics,
-philosophy, also
-revolutionary fiction, poetry
-and drama. All current
-radical newspapers and
-magazines.
-</p>
-
-<p class="u c">
-Mail orders promptly filled.<br />
-Send for catalogue.
-</p>
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-
- </div>
-<p class="u ade">
-<span class="larger">817½ North Clark Street</span><br />
-Chicago, Illinois
-</p>
-
-</div>
-
-<div class="trnote chapter">
-<p class="transnote">
-Transcriber’s Notes
-</p>
-
-<p>
-Advertisements were collected at the end of the text.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-The table of contents on the title page was adjusted in order to reflect correctly the
-headings in this issue of <span class="smallcaps">The Little Review</span>.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-In the poem <em><a href="#LESCONDOLYYANCES">Les Condoléances</a></em>, the line
-<em><a href="#line">Qu’il est sous les mers</a></em>
-was moved from the end of the stanza beginning with
-<em><a href="#stanza1">“Je n’insiste pas. Je suis venu vite,</a></em>
-to the end of the stanza beginning with
-<em><a href="#stanza2">“Si notre avenir—souffrez que je cache</a></em>
-where it most likely belongs.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-The original spelling was mostly preserved. A few obvious typographical errors
-were silently corrected. All other changes are shown here (before/after):
-</p>
-
-
-
-<ul>
-
-<li>
-... seines Nachbarvolkes fühlt, als <span class="underline">würs</span> dem eigenen Volk ...<br />
-... seines Nachbarvolkes fühlt, als <a href="#corr-2"><span class="underline">wärs</span></a> dem eigenen Volk ...<br />
-</li>
-
-<li>
-... for life, even if it be a fight against the whole world. “<span class="underline">Veder</span> Schlafpulver ...<br />
-... for life, even if it be a fight against the whole world. “<a href="#corr-4"><span class="underline">Weder</span></a> Schlafpulver ...<br />
-</li>
-
-<li>
-... And where shall be the end at last<span class="underline">.</span> ...<br />
-... And where shall be the end at last<a href="#corr-14"><span class="underline">?</span></a> ...<br />
-</li>
-
-<li>
-... I am <span class="underline">such</span> of the artificial inanities of the drawingroom—the polite ...<br />
-... I am <a href="#corr-17"><span class="underline">sick</span></a> of the artificial inanities of the drawingroom—the polite ...<br />
-</li>
-
-<li>
-... <span class="underline">Schoengist</span> nobility. ...<br />
-... <a href="#corr-18"><span class="underline">Schöngeist</span></a> nobility. ...<br />
-</li>
-
-<li>
-... rumble bizarrely from the depths of every philosophical <span class="underline">sub-celler</span> they can ...<br />
-... rumble bizarrely from the depths of every philosophical <a href="#corr-19"><span class="underline">sub-cellar</span></a> they can ...<br />
-</li>
-
-<li>
-... I am sick of their kinsmen, of the surgical tongues who dissect, <span class="underline">who who</span> ...<br />
-... I am sick of their kinsmen, of the surgical tongues who dissect, <a href="#corr-20"><span class="underline">who</span></a> ...<br />
-</li>
-
-<li>
-... <span class="underline">Huntley</span> Carter. ...<br />
-... <a href="#corr-28"><span class="underline">Huntly</span></a> Carter. ...<br />
-</li>
-</ul>
-</div>
-
-
-<div style='display:block; margin-top:4em'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LITTLE REVIEW, JUNE-JULY 1915 (VOL. 2, NO. 4) ***</div>
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