The Little Review

Literature Drama Music Art

MARGARET C. ANDERSON
EDITOR

MARCH 1916

Published Monthly

15 cents a copy

MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Publisher
Fine Arts Building
CHICAGO

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Entered as second-class matter at Postoffice, Chicago

The Little Review

VOL. III

MARCH, 1916

NO. 1

Copyright, 1916, by Margaret C. Anderson

Cheap

HELEN HOYT

After all, what does a man amount to?

It only takes some twenty—thirty—years or so

To make a man, with everything complete.

Longer, it is true, than growing cabbages

Or currant bushes, or a cow,—

Or a fair-sized hog;

But not so very long, and there’s always time.

When breeding’s good we get them fast enough....

Merely a matter of waiting till they grow....

Some food and clothes must be supplied—

And shelter—and all that—

But it’s surprising (in fact, without statistics,

A person would scarcely believe it possible)

How very little a man can live upon

From birth until he reaches the enlisting age.

For first he has to be born, of course,

And that takes time,—makes us some trouble too—

But it’s a simple matter on the whole,

And not expensive: not at all expensive:

You see, the women are the ones that attend to this

And they work cheap.

They pour men from their bodies.

Always pleased to undertake affairs of this sort,

Women are,—O, most delighted. It’s their way.

Willing and lavish: it doesn’t cost them much.

They only have to give some flesh and bone

And blood; and perhaps, one might say,

A scrap of soul, to make the creature go;

But these things nature furnishes;

They’re free and plenty:

And after a man’s once started, he’s not long growing;

There’s always a generation on the way:

More than we want, sometimes, or there is room for.

Lord, how they swarm! In the cities like flies.

If only horses were so plentiful!

If only horses could be foddered so lightly

And bedded so many to a stall as men!

Certainly, men are less of a bother

And also, think what men do for you that a horse can’t.

You cannot teach a horse to hold a gun.

A horse can’t shoot or burn or pillage or murder well in the least.

And too, a man has this convenient feature,

That you can make him go without whip or lash.

You only have to charm him the right way.

Other animals you charm by dazzling radiance:

With men it’s always colors and bright sounds

(Slogans and bands and banners are the best).

Why, you can play upon them with the beat of drums

Till they are got to an energy and fury fine as a bull’s

How they will fight for you then!

Tigers and wolves and wild-cats

(Considering differences in weight and bulks of meat)

Wouldn’t fight fiercer or longer or more willingly.

You never could train a horse to be so clever.

And therefore it’s curious, when you think of it,

That horses should come so much more dear than men.

To be sure, there isn’t the cheap source of supply

Or the same over-stock as in the case of men:

A horse is harder to raise and more expense—

More trouble; more of a responsibility:

But nevertheless, allowing for all this,

It still is curious, that difference in value....

Now isn’t it?

Rather?

Art and Anarchism

MARGARET C. ANDERSON

When “they” ask you what anarchism is, and you scuffle around for the most convincing definition, why don’t you merely ask instead: “What is art?” Because anarchism and art are in the world for exactly the same kind of reason.

An anarchist is a person who realizes the gulf that lies between government and life; an artist is a person who realizes the gulf that lies between life and love. The former knows that he can never get from the government what he really needs for life; the latter knows that he can never get from life the love he really dreams of.

Now there is only one class of people—among the very rich or the very poor or the very middling—that doesn’t know about these things. It is the uneducated class. It is composed of housewives, business men, church-goers, family egoists, club women, politicians, detectives, debutantes, drummers, Christian Scientists, policemen, demagogues, social climbers, ministers who recommend plays like Experience, etc., etc. It even includes some who may be educated—journalists, professors, philanthropists, patriots, “artistic” people, sentimentalists, cowards, and the insane. It is the great middle-class mind of America. It is the kind of mind that either doesn’t think at all or that thinks like this: “Without the violence and the plotting there would be nothing left of anarchism but a dead theory. Without the romance of it anarchism would be nothing but a theory which will not work and never can until nature has evolved something very different out of man. It is cops and robbers, hare and hounds, Ivanhoe and E. Phillips Oppenheim all acted out in life. It is not really dangerous to society, but only to some members of it, because unless every one is against it there is no fun in it.”

There is no fun talking about anarchism to people who understand it. But it would be great fun to make the middle-class mind understand it. This is the way I should go about it:

What things do you need in order to live? Food, clothing, shelter. What things must you have to get life out of the process of living? Love, work, recreation. All right.

Does the government give you the first three things? Not at all. It isn’t the government or law or anything of that sort that gives you food or clothes. It’s the efficient organization between those who produce these things and those who sell them to you. And it isn’t government that keeps that organization efficient. It’s the brains of those who work in it. You will say that government exists to prevent that organization from charging you too much for food and clothes. Then why doesn’t government do it? Heaven knows you’ve got all the government you can very well use and you pay too much for everything.

Does the government give you a house? If you happen to be an ambassador or something like that. Not if you happen to be a mail man. Maybe some one leaves you a house—which means that he once bought it or stole it or had it left to him. You can do any of these three things yourself. Or you can go without, as nearly every one else does. Sometimes the government helps you to steal one—but not you of the middle-class. What I want to know is why you are so crazy about the government?

Now, about work. What do you call work?—spending eight hours a day in an office to help make somebody’s business a success, and incidentally to earn the money for your bread and butter? But that’s a third of the time you’re given on earth. Another third has to be spent in sleep, and the last third in eating your dinner, “spending the evening,” getting undressed, getting dressed, eating your breakfast, and catching your train. I call that slavery. Work is something over which you can toil twenty-four hours a day if you feel like it, because if you don’t your life will have no meaning. It’s like art. What has the government to do with your work? About as much as it had to do with Marconi’s brain when he was conceiving his wireless.

What do you call recreation?—lounging in hotel lobbies, gossiping over tea tables, going to the movies? All right. But what has the government got to do with it? Or do you call it walking, riding, reading, lying in the sun? The government doesn’t give you good legs or a motor car or books or a stretch of beach to lie on. But it can keep some of the best books away from you and close up the bathing beaches on the hottest October day. Maybe you call recreation what it really means: re-creation. That means the time and the leisure to invite your soul. You’ve got government: have you got either time or leisure?

And as for love.... You love some one who loves you, and the world is good. Or you love some one who doesn’t love you and the world is hell. Or you love and love and can find no one to love. Or you love and cannot give, or love and cannot take, or maybe you cannot love at all. And where is the government all this time?

The government can bring you a letter from some one you love. But why must even that be done with graft?

Some one assaults a woman in a dark alley, you say, and where would we be without the government? What has that to do with love, first? Now clear up your minds: have you ever imagined why these things happen? Because some people are vicious, you say. But every one is vicious—every one who has life in him. You are: only you can take it out on your wife or on whatever prostitutes you can afford, or in eating large dinners, or in joy rides, in vulgar parties, in the movies, in luxury, in fads, in art, even in religion. It just depends upon your type. The point is that you have your outlets and the other wretch hasn’t. And second, since these things are always happening and you have plenty of chances to see how the government deals with them, the only sensible question left for you to ask is: Why aren’t they dealt with? You’ve got government and you’ve got crime on the increase. May it be that you will ever see this: that the thing needs treat-ment, not govern-ment?

But if you’re talking about love.... In love you will act just like a cave man or an Athenian or an early Christian or an Elizabethan or a modern, like a satyr or a traveling salesman or an artist—it depends upon your type. Governments may come and go, may change or cease to be, and nothing remains forever except “your type.”

But it’s just here that your government has its functions. It can do various things. And since the value of your life depends upon the intensity with which you love something or somebody, you might as well recognize what your government can do for you in this regard:

If you think that love and freedom ought to go together the government can put you in prison.

If you marry out of respect for the government, and grow to hate each other, the government won’t give you a divorce out of respect for you.

If you marry as a concession to the government, because you don’t want to ruin your business or have your wife insulted, the government will divorce you—and on the concession basis: but you pay for both the concessions.

If you believe that love is love, whether it brings you children or not, you may be happy and prosperous, but you will not be safe. The government can put your physician in prison.

If you’re very poor or very ill, and ought not have children, the government can keep information for prevention away from you; and it can put any one who tries to give you that information in prison.

If you should die from an abortion—and you surely will die if you contract blood-poisoning; and you surely will do that if you must be treated in secrecy and without skill—the government can hang your physician.

Why are you so crazy about the government?

Why do you want to govern anything or anybody?—even your own temper? Nietzsche said not to preserve yourself but to discharge yourself! Why not use your temper as well as your nice moods?

Why do you want to govern your child? To give him character? But who ever told you that life is for the making of character? Even if it were, you can’t give your child character. He can get it by going through a great deal. But if you govern him successfully he won’t go through a great deal. He will just be something that is like something else. He won’t be himself.

Why do you want to govern human nature? Because you want people to be good instead of bad? But how can you tell when they’re good and when they’re bad? Suppose you all agree that Jean Crones did a very bad thing? If you knew Jean Crones you should probably all see at once that he is a very good man—if he exists at all. Clear up your thinking!

Who ever told you that an anarchist wants to change human nature? Who ever told you that an anarchist’s ideal could never be attained until human nature had improved? Human nature will never “improve.” It doesn’t matter much whether you have a good nature or a bad one. It’s your thinking that counts. Clean out your minds!

If you believe these things—no, that is not enough: if you live them—you are an anarchist. You can be one right now. You needn’t wait for a change in human nature, for the millennium, or for the permission of your family. Just be one!

You have seen that “the blind, heavy, stupid thing we call government” can not give you a happy childhood. It cannot educate you or make you an interesting person. It cannot give you work, art, love, or life—or death if you think it is better to die.

And finally when you see that you can never get all the love you imagined from life; that you are trapped, really, and must find a way out; when you see that here where there is nothing is the way out, and that the wonder of life begins here—when you see all this you will be an artist, and your love that is “left over” will find its music or its words.

Stravinsky’s Three Pieces, “Grotesques,” for String Quartets[1]

AMY LOWELL

First Movement

Thin-voiced, nasal pipes

Drawing sound out and out

Until it is a screeching thread,

Sharp and cutting, sharp and cutting,

It hurts.

Whee-e-e!

Bump! Bump! Tong-ti-bump!

There are drums here,

Banging,

And wooden shoes beating the round, grey stones

Of the market-place.

Whee-e-e!

Sabots slapping the worn, old stones,

And a shaking and cracking of dancing bones,

Clumsy and hard they are,

And uneven,

Losing half a beat

Because the stones are slippery.

Bump-e-ty-tong! Whee-e-e! Tong!

The thin Spring leaves

Shake to the banging of shoes.

Shoes beat, slap,

Shuffle, rap,

And the nasal pipes squeal with their pig’s voices,

Little pig’s voices

Weaving among the dancers,

A fine, white thread

Linking up the dancers.

Bang! Bump! Tong!

Petticoats,

Stockings,

Sabots,

Delirium flapping its thigh-bones;

Red, blue, yellow,

Drunkenness steaming in colours;

Red, yellow, blue,

Colours and flesh weaving together,

In and out, with the dance,

Coarse stuffs and hot flesh weaving together.

Pig’s cries white and tenuous,

White and painful,

White and—

Bump!

Tong!

Second Movement

Pale violin music whiffs across the moon,

A pale smoke of violin music blows over the moon,

Cherry petals fall and flutter,

And the white Pierrot,

Wreathed in the smoke of the violins,

Splashed with cherry petals falling, falling,

Claws a grave for himself in the fresh earth

With his finger-nails.

Third Movement

An organ growls in the heavy roof-groins of a church,

It wheezes and coughs.

The nave is blue with incense,

Writhing, twisting,

Snaking over the heads of the chanting priests.

Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine;

The priests whine their bastard Latin

And the censers swing and click.

The priests walk endlessly

Round and round,

Droning their Latin

Off the key.

The organ crashes out in a flaring chord,

And the priests hitch their chant up half a tone.

Dies illa, dies irae,

Calamitatis et miseriae,

Dies magna et amara valde.

A wind rattles the leaded windows.

The little pear-shaped candle-flames leap and flutter,

Dies illa, dies irae,

The swaying smoke drifts over the altar,

Calamitatis et miseriae,

The shuffling priests sprinkle holy water,

Dies magna et amara valde.

And there is a stark stillness in the midst of them

Stretched upon a bier.

His ears are stone to the organ,

His eyes are flint to the candles,

His body is ice to the water.

Chant, priests,

Whine, shuffle, genuflect,

He will always be as rigid as he is now

Until he crumbles away in a dust heap.

Lacrymosa dies illa,

Qua resurget ex favilla

Judicandus homo reus.

Above the grey pillars, the roof is in darkness.

[1] This Quartet was played from the manuscript by the Flonzaley Quartet during their season of 1915 and 1916. The poem is based upon the programme which M. Stravinsky appended to his piece, and is an attempt to reproduce the sound and movement of the music as far as is possible in another medium.

Vibrant Life

SHERWOOD ANDERSON

He was a man of forty-five, vigorous and straight of body. About his jaws was a slight heaviness, but his eyes were quiet. In his young manhood he had been involved in a scandal that had made him a marked man in the community. He had deserted his wife and children and had run away with a serious, dark-skinned young girl, the daughter of a Methodist minister.

After a few years he had come back into the community and had opened a law office. The social ostracism set up against him and his wife had in reality turned out to their advantage. He had worked fiercely and the dark-skinned girl had worked fiercely. At forty-five he had risen to wealth and to a commanding position before the bar of his state, and his wife, now a surgeon, had a fast-growing reputation for ability.

It was night and he sat in a room with the dead body of his younger brother, who had gone the road he had traveled in his twenties. The brother, a huge good-natured fellow, had been caught and shot in the home of a married woman.

In the room with the lawyer sat a woman. She was a nurse, in charge of the children of his second wife, a magnificent blonde creature with white teeth. They sat beside a table, spread with books and magazines.

The woman who sat with the lawyer in the room with the dead man, was, like himself, flush with life. He remembered, with a start, that she had been introduced into the house by the boy who was dead. He began to couple them in his mind and talked about it.

“You were in love with him, eh?” he asked presently.

The woman said nothing. She sat under a lamp with her legs crossed. The lamplight fell upon her shapely shoulders.

The lawyer, getting out of his chair, walked up and down the room. He thought of his wife, the woman he loved, asleep upstairs, and of the price they had paid for their devotion to each other.

“It is barbarous, this old custom of sitting up with the dead,” he said, and, going to another part of the house, returned with a bottle of wine and two glasses.

With the wine before them the lawyer and the woman sat looking at each other. They stared boldly into each other’s eyes, each concerned with his own thoughts. A clock ticked loudly and the woman moved uneasily. By an open window the wind stirred a white curtain and tossed it back and forth above the coffin, black and ominous. He began thinking of the years of hard, unremittent labor and of the pleasures he had missed. Before his eyes danced visions of white-clad dinner tables, with men and bare-shouldered women sitting about. Again he walked up and down the room.

Upon the table lay a magazine, devoted to farm life, and upon the cover was a scene in a barn yard. A groom was leading a magnificent stallion out at the door of a red barn.

Pointing his finger at the picture, the lawyer began to talk. A new quality came into his voice. His hand played nervously up and down the table. There was a gentle swishing sound of the blown curtain across the top of the coffin.

“I saw one once when I was a boy,” he said, pointing with his finger at the stallion.

He approached and stood over her.

“It was a wonderful sight,” he said, looking down at her. “I have never forgotten it. The great animal was all life, vibrant, magnificent life. Its feet scarcely touched the ground.”

“We are like that,” he added, leaning over her. “The men of our family have that vibrant, conquering life in us.”

The woman arose from the chair and moved toward the darkened corner where the coffin stood. He followed slowly. When they had gone thus across the room she put up her hand and plead with him.

“No, no!—Think! Remember!” she whispered.

With a low laugh he sprang at her. She dodged quickly. Both of them had become silent. Among the chairs and tables they went, swiftly, silently, the pursuer and the pursued.

Into a corner of the room she got, where she could no longer elude him. Near her sat the long coffin, its ends resting on black stands made for the purpose. They struggled, and then as they stood breathless with hot startled faces, there was a crash, the sound of broken glass and the dead body of his brother with its staring eyes rolled, from the fallen coffin, out upon the floor.

Don’ts for Critics[2]

(Apropos of recent criticisms of Imagism, vers libre, and modern poetry generally.)

ALICE CORBIN HENDERSON

Don’t confuse vers libre and Imagism. The two are not identical. One pertains to verse, the other to vision.

Don’t attempt to “place” Imagism until you know what it is.

Don’t substitute irritability for judgement.

Don’t attempt to establish absolutes—positive or negative—by precedents of a half or a quarter of a century, or a mere decade ago.

Don’t be a demagogue.

Don’t try to speak the last word—you can’t.

Don’t be dishonest with yourself. Analyze your own inhibitions.

Don’t believe that beauty is conventionality, or that the classic poets chose only “nice” subjects.

Don’t forget that the age that produced the cathedrals produced also the grotesques.

Don’t be afraid to expand.

Don’t deny the poet his folly, or expect him to appear always pompously on stilts. Think of the poets who have fun in their make-up, and you think of some of the greatest—Shakespeare, Chaucer, Villon,—(by no means excepting Lewis Carroll, whose Jabberwock is almost “pure” poetry and the poetic prototype of much excellent modern painting.) Don’t relax your own appreciation of humor to the soft, easy level of the newspapers.

Don’t squirm when a poet is a satirist. We need the keen vision. Not all pessimism is unhealthy, and not all optimism healthy.

Don’t think that Spoon River is more sordid than Athens, Greece, or Athens, Georgia, than Sparta or Troy, or—the Lake Shore Drive.

Don’t think that the poet must always copy something or somebody, and that something usually of a recent date. Correspondences, to be valuable, must be genuine and of the spirit, rather than of the letter.—When Mr. Powys brackets the names of Chaucer and Edgar Lee Masters, he is illuminating. When Mr. Hervey or Mr. Willard-Huntington-Wright discover each a different one of Mr. Masters’ copybooks, and publish their discoveries, the absurdity is manifest. Picture Mr. Masters sitting with Robinson’s book in one hand, and somebody’s Small Town in the other, inditing Spoon River with his teeth!

Don’t expect a poet to repeat himself indefinitely, however much you may admire his earlier work. You may appreciate his later work in time.

Don’t condemn the work of a man whose books you have not read. Unfortunately there are no civil service examinations for critics.

Don’t think that competition is unhealthy for the poet, or that his poetry suffers thereby.

Don’t be confident, as Mr. Arthur J. Eddy said at the “Poetry” dinner, that no good thing is ever lost. Ask Mr. Eddy, who is a lawyer, to prove that no good thing is ever lost.

Don’t expect poets to refrain from writing about one another—even in praise. If you don’t enjoy the feast, don’t eat it. When the poets tear one another to pieces, don’t you enjoy it? But if, like most critics of poetry, you are a poet also, take warning. Be prepared!

Don’t wait until a poet is dead before you discover him.

Don’t gnash your teeth and expect the public to take it as a sign of force and insight.

Don’t forget that prosody is derived from poetry, not poetry from prosody.

Don’t waste your time trying to squeeze exceptions into the rule. Remember that exceptions in poetry, as in music, are the variations that give life.

Don’t measure English poetry by English poetic standards alone. Consider the sources of English poetry, and don’t begin with Chaucer, or stop with Tennyson.

Don’t think that English or American poetry may not assimilate as much new beauty and richness from foreign sources in the future as it has in the past.

Don’t consider rhyme as the be-all and end-all of poetry. Rhyme is sometimes as beautiful as the reflection of trees in water; it is sometimes as monotonous as a stitch in time.

Don’t substitute vituperation for the “critique raisonné”—almost an unknown quantity in this country.

Don’t look first at the publisher’s imprint.

Don’t cling to convictions that you fear to have upset.

Don’t, because you fail to share the convictions of a fellow critic, think that he is a bigger fool than you are—unless you can prove it.

Don’t imagine that printing a poem as prose makes it prose. A musical masterpiece may be distorted by unrhythmic playing, yet the composer’s rhythm remains intact in the score.

Don’t object to conceptions in poetry that you might find striking and powerful in bronze or plaster. “The Hog Butcher of the World” is one picturesque attitude of Chicago.... Is the truth unbearable? One may still love Chicago in spite of its dirty face.

Don’t try to establish even a distant kinship between poetry and ethics. The relation is illicit.

Don’t tell the poet what he must, or must not, write about—he doesn’t hear you.

Don’t be tedious.

Don’t take ten times as much space as the poet to prove that he is a bad poet. Your sin against the public is more grievous, and your art less, than his.

Don’t make up your review from the publisher’s advance notice. The poet might like to know what you think about his work—not what he told the publisher to tell you.

Don’t expect a poet to punch a time-clock, or record only the emotions of his fellow townspeople.

Don’t limit a poet to primary emotions, or find decadence in a refinement that may exceed your own.

Don’t fancy that brutality is strength, or delicacy weakness.

Don’t fancy that the poem that gives up its meaning quickest gives most, or lives longest.

Don’t make the mistake of believing that vers libre is easier to write than rhymed metrical verse—or the reverse.

Don’t think because you say a thing, it is so. Your venture is as uncertain as the poet’s. Authority, unless bestowed by the Mayor, is the gift of time; and then not unassailable.

Don’t reverence only dead poets or be certain that the dead poets would think just as you do about contemporary poets.

Don’t discard the past for the future, or the future for the past. We learn about the earth from the telescope, and about the stars from the microscope.

DON’T be as negative as this list, or sit on the fence. It is better to be on the wrong side than to straddle.

[2] See [page 23].

Poems[3]

JEANNE D’ORGE

The Cup

My body is no more clay

But rapture—touched and golden:

The Cup—the Cup

From which my lover drinks

And drinking makes immortal.

The Stranger

(Eleven years)

Oh you spoil everything!

I am glad you are only my teacher—