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                           THE LITTLE REVIEW


                       Literature Drama Music Art

                          MARGARET C. ANDERSON
                                 EDITOR

                            SEPTEMBER, 1916

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       Light Occupations of an Editor                           
       The San Francisco Bomb Case:                             
         What Can a Poor Executioner Do?            Robert Minor
         The Labor Farce                    Margaret C. Anderson
       And——                                                    
       New York Letter                     Allan Ross Macdougall
       The Reader Critic                                        
       Facts About the Bomb                                     
       The Vers Libre Contest                                   

                           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.

                            SEPTEMBER, 1916

                                 NO. 6

                Copyright, 1916, by Margaret C. Anderson

_The Little Review_ hopes to become a magazine of Art. The September
issue is offered as a Want Ad.

... “The other pages will be left blank.”

[Illustration: _Light occupations of the editor while there is nothing
to edit._]

   SHE PRACTICES EIGHTEEN HOURS A DAY AND—

   —TAKES HER MASON AND HAMLIN TO BED WITH HER

   BREAKFASTING

   CONVERTING THE SHERIFF TO ANARCHISM AND VERS LIBRE

   SUFFERING FOR HUMANITY AT EMMA GOLDMAN’S LECTURES

                     [Illustration: _(Continued.)_]

   GATHERING HER OWN FIRE-WOOD

   SWIMMING

   THE STEED ON WHICH SHE HAS HER PICTURE TAKEN

   THE INSECT ON WHICH SHE RIDES




                      The San Francisco Bomb Case


     What Can a Poor Executioner Do Against a Man Who Is Willing to
                                Die?[1]

                              ROBERT MINOR

I am glad that it’s Ed Nolan, Tom Mooney, Rena Mooney, Warren Billings,
and Israel Weinberg who are in jail at San Francisco, awaiting death—or
_friends_. Not that I want such men and women to meet death, but I wish
the friends to be able to come to the rescue, knowing that they are
worthy of the best effort that rebel ever put forth for an individual.
We are so tired of the revolter who whines when his turn comes to pay.
So we can almost laugh with an almost glee in the thought that we shall
not be cheated this time; these rebels do not whine.

This is not a McNamara case. The prisoners are not going to “confess.”
Even if they wanted to, they’d have to get the prosecutor to write their
confession for them, for they did not cause the Preparedness Parade
explosion. I know they didn’t, as you would know it had you read the
transcript of the testimony on which the Grand Jury indicted them, or if
you could observe their open efforts to provide every possible light on
their actions.

Dirty Hearst tried to lynch them. So did all the rest. All the rats from
the cellar of life—Pastors of the Lord, Broadminded Editors, Illustrious
Exceptions, etc., turned tail and ran—or helped in the near-lynching.
All except _one Catholic priest_!

They all thought it was 1886, that “the anarchists were to be
hanged”—and one doesn’t believe in that _kind_ of thing, you know, and
can’t sacrifice one’s great opportunity to good in general—and every
skunk would stink alike, so all would be well.

But this is _not_ 1886, and there _have_ been some to come forward, and
the men and woman are going to be saved. With all Prominent Persons in
their holes, a few unimportant workingmen, between announcements of
their own hangings to come, have stirred up some of the labor unions to
an extent that you would never believe possible, to do the unheard-of
thing to be loyal to their fellow members.

The International Workers’ Defense League, thoroughly discredited, as
the papers announce, by having defended every labor rebel of recent
American history, is taking contributions to the enormously expensive
work. Simply to gather evidence and enlighten the few thousand who are
not afraid, and to pay a high-priced lawyer to array the evidence—that
is what we want your money for. Send it to the International Workers’
Defense League, Robert Minor, Treasurer, Room 210 Russ Building, San
Francisco.

And know that if we lose this fight it will be because a horde of
“business men” have been judge, jury, and prosecutor against their five
rebel enemies. It will not be because our men have flinched. When Ed
Nolan says “the fear of death is the beginning of slavery,” he speaks
the spirit of the five. We shall not be ashamed of these.


                            The Labor Farce

                          MARGARET C. ANDERSON

I really must say what I think about this ridiculous bomb business.

You will find the facts of the case, about the five innocent people who
were indicted and why the Chamber of Commerce wanted them indicted, on
page twenty-nine. But what happened after the indictment is more
interesting and more horrible to me.

The five victims were put into jail. Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman
and a few other anarchists began a fight for them,—raising
money for lawyers, etc. The labor unions began to raise
money. After about three weeks of argument and hesitation
and won’t-it-be-better-to-go-a-little-slow and
is-it-advisable-to-distribute-pamphlets, etc., etc., no lawyer had been
engaged and none of the “workers” could agree about what “stand” to
take: would it be better to express sympathy openly with the
anarchists—(none of the five has ever claimed to be an anarchist, I
believe)—or would it be wiser to try to prove they were not anarchists,
or would it be safer to get a small lawyer who costs little and is worth
nothing or a big one who costs too much and might do something, or would
it be more expedient to keep out of it altogether, etc., etc., etc.,—or
shall we just do the best we can even if it isn’t much? Do you think
there was a single worker with the incredible inspiration to “do the
most we can and make sure that it is very much”? I saw Emma Goldman and
Berkman brooding over this strange and awful spectacle like two prophets
whose souls are slowly petrifying under the antics of their disciples.

Just here some one told me a story. Once upon a time Björnstjerne
Björnson, up in Norway, heard of a little French seamstress who was
accused of murder in Paris. She was poor and quite unbefriended and
there was practically no chance of her receiving justice. Björnson
hurried to Paris, took her case, and won it in the French courts, in
French, for the simple joy of doing something he believed in.

Can you imagine that happening in America? There isn’t a single labor
lawyer in the country who ever does it. If there are any who are willing
they are not able; if they are able they are not allowed. C. E. S. Wood
tried to do it for Caplan and Schmidt, but the workers themselves
prevented him from taking the case. They kept him trotting between
Portland and Los Angeles while they decided that it would be fatal to
have him come straight out with the fact that it was a labor fight.
Sometimes I imagine a young god springing up in labor ranks strong
enough to rush in and fight the courts for his people, young enough to
devote his life to it, naive enough to do it for an idea rather than for
a fee, and ironic enough to do it whether his people want it or not.

But to continue about the bomb. Finally a prominent lawyer was found—one
whose name carried enough weight to impress even the important and
ignorant San Francisco citizens who were howling about “anarchists.” But
the fee he charged before even touching the case was so large that Emma
Goldman and the unions could raise only half of it, and the rest was
supplied by the daughter of a man whom the workers would call a
capitalist and whose money they would repudiate as having been drained
from the blood of their class. She not only supplied the money; she said
she would stand behind the victims if it took the last cent she had—_not
merely because they were innocent_; and the only thing she asked was
that the money should be used in a direct and active way and not for the
pretending and denying and covering up that characterize all labor
fights in this country. Well, I wouldn’t get half so disgusted with
labor if it would ever acknowledge that vision is not necessarily a
matter of class. It is almost terrifying to watch a labor propagandist
think. If he is talking about Henry Ford, for instance, he will sketch
the picture of a man who has created a $5 a day minimum wage only by
such speeding-up of labor that labor is too nerve-racked to benefit by
it; so that Ford becomes a clever rascal who makes labor rich only to
make himself richer. Of course Ford is an idealist of appalling and
marvelous simplicity, in quite the same position that an anarchist would
be whose scheme had begun to work, and no more to blame for the spots in
which it didn’t work.

The propagandist can’t think. But for that matter only one kind of mind
really does _think_, and that is the artist kind. I mean this: only the
artist mind sees that this is the way things happen in the world and
refuses to sentimentalize over it or _to do nothing about it_. Here are
five labor people misunderstood by “society,” unchampioned by “labor,”
and rescued by the bloody capitalist who has neither the limitations
with which labor endows capital nor the limitations with which capital
endows labor. What fun! And some of the propagandists will feel like
“Major Barbara” about accepting that money. Only the artist mind knows
that it doesn’t matter where the money comes from: money is money, and
it is made of slavery whether it comes from a financier or a
coal-digger. Only the artist mind....

                   *       *       *       *       *

Of course the point of the whole business is this: the labor farce isn’t
confined to labor: it is merely the farce in which all people
contentedly luxuriate. It is a matter of rebellions that never become
real.

There is the sixteen-year-old girl living in the midst of a typical
American family. Now, no one can live long in such a place without
losing his mind—unless he has none to lose. But let the girl try to get
out of that hideous hell and the family detectives can have her back in
a minute and arrest any one who tried to help her as an abductor.

Such a thing happened the other day in Chicago. It happens every few
minutes all over the earth. The only way to get out of such a mess is
_to get out of it_—detectives, jails, families and friends to boot.
Follow through! Make it real! Your friends can’t afford to be very real:
one of them probably has a family to support and the others probably
couldn’t stand the horror of being in the papers! But a girl or a boy
can stand up to _anything_. If they can’t their old age will find them
among the rest of the botched and the weak.

Ed Nolan says that the fear of death is the beginning of slavery. I
think it may be that the fear of life is the very beginning.

----------

   [1] The facts of the bomb case in detail will be found on page
   29.




                                 And——


There is Frank Harris’s _Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions_—a book
that will never disturb Wilde’s legend here, his peace of mind where he
has gone, nor his reputation as an artist anywhere.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Chicago—always bragging about having a sooner eye for Art.... And
Sokoloff out here in San Francisco.... And the Chicago Orchestra being
led on to the goal of music by efficiency like the Germany army getting
to Paris.

                   *       *       *       *       *

At the Grand Opera in Paris, in the première of _The Miracle_, an opera
by two young Swiss, I saw the great Marthe Chenal, who will sing in the
Chicago Opera Company this winter. I have had a creative memory of her
for five years. But I wonder what will become of it up against that
pinnacle of earthly glory, Mary Garden.

                   *       *       *       *       *

A. C. H. in _Poetry_ has done all that can be done for the new quarterly
_Form_. “Form”—that’s a name to start hope and the imagination; and then
... we have a story we’ll print sometime called “The Funny Shape.”

                   *       *       *       *       *

Why so much comment on John Cowper Powys’s _One Hundred Best Books_?
Powys should never write anything. People like Q. K. in The New Republic
come about as near to getting Powys as they would come to catching a
comet. Powys is not for culture-snatchers, matinee girls, or glorifiers
of the obvious. He is merely for those possessed enough of their
imaginations to fall for a miracle when they see one. Who goes to hear a
lecture on Nietzsche and Dostoevsky to find out what Powys thinks of
those men? You go—hoping through the gloom of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky
to catch a flash of Powys. Powys is the best thing that has come to
us—that mad wolf! I always feel sorry for Velasquez that he never had a
chance at him.

                   *       *       *       *       *

“Everything is just perfect,” as our Editor so ecstatically says:
Paderewski will make three concerts in San Francisco this month.

                   *       *       *       *       *

The Roadside Press is to come out with a Chicago Anthology, a hundred
and fifty poems, by Chicago authors. As _Poetry_ would say: “Most of
these appeared first in _The Little Review_; and will probably be
reprinted without any acknowledgment whatever.”

                   *       *       *       *       *

We have been waiting for what we hoped would be a good comment on
Sherwood Anderson’s first novel, _Windy McPherson’s Son_. All we will
say now is that it’s so much worse than Sherwood should ever be.

                   *       *       *       *       *

A few years ago you couldn’t talk to any one who wasn’t writing a play.
Now you can’t talk to any one who isn’t starting a theatre. If everyone
is mad for theatres, who are they that aren’t? Or why haven’t we
municipal theatres? One, out of all this, and that in the town of
Northampton, Massachusetts; and that isn’t what any one but a town would
call a municipal theatre. Sometime I’ll write about Donald Robertson’s
idea for a municipal theatre. He is always damned for being an
idealist—a sure sign that what he has is an idea.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Rabindranath Tagore is coming back to America to lecture. Go, if you
have never seen that slight presence with features drawn of air—with
eyes that seem never to have looked out—and let him put that white spell
of peace upon your complex futility.

You sometimes wonder why men like Dr. Coomaraswamy come telling us
border-ruffians of Art about Ajanta frescoes and sculpture and the music
of India. Perhaps they know our homesickness and know that alone we
can’t even find the road.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Bernhardt is coming again. Well, that’s all right, too. And those who
jeer at her age never could have appreciated her youth. But you, young
ones, see her; and have the double joy of seeing her now; and, if you
have it in you, you will see her then, too.


   At bottom everything in literature is useless except literary
   pleasure, but literary pleasure depends upon the quality of
   sensibility. All discussions die against the wall of personal
   sensibility, which is flesh on the inside and on the outside a
   wall of stone. There is a way to turn it about, but this you do
   not know.—_Remy de Gourmont._




                            New York Letter


                         ALLAN ROSS MACDOUGALL


                    _A New Playhouse and a New Play_

I have always felt that the hope of a new spirit in the theatre will
come not so much from amateurs and their talking organizations as from
the rebels within the theatre and the work they can accomplish. I agree
with Gordon Craig when he says that no one has any right to meddle with,
and potter about, the theatre who does not know it from the inside. In
no other field is there such a gang of busy bodies—old women of both
sexes, who have the ignorant reformers talking sense developed to such a
pernicious degree. The air is dark with the empty words they belch
forth, but from their deeds the world remains light and free. If the
regeneration of the theatre from the base influences that now possess
it, is to take place it will not, I am sure, be by the work of the drama
leagues and so-called “art” theatres. The work of such managers as J. D.
Williams and producers like Granville Barker and B. Iden Payne does more
for the theatre by the working out of certain ideals than all the talk
about those ideals and the jumbling with them by the old ladies’ leagues
and the “arty” amateurs. A plague on them all!

In New York this season a new theatre is to be opened. Helen Freeman,
who for a time was a Belasco star and later the leading woman with
William Gillette, is to own and direct this latest attempt to establish
a new spirit in the theatre. With Miss Freeman will be associated a
group of six professional actors. All of them, like their director, have
ideals which they plan to work for. For the first few months they are to
produce one-act things. Among them will be plays by Evreinov, a young
Russian not yet “discovered” by this rapacious country; two plays by the
Spanish dramatist, Jacinto Benveneto, of whose seventy-five excellent
plays not one has yet been given here; plays by other unknown European
dramatists; new plays by Zoë Akins, Witter Bynner, Rollo Peters, and
other American writers.

Miss Freeman has chosen as a name for this interesting theatre the hour
of the curtain rise. It will therefore be known as “The Nine o’Clock
Theatre.” Much is expected from Miss Freeman and much from her theatre.
Success to it, and to her!


                              _A New Play_

When I heard that a new fantastic play was to be produced by Arthur
Hopkins, and that the scenes and costumes were to be designed by Robert
Edmond Jones, I booked seats as early as I could. I remembered the work
of Jones in Anatole France’s _The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife_ and his
work on the inner scenes and costumes of the Shakespeare Masque. Both
were the works of a new decorative genius who had much to give to our
theatre that is barren of the work of artists. I expected much of the
new play, and lo! what was disappointment was waiting there.

The play first. It is the story of a princess of a mythical land, whose
lover has been killed in war and who in the last act joins him. (The
play is named _The Happy Ending_). The curtain rises on a dark forest,
through which the princess is wandering and posing, and mumbling and
moaning to herself. Comes then three Maeterlincian maidens also mumbling
and playing chorus to themselves. Exit the mumbling maidens and enter
the King and Queen of this mythical land. Mumbleth then these two for a
while, till, without any warning, the King bluntly asks the Queen for a
child! Yes! Right there in the forest he does it. It’s the last thing
one expects in a fantasy, this realistic demand for a son and heir. But
that’s a minor point. Like many another thing that happened, it had
nothing to do with the drama.

After a dreary scene, in which the wandering princess seats herself on
some potato sacks and mumbles to the accompaniment of “yes, princess,”
“no, princess,” spoken at half minute intervals by a dull-witted
woodsman, the curtain rises on a scene, entitled in the programme “The
Hereafter.” What a Hereafter! A bank of sunburnt stage grass: a bilious
yellow tree: much amber light. Crowds of children with squeaky voices
lolled and pranced about the place. The authors seem to have taken their
cue from the old hymn:

   Little children will be there,
   Who have sought the Lord in prayer;
   In Heaven we all shall meet,
   Oh that will be joyful!

I can assure you that it was anything but joyful. A sort of stagey joy
was evident but not a sight of the real spontaneous feeling. There was a
sort of Queen-hostess, who welcomed everyone. I have an idea she was
Mrs. God or maybe assistant to St. Peter. She wore an elaborate shiny
yellow evening gown; and a set smile after the fashion of the ladies in
charge of Y. W. C. A. hostels on earth. A nice, well-spoken motherly
sort of person this Queen was, who did her best to make everybody feel
at home.

When there was a wreck at sea or a railway accident, many male and
female supers waddled their bodies in joyous movement across the stage
and laughed and made mouthy noises. Oh, so glad they were to be in
Heaven after the shocks they had gone through on earth. It was curious
to note that they all entered Heaven with whole bodies and unmessed
clothes, these merry wreck and collision victims.

When the curtain rings down on the scene of the Hereafter it does so to
the sound of cheering. And why? A whole army has just been annihilated,
and to the tune of “John Brown’s Body” their spirits are marching toward
Heaven. And so the happy inhabitants of the Hereafter must cheer to
think of this influx to their land. After the tawdry Heaven one is
refreshed by the beauty of the unnecessary scene, “On the way to the
islands of sleep.” They still use rowboats in that land it seems, but as
they are rowboats with beautifully lighted innards one doesn’t object
very much. One does object, however, to the next scene. It is called
“Space.” Imagine Space as a back-drop sprinkled with stars like an
old-fashioned frosted Christmas Card. In the middle of this a scarlet
circle with the continents of North and South America painted in a muddy
brown color. A sorry picture of space to come from an imaginative
artist.

The last scene, and the best from the scenic and dramatic standpoint,
takes place in the palace of the King. Here comes the princess after
having wandered through the forest awake and the Hereafter in a dream,
and after falling in some queer kind of fit dies and so joins her dead
lover and the rest of the cosmopolitan group in Heaven.

A mess by masters! A very messy mess. A sloppy play to start with. Bad
acting to carry it along. Mediocre music and stage setting that seem to
have been influenced by the play instead of rising above it. I await
with interest to see the work that Jones is to do for the Russian
Ballet. He will have his chance to re-establish himself. I’m sure he is
artist enough to grasp it.




                           The Reader Critic


                          Infantile Paralysis

_D. H., New York_:

Congratulations! You have the capacity for suddenly turning back and
becoming young enough to say “All or nothing.” And subconsciously
realizing that you will get mostly nothing, you threaten your readers
with blank pages. And all those who thought that _The Little Review_ did
publish only artistic writing have had the veil torn from their eyes and
their faith in you begins to waver. Perhaps to vanish altogether!

Is all of the _Meistersinger_ one continuous “Preislied”? Is all of
Beethoven equal to his “Ninth”? Is all of Pachman as marvelous as his
Chopin? All or nothing! You would feast, and have your readers feast,
upon the perfection of art and give them none of its strivings?

Your challenge will remain unanswered. If you dare, or through sheer
carelessness, allow this to appear in the next issue, I shall suspect
you of considering the writing of an artist a work of art—even though he
speak not in his own tongue.

Your challenge will remain unanswered! For who are _you_, to expect a
staff of ready geniuses to fill your pages? You should be grateful for
one pearl you may find among hundreds of near-jewels. And the world is
grateful for one _Ave Maria_ (Schubert) among a thousand near-songs. I
preach no gospel of meekness to you, for I know you will turn again and
leave your youthful—nay, puerile,—cry of “All or nothing.” It is the cry
of the mad—of the foolish, impatient ones! You only want the miracle?
You are like the child crying for the moon and, like him, you will
accept a round cheese instead.

Do come to New York, and I will play more than an hour uninterrupted for
you, and perhaps for five minutes (if I am lucky) you will have a
miracle. If I am unlucky you will have only a near-miracle, which will
be just very good violin playing.

                   *       *       *       *       *

But what did I say about wanting only the perfection of art and none of
its strivings? I said—Art. That includes the strivings, doesn’t it?
Surely we needn’t go back to definitions. Ezra Pound has a nice analysis
somewhere—to this effect: In such measure as an artist expresses himself
truthfully, he will be a good artist; in such measure as he himself
exists, he will be a great one. I want a record of the process of that
“existing” from as many artists as possible. The process of each will
include many things that are not perfection, but who ever told you that
perfection and Art are synonymous terms? Some one sent me a sketch, in
answer to my editorial, with this note: “You said you wanted Beauty. I
am sending you something which I think has it.” I thought it had beauty,
too; but it had no Art. What do you people think I meant by the
“miracle”? I meant simply those _strivings and achievements_ which show
that the great process is really “on.” We published Ben Hecht’s _Night
Song_. It had much beauty and no perfection, but it had Art quite apart
from either of those elements. Amy Lowell’s poems (not _Off the
Turnpike_) have an Art that happens to include perfection. The “miracle”
was very much present in _Malmaison_, for instance. Flint’s _London My
Beautiful_ has it. The principal trouble is that miracles usually have
to be explained to be recognized. It’s like the painter who took a
friend to hear Powys. The friend went to hear what Powys had to say—“and
I told her what he looked like,” said the painter—_M. C. A._

                   *       *       *       *       *

From your letter you sound like a lot of other young things paralyzed by
smugness and complacency. You become a one-stringed instrument and you
hope to play the violin. If you dared to be an artist, and all that
means of madness and impatience and foolishness and crying for the moon,
you’d dare promise more than five minutes miracle in an hour. It would
be outside of promises.—_jh._


                          A Word From Real Art

_Frank Lloyd Wright, Chicago_:

The less money _The Little Review_ has the better it _looks_ anyway!
Your resolve is interesting—but it looks like the end.... I don’t see
where you can find the thing you need.

But miracles do happen—I wish I had a million or a pen.


                                Freudian

_A Contributor, Chicago_:

_The Little Review_ sickens me. I don’t understand why in the devil you
talk imagism and color and beauty and fill your magazine full of that
sputtering trash, that colorless-degenerate edgarleemasters junk. Why
not leave blank pages? And your article.... Good Lord!... It was like
warm candle grease just after the little candle flame has been sniffed
out. I see and feel _The Little Review_ as a case of feminine callowism
gone mad.

The idea of writing anything about Masters fills me with disgust.
Masters doesn’t even inspire me with rage. I regard his work as a
pretentious mediocrity. There isn’t a poem in his books that I couldn’t
have written myself in twenty minutes on a typewriter. Why write about
Masters? He’s only one of the many dub artists overrunning the country.
He isn’t to blame, even if he is cocky about his success. In fact, he is
to be commended for putting it over. The fault, in my mind, lies with
the great tribe of morons who yap over his doggerel—pro or con. I have
read three or four things in his first book, and as many in his second
book, and I see no occasion for rubbing it in on him any more than on
Luke McGluke, the poet laureate of _The Hickville Clarion_. Put him out
of your head, why don’t you? Criticism doesn’t concern itself with the
feverishly inflated mob banalities of the moment. Selah!

                   *       *       *       *       *

You say _The Little Review_ sickens you? With the above temperature and
tongue? I should diagnose the case as autointoxication.—_jh._


                                 Query

_Mitchell Dawson, Chicago_:

I have read the August number, and have read only the poetry—which makes
me sad. Does the new cover represent the Western afterglow?


                              Consoling Us

_Rex Lampman, Portland_:

Don’t you think you’re asking a little too much of yourself and your
contributors, that _The Little Review_ be absolute in each number?

No. I don’t mean that. It’s fine to aim at Art, always, but it isn’t
failure to miss it most of the time.

As for me, _The Little Review_ has been an inspiration and a delight. A
paper that will publish anything so wonderful as John Gould Fletcher’s
_Green Symphony_ doesn’t need, so far as I’m concerned, to “do it again”
for quite a while, and I’m quite content that you should fill in with
such stuff as Ben Hecht’s _The Poet Sings to the World_ until you get
something as good, again, as the _Symphony_.

I’m a newspaper man, and I’m supposed to “write something” every day. Of
course, it can’t be done; but once in a while, when the powers are kind,
I am permitted to write something that delights me and others. That’s
the best I can do, so help me, and I am reminded of the Western epitaph,
which went something like this:

   Here Lies
   JIM JONES.
   He Done His Damnedest.
   Angels Can Do
   No More.

And so I hope you’ll never get out a _Little Review_ with any of the
pages blank.

You are wonderfully honest—one of the honestest persons, I think, that I
know, and I shout for joy at your godlike impatience with imperfection.
But patience—pardon the platitude—is also a godlike attribute.


                            More Consolation

_C. A. C., Chicago_:

Bully! Since your outburst of righteous indignation towards yourself and
your contributors I have been comparing your magazine with the others I
receive. _The Forum_, _Vanity Fair_ (Oh, dear, yes!), _The Masses_, and
sometimes I see _The Bang_—a weekly pamphlet of Alexander Harvey’s,
which he distributes discriminately. Your wail seems not wholly
justified. True, Arthur Symons’s _Spiritual Adventures, Plays, Acting,
and Music_, and other essays, are things to be sought after by any
editor. His stuff is appearing in America in _Vanity Fair_ and _The
Forum_; it seems to lack his first fire, except that he has put a new
ring to Cleopatra’s statement of herself:

                     Kings have cast their crowns
   Into the dust, and kings that are my foes
   I can take up into my hand and cast
   Into the dust for love of me. I am a woman
   But I have power greater than any man’s.

And his poems—Symons never was much of a poet. Then, again, that Wright
person who writes for _The Forum_—any magazine is the better without his
squibs on Art.

Max Eastman had an article in a recent number of _Vanity Fair_ on
“Magazine Writing.” He claims it is amazingly well done, so well done
that there is “not a speck on it”—the main fault being that “it is
professional. It is work and not play. And for that reason it is never
profoundly serious, or intensely frivolous enough to captivate the soul.
It lacks abandon. It is simply well done.” Now, the fact that the very
essence of your magazine seems “pure living,” brings it out of Eastman’s
indictment. One cannot say that Sherwood Anderson, Hecht, and Kaun, or
even yourself, have been guilty of “earning your living” at the expense
of play. “In that play alone is the heart altogether gay and
inconsiderate.”

And _The Bang_ has been pounding away steadily for a magazine that
exists for the fun of it, the joy of it, and is not built upon the
circulation manager’s point of view. Does Harvey get your magazine? Does
he ever feel, if he sees it, that the “Ideal” he holds for magazinedom
is being realized in your magazine?

Summing it up, Miss Editor, you who once declared you had none of the
qualifications of an editor, it seems to me you have been doing rather
well. We don’t want you to stand still—_you_ can’t do that—or to stop
trying. Please, for our sake, keep it up.


                       Casting a Slur Upon What?

_Ruth C. Sweeney, Chicago_:

I simply cannot understand how a person who could write such a beautiful
thing as your poem, _Life_, could allow _The Nymph_ to appear in _The
Little Review_.

How can you hope to encourage Art when you will print such a thing? I
have noticed these free-thinkers, and with the casting aside of “forms
that have to be respected” has gone whatever taste they had. They gulp
down everything, provided it casts a slur upon something. Does one have
to lose all his finer sensibilities because he wishes to be free and
open minded?

I have thought of you people when Nietzsche says, “Sensualists are they
now become—a trouble and a terror is the hero to them.”

I join with you in your cry of blank pages if _The Nymph_ is the
alternative.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Give over reading Nietzsche for a bit; you belong in the primary class.
The person who wrote _The Nymph_ has a background of life, if not of
Art. And your hero? “A Trouble and a Terror” would make him appear the
villain.—_jh._


                         Why Editors Go Insane

_Alice Groff, Philadelphia_:

I am going to tear to pieces your “A Real Magazine.”

No one ever _reaches_ the “Ideal.” The moment he does, there has ceased
to _be_ an “_Ideal_.” Our ideal is an ever-advancing goal. Art is the
embodiment of the human ideal—which ideal is the ever-advancing goal of
human life.

Art is _not_ the ultimate reason for Life. Life _is_,—for its own sake.
Life lives for the ideal—for the ever-advancing goal, which embodies
itself in Art—that Life may become ever more and more abundant _life_.
Life continually seeks to express its absolute essence in Art, and it
will never cease this seeking through all eternity. Such expression will
always be compelled by the aspiration to reach the ever-advancing
goal—the Ideal which will continually incarnate, and reincarnate, itself
in an ever-renewing body—Art.

Art is the incarnation of the Ideal—the shed Chrysalis. The Ideal is the
Psyche—continually wending its way toward a new goal and a new Chrysalis
(which it continually sheds, leaving with us its mortal part only—Art.)




                   Facts About the Preparedness Bomb


Out here in the big West, a whooping, yelling mob of “Vigilante”
business men is trying to wipe out the last labor union. Hiring an army
of bristling gunmen for a spy- and strike-breaker system, they have
slowly advanced from conquered Los Angeles to the siege of San
Francisco.

The opening fight here was to force Labor, against its will, into a
“preparedness” parade. Every organized man refused to move, and the
parade for military piracy was cut down to a handful of the unorganized
who were bulldozed into line.

Organized Labor, victorious, was satisfied and completely through with
the affair before the day of march.

But some individuals, fired by the wild propaganda for military
violence, sent hundreds of warnings through the mails, saying that they
would blow up the parade with a bomb. Employers and newspapers tried to
keep this quiet, but Organized Labor men discovered it and requested
their followers to avoid any chance for such a thing to be laid at their
door, by abstaining from all activity and treating the parade with
silent contempt. This was done.

The ranks of the unorganized marched down Market street behind their
employers and society women, unaware of the warnings. A bomb exploded
which killed six people outright, three more dying later. A prominent
Chamber of Commerce man was heard to remark: “This is a fine chance for
the open shop.”

Immediately the Chamber of Commerce, through its tools in public office,
swooped down on its most hated enemies in Organized Labor ranks. They
took the leader of the recent attempted street car strike, Thomas J.
Mooney (as well as his wife, an inoffensive music teacher), ignored his
complete alibi and charged him with heading a “conspiracy.” The chief of
pickets of the recent Machinists’ strike, Edward D. Nolan, was taken for
vengeance’s sake, without evidence, and they announce, in the papers
that they “have the hemp stretched around the necks of all.” Israel
Weinberg, prominent in the Jitney Bus Operators’ Union, which is
troubling the United Railways, was jailed and accused of murder. Warren
K. Billings, past president of the Shoe Workers, was charged with the
actual dynamiting, and an eye-witness who saw an altogether different
man place the supposed suit-case bomb, was assaulted in the office of
the prosecutor.

Five conspicuous enemies of the employers were thus caught and
apparently doomed. The warnings in advance that had been received
through the mails, were thereafter ignored. Direct evidence of
eye-witnesses was ignored. The Chamber of Commerce had the men it
wanted.

Every newspaper blandly declined to print a word without approval of the
“Law and Order Committee.” Several newspaper men working on the case
came secretly to us to whisper that they knew the men were innocent, but
“for God’s sake don’t mention us!” One detective working for the
prosecution told a member of the International Workers’ Defense League
that the men were to be convicted on fake evidence, now being cooked up,
but “not to let on who told you.” Only by keeping the men from having
any defense could they be convicted, so the prosecution had the
indecency to try to prevent any prominent lawyer from taking the case. A
judge forced upon the principal defendant, fighting for his life, a
greenhorn lawyer of one year’s experience.

By making it clear to a prominent criminal lawyer that the accused are
not guilty, we have gotten him, through a sense of justice, to take the
cases for a fee much lower than his usual charge. But we have not even
that much money.

Twenty-one Thousand Dollars blood money is in the sight of the horde of
ex-Pinkertons and United Railways detectives, and they will not give up
their prey without a tough fight. The prisoners are in the hands of men
who consider labor unionism in itself a crime. They are now proving this
by making peaceful picketing a prison offense.

We have demonstrated to many unions the innocence of the men and gotten
them to send delegates to the League.

We are not defending bomb throwers, but innocent men. They will be
executed practically without trial if we don’t get the money to defend
them.

Send money, and much of it, QUICK, to the International Workers’ Defense
League, Robert Minor, treasurer, 210 Russ Building, 235 Montgomery
street, San Francisco.




                         The Vers Libre Contest


The poems published in the Vers Libre Contest are now being considered
by the judges. There were two hundred and two poems, thirty-two of which
were returned because they were either Shakespearean sonnets or rhymed
quatrains or couplets. Manuscripts will be returned as promptly as they
are rejected, providing the contestants sent postage.

We hope to announce the results in our October issue, and publish the
prize poems.

                                                  —The Contest Editor.




                                IN BOOKS

                Anything that’s Radical MAY be found at


                        McDevitt’s Book Omnorium

              1346 Fillmore Street and 2079 Sutter Street
                       San Francisco, California

                   (He Sells The Little Review, Too)




                        The Truth From All Sides

                “_To understand all is to forgive all._”

   In an honest endeavor to present the truth about the great world
   war now raging, THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING COMPANY authorized its
   London agent to obtain for publication in America books by
   eminent and reliable authors in all the belligerent states.

   ROMAIN ROLLAND speaks for France in a wonderful appeal to
   humanity entitled “_Above the Battle_.” _Cloth, $1.00._

   HON. BERTRAND RUSSELL speaks for England and justice to small
   nations in a veritable classic entitled “_Justice in War Time_.”
   _Price, cloth $1.00, paper 50 cents._

   DR. J. H. LABBERTON speaks for Belgium and the question of
   Germany’s right to invade Belgium in a book entitled “_Belgium
   and Germany_.” _Cloth, $1.00._

   MARSHALL KELLY, an English radical and labor leader, writes a
   bitter denunciation of England’s foreign policy during the past
   twenty years in a book entitled “_Carlyle and the War_.” _Cloth,
   $1.00._

   S. IVOR STEPHEN, an international newspaper writer, denounces the
   policy of newspapers in general and New York City in particular,
   for their part in arousing prejudice in war time. His book is
   entitled “_Neutrality_.” _Cloth $1.00, paper 50 cents._

   ROLAND HUGINS, Cornell University, makes an eloquent appeal to
   the American people for justice and moderation entitled “_Germany
   Misjudged_.” _Cloth, $1.00._

   These books should be read by every intelligent person, no matter
   what his sympathies may be. It will help to enlighten this world
   and drive away the hatred and prejudice which a one-sided view is
   bound to engender.

                     The Open Court Publishing Co.
                122 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Ill.




                          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. 23]:
   ... play is name The Happy Ending). The curtain rises on a dark
       forest, ...
   ... play is named The Happy Ending). The curtain rises on a dark
       forest, ...




*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 76075 ***