The Little Review

Literature Drama Music Art

MARGARET C. ANDERSON
EDITOR

JUNE-JULY, 1915

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).