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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75976 ***





                           THE LITTLE REVIEW


                       Literature Drama Music Art

                          MARGARET C. ANDERSON
                                 EDITOR

                              AUGUST, 1916

        A Real Magazine                     Margaret C. Anderson
        Wakefulness                                   Amy Lowell
        Plymouth Rocks                                     R. G.
        Ulysse Fait Son Lit                    Jean de Bosschere
        Modernity Exposed:                         Caesar Zwaska
          Sandburg’s Chicago Poems                              
          The Case of Masters                                   
        The Poet Sings to the World                    Ben Hecht
        Splendid Isolation                           John Grimes
        The Tree                                      Helen Hoyt
        Editorials and Announcements                            
        Julia to Jim                                  Sue Golden
        A Vers Libre Contest                                    
        The Reader Critic                                       

                           Published Monthly

                            15 cents a copy

                    MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Publisher
                            Montgomery Block
                          SAN FRANCISCO, CAL.

                              $1.50 a year

   Entered as second-class matter at Postoffice, San Francisco, Cal.




                           THE LITTLE REVIEW


                                VOL. III

                              AUGUST, 1916

                                 NO. 5

                Copyright, 1916, by Margaret C. Anderson




                            A Real Magazine


                          MARGARET C. ANDERSON

I am afraid to write anything; I am ashamed.

I have been realizing the ridiculous tragedy of _The Little Review_. It
has been published for over two years without coming near its ideal.

                   *       *       *       *       *

The ultimate reason for life is Art. I don’t know what they mean when
they talk about art for life’s sake. You don’t make art so that you may
live; you do just the reverse of that. Life takes care of itself, rolls
on from the first push, and then falls over the edge. Art uses up all
the life it can get—and remains forever. Art for Art’s sake is merely
the sensible statement of the most self-evident fact in the world. It
has been the easy creed of charlatans; but what does that matter? It has
always been the faith of the strongest.

Well—I wanted Art in _The Little Review_. There has been a little of it,
just a very little.... It is tragic. I tell you.

And Revolution? Revolution _is_ Art. You want free people just as you
want the Venus that was modelled by the sea.... All my inadequate
stammerings about Emma Goldman have been to show her as the artist she
is: a great artist, working in her own material as a Michael Angelo
worked in his.

Now we shall have Art in this magazine or we shall stop publishing it. I
don’t care where it comes from—America or the South Sea Islands. I don’t
care whether it is brought by youth or age. I only want the miracle!

Where are the artists? Where is some new Pater, and how will his “She is
older than the rocks among which she sits” sound to us? Where is some
new Arthur Symons with his version of “Peter Weyland”? Where is a Henry
James and a Hardy and a Bjornson and an Andreyev for us? Where is a
Jean-Christophe who will let us publish his songs?

Helen Hoyt, you have a poem in this issue called _The Tree_. It is not
Art; it is merely a rather good poem. You could have made it Art. Do it
every time, for the love of the gods! “Sue Golden” has one about Jim and
Arabella. It has an interesting idea that many people need to
understand. Why not make Art of it? I know one of hers which begins “My
body is too frail for these great moods”—and the miracle is in it.

I loathe compromise, and yet I have been compromising in every issue by
putting in things that were “almost good” or “interesting enough” or
“important.” There will be no more of it. If there is only one really
beautiful thing for the September number it shall go in and the other
pages will be left blank.

Come on, all of you!




                              Wakefulness


                               AMY LOWELL

   Jolt of market-carts;
   Steady drip of horses’ hoofs on hard pavement;
   A black sky lacquered over with blueness,
   And the lights of Battersea Bridge
   Pricking pale in the dawn.
   The beautiful hours are passing
   And still you sleep!
   Tired heart of my joy,
   Incurved upon your dreams,
   Will the day come before you have opened to me?




                             Plymouth Rocks


                                 R. G.

Some new Agitation is always fretting the souls of those who feel that
it is their task to save the world from itself. Of late it has been
Birth Control. They have been going to prison for merely mentioning the
words Birth Control in the presence of an ingenue government. And all
the time the government has the most perfect system of Birth Control for
genius and art—the National Board of Censorship—so perfect as to produce
sterility.

A simple mind would wonder why these agitators don’t first fight the
censorship, and perhaps all these things would be added unto them!

Last winter a rumor did come out of New York that a few of these and a
few artists were trying to form a plan of unorganized but concerted
action, each profession or art or group protesting to the state on its
own behalf. It turned out to be another of those Spoon River things:
when the test came a few stood by the idea, but the others were either
too lily-livered to have their names appear or the inevitable Puritan
ancestor arose to remind them that after all they were Plymouth Rocks.

And all the while the tale grows finer yet:

Jerome Blum, a painter of reputation, a real painter, returned from
China in the spring naively bringing with him, to this land of the free,
a little collection of Chinese and Japanese art to keep by him for the
delight of his soul. In the collection was a book over one hundred and
fifty years old, containing eight original paintings on silk, by one of
the greatest of Chinese painters, and a Japanese scroll, twelve feet
long, of even finer workmanship.

Mr. Blum was summoned before the Collector of the Port of Chicago. The
two works described had been declared obscene by an appraiser: “They
would arouse the passions of an ordinary man.” They were to be
destroyed, with the possible inclusions of the entire case of old
bronzes, tapestries, embroideries, etc., in which they were shipped. Mr.
Blum had laid himself open to a fine of thousands of dollars, with
something like five years imprisonment, for good measure.

Law versus Art. Mr. Blum offered to paint out all objectionable parts,
asked permission to send the things back to China or permission to
present them to some museum. “Art or no Art, all paintings of the kind
were to be burned” was the decree from the customs officials. And the
two “obscene” works of art were burned in the furnace of the Federal
building.

No need here to go into what Mr. Blum must have suffered as an artist
over the destruction of precious beauty never to be replaced—or as a man
over the delicate and unobscene discussions, by the officials, of the
objectionable parts, over the injustice of having his property destroyed
without trial before a jury of his peers.

All people of any education know that the art of all ancient peoples
sprung from a desire to recreate for the hearts of men the mystery of
creation and reproduction of life; thence came religion to explain to
the minds of men the awe and wonder of creation. The Art of the Orient
is almost wholly concerned with these subjects. Here was where Mr.
Blum’s became “obscene” art.

If the censors should become informed woe for the Christian churches,
each raising an “obscene” phallic symbol, in the cross, shamelessly
uncensored to the sky; the bishops would mourn their fish-mouthed
phallic hats, and so on endlessly.

Who knows but if left to themselves they may not even reach themselves
in their unlimited censorship and be their own destruction?


   It is not doubt, but certitude which drives one mad.—_Nietzsche._




                          Ulysse Fait Son Lit


                           JEAN DE BOSSCHERE

   Ulysse glorieux, revenu des batailles
   Choisit une terre, dans la ville qui sourit à sa paix
   Il est à eux; il s’est donné avec la paix.
   Tous le touchent, et
   S’il pose la main sur les yeux
   Tous crient
   “Il songe à trahir, il est orgueilleux
   Peut-être croit-il nous faire honneur
   Même en ne nous regardant pas.
   Nous ferons deux nouvelles statutes pour toi, Ulysse!
   Tu seras bien forcé à te tenir parmi nous.”

   Or, Ulysse ne songe pas à fuir.
   Il sait l’homme dans les cuisines
   Dans l’aréopage, dans les batailles
   Il les aime avec leurs écailles de poisson
   Leurs nageoires sur un corps de truie
   Et la tête est celle du canard,
   Les pattes celles du coq,
   Avec des ailes de moineau;
   Il aime leur saveur de mauvais pain d’épices
   Mais souvent, le soir, l’odeur de chat,
   L’odeur est trop forte
   Et il ne peut plus embrasser ses amis
   “Que ma statue et ma penseé soient avec eux” dit-il.

   Dans sa terre, autour d’un sycomore
   Il elève un mur rond de pierre et de bois;
   À la hauteur du front, il coupe une porte;
   Elle n’est pas plus large que des épaules d’homme
   Puis il la ferme avec des planches
   Comme les cinq doights de la main cachent une blessure
   “Comme un pied appliqué aux vastes fesses des hommes”
   Dit-il; mais il rougit
   “Comme un couvercle sur le monde
   Comme un couvercle sur un pot de fromage piqué de vers.”
   Dit-il; mais il rougit.
   Et se frappe trois fois la poitrine.

   La foule regarde le mur
   Il n’y a pas de fenêtres.
   “Ulysse n’a pas le droit de se mettre au tombeau.”
   Le jeune Franklin s’accroche aux branches du sycomore
   Se hisse, et regarde par dessus le mur.
   Il retombe sur ses pieds de sycophante;
   “Ah! il scie le tronc de l’arbre” crie-t-il.
   “Il nous trahit, il nous vend, il nous renie.”

   “Ulysse, Ulysse! nous avons déposé des roses blanches
   Sous ta statue
   Ulysse, Ulysse! nous accrochons des roses rouges à ta porte;
   Ulysse, Ulysse montre-toi aux bourgeois de la ville.”
   Il a scié le tronc.
   Il en sépare des planches adorables,
   Et que l’on peut aimer d’amour
   Des planches plus aimables que des miches de pain.
   Ulysse, sans clous de fer
   Construit son lit avec le sycomore.
   “Ulysse, Ulysse, le conseil te réclame.
   Nous lui contâmes ce que tu fis de l’arbre”
   Lui avait-on, avec le terre, donné l’arbre
   D’où le jeune Franklin pouvait le voir?
   Il n’a pas le droit,
   Pas le droit.
   Il y a peut-être un souterrain
   Certainement il reçoit des messages sans fils.
   Oui, il communique avec l’ennemi.
   Ulysse avec des couleurs rouges et noires
   Trace des signes de joie sur son lit et sur sa porte.
   Puis il rit,
   Il rit, et son cœur
   Au milieu de l’air joyeux de la poitrine
   Et comme une rose sensuelle qui l’ouvre.
   Elle s’épanouit comme un soupir d’aise sans limite.
   Alors, du coté de la mer
   Il fore un trou dans la muraille.
   “Je vais prendre femme” dit-il,
   “Je sais bien comment elle sera, lisse et blanche
   Des cheveux ni de blé, ni de châtaigne
   Et des yeux sages avec l’ardeur des chats.
   Mais je veux la voir dans ce jour d’exultation
   À peine s’il me faut ajouter une table, un coffre, un autel.”

   Ulysse regarde par le trou ouvert, dans la pierre
   Ils sont mille autour du mur rond
   Et il entend que les hommes disent
   “A-t-il ses armes?
   Vous savez combien des la mamelle il fut malin
   Habile aux armes
   Et méchant”
   Il voit que les hommes sont chargés de fagots.
   Il y a un bûcher autour de la maison.
   Les femmes l’arrosent avec l’huile des lampes
   Et y versent celles de leur toilette,
   Les cuisiniers l’huile des poissons conservés,
   Les charrons la poix des charrettes,
   Le batelier apporte une marmite de goudron,
   Et un capitaine, vêtu de ses médailles de sioux
   Pousse la flamme d’une torche sous le bûcher.
   Ils cuisent Ulysse
   Car il est bien à eux.

   Au loin les statutes sont traîneés vers la mer.
   Un chaudronnier les achète à la foule trahie.
   Il paie trois guinées pour boire en paix.
   Ulysse cuit
   Les jeunes filles chantent
   Rougies par la lueurs des flammes
   Et les mères ravies, sourient.




                           Modernity Exposed


                        —And Gone One Better[1]

                             CAESAR ZWASKA

It has come to be that on the stage, where once we watched for artists,
we find only vainly strutting weak-willed human beings. We are not held,
and the light within the sacred space grows dimmer. We lose all interest
in places where once we have found Art.

And how desperate we have become!

The procession of the Imagists has been the only sacred thing before our
eyes—thin and fragrant. Their fragility has the sap of eternity;
blustering winds, blowing through the gaps back-stage, tear at them in
vain. The Imagists have grown straight and strong. The beauty of their
tiny procession strikes into our very hearts the emptiness, the
appalling desolation, of our position.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Carl Sandburg has understood the failures and the lies and exposed the
cause. He has shown the lie of your government and the farce and folly
of monuments to those who kill to keep it alive. He exposes your little
deaths and their perfumed sorrow and the bunk of words and antics of
your Billy Sunday and fellow citizens. He has heard the “fellows saying
here’s good stuff for a novel or it might be worked up into a good
play,” when speaking of an Italian widow living in city slums. He has
the courage and the knack of giving them the challenge—calling their
bluff; and he declares with strong conviction that he’s able to back up
his defiance. Who of the scatter-brains living could put her or her
daughter-in-law or the working girls or the entire mob, for that matter,
into a play? But _he_ has put them, their spirit, into lines, gaunt and
vivid as their lives. And I declare he is the only modern that has got
it across.

                   *       *       *       *       *

This is the process of the book and of the poet’s progress: The Chicago
poems; he has worked his vengeance; from the cinders and ashes, glowing
still, rise sparks, brilliant and tiny. (He calls them _Handfuls_.) The
stifling smoulder of the War poems to the warm rich glow of The Road and
the End and the flame of the fire with its attendant fogs and then grim
shadows. As a confession, or rather a solidifying of the entire force of
the poet, he reveals the _Other Days_, quite as intense as the present
mood. This from the last of that section:

      Snatch the gag from thy mouth, child,
      And be free to keep silence.
      Tell no man anything for no man listens,
      Yet hold thy lips ready to speak.

Why should a man speak? When there are things to say, such as the _Red
Son_, always have your lips ready to speak:

      I am going away and I never come back to you;
      Crags and high rough places call me,
      Great places of death
      Where men go empty-handed
      And pass over smiling
      To the star-drift on the horizon rim;
      My last whisper shall be alone, unknown;
      I shall go to the city and fight against it,
      And make it give me passwords
      Of luck and love, women worth dying for,
      And money.
          I go where you wist not of
          Nor I nor any man nor woman.
          I only know I go to storms
      Grappling against things wet and naked.
      There is no pity of it and no blame
      None of us is in the wrong.
      After all it is only this:
          You for the little hills and I go away.

Poetry has grown stronger in your eyes?

Thus has Carl Sandburg in one book gone the entire range of a life
today. The humanitarian poet as well as the artist-poet. He has proven
things—and peoples. The nigger: foam of teeth ... breaking crash of
laughter; Mrs. Gabrielle Giovannitti: with that kindling wood piled on
her head, coming along Peoria street nine o’clock in the morning; Jan
Kubelik: girls of Bohemia ... in the hills with their lovers; Chick
Lorimer: a wild girl keeping a hold on a dream she wants; Mischa Elman:
a singing fire and a climb of roses; the plowboy: turning the turf in
the dusk and haze of an April gloaming; the gypsy: her neck and head the
top piece of a Nile obelisk. He has known uplands when the great strong
hills are humble; losses: and one day we will hold only the shadows;
wars: in the wars to come kings kicked under the dust and millions of
men following great causes not yet dreamed out in the heads of men; joy:
sent on singing, singing, smashed to the hearts under the ribs with a
terrible love; the mist: at the first of things, I will be at the last;
and The Great Hunt:

          When the rose’s flash to the sunset
          Reels to the rack and the twist,
          And the rose is a red bygone,
          When the face I love is going
          And the gate to the end shall clang,
          And it’s no use to beckon or say, “So long”—
      Maybe I’ll tell you then—
                                some other time.


                          The Case of Masters

In one of Whitman’s songs he speaks to those “who would assume a place
to teach, or be a poet here in the States”; or, rather, he questions
them, something like this:

      What is it you bring my America?
      Is it uniform with my country?
      Is it not something that has been better told or done before?
      Have you not imported this, or the spirit of it, in some ship?
      Is it not a mere tale? a rhyme? a prettiness?—is the good old cause
         in it?
      Has it not dangled long at the heels of the poets, politicians,
         literats, of enemies’ lands?
      Does it not assume that what is notoriously gone is still here?
      Does it answer universal needs? Will it improve manners?
      Can your performance face the open fields and the seaside?
      Will it absorb into me as I absorb food, air, to appear again in my
         strength, gait, face?
      Have real employments contributed to it? original makers, not mere
         amanuenses?

And so on. I think the questions quoted and the rest of the poem are
valuable; especially in thinking of Masters’ new book.[2] Because here
are put to the lawyer, who is known as a poet, all the questions of our
time. They are put to him because his first book gave us to believe that
he was the first poet whom we need scrutinize closely since Whitman
spoke his simplicities to the present and the next ten futures.

Masters may not cringe before these “terms obdurate.” He will point to
_The Spoon River Anthology_. I will point to his work before the
Anthology and again these later things. Masters of course loves Walt
Whitman. He knows the poem from which I quoted. But Theodore
Watts-Dunton—you remember him? Masters, I am sure, is more anxious and
willing to accept, nay, subscribe to, the rules and judgments of this
Victorian critic than to the mere words spoken in poesy of
Watts-Dunton’s American contemporary, Whitman. I am almost certain of
this. Masters speaks highly of Watts-Dunton’s essay on poetry. It
appeared in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Please read it and find the
Masters creed. He seems ready to bow before it. If Masters wants honors
as a decadent he can have them—really he has earned them. _The Spoon
River Anthology_: its manner, joy, abandon, deepest humanity, art (all
that makes it the tremendous book it is), seem to be the one great thing
that Masters had to give us. The new book does not show the “truly deep
poetic spirit” which Francis Hackett claims to have found in it. Such a
judgment is given the lie by such poems as: _St. Francis and the Lady
Clare_, _Rain in My Heart_, _Simon Surnamed Peter_, _The City_, _Helen
of Troy_, _O Glorious France_, _Love Is a Madness_, _The Altar_, _Soul’s
Desire_, _Ballad of Launcelot and Elaine_, _In Michigan_, _The Star_.

Our own feeble voice aside, I merely put before you words of two men—one
a creator and critic, and the other a creator and human being. And I
hope I have visualized for you the pathetically absurd spectacle of a
“modern poet” bowing on bended knee before—. Well, why should a poet bow
at all?

----------

   [1] _Chicago Poems, by Carl Sandburg. New York: Henry Holt._

   [2] _Songs and Satires, by Edgar Lee Masters. New York:
   Macmillan._




                      The Poet Sings to the World


                               BEN HECHT

   I am a stranger, wandering always.
   Only the dark trees know me and the dark skies.
   Wistfully I look on you and wander on coldly,
   For you will not know me...
   Only the night that swims in the black branches knows me
   And the silence that walks in the dark streets.

   But I know you—
   You of the little words and the little visions
   Who are warm with laughter and the joy of common things.
   I wander among you and I wish to laugh
   And I yearn to take your hand.
   But your eyes look into mine and stare
   And there is no love in them such as you lavish elsewhere.
   Your eyes look into mine and frown
   For you will not know me...
   Only the blue distances of the day on the water know me
   And the cold wind that warms itself in my heart.

   I reach to embrace you,
   I dream of touching your heart with my fingers,
   But I am a stranger, wandering always;
   Wistful and coldly mocking your dull faces
   As you slip from my arms like a shadow;
   Hating and laughing at your little sacredness...
   For you will not know me...
   Only the dark trees know me and the white stars
   And the friendless night that comes smiling to me for comfort,
   And the cold wind that warms itself in my heart.

   For you have sent me, doomed me to wander,
   And only they know me—the far-away things.
   Only they come to me,
   Taking my hate and my love into their vastness.
   And sometime you will hear the things I have spoken to them—
   Unsaid things of myself and of you—
   Coming out of their distances;
   Tears for your sorrow and wild laughters for your joy.
   And then you will know me
   Even as they knew me:
   Not as an exile singing
   But as a part of your soul that wandered away.




                        “Splendid Isolation”[3]


                              JOHN GRIMES

He might have removed mountains or carved out empires; instead he turns
his nails against provincial society and scratches. Pechorin—egoist,
self-seeker, hater, superman in swaddlings—stifled to madness by the air
of Russia, bled of energy, his idealism thwarted; fearing to raise his
head from the ashes and launch against circumstance, there was nothing
in all Holy Russia that could test his soul in supreme activity. He
lacked the moral courage that forced the sons of the fathers into
revolution. There was left mockery, and the insulting of the soul with
puny wickedness, vapid and provincial. So genius was poured into the
mould of the commonplace.

Pechorin sought a splendid isolation. He killed humanity in his heart,
became a creature of self, and began to hate as sincerely as a
revengeful, spoiled child. His hatred becomes sordid vindictiveness; his
emotions correspond to tantrums. He feeds upon the ruined hopes and the
despair of society, making himself “an author of middle-class
tragedies.”

He looms before us on the screen, menacing, grandiose, Byronic. But he
is great only from the scaling of values. His contact is incessantly
with weaker types who bend or break before him. Grushnitski is a modish
idealist; Bela, a captive maid who acknowledges his right to do as he
wills; Vera, a hysterical sentimentalist of that spirituelle type to
whom the intense physical traits of Pechorin make a ready appeal. She
quiets her scruples with the sacred notion that she is sacrificing
herself, soul and body to one whose life would otherwise be incomplete.
Princess Mary is a typical Byronese victim, a devotee at the shrine of
heroism, who for nothing in the world would give herself to a man who
has not some mystery or who has not been the victim of some crushing
sorrow. Contrast her with the vital, passionate Natalya in Turgene’s
_Rudin_.... Pechorin hunts easy game. He acknowledges that he has never
loved women of spirit: “Once only I loved a woman with a firm will that
I was unable to vanquish. We parted enemies.” What would these erotic,
parasitic Byrons subsist upon nowadays? Woman is no more the mere giver;
she asks and receives in return.

Pechorin wins from us not honest hatred but contempt. One searches the
book for an honorable impulse upon his part. He is a washed-out Byron; a
pale Don Juan. He loves many women for the excitement of mere change.
“We live out of curiosity. We expect something new. How absurd, and yet
how vexatious!” Women fall at his feet and he asks derisively: “Can it
be that wickedness is so attractive?” He knows the ways of his victim by
heart, he anticipates her every move, and calls her accomplishment
tiresome. Passion has shriveled until it is an inglorious segment of his
life. It is a thing of curiosity rather than of sympathy. Love is an
annoyance, yet he persists in it: “I feel within me an insatiate hunger
that devours everything it meets upon the way. I look upon joy and
suffering only in their relation to myself, regarding them as nutriment
that sustains my spiritual forces.... To none has my love ever brought
happiness because I have never sacrificed anything for the sake of those
I loved. I have only tried to satisfy the strange cravings of my heart,
greedily draining their feelings, their tenderness, their joy, their
suffering—and I have never been able to sate myself.”

It occurs to Pechorin that such aimlessness cannot but be a
misinterpretation of the mystic handwriting of life. “It cannot be that
I came purposeless into the world. A purpose there must have been, and
surely mine was an exalted destiny because I feel within my soul powers
immeasurable. But I was unable to discover that destiny. I allowed
myself to be carried away by the allurements of passions innane and
ignoble. From that crucible I issued hard and cold as iron.”... “My
chief pleasure is to make everything around me subject to my will. To be
the cause of suffering or joy to another without having a definite right
to be—is it not the sweetest food for our pride?”

Lermontov is honest. He makes no attempt to vindicate a type. He must
have smiled at his hater, his incipient superman, shattered by fate
casting himself on the bare steppe after killing his horse in a mad
ride, and clasping his body to the earth. Did he think to merge himself
with the great “I am”?

“Alas! there cometh a time when man shall no longer give birth to a
star. Alas! there cometh the time of the most contemptible man who can
no longer despise himself!”

                   *       *       *       *       *

Thus spake Zarathustra!

Not submission, self-abnegation, Tolstoyanism, but wholesome
self-hatred, acknowledging in one’s self but a bridge to beyond-man.
Pechorin saw life as an end in itself. He was a creature of the surface,
he feared to plunge into the blue depths.

One smiles at his childlike attempt to be self-efficient, isolated,
damnable. But one is impatiently sorry that his splendid vitality was
turned from healthful pioneering to the puny triumphs of the ballroom,
and the conquest of hysterical ladies. Young Russia despises life except
as a means. It will hurl revolutions into the world’s face, it will
build empires. Life will be a hot flame of action and not a hectic
afterglow of spent passion.

----------

   [3] _A Hero of Our Time, by A. Lermontov. New York, Alfred A.
   Knopf._




                                The Tree


                               HELEN HOYT

   On the way to the factory,
   In the block as you leave the car,
   Growing from cinders
   Is a tree.
   And it has leaves ....
   Green ....
   All around are the factory walls
   And small sooty houses with bleak steps
   And babies crawling among flies ....
   In summer I have felt the pavements
   Pouring out heat like ovens.

   O tree, how can you be so patient!




                      Editorials and Announcements


                  _A Real Orchestra in San Francisco_

It’s a quite amazing phenomenon: here in this town encased in
philistinism there is a symphony orchestra, conducted by a radical young
man who knows his business, playing a series of modern music programs
during the summer!

The first day I went out to inspect San Francisco I was struck dumb
before a poster in a music store announcing Sunday afternoon concerts by
a People’s Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by N. Sokoloff, with
Debussy’s “_Faun_” and those lovely _Caucasian Sketches_ of
Ippolitow-Ivanow on the program, and Tina Lerner as soloist, etc.,
etc.—all for a price ranging between twenty-five and seventy-five cents.

I went, naturally; not because I expected it to be a very good concert,
but because I was starved for music. I knew nothing of Sokoloff, except
that he had played the violin in Chicago last winter and I had missed
his concert. Perhaps you can imagine the shock and the joy of hearing
the “Faun” conducted as I at least have never heard it done before: so
that it became really a thing of cool lavender shadows in a forest....
It’s impossible to describe, but it made you weep—it was so beautifully
done.

Since then I have heard the story of the unique organization. San
Francisco has one orchestra under the leadership of a man who may be
called a conservative, I suppose, and backed by numerous wealthy
citizens who have the artistic interests of the town at heart without a
very definite knowledge of what channels they should follow. But Mrs. J.
B. Casserly, a musician, conceived the idea of having better music in
San Francisco, and asked Mr. Sokoloff to undertake these concerts. Mr.
Sokoloff, who was a violinist rather than a conductor, was fired by the
idea, and a skating-rink was hired for the first rehearsal. There was
some embarrassment as to who should pay the expenses of the rehearsal,
but it was finally decided that if the orchestra men liked the new
conductor they would assume the entire cost; if not, it was to be “on”
Mrs. Casserly. As I remember, they played the Tchaikovsky _Pathetique_
that afternoon in the sacred halls of the skating-rink, and when it was
over the men rose to cheer the conductor. “Well, gentlemen,” said Mrs.
Casserly, “who pays?” But there was no hesitation over that trifling
matter.

And so the concerts began in a local theatre. It is perfectly simple to
realize that San Francisco would not largely appreciate such a blessing,
and that Mrs. Casserly and Mr. Sokoloff would be criticised for their
“modern” programs; but it is hard to understand the action of the other
orchestra people, who locked up their scores so that the “rival”
musicians couldn’t use them and were forced to buy new ones. This is the
typical history of all struggles in the world to find beauty, so one
grows used to it. But the important thing is that the People’s
Philharmonic is to go on next year, and their programs (I should have
mentioned that they play old music, which is good as well as new music)
are exciting to think of. I listened yesterday to their rehearsal of the
_Tristan_ Prelude and I know that Mr. Stock in Ravinia Park is not
offering his audiences anything so fresh and inspired as Mr. Sokoloff’s
reading. May they live long and prosper!


                       _An Anarchist’s Question_

On the day of the Preparedness Parade in San Francisco some one threw a
bomb and killed eight people, who undoubtedly didn’t deserve to die.
Since then the city has gone around on tip-toe, as an anarchist I know
expressed it. Five people who undoubtedly don’t deserve it have been
thrown into jail and tortured. Puzzle: if the object of preparedness
parades is achieved, everybody will be killed off anyway; why is one
kind of murder so much worse than another?




                              Julia to Jim


     (_After reading Edgar Lee Masters’ “Jim and Arabel’s Sister”_)

                               SUE GOLDEN

   You see, it’s this way, Jim ...
   You can call me a primrose, if you like,
   Or the Lover, for that’s a way you have, or men have,
   Of tying things in bundles,
   That don’t belong in bundles;
   For every woman, or man too, I guess,
   Is a separate complex package
   With a little bit of everything
   Out of all the other bundles.
   You find in us exactly what you look for,
   As Francis did in Arabella;
   It wouldn’t have made the least difference
   What you or I told him,
   Or what he found out—
         But about me, Jim?
   You’ve sat here drinking my coffee,
   And I’ve made you comfortable and happy,
   And you’ve told me all about myself,
   And you haven’t even asked me what I thought about myself.
   It didn’t occur to you.
   Do you think Francis
   Has ever gone deeper
   Than the curve of Arabel’s cheek,
   Or what he thought her, or wanted her to be?

   You call me the Lover.
   And try to figure out
   Why I am not like other women;
   But I am, Jim—
   Just an ordinary primrose,
   For that primrose that changed
   Started out like all the others;
   And you wonder why I don’t live like the others,
   Get married—I was once, have children—my son’s grown—
   So I’ve been all three, sweetheart and mother and wife,
   And I am still.
   Every woman is all three,
   But not all at the same time;
   That’s why it is such a bore
   Being expected to be.

         When you have had your coffee, you’ll go down town
   And forget me.
   And I’ll forget you, and be comfortable and happy,
   Not having to remember you.
   But if I were married to you,
   You’d want me to keep on remembering you
   Every minute of the day,
   And I’d be so tired of it by the time you came home,
   I’d be sorry to see you.
   I have nothing against marriage,
   Except that it’s a bore
   Trying to live somebody else’s life.
   You can’t do it.
   Married people would be happier
   If they didn’t try to.
   They ought to live as freely
   As we do.
   All these sudden split-ups
   In the newspapers
   Are just this:
   The hysteria of woman is a shriek of boredom.
   Why, I’d die in a week if I had to keep on
   Being the particular kind of primrose
   That you think me.
         But the hysterical woman,
   There’s your flower changing, Jim.
   I’m just the common kind, but I know that
   I’m never the same, and I don’t want to be.
   If I’m the mother today, I may be the lover tomorrow,
   And I don’t want anybody sitting around on me
   And keeping me from growing. Your primrose probably changed
   Just to spite the old scientist who kept prying at it.

   Sex? No, it isn’t sex that these people are writing about,
   _It’s sentimentality_.
   They have an ideal, and if the first woman doesn’t answer it
   They think the second will, or the third.
   And they call it sex, or beauty, or urge—
   But it isn’t sex, Jim.
   I know what sex is.

   The reason I like you, Jim,
   Is because you haven’t any of these silly notions.
   Sex is honest and healthy.
   You say they trace morbid ideas to sex,
   But I tell you it’s the morbid, silly, beautiful ideas
   About Love and about being able to satisfy the ideal
   That are at the root of the trouble about sex!
   I can’t absorb you, and I don’t want to,
   And I don’t want to be absorbed.

   I don’t know whether you get what I mean.

   I like you, Jim,
   Because you leave a person free.
   After you go, I shall be busy with my own thoughts
   And my own life, just as if a friend had dropped in.
   I shall be anything I want to be. I shall change into
   Just as many primroses as I want to, and you won’t
   Know anything about it.

   You ought to get married, Jim,
         No, not me.
   But if you came here every night,
   I’d a thousand times rather be married to you,
   For I have never known anybody more tied up
   Than these “free-love” people.

   Am I happy? Well, I’m free.
   We’d all like to be free _and_ happy.
   Lots of people could be happy—ought to be happy,
   If they knew enough to be free.....
         Perhaps happiness is partly the chance of being unhappy—
   You and I, Jim, haven’t that.

   But what I hate is all this mussing up
   Of love and sex and the ideal—it isn’t life.
   One ought to start straight on earth,
   And take heaven when it comes.


   I promise the advent of a tragic age: the highest art in the
   saying of yea to life, “tragedy,” will be born when mankind has
   the knowledge of the hardest, but most necessary of wars, behind
   it, without, however, suffering from that knowledge.—_Nietzsche._




                       A Vers Libre Prize Contest


Through the generosity of a friend, THE LITTLE REVIEW is enabled to
offer an unusual prize for poetry—possibly the first prize extended to
free verse. The giver is “interested in all experiments, and has
followed the poetry published in THE LITTLE REVIEW with keen
appreciation and a growing admiration for the poetic form known as _vers
libre_.”

The conditions are as follows:

Contributions must be received by August 15th.

They must not be longer than twenty-five lines.

They must be sent anonymously with stamps for return.

The name and address of the author must be fixed to the manuscript in a
sealed envelope.

It should be borne in mind that free verse is wanted—verse having beauty
of rhythm, not merely prose separated into lines.

There will be three judges: William Carlos Williams, Zoë Aikens and
Helen Hoyt.

There will be two prizes of $25 each. They are offered not as a first
and second prize, but for “the two best short poems in free verse form.”

As there will probably be a large number of poems to read, we suggest
that contributors adhere closely to the conditions of the contest.




                           The Reader Critic


                               The Nymph

(_Edgar Lee, have you missed anything?—Editor._)

   I see it all now: I was born with the soul of a nymph,
   And they expected me to be law-abiding and moral!
   Why, I was a nymph from the day my mother lashed me
   For playing kissing games with the boys, out behind the school,
   To the day I shot my lover in a South State Street cabaret
   For flirting with another girl and they put me in the penitentiary.
   Good God! is it a sin to be young?

                                                         —_Anonymous._


                 How Stanilaus Szukalski Expresses Life

_L. C. B._:

There are trees and valleys and mountains—red, blue, orange and
purple—all smothered by a phosphorescent green. The trees stretch up
gnarled hands, swollen from too much striving. There is no sky. Dull
coal mingles with the earth clods. Diamond mines glitter. The ground is
misshapen. Flowers give forth a stale odor. A hideous laugh sounds. It
comes from the mouth of a hunch-back who, with prods of burning metal,
forces people into the quick-sands. Over the sands sucking, demoniacal
waters rush. Here and there an eye or a torso floats on the surface.
From the trees and valleys and mountains, luridly colored, come human
faces. Blood runs from their opened arteries. Their hands are horribly
twisted. In the foreground writhes a shape whose fingers bend back to
meet his knuckles. Another rears a massive head, the veins of which
stand out further than his purple lips. A woman’s arm is extended, too
full of blood. A weird figure hovers over an abyss, swathed with the
vapors arising from the gases of the underground. All the people are
dying. Everyone breathes hard. A whole mound is composed of a soft
substance—disintegrated limbs. The jelly-like mass quivers. This is
life.

Did you see his exhibition at the Art Institute? At seventeen one is
almost wholly in sympathy with him.


                                Phantasy

_Noncompos Mentis, Napa, California_:

   Night! A lambient fog * * * * *
   Stirs the damp echos of the baleful deep,
   Cimmerian in its fell intensity.
   Shrouded in mist, pale wraiths flit hitherward
   Or yon; lured or impelled * * * * * Peace!
   Ah! Who shall say?

   Borne on the vagrant breeze she floats;
   Kelp in her hands; ’twined in her hair
   The weed from outer seas; writhing yet strangely still.
   Behold her eyes—shallow, opaque,
   Yet glaucous with a nascent light, gleaming
   Its message of appeal to answering soul.
   * * * * * Ah me! Recall the past;
   Blot out its infamies; this fiery tumult quell
   With one tempestuous kiss.
   My being swoons—my soul is wafted hence,
   Drowned in its God-like, saccharine ecstasy.[4]

----------

   [4] Here the Muse skidded. Author contemplated another stanza,
   but warder entered with strait jacket and gag.


                             Birth Control

_Russell Palmer, Seattle_:

... With particular reference to the matter of Birth Control, which the
writer has studied in an amateurish fashion for some time, I want to ask
you if there has ever been framed a model statute providing for the
dissemination of such information by the State.

If such a model statute exists I will arrange to have it introduced in
the Washington State Legislature when that body convenes next January.
If nothing of this sort is available I would earnestly recommend that
steps be taken immediately to prepare a measure which will bring about
the maximum amount of good and yet at the same time have an opportunity
of receiving the support of law-makers elected by a semi-civilized and
bigoted people.

It should be borne in mind that the Initiative and Referendum are both
in effect in the State of Washington, so that there would be a strong
probability that such a proposed law would be passed upon directly by
the people, either through the failure of the legislature to meet the
issue squarely or its over cautious desire to have its action approved
by the voters individually.

I believe that such an act would have a fair chance of passage. We look
upon our State as not altogether unprogressive, for in addition to the
legislative progress indicated by the Initiative and Referendum we enjoy
woman suffrage, glory in non-partisan direct primaries, carry but do not
wave a Red Light Abatement Act, tolerate Prohibition and threaten Single
Tax. So you see there are hopes.


                           What Is the State?

             (An answer to Alan Adair’s “What Is Anarchy?”)

_Alice Groff, Philadelphia_:

Is it not time that thinking people should cease to speak of the social
order as “the state”? The very meaning of state is static, and if there
be a qualifying word that does _not_ apply to the life of the social
order static is that word. The social order is a growing, developing,
evolving thing.

Man is a social as well as an individual being. He may be called a
political being by virtue of his social activities, and the methods he
uses to live best his social life; but the individual man is not a
political being—he cannot “flock in a corner all by himself” as
Dundreary would say—he is political only in the sense of being an
element in a social ego, with a social will toward the desired social
end of that ego.

Such social ego is continually being formed anew in the social order.
The dominating social ego of any stage is not necessarily the highest
ideal which the most advanced and thoughtful minds in that stage can
conceive. It is the highest ideal of the largest or most powerful number
of individuals that are in unanimity upon that ideal and capable of
ruling the rest of the social order with it for the time being. Every
form of social dominance that has ever prevailed in the history of the
world will come under this head and answer to this description. And who
shall say that the prevailing and dominating social ego at any one stage
is not the best possible for the social order at that stage?

The individual man with a high philosophic gift and a reasoning mind may
say to himself, and to others: “Man is capable of a better social order
than this, there are higher and finer ideals than those that
prevail”—but he can do absolutely nothing of himself to do away with the
prevailing social ego, and to substitute a new one with better ideals,
as he thinks, except to teach, to agitate, until he can induce a number
of individuals to take up his ideal and to join him in a social ego that
shall become powerful enough to drive out the dominating ego and
substitute for it the new one. This is all that there is to political
activity. This is the whole story of social evolution. And no individual
or social ego can possibly decide that the new ideal is better than the
old until it is “tried out.” It is of course likely to have better
elements than the old in so far as it is born of criticism upon the old
which _then_ was being “tried out.” But no dominating social ego can
ever hope statically to establish itself in the social order while the
world endures; consequently the reasoning mind must say to itself: “The
highest social ideal that I can conceive and can induce a social ego to
stand for is only the next step in social evolution, which must give
place to the next and the next.” Hence, such mind can only smile
indulgently upon all static ideals—monarchy, democracy, anarchy,
socialism alike; realizing that the only social ideals worthy the name
are those based upon demonstrated scientific truth—the collected and
collated set of social facts that have been found to work in accordance
with natural law in past social evolution; realizing that the personal
ideal of the individual man, unless based upon such facts, is socially a
child’s soapbubble, whatever it may be in the innermost of his own soul
as to the evolution of his own individuality.




                           The Little Review


                     Literature, Drama, Music, Art

                      MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Editor

       The monthly that has been called “the most unique journal
                             in existence.”

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   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 Splendour of Life, and whose function is—to express
   itself.

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                                 OTHERS


                      A Magazine of the New Verse

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                                  The
                            Mason and Hamlin


                           The Artist’s Piano


                           The Cable Company

                           Wabash and Jackson
                         Chicago - - - Illinois




                          Transcriber’s Notes


Advertisements were collected at the end of the text.

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

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

   [p. 7]:
   ... Se hisse, et regarde par desses le mur. ...
   ... Se hisse, et regarde par dessus le mur. ...

   [p. 8]:
   ... Un chaudronnier les achète à la foule traphie. ...
   ... Un chaudronnier les achète à la foule trahie. ...




*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75976 ***