The Little Review

Literature Drama Music Art

MARGARET C. ANDERSON
EDITOR

MARCH, 1914

THE LITTLE REVIEW
Fine Arts Building
CHICAGO

Volume 1
Number 1

Copyright, 1914, by
Margaret C. Anderson

25 cents a copy
$2.50 a year

The Little Review

MARCH, 1914

Announcement

“The realm of art is prodigious; next to life itself the vastest realm of man’s experience.”

Appreciation has its outlet in art; and art (to complete the circle and the figure) has its source in—owes its whole current—to appreciation. That is, the tides of art would cease to ebb and flow were it not for the sun and moon of appreciation.

This function of the sun and moon is known as criticism. But criticism as an art has not flourished in this country. We live too swiftly to have time to be appreciative; and criticism, after all, has only one synonym: appreciation. In a world whose high splendor is our chief preoccupation the quality of our appreciation is the important thing.

Life is a glorious performance: quite apart from its setting, in spite of the kind of “part” one gets, everybody is given at least his chance to act. We may do our simple best with the roles we receive; we may change our “lines” if we’re inventive enough to think of something better; we may alter our “business” to get our personalities across more effectively; or we may boldly accost the stage manager, hand back the part he’d cast us for, and prove our right to be starred. The player who merely holds madame’s cloak may do it with dignity and grace; and he who changes his role, with a fine freedom and courage, discovers that he’s not acting but living his part! For this reason we feel that we needn’t be accused of an unthinking “all’s-right-with-the-world” attitude when we assert that life is glorious.

And close to Life—so close, from our point of view, that it keeps treading on Life’s heels—is this eager, panting Art who shows us the wonder of the way as we rush along. We may as well acknowledge right here that we’ve never had a friend (except in one or two rare instances) who hasn’t shaken his head at us paternally about this attitude toward art. “It’s purely transitional,” he says, tolerantly; “life is so much more interesting, you see, that you’re bound to substitute people for art, eventually. It really doesn’t matter so much that Alice Meynell wrote ‘Renouncement’ as that Mrs. Jones next door has left her husband.” Well, he’s wrong; at least, he can’t speak for us. Wells said to save the kitten and let the Mona Lisa burn; who would consider anything else? We think it’s rather silly in our paternal friend to argue with us so heatedly—beside the point! It’s not a question as to which is more important—“Renouncement” or Mrs. Jones. We’re merely trying to say that we’re intensely interested in Mrs. Jones, but that Mrs. Meynell has made our lives more wonderful—permanently.

The Little Review means to reflect this attitude toward life and art. Its ambitious aim is to produce criticism of books, music, art, drama, and life that shall be fresh and constructive, and intelligent from the artist’s point of view. For the instinct of the artist to distrust criticism is as well founded as the mother’s toward the sterile woman. More so, perhaps; for all women have some sort of instinct for motherhood, and all critics haven’t an instinct for art. Criticism that is creative—that is our high goal. And criticism is never a merely interpretative function; it is creation: it gives birth! It’s not necessary to cite the time-worn illustration of Da Vinci and Pater to prove it.

Books register the ideas of an age; this is perhaps their chief claim to immortality. But much that passes for criticism ignores this aspect of the case and deals merely with a question of literary values. To be really interpretative—let alone creative—criticism must be a blend of philosophy and poetry. We shall try very hard to achieve this difficult combination.

Also, we mean to print articles, poems, stories that seem to us definitely interesting, or—to use a much-abused adjective—vital. Our point of view shall not be restrictive; we may present the several judgments of our various enthusiastic contributors on one subject in the same issue. The net effect we hope will be stimulating and what we like to call releasing.

Feminism? A clear-thinking magazine can have only one attitude; the degree of ours is ardent!

Finally, since The Little Review, which is neither directly nor indirectly connected in any way with any organization, society, company, cult or movement, is the personal enterprise of the editor, it shall enjoy that untrammelled liberty which is the life of Art.

And now that we’ve made our formal bow we may say confidentially that we take a certain joyous pride in confessing our youth, our perfectly inexpressible enthusiasm, and our courage in the face of a serious undertaking; for those qualities mean freshness, reverence, and victory! At least we have got to the age when we realize that all beautiful things make a place for themselves sooner or later in the world. And we hope to be very beautiful!

If you’ve ever read poetry with a feeling that it was your religion, your very life; if you’ve ever come suddenly upon the whiteness of a Venus in a dim, deep room; if you’ve ever felt music replacing your shabby soul with a new one of shining gold; if, in the early morning, you’ve watched a bird with great white wings fly from the edge of the sea straight up into the rose-colored sun—if these things have happened to you and continue to happen till you’re left quite speechless with the wonder of it all, then you’ll understand our hope to bring them nearer to the common experience of the people who read us.

The more I see of academicism, the more I distrust it. If I had approached painting as I have approached book-writing and music, that is to say, by beginning at once to do what I wanted ... I should have been all right.—The Note-Books of Samuel Butler.

Poetry is in Nature just as much as carbon is.—Emerson’s Journals (1856-1863).

Life is like music; it must be composed by ear, feeling and instinct, not by rule.—The Note-Books of Samuel Butler.

A Letter from Galsworthy

Written from Taormina, February 23, 1914.

My Dear Madam:

You ask me to bid your magazine good speed; and so far as I have any right, I do indeed. It seems you are setting out to watch the street of Life from a high balcony, where at all events the air should be fresh and sunrise sometimes visible. I hope you will decide to sleep out there under the stars, for what kills most literary effort is the hothouse air of temples, clubs, and coteries, that, never changed, breeds in us by turn febrility and torpor. Enthusiasms are more convincing from those who have not told their loves too often. And criticism more poignant from one who has been up at dawn, seen for himself and put down his impression before he goes on ’Change. There is a saying of de Maupassant about a writer sitting down before an object until he has seen it in the way that he alone can see it, seen it with the part of him which makes him This man and not That. For the creative artist and the creative critic there is no rule, I think, so golden. And I did seem to notice in America that there was a good deal of space and not much time; and that without too much danger of becoming “Yogis” people might perhaps sit down a little longer in front of things than they seemed to do. But I noticed too a great energy and hope. These will be your servants to carry through what will not, surely, be just an exploit or adventure, but a true and long comradeship with effort that is worth befriending.

So all good fortune!

Very faithfully yours,
John Galsworthy.

Five Japanese Prints

Arthur Davison Ficke

I KIYONOBU SPEAKS

The actor on his little stage

Struts with a mimic rage.—

Across my page

My passion in his form shall tower from age to age.

What he so crudely dreams

In vague and fitful gleams,

The crowd esteems.—

Well! let the future judge, if his or mine this seems—

This calm Titanic mould

Stalking in colours bold

Fold upon fold—

This lord of dark, this dream I dreamed of old!

II FIGURE BY OKUMURA MASANOBU

Garbed in flowing folds of light,

Azure, emerald, rose, and white,

Watchest thou across the night.

Crowned with splendor is thine head:

All the princes great and dead

Round thy limbs their state have shed—

Calm, immutable to stand—

Gracious head and poisèd hand—

O’er the years that flow like sand.

III PILLAR-PRINT BY KIYOMITSU

A place for giant heads to take their rest

Seems her pale breast.

Her sweeping robe trails like the cloud and wind

Storms leave behind.

The ice of the year, and its Aprilian part,

Sleep in her heart.

Wherefore, small marvel that her footsteps be

Like strides of Destiny!

IV PILLAR-PRINT BY TOYONOBU

O lady of the long robes, the slow folds flowing—

Lady of the white breast, the dark and lofty head—

Dwells there any wonder, the way that thou art going—

Or goest thou toward the dead?

So calm thy solemn steps, so slow the long lines sweeping

Of garments pale and ghostly, of limbs as grave as sleep—

I know not if thou, spectre, hast love or death in keeping,

Or goest toward which deep.

Thou layest thy robes aside with gesture large and flowing—

Is it for love or sleep—is it for life or death?

I would my feet might follow the path that thou art going,

And thy breath be my breath.

V PILLAR-PRINT BY HARUNOBU

From an infinite distance, the ghostly music!

Few and slender the tones, of delicate silver,

As stars are broidered on the veil of evening....

He passes by, the flute and the dreaming player—

Slow are his steps, his eyes are gravely downcast;

His pale robes sway in long folds with his passing.

Out of the infinite distance, a ghostly music

Returns—in slender tones of delicate silver,

As stars are broidered on the veil of evening.

“The Dark Flower” and the “Moralists”

Margaret C. Anderson

The Dark Flower, by John Galsworthy. (Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York.)

A book that has beauty as it’s given to few books to achieve it has been the innocent cause of more ignorant, naïve, and stupid condemnation than anything published for a long time. Even the English critics—who usually avoid these shallows—in several cases hit the rocks with awful force. And all because a man with the soul of the old gods chose to tell, quite simply and with inexpressible beauty, the truth about an artist. The Dark Flower was everybody’s opportunity to deepen his vision, but nearly everybody decided to look upon it as an emotional redundancy. Perhaps this doesn’t do some of them justice: I believe a good many of them considered it positively dangerous!

My quite spontaneous tribute to Galsworthy’s Mark Lennan—before I’d heard anyone discuss him—was that here was a man a woman would be glad to trust her soul to. And, in view of how silly it is for a woman to trust her soul to anyone but herself, I still insisted that one could do it with Mark Lennan: because he’d not take charge of anyone’s soul!—his wife’s least of all. Of course, to love a man of his sort would mean unhappiness; but women who face life with any show of bravery face unhappiness as part of the day’s work. It remains to decide whether one will reach high and break a bone or two over something worth having, or play safe and take a pale joy in one’s unscarred condition. With Mark Lennan a woman would have had—à la Browning—her perfect moment; and such things are rare enough to pay well for, if necessary.

All of which is making a very personal issue of The Dark Flower; but it’s the kind of book you’ve got to be personal about; you revise your list of friends on a basis of their attitude toward Galsworthy.

After I’d finished The Dark Flower—and it had never occurred to my naïve mind that anyone would disagree with me about it—various persons began to tell me how wrong I was. Mark Lennan was a cad and a weakling—decidedly the kind of person to be kept out of a good novel. The very beauty of the book made it insidious, someone said; such art expended in defense of immorality would soon tend to confuse our standards. Someone else remarked patronizingly: “Oh, The Dark Flower may be well done and all that, but personally I’ve always had a passion for the normal!” But, most maddening of all, I think, were those readers of thrillers, of sweet, sentimental stories—those persons who patronize comic opera exclusively because they “see enough tragedy in life to avoid it in the theater”—who asked earnestly: “But, after all, what’s the use of such books? What possible good do they do?”

On another page of this review such questions are answered with a poignancy I dare not compete with. I want to try, instead, to tell why The Dark Flower seems to me an altogether extraordinary piece of work.

In the first place, constructively. The story covers three episodes of a man’s love life: Spring, with its awakening; Summer, with its deep passion; and Autumn, with its desperate longing for another Spring. But the handling of the episodes is so unepisodic that you feel you’ve been given the man’s whole life, day by day, from Oxford to that final going down the years—sans youth, sans spring, sans beauty, sans passion; sans everything save that “faint, glimmering light—far out there beyond....” This effect of completeness is achieved, I think, by the remarkable intensity of the writing, by the clever (and by no means easy) method of sometimes allowing the characters the author’s prerogative of addressing the audience directly. Highly subjective in everything that he does, Galsworthy has reached a climax of subjectivity here: The Dark Flower is as personal in its medium as music.

In the second place—the great matter of style. Every page shows the very poetry of prose writing; there’s an inevitability about its choice of beautiful and simple words that makes them seem a part of the nature they describe. For instance, to choose at random from a multitude of exquisite things: “... under the stars of this warm Southern night, burning its incense of trees and flowers”; or, “And he sat for a long time that evening under a large lime-tree on a knoll above the Serpentine. There was very little breeze, just enough to keep alive a kind of whispering. What if men and women, when they had lived their gusty lives, became trees! What if someone who had burned and ached were now spreading over him this leafy peace—this blue-black shadow against the stars? Or were the stars, perhaps, the souls of men and women escaped for ever from love and longing? ... If only for a moment he could desert his own heart, and rest with the trees and stars!” With a single clause like “for ever part of the stillness and the passion of a summer night” Galsworthy gets effects that some poets need three or four verses for. In one place he defines for all time a Chopin mazurka as “a little dancing dirge of summer”; in another gives you with one stroke an impression of his hero that it’s impossible to forget: “He looks as if he were seeing sands and lions.”

In the third place, Galsworthy’s psychology is profound—impregnable. One simple characterization will serve to illustrate: he describes a man’s face as having the candour of one at heart a child—“that simple candour of those who have never known how to seek adventures of the mind, and have always sought adventures of the body.”

As to the lesson of The Dark Flower—its philosophy, its “moral”—I can only say that it hasn’t any such thing; that is, while it’s full to the brim of philosophy, it doesn’t attempt to force a philosophy upon you. It offers you the truth about a human being and lets it go at that—which seems to be the manner of not a few who have written greatly. For the other sort of thing, go to any second-rate novelist you happen to admire; he’ll give you characters who have a hard time of it and tell you just where they’re right and where they’re wrong. I can see how you feel you’re getting more for your money.

I can’t help feeling that everything Galsworthy has done has had its special function in making The Dark Flower possible. The sociology of Fraternity, the passionate pleading of Justice and Strife, the incomparable emotional experiments of A Commentary, the intellectuality of The Patrician—all these have contributed to the noble simplicities and the noble beauty of The Dark Flower.

The Garden

My heart shall be thy garden. Come, my own,

Into thy garden; thine be happy hours

Among my fairest thoughts, my tallest flowers,

From root to crowning petal thine alone.

Thine is the place from where the seeds are sown

Up to the sky enclosed, with all its showers.

But ah, the birds, the birds! Who shall build bowers

To keep these thine? O friend, the birds have flown.

For as these come and go, and quit our pine

To follow the sweet season, or, new-comers,

Sing one song only from our alder-trees,

My heart has thoughts, which, though thine eyes hold mine,

Flit to the silent world and other summers,

With wings that dip beyond the silver seas.

—Alice Meynell’s Poems. (Charles Scribner’s Sons.)

A Remarkable Nietzschean Drama

DeWitt C. Wing

Mr. Faust, by Arthur Davison Ficke. (Mitchell Kennerley, New York.)

Have you thought there could be but a single Supreme? There can be any number of Supremes.—Whitman.

Mr. Faust is the embodiment of the Nietzschean attitude toward the universe. This characterization consciously ignores the legendary Faust of Goethe as having no vital kinship with his namesake. There is of course a skeletal likeness one to the other, but the hero in Mr. Ficke’s drama is incarnated with modern flesh and endued with a supreme will. His unconquerable spirit is not that of Goethe’s Faust but of Friedrich Nietzsche. Incidentally and singularly it is the spirit of Whitman. And these two men, more than any other two or twenty in the realm of literature, represent the undying god Pan, or the spirit of Youth. Nietzsche and Whitman are the understanding comrades of the young-hearted and open-minded.

Mr. Faust’s creator may have no conscious knowledge of Whitman’s poetry, which is a matter of no moment, but he has read Nietzsche, and that is momentous—indispensable—in relation to this splendid result of white-heat intellection. I say intellection because Mr. Faust is not so much a work of art as a remarkable example of reproduction. I know that, although the thought and feeling of the work rise in places to the power of an inspiration wholly personal to the author, never “Thus Spake Zarathustra.” For that is an original, authentic voice which, like everything else in nature, has no substitute or duplicate.

I can fancy a strong, healthy, organically cultured young man, just beginning to feel his way into the realities that lie outside the American cornbelt, by chance taking a peep into one of Nietzsche’s great books, and, fascinated and quickened by that marvelously contagious god, leaping to new heights of his own manhood. I should guess that in this instance the young man, who happens to be a lawyer, thirty-one years old, living at Davenport, Ia., was temporarily Christianized by bad luck, illness or something of the sort, and in this extremity, kicked by Nietzsche, experienced the feeling of personal adequacy to which Mr. Faust gives utterance. Recovering himself, he avowed his own godhood, even to the last ditch! And that is the triumphant Youth—the Nietzsche—of the thing.

A day or two subsequent to the appearance of Mr. Ficke’s book upon the market I had the pleasure of hearing it read, with well-nigh perfect sympathy and appreciation, by the foremost Nietzschean expositor in this country. Like other listeners I was amazed, charmed and aroused. Were these results referable to the play alone or in part to the reader, or to both? To what extent, I was compelled to ask, was the effect illusory or hypnotic? I had read some of Ficke’s verse, which had given no intimation of anything in its author so heroically Nietzschean as Mr. Faust. I had consequently tabbed Ficke as probably a poetic possibility, provided he lived a dozen years in an involuntary hell, undergoing a new birth. Entertaining the doubts indicated by my questions, I read Mr. Faust to myself, trying it in my fashion by the trees, the stars and the lake. Subjected to this test the play did not have the ring and lift which I had heard and felt when it was read—perhaps I should say given an added vitality—by a Nietzschean philosopher. It now impressed me as an extraordinary tour de force, reaching in some of its passages a species of accidental trans-Nietzscheanism.

Written in blank verse, the superior quality of which is admirably sustained, the style of the drama is undeniably poetical, as Edwin Björkman, the editor of Mr. Kennerley’s Modern Drama Series, states in an interesting biographical sketch; but where there is so much consciousness of workmanship—so much preoccupation with an imported idea instead of sweeping control by an inner, personal urge like that, for example, which produced Thus Spake Zarathustra—poetry is not to be expected. What surprises me is that, despite this restriction, Mr. Ficke strides upward in many lines to the borderland of the gods. In the first three acts he writes as one possessed—as an intellectualist furiously interested in Americanizing, if you please, the racial implications of the philosophy of a superhumanity which will always be associated with the name of his temporary master, Nietzsche. In these acts there is a deal of amazing revealment of insight; of aspiration for transcendent goals; of the spiritual insatiability of man. And there is a cold humor. Underneath the whole thing lies its own by-product: social dynamite!

I think that Mr. Ficke finished his play in three acts, but he added two more—to make it five, I was about to say, but in the fifth he achieves a measurable justification, for the last sentence, “Touch me across the dusk,” is poetry—the wonderful words of the dying Faust, addressed to Midge, the only person who understood him.

Near the middle of the opening act, Faust, roused by an inquiring mind to an analytical protest against things as they are, says,

... I would go

Out to some golden sun-lighted land

Of silence.

That is poetical; it is cosmic in its feeling. Looking at a bust of Washington, he enviously—no, compassionately—remarks,

... Not a star

In all the vaults of heaven could trouble you

With whisperings of more transcendent goals.

At this juncture Satan appears, gains recognition by recalling an incident involving Faust with a blackmailing woman in a college during his youth, and thereafter tempts him into empty, unsatisfying paradises. In his wandering and winding pilgrimage through the world Faust makes the footprints that we recognize as those of our own humanity, seeking its way—somewhither. He is offered but rejects peace, happiness, salvation and all the rest of their related consolations, knowing that none of them could satisfy his restless heart. To his uncomprehending friends he is lost, and Satan himself, to whom in such circumstances he is obviously resigned by society, fails to claim him. But Midge, the heroine, knew him; she could touch him across the dusk, which was his kind of immortality. And so Faust, with a vague consciousness of his own godhood, a sense of his own supremacy, an unshakable faith in one thing—himself—passed from the earthly freedom of his will into the great release.

It is altogether too early in the morning of humanity to expect to see this play or one like it on the stage. That it should be written by a young American and published by a young Englishman is enough to satisfy those who would enjoy its presentation, and those to whom it would be Greek or “unpleasant,” whether they saw it or read it, must wait for its truth through their children—across the dusk!

The Lost Joy

Floyd Dell

There was once a lady (I forget her name) who said that love was for women one of the most important things in the world. She made the remark and let it go at that. She did not write a book about it. If she had considered it necessary she would doubtless have written such a book.

Consider the possibility—a book entitled Woman and Love, a book proving with logic and eloquence that woman ought to love, and that, unless she loved, the highest self-development was impossible to her and to the race!

It is not entirely absurd. Such a book might have been necessary. If half of all womankind, through some change in our social and ethical arrangements, refrained from love as something at once disagreeable and ungenteel, and if the other half loved under conditions disastrous to health and spirit, then there might have been need for a book preaching to women the gospel of love. It would have been time to urge that, hateful as the conditions might be, love was for women, nevertheless, a good thing, a fine thing, a wonderful and necessary thing. It would have been time to break down the prejudice which made one-half of womankind lead incomplete and futile lives, and to raise love itself to its proper dignity.

Well, we are in a condition like that today, only it is not love, it is work that has lost its dignity in the lives of women. It is not love, it is work from which one-half of womankind refrains as from something at once disagreeable and ungenteel, while the other half of womankind performs it under conditions disastrous to health and spirit.

There is need today for a book preaching to women the gospel of work. It is time to break down the prejudice which makes one-half of womankind lead incomplete and futile, because idle, lives. We need a book to show women what work should mean to them.

And, curiously enough, the book exists. It is Olive Schreiner’s Woman and Labor. It is a wise book and a beautiful book. There are statistics in it, but there is eloquence flaming on every page. It is a book of the joy and the significance of work for women.

When Olive Schreiner says “work,” she means it. She does not refer to the makeshifts which masquerade under the term of “social usefulness.” She means work done with the hands and the brain, work done for money, work that sets the individual free from dependence on any other individual. It is a theme worth all her eloquence. For work and love, and not either of them alone, are the most important things in the world—the supremest expressions of individual life.

H. G. Wells on America

I came to America balancing between hope and skepticism. The European world is full of the criticism of America; and, for the matter of that, America, too, is full of it; hostility and depreciation prevail—overmuch; for, in spite of rawness and vehemence and a scum of blatant, oh! quite asinine, folly, the United States of America remains the greatest country in the world and the living hope of mankind. It is the supreme break with the old tradition; it is the freshest and most valiant beginning that has ever been made in human life.—The Passionate Friends.

Paderewski and the New Gods

Margaret C. Anderson

I shall keep always, as my most unforgettable memory, the thought of a certain afternoon during Paderewski’s tour this year when he walked quietly back across the stage, in response to an encore, and played Schumann’s Warum. It was somehow heart-breaking. It was a more poignant questioning to me, than Arnold’s

“unquenched, deep-sunken, old-world pain—

Say, will it never heal?”

Nothing that I have ever heard or seen has given me so vivid a sense of being in the presence of an art that is immortal.

It seems to have become hideously “popular” to love Paderewski. The critics will tell you that it’s only done in America; that Europeans have any number of idols they put before him; and that we who persist in calling him “the greatest” are simply under the spell of an old hypnotism. There was a time, they’ll concede, when he came like a conqueror, royally deserving the flowers we strewed. But now—there’s Bauer, there’s Godowsky, and Hofman, and Gans, and Busoni! One local critic has even gone to the length of saying that since the American public has sat at the feet of these men and learned sanity in piano playing it has no enthusiasm for Paderewski’s “neurotic, disordered, incoherent” music—“his woeful exaggerations of sentiment and hysterical rhapsody.” I should say some unpublishable things to that critic if we should ever discuss the subject.

The three most interesting human faces I know are Forbes-Robertson’s, Kreisler’s, and Paderewski’s. In the English actor’s there is a meeting of strength and spirituality (not the anæmic “spirituality” of certain new cults, but a quality of soul that makes him “a prince, a philosopher, a lover, a soldier, a sad humorist,” all in the limits of one personality) that means utter nobility. It can be as cold as a graven image, or as hot with feeling as a poet’s. Depth upon depth of subtlety plays across it—not the hypnotic subtlety of the Orientalist, but the austere subtlety of an English scholar and a great gentleman. In Kreisler’s there is a meeting of strength and sensuousness that means utter fascination to the artist who would paint him—utter revealment to the musician who would analyze his art. For the secret of Kreisler’s personality and his music lies in that finely balanced combination of qualities: a sensuousness that would be a little overpowering, a little drugging, without the gigantic strength that seems to hold it in leash. That balance makes possible his little air of military jauntiness, of sad Vienna gayety; it gives him that huge effect of power that always makes me feel I’m watching the king of the forest stride through his kingdom. You need never expect emotionalism from this musician; he’s too strong to give you anything but passion. In Paderewski’s face there is a meeting of strength and two other predominant qualities: sentience, I think, and suffering. It’s difficult to express his great, interesting head in a series of nouns; but there are some that come near to it: mystery, melancholy, weariness, a sort of shattering sorrow; always the sense of struggle and pain, and always the final releasement—in music. For while you can conceive a Forbes-Robertson away from the stage, and a Kreisler apart from his violin, you can never for a moment think of Paderewski without his piano. Not that he’s less of a man, but that he’s the most sensitized human instrument that ever dedicated itself to an art.

To resort to the most overworked phrase in the language, Paderewski has a temperament. Somebody has said that no fat person ever possessed one; and after you’ve speculated about this till you begin to wonder what temperament really is, you can come back to Paderewski as the most adequate illustration. Ysaye is the best example I know of the opposite. When strength turns to fat ... well, we’ll not go into that; but to make my point—and there’s certainly nothing of personal maliciousness in it—it’s necessary to reflect that obesity has some insidious influence upon artistic utterance. (Schumann-Heink is an artist in the best meaning of the word; but no one ever talked of her and temperament in the same breath, so she doesn’t negate the issue.) But Ysaye’s tepid, wingless, uninspired music—his utterly sweet but fat music—that appears to attract thousands of people, is as lazily inadequate as its creator would be in a marathon. It’s as though his vision had dropped slowly away with every added pound of avoirdupois. Or perhaps it’s because vision has a fashion of dropping away with age....

Ah!—but Paderewski has the years, too, now, and his playing is as virile, as flaming, as it ever was. An artist—with a temperament—doesn’t get old, any more than Peter Pan does. Paderewski’s furrowed face shows the artist’s eternal striving; his music shows his eternal youth, his faithfulness to the vision that furnishes his answer to the eternal “Warum?”

This is the secret of Paderewski’s white magic. He’s still the supreme god! Bauer plays perfectly within the rules—exquisitely and powerfully—and misses the top height by the mere fraction of a mood, the simple lack of a temperament; or, as O. Henry might have explained it, by the unfortunate encumbrance of a forty-two-inch belt. Hofman has an impatience with his medium, apparently, that leaves his hearer unsatisfied with the piano; while Paderewski, though he transcends the instrument, does so because of his love for the piano as a medium, and forces his hearer to agree with him that it’s the supreme one. Godowsky forces things into the piano—pushes them in and makes them stay there; Paderewski draws things out, always, and fills the world with them.

I can think of no comparison from which he doesn’t emerge unscathed. If I were a musical reactionary, this judgment would have no value here; but I’m not. Classical perfection is no longer interesting; Beethoven seems no longer to comprehend all music—in fact, the people who have no rebellions about the sterility of the old symphonies are quite beyond my range of understanding. But Paderewski plays the old music in a new way, gives it such vitality of meaning that you feel it’s just been born—or, better, perhaps, that its composers have been triumphantly revalued, rejustified in their claim for eternal life. His Beethoven is as full of color as his Chopin; and who, by the way, ever started the popular nonsense about De Pachmann or anyone else being the supreme Chopin exponent? No one has ever played Chopin like Paderewski; no one has ever made such simple, haunting melodies of the nocturnes; no one has ever struck such ringing Polish music out of the polonaises, or such wind-swept cadences from the Berceuse; no one has ever played the Funeral March so like a cosmic procession—the mighty moving of humanity from birth to death and new life; no one has ever so visualized those “orchestras of butterflies that played to Chopin in the sun.”

I have still one great wish in the world: that some time I may hear Paderewski play on a Mason and Hamlin—that piano of unutterable depth and richness. The fact that he’s never used it is the one flaw in his performances, for no other instrument that I’ve heard gives you the same sense of drowning in great waves of warm sound. The combination would convince even the followers of the new gods. But, old or new, and even on his cold Steinway, no one has ever drawn from the piano the same quality of golden tone or dared such simplicity of singing as Paderewski. To put his genius into a sentence: no one has ever built so strong a bridge across the gulf that yawns between vision and accomplishment.

The Major Symphony

George Soule

Round splendor of the harp’s entonéd gold

Throbbing beneath the pleading violins—

That hundred-choiring voice that wins and wins

To over-filling song; the bright and bold

Clamor of trumpets; ’cellos that enfold

Richly the flutes; and basses that like djinns

Thunder their clumsy threatening, as begins

The oboe’s mystic plaint of sorrows old:—

Are these the symphony? No, it is will

In passion striving to surmount the world,

Growing in sensuous dalliance, sudden whirled

To ecstasies of shivering joy, and still

Marching and mastering, singing mightily,

Consummate when the silence makes it free.

The Prophet of a New Culture

George Burman Foster

A profound unrest tortures the heart of the modern man. The world, slaughtering the innocents, is meaningless; life, bruised and bewildered, is worthless—such is the melancholy mood of modernity. Today life is a burden to many to whom it was once a joy. Decadents, they call themselves, who rediscover the elements of their most personal life in everything that is weary and ailing. We are all more or less infected with this weariness and ennui. The blows which the spirit experiences from opposing sides today are so powerful that no one is in a position to endure them with equanimity. The forces resident within the soul no longer suffice to give support and stability to life. Hence our culture has lost faith in itself. Our civilization is played out. What the Germans call Weltschmerz has come over us. Philosophers have fashioned it into systems; singers, into song—the sad but not sweet music of humanity; sufferers all, into a sharp cry for redemption. Deniers of the malady must have their eyes opened by physicians, scurrying around curatively in this humanity.

First of all, there are those who borrow their panacea from religion. They demand a reform of the ecclesiastical life according to the sense and spirit of primitive Christianity. They propose to recover the religion of Jesus, and to find in it healing for all the diseases of the times. But this remedy is so complicated that it reveals rather than heals the whole disunity and distraction of our present life. It was Tolstoi, in garb of desert prophet, who would restore original Christianity. He preached a radical reversal of our cultural life—a monastic asceticism, a warfare against all life’s impulses, on whose development our culture is founded. And ecclesiastical liberals would do virtually the same thing when they try to extract from the religion of Jesus a food that shall be palatable to modern taste, and then call their ragout, compounded according to their own recipe, “original” Christianity.

There are other voices, noisier and more numerous. These hold Christianity in all its forms to be the hereditary evil of humanity, and see the salvation of the world only in a purification of life from every Christian memory. Owing to the brisk international interchange of ideas today, Buddhism has awakened a momentary hope, as if from the religion of far-off India a purer spiritual atmosphere might be wafted to us, in which we could convalesce from the Christian malady.

Now, what shall we say of all these strivings to heal the hurt of the modern mind?

All of them have one adverse thing in common: They would tear up an old tree by its roots, and put in its place another tree equally as old and equally as rotten. There is something reactionary in all of them. They want to cure the present by the past. It is precisely this that cannot be done. If Christianity was once original, spontaneous, creative, it is so no more. We cannot lead an age back to Jesus, which has grown out beyond him. And the Buddha-religion is no more youthful and life-giving than the Jesus-religion. It is indicative of the depth of the disgust and the extent of the confusion on the part of the man of today that such a hoary thing as Buddhism can make so great an impression upon him. A revived, renascent heathenism, even as compared with Christianity, would mean a reactionary and outlived form of life. That men of moral endeavor and scientific vision could hope for a substitute for Christianity, a conquest over Christianity, in a rebirth of paganism, is a new riddle of the Sphinx.

One way only remains out of the aberration and dividedness of our present life: not backward, but forward! No winning of a religious view of the world in any other way! No pursuit of the tasks of the moral life by those who seek a real part and place in the modern world, in any other way!

Hence, a man is coming to be leader—a man who, as no other, embodies in himself all the pain and all the pleasure, all the sickness and all the convalescence, all the age and all the youth, of our tumultuous and tortured times: Friedrich Nietzsche!

I do not know how many of you know the poet of Zarathustra. But if you do not know him, if you have never even heard his name, yet you do know him, for a part of him is in your own heart and hope. If you have ever thought seriously about yourself, if you have even tried to think seriously about yourself, you have taken up into yourself a part of Nietzsche as you have so thought. Even without your knowledge or intention, you have passed into the world of thought for which the name of Nietzsche stands. It has been only now and then, in quite significant turning points in human history, and only in the case of the rarest of men, that such an influence has gone forth as from this man. Once in the horizon of his power, and you are held there as by magic. And yet not in centuries has a name been so reviled and blasphemed as his. Anathematized from the pulpit, ridiculed from the stage, demolished by any champion of blatant and blind bourgeoisie, refuted regularly by pedants, he is still Friedrich Nietzsche, and, unlike most preachers, his congregation grows from year to year. Newspapers, always sensitive to the pulse-beat of mediocrity, tell us that “the man is dead”; that he belongs to the past; that he is already forgotten. But he is more alive, now that he is dead, than he was when he was living. Dead in the flesh, he is alive in the spirit, as is so often the case. Superficial misunderstandings, transient externals, regrettable excrescences—these were interred with his bones. The real and true Nietzsche lives, and has the keys of death and of hell. Who has the youth has the future—and this is why the future belongs to Nietzsche; for no contemporary so gathers the youth under his shining banner. And it is because the moral seething of our time, our struggle with questions of the moral life, are recapitulated and epitomized in Nietzsche, that he stands out, like an Alpine apocalypse, as the new prophet of our new day. The mysterious need of a man to find himself in another, another in himself, as deep calls unto deep or star shines unto star, is met in the resources of the great personality of Nietzsche.

The new day whose billows bear us afar began with doubt. First, a doubt of the Church and its divine authority. A violent, devastating storm swept over popular life. The storm was speedily exorcised. Again—

“The sea of faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.”

A new faith emerged from the old doubt, like sweet waters in a bitter sea, and kept man a living soul.

“The sea is calm tonight;

The tide is full.”

But the calm proves to be treacherous. The tide of the new faith now in the bible, and in the doctrine derived from the bible, went back to sea, and now I only hear

“Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating to the breath

Of the night-wind down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.”

The human spirit urged a new, mightier protest against the “It is written,” which was said to put an end to all doubt. The new doubt, as free inquiry, as protestant science, flung down the gauntlet to the bible faith. No page of the sacred book remained untouched. Only one certainty sprang from this new doubt—the certainty that the sacred book was a human book. Therefore it had no right to rule over man. Man was its judge; it was not man’s judge. It must be measured by man’s truth, man’s conscience.

How, now, should the timorous heart of man be quieted in the presence of this new doubt? At once new props were offered him—truth and the state. What science recognized as “true,” what morals and bourgeoise customs and civil law sanctioned as “good”—these were now proffered man, that he might brace up his tottering life thereby. “Trust the light of science, and you shall indeed have the light of life; do what is ‘good,’ and you shall be crowned with the crown of life.” This was the watchword. Then there stirred in the womb of present-day humanity the last, ultimate, uncanniest doubt. If we doubt the Church, why not doubt the state, too? If we doubt faith, why not doubt science, too? If we doubt the bible, why not doubt reason, doubt knowledge, doubt morality? Even if what we call “true” be really true, can it make us happy? Can the men who have all the knowledge of our time at their disposal, can the scholars, can the cultivated, really become fit leaders of humanity through life’s little day? Is not that which is called “good” grievous impediment in our pilgrimage? Law, morals—are not these perhaps a blunder of history, an old hereditary woe with which humanity is weighted down?

This doubt—long and ominously maturing throughout the spiritual evolution of our new time—finds its most radical, most conscious, and most eloquent expression in Friedrich Nietzsche. He launches this doubt not only against all that has been believed and thought and done, but against all that men believe and think and do today. He shakes every position which men have held to be unshakable. An irresistible, diabolical curiosity impels him to transvalue all values with which men have reckoned, and to inquire whether they are values at all; whether “good” must not be called evil, “truth” error. As Nietzsche ventures upon this experiment of his curiosity, as he advances farther and farther with it, suddenly he laughs with an ironic, uproarious laughter. The experiment is a success! In the new illumination all the colors of life change. Light is dark, dark is light. What men had appraised as food, as medicine, evinced itself to be dangerous poison, miserably encompassing their doom. And since men believed that all the forces present, dying, poisoned culture, were resident in their “morals” and their “Christianity,” it was necessary to smash the tables of these old values. In full consciousness of his calling as destroyer of these old tables, Nietzsche called himself the immoralist, the anti-Christ. Morals and Christianity signified to him the most dangerous maladies with which men were suffering. He considered it to be his high calling as savior to heal men of these maladies. He sprang into the breach as anti-Christ. Like Voltaire, he was the apostle and genius of disrespect—respectability was the only disgrace, popularity the only perdition.

Nietzsche the Immoralist, Nietzsche the Antichrist! Dare we write his name and name his writings without calling down upon our much-pelted heads the wrath of the gods? Does he not blaspheme what is sacred, and must we not, then, give him a wide berth? There are the familiar words concerning false prophets in sheep’s clothing, but ravening wolves within. Such wolves there are—smooth, sleek men, paragons of “virtue,” and “morals,” and “faith,” but revolting enough in their inner rawness as soon as you get a glimpse of their true disposition. Conversely, might there not be men who come to us in wolves’ clothing, but whose hearts are tender and rich and intimate with a pure and noble humanity? We know such men. Friedrich Nietzsche was one of them. He was a true prophet. All his transvaluations dealt deadly blows at the old, false, man-poisoning prophetism. What if more morals matured in this immoralist, more Christianity in this anti-Christ, more divinity in this atheist, than in all the pronouncements of all those who today still are so swift to despise and damn what they do not understand?

Even Christianity, at its origin, in its young and heroic militancy, was not so amiable and harmless as we are wont to think. It, too, was born of the doubt of that whole old culture; of the most radical protest again status quo. It, too, leagued with all the revolutionary spirits of humanity. And it, too, revalued all the values of “faith” and “morals.” What if this new Nietzschean spirit of life’s universal reform, this creative, forward-striving genius of humanity, be once yet again embodiment and representative of life’s essential element of rejuvenescence and growth? What if true prophets are always men of Sturm und Drang, men of divine discontent, fellow-conspirators with the Future? Anti-Christs? These are they who blaspheme the holy spirit of humanity. Immoralists? These are they who say that life is good as it is, and therefore should stay as it “is” forever. Faith? This is directed, not to the past, but to the future; not to the certain, but to the uncertain. Faith is the venturesomeness of moral knighthood. Nietzsche was a Knight of the Future.

Why, then, should not a magazine of the Future interpret Nietzsche the prophet of a new culture? Man as the goal, beauty as the form, life as the law, eternity as the content of our new day—this is Nietzsche’s message to the modern man. In such an interpretation, Man and Superman should be the subject of the next article.

How a Little Girl Danced

Nicholas Vachel Lindsay

Being a Reminiscence of Certain Private Theatricals

(Dedicated to Lucy Bates)

Oh, cabaret dancer,

I know a dancer

Whose eyes have not looked

On the feasts that are vain.

I know a dancer,

I know a dancer,

Whose soul has no bond

With the beasts of the plain:

Judith the dancer,

Judith the dancer,

With foot like the snow

And with step like the rain.

Oh, thrice-painted dancer,

Vaudeville dancer,

Sad in your spangles,

With soul all astrain:

I know a dancer,

I know a dancer,

Whose laughter and weeping

Are spiritual gain;

A pure-hearted, high-hearted

Maiden evangel

With strength the dark cynical

Earth to disdain.

Flowers of bright Broadway!

You of the chorus

Who sing in the hope

Of forgetting your pain:

I turn to a sister

Of sainted Cecelia,

A white bird escaping

The earth’s tangled skein!—

The music of God

In her innermost brooding!

The whispering angels

Her footsteps sustain!

Oh, proud Russian dancer:

Praise for your dancing!

No clean human passion

My rhyme would arraign.

You dance for Apollo

With noble devotion:

A high-cleansing revel

To make the heart sane.

But Judith the dancer

Prays to a spirit

More white than Apollo

And all of his train.

I know a dancer

Who finds the true God-head;

Who bends o’er a brazier

In Heaven’s clear plain.

I know a dancer,

I know a dancer,

Who lifts us toward peace

From this Earth that is vain:—

Judith the dancer,

Judith the dancer,

With foot like the snow,

And with step like the rain.

The Dream of the Children

The children awoke in their dreaming

While earth lay dewy and still:

They followed the rill in its gleaming

To the heart-light of the hill.

From their feet as they strayed in the meadow

It led through caverned aisles,

Filled with purple and green light and shadow

For mystic miles on miles.

—From A. E.’s Collected Poems.

The Critics’ Critic

Galsworthy as a Greek

Do you read Arthur Guiterman’s rhymed reviews? They are not to be taken too seriously, of course, though they are generally sane; but in the one on The Dark Flower he asks if such things don’t tend to weaken our moral fiber! Wow! Probably Homer might be said to do the same thing; we’d better take it out of the schools, hadn’t we? There’s an episode I recall about a female person named Helen, who was torn from her adoring husband, etc., etc. You know I don’t believe in weakening moral fiber, but beauty is beauty. All I could think of, in reading The Dark Flower, was Greek classics. Do you remember that exquisite thing (is it Euripides?)—

“This Cyprian

She is a million, million changing things;

She brings more joy than any god,

She brings

More pain. I cannot judge her; may it be

An hour of mercy when she looks on me.”

Galsworthy’s hero was just a Greek, swayed by Aphrodite. There’s no question of morals. And besides, he behaved pretty well—for a man!

The Case of Rupert Brooke

I can’t share The Little Review’s estimate of Rupert Brooke. I’m reminded immediately of something I found not long ago by Herbert Trench:

“Come, let us make love deathless, thou and I,

Seeing that our footing on the earth is brief,

Seeing that her multitudes sweep out to die

Mocking at all that passes their belief.

For standard of our love not theirs we take

If we go hence today