The Little Review, May 1916 (Vol. 3, No. 3)
Date: 2025-03-25T00:00:00+00:00
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Title: The Little Review, May 1916 (Vol. 3, No. 3)

Author: Various

Editor: Margaret C. Anderson

Release date: March 25, 2025 [eBook #75706]

Language: English

Original publication: Chicago, New York: Apparently none other than the Editor (see above), 1922

Credits: Jens Sadowski and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net. This book was produced from images made available by the Modernist Journal Project, Brown and Tulsa Universities.

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LITTLE REVIEW, MAY 1916 (VOL. 3, NO. 3) ***

The Little Review

Literature Drama Music Art

MARGARET C. ANDERSON
EDITOR

MAY, 1916

Three Flesh-tints: | Ben Hecht
The Incense Burner
The Goldfish in a Bowl
A Nude
“The Compleat Amateur” | Harold Bauer
Three Japanese Paintings: | Arthur Davison Ficke
Dream of a Chinese Landscape
Dream of a Chinese Rock Promontory
The Golden Symphony
The Struggle | Sherwood Anderson
A Mischievous Rhapsody of the First Recurrence |
Poems: | Daphne Carr
Welt Schmertz
Prisoners
Leo Ornstein | Margaret C. Anderson
Nocturne (from Paul Verlaine) | Clara Shanafelt
White Mists | M. C. A.
Letters from Prison | Emma Goldman
Off the Turnpike | Amy Lowell
Potatoes in a Cellar | R. G.
New York Letter | Allan Ross Macdougall
Amber Monochrome | Mark Turbyfill
Three Imagist Poets | John Gould Fletcher
Rossica | Alexander S. Kaun
The Independent Exhibition | Lupo de Braila
The Reader Critic |

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. III

MAY, 1916

NO. 3

Copyright, 1916, by Margaret C. Anderson

Three Flesh-tints

BEN HECHT

The Incense Burner

A bending flower rises from its mouth

And sways like the vein of a zephyr.

Threads of moonlight float entangled over it,

Delicate as the breath of a dying woman.

Souls come whispering from its ancient lips,

Laden with thin secrets,

And torn by the long nails of idiot Gods....

Pale dancers arise, whirling listlessly,

Expiring in a writhing languor.

Heavy-lidded eyes crawl out and open vacantly and close....

Dried whisps of water break into blue wings.

A sleeping woman’s arm reaches up and curves into a sigh

And scratches at the air with opalescent claws.

Dead pearls drift in a dead circle—till, quivering,

A slow finger rises, balancing a grey moon on its tip.

And then a severed face squeezes out and lolls to and fro,

Its washed purple lips leering with a grotesque sin.

The Goldfish in a Bowl

A tiny shimmering courtesan

Dressed in red spangles,

Weaves a monotonous thread of painted rubies

Through the stagnant curtains of her room.

Stifling under faint rags,

A dumb enchanted nightingale

Tosses in droll anguish,

Dreaming of the sapphire roses and the crystal fringe and the topaz silks

That were her lovers.

A Nude

The rich brocade of night,

Sewn with the red dust of roses

And the topaz breath of the sleeping sun

Hangs from the cool ivoried silk of her shoulders.

The winged beacons of her breasts

Gleam with golden moonlight.

And her eyes are like purple bosomed birds

That circle and beat against the azure gloom.

Her nakedness is an opal mirror,

Quivering with splintered images.

Her nakedness is a white kiss.

Burning on the shadowed lips of the night.

Her nakedness is the flowing of ghostly water

Under fierce moons—

The poplar silver of the wind that dances in the gardens at night.

Her nakedness is the golden fabric woven out of bloody grapes

And the dead mists of incense.

“The Compleat Amateur”

or
How Not to be An Artist

HAROLD BAUER

(No, I cannot write you an article. And I add to this the expression of my fervent hope that no Amateurs are going to be allowed to scribble for The Little Review. Speaking as a subscriber, I haven’t the least desire to read any of H. Bauer’s clumsy attempts to express himself in a medium that is foreign to him. Let him stick to his business.... You must write the article you have in mind yourself. From the depths of your artistic intuitions draw forth the material and give away the secrets—which are no secrets. Moreover, don’t confine yourself to music, much less to piano playing; take in the whole field of art and call it “The Compleat Amateur, or, How Not To Be an Artist.” I suggest the following headings.—Extract from a letter of the Author.)

I. “Le Style fait l’homme”

If you want to become an author, give up your life to the study of calligraphy, if a painter, devote yourself to the manufacture of paints and brushes, if a composer, commit to memory the number of notes in every standard classical work, and if a singer or instrumentalist, spend your whole energy in the establishing of a “sound technical foundation.” Emotional expression can then, if desired, be subsequently smeared like treacle on bread over all these different stylistic bases, this operation requiring neither skill nor expression.

II. “Means to an End”

The amateur must learn that technique represents an obstacle to be overcome and a set of tools to be acquired. It has nothing to do with expression. Only an imaginative artist like Maeterlinck would suggest that the road along which the student travels towards his destination is in reality a link, a connection joining one with the other—an umbilical cord partaking of the nature and attributes of both traveler and goal. To a perfectly rational person the road is merely a distance to be covered, a separation.

III. Personality, or, as some authorities have it: Individuality

This is the greatest asset of the Amateur. An artist is like everybody in the world. The book we read, the picture we see or the music we hear which renders tangible our own dimly-felt thoughts and emotional stirrings shows that we are in reality one with the artist and with the universe of which these expressions are but reflections of unseen and unheard forces. An artist combines the power and responsibilities of the aristocrat with the feelings of an anarchist, he is the guardian of privilege and the destroyer of authority, the leveler of barriers and the creator of the superman, the leader and the servant of humanity and ... the Arch Enemy of the Amateur! The artist is like all humanity, but the Amateur is not like the Artist. The Amateur must hang on for dear life to his precious soul and resist to the last gasp the incursions of any outside force in which he can trace the semblance of his own nature, for if anything gets in something may get out and he won’t be able to sort himself out afterwards. Hence the Amateur must be an Individualist; otherwise he is doomed to extinction. The Amateur’s business is to interpret the universe in terms eternally incomprehensible to anyone but himself, and to compromise with the necessity for intercourse with his fellow-creatures by the adoption of an artificial language which can convey thoughts and feelings of a superficial character, but nothing more.

The tale that points a moral, the picture that suggests a tale, and the music that evokes a picture; these are the vehicles for “personality” and your fine amateur must cultivate the pride that the realization of an exclusive understanding of these things gives. If Hamlet had been an amateur instead of being an artist he would never have suggested that a cloud was like a camel, a weasel, or a whale; he would have pointed out its resemblance to a mathematical calculation or a treatise on political economy, and Polonius would have been far more impressed—for this would have shown Great Individuality.

IV. The Mission of Amateurism

A true Amateur must learn the value of success, the immense importance of achievement, the inward meaning of gratified self-conceit. Praise from small minds represents the highest possible attainment of accomplished Amateurism. The object of Amateurishness is, like the puzzle pictures in the daily papers, to present a pretty little problem with a perfectly simple and obvious solution, thus giving effortless pleasure and satisfaction to all concerned.

The opportunities afforded by collective Amateurism for the repression of Art are invaluable and as the study of the subject is within the reach of all, including those who are congenitally afflicted with artistic talent, it devolves upon everyone who holds the opinion that this is the best of all possible worlds, to make it his life’s occupation and aim to be a “compleat amateur”.

Three Japanese Paintings

ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE

I.
Dream of a Chinese Landscape
(A Screen by Soga Shubun)

Mists are rolling

Over the grey mountains,

Over the quiet waters

And marshy shores—

Rolling up into valleys

Where pagodas rise,—

Rolling over slopes

Along whose crests

Monasteries dream.

Wild geese soar

Above the marshes

In downward flight—

In flight from unknown shore

To unknown shore.

Over all

Mists are swaying.

The shadowy bridge

And wandering roadway,

The dark gnarled tree by the road

And the pale tree afar,

Are touched with doubtful mists

Or emergent from lifting mists,—

Trembling in mist; born of mist; shadows....

O mountains, shores, and streams!

Beautiful transient illusion!

Mortal world, dream world,

Vanishing into mist, into mist only!

II.
Dream of a Chinese Rock Promontory
(A Screen by Sesshu)

Across quiet waters, far off,

Faint, misty mountains unfold in limitless ranges,

Guarding some dream-world,—

Some dim and tranquil world of golden pagodas,

Lawns and pools, terraces and deep groves,

Vermilion palaces, and peacock-haunted gardens.

But that is afar;

And the quiet waters lie between.

Here at our feet

Rises out of the quiet water

Stormily, ridge by ridge,

Buttress by buttress,

Cliff beyond cliff beyond cliff,

The jagged headland.

Here,

Gigantic, primeval,

Juts the grey promontory.

It is bleaker than death, though temples deck it;

Starker than ice, though pines bestrew it;

Inhuman, though the village at its base

Humanly nestles.

With writhing turrets,

With dizzy gulfs,

With winding abysses

And cloven brinks,

The rock rises

In ripples, in waves, in spires—

It rises fiercely, with an appalling passion,—

An apparition of dark monstrous life,—

And foaming up at last to its highest crest

Stands frozen

To freeze the blood of generations.

III.
The Golden Symphony
(A Screen by Sotatsu)

Golden clouds, and a golden bridge

Lifting in a great arc, swinging in a high arc,

Under clouds of gold, over clouds of gold,—

From the long slow curve of a golden shore

Across wide spaces of dark river!...

And behold! a drifting miracle—

Behold the long steady advancing prow

Of a golden boat, heavier than the sun,

Quiet upon the dark river; bearing two lovers

In robes of state, intricate, luminous,

Upon this dim river—where the great arc

Of the bridge from clouds into clouds

Swings, from golden shore to golden shore,

From the gold earth to the gold heaven.

The Struggle

SHERWOOD ANDERSON

The story came to me from a woman, met on a train. The car was crowded, and I took the seat beside her. There was a man in the offing, who belonged with her,—a slender, girlish figure of a man, in a heavy brown canvas coat such as teamsters wear in the winter. He moved up and down in the aisle of the car, wanting my place by the woman’s side, but I did not know that at the time.

The woman had a heavy face and a thick nose. Something had happened to her. She had been struck a blow or had a fall. Nature could never have made a nose so broad and thick and ugly. She talked to me in very good English. I suspect now that she was temporarily weary of the man in the brown canvas coat, that she had travelled with him for days, perhaps weeks, and was glad of the chance to spend a few hours in the company of some one else.

Everyone knows the feeling of a crowded train in the middle of the night. We ran along through western Iowa and eastern Nebraska. It had rained for days and the fields were flooded. In the clear night the moon came out and the scene outside the car-window was strange and in an odd way very beautiful. You get the feeling: the black bare trees standing up in clusters as they do out in that country, the pools of water with the moon reflected and running quickly as it does when the train hurries along, the rattle of the car-trucks, the lights in isolated farmhouses, and occasionally the clustered lights of a town as the train rushed through it into the west.

The woman had just come out of war-ridden Poland, had got out of that stricken land with her husband by God knows what miracles of effort. She made me feel the war, that woman did, and she told me the tale that I want to tell to you.

I don’t remember the beginning of our talk, nor can I tell you of how the strangeness of my mood grew to match her mood, until the story she told became a part of the mystery of the still night outside the car-window and very pregnant with meaning to me.

There was a company of Polish refugees moving along a road in Poland in charge of a German. The German was a man of perhaps fifty, with a beard. As I got him, he was much such a man as might be professor of foreign languages in a college in our country, say at Des Moines, Iowa, or Springfield, Ohio. He would be sturdy and strong of body and given to the eating of rather rank foods, as such men are. Also he would be a fellow of books and in his thinking inclined toward the ranker philosophies. He was dragged into the war because he was a German, and had steeped his soul in the German philosophy of might. Faintly, I fancy, there was another notion in his head that kept bothering him, and so to serve his government with a whole heart he read books that would re-establish his feeling for the strong, terrible thing for which he fought. Because he was past fifty he was not on the battle-line, but was in charge of the refugees, taking them out of their destroyed village to a camp near a railroad where they could be fed.

The refugees were peasants, all except the woman in the American train with me and her mother, an old woman of sixty-five. They had been small land-owners and the others in their party were women who had worked on their estate. Then there was the one man, my companion’s lover, weak in body and with bad eyes.

Along a country road in Poland went this party in charge of the German, who tramped heavily along, urging them forward. He was brutal in his insistence, and the old woman of sixty-five, who was a kind of leader of the refugees, was almost equally brutal in her constant refusal to go forward. In the rainy night she stopped in the muddy road and her party gathered about her. Like a stubborn old horse she shook her head and muttered Polish words. “I want to be let alone, that’s what I want. All I want in the world is to be let alone,” she said, over and over; and then the German came up, and putting his hand on her back pushed her along, so that their progress through the dismal night was a constant repetition of the stopping, her muttered words, and his pushing. They hated each other with whole-hearted hatred, that old Polish woman and the German.

The party came to a clump of trees on the bank of a shallow stream. The German took hold of the old woman’s arm and dragged her through the stream while the others followed. Over and over she said the words: “I want to be let alone. All I want in the world is to be let alone.”

In the clump of trees the German started a fire. With incredible efficiency he had it blazing high in a few minutes, taking the matches and even some bits of dry wood from a little rubber-lined pouch carried in his inside coat-pocket. Then he got out tobacco, and, sitting down on the protruding root of a tree, smoked, and stared at the refugees, clustered about the old woman on the opposite side of the fire.

The German went to sleep. That was what started his trouble. He slept for an hour, and when he awoke the refugees were gone. You can imagine him jumping up and tramping heavily back through the shallow stream and along the muddy road to gather his party together again. He would be angry through and through, but he would not be alarmed. It was only a matter, he knew, of going far enough back along the road, as one goes back along a road for strayed cattle.

And then, when the German came up to the party, he and the old woman began to fight. She stopped muttering the words about being let alone and sprang at him. One of her old hands gripped his beard and the other buried itself in the thick skin of his neck.

The struggle in the road lasted a long time. The German was tired and not as strong as he looked, and there was that faint thing in him that kept him from hitting the old woman with his fist. He took hold of her thin shoulders and pushed, and she pulled. The struggle was like a man trying to lift himself by his boot-straps. The two fought and were full of the determination that will not stop fighting, but they were not very strong physically.

And so their two souls began to struggle. The woman in the train made me understand that quite clearly, although it may be difficult to get the sense of it over to you. I had the night and the mystery of the moving train to help me. It was a physical thing, the fight of the two souls in the dim light of the rainy night on that deserted muddy road. The air was full of the struggle, and the refugees gathered about and stood shivering. They shivered with cold and weariness, of course, but also with something else. In the air, everywhere about them, they could feel the vague something going on. The woman said that she would gladly have given her life to have it stopped, or to have some one strike a light, and that her man felt the same way. It was like two winds struggling, she said, like a soft yielding cloud become hard and trying vainly to push another cloud out of the sky.

Then the struggle ended and the old woman and the German fell down exhausted in the road. The refugees gathered about and waited. They thought something more was going to happen, knew in fact something more would happen. The feeling they had persisted, you see, and they huddled together and perhaps whimpered a little.

What happened is the whole point of the story. The woman in the train explained it very clearly. She said that the two souls, after struggling, went back into the two bodies, but that the soul of the old woman went into the body of the German and the soul of the German into the body of the old woman.

After that, of course, everything was quite simple. The German sat down by the road and began shaking his head and saying he wanted to be let alone, declared that all he wanted in the world was to be let alone, and the Polish woman took papers out of his pocket and began driving her companions back along the road, driving them harshly and brutally along, and when they grew weary pushing them with her hands.

There was more of the story after that. The woman’s lover, who had been a school-teacher, took the papers and got out of the country, taking his sweetheart with him. But my mind has forgotten the details. I only remember the German sitting by the road and muttering that he wanted to be let alone, and the old tired mother-in-Poland saying the harsh words and forcing her weary companions to march through the night back into their own country.

The feeble and poor in spirit must not be allowed to judge life.—Nietzsche.

A Mischievous Rhapsody of the First Recurrence

I Zarathustra, declare myself! Ye have dulled me with priests; ye have sweetened me with girls; ye have betrayed me with envious anarchists.

Lo, I am not for the preacher, I am not for the woman, I am not for the oppressed! Ye say that by me ye shall save the world; I say that I shall destroy the world!

These things do I hold sacred—my strength, my lust, my joy. These ye shall feed, and die.

Too long have I stood silent in the cackle of my followers. Poultry after my corn! I have said, “Dost thou seek to multiply thyself? Find ciphers!”

I will give you a new law:—Love your enemy, for him ye may destroy. Fear your friend, for he shall steal your raiment.

Dost thou think that my aloofness is thy aloofness? Dost thou flutter upon a ridgepole because I stand upon a mountain? Fool, thou shalt starve unless thou peck the earth.

I say unto the preacher: Stick to the Nazarene; he hath deserved his Golgotha. But who shall make my words a law for me?

I say unto the woman: My scourge is yet upon thee. Dost thou set thyself against myself? I shall ravish thee when I desire thee. Who art thou to pretend manhood? Submit or deny thy life. Serve, or go barren into the earth.

I say unto the poor and lowly: I denied you my pity; now ye think to rob me of my scorn. Paltry ones! Shall I deny myself because of you? Lo, if I delight in riches, I shall take them. My life is not your life; my children are not your children. Cry not at my oppression; ye shall not move me. And if ye mock me with my own words, they shall scorch your tongues; ye shall go to a blacker oppression, ye shall find harder masters—yourselves!

And I say unto the priest, the woman, and the lowly: Touch me not; ye are my enemies! I have declared myself, and ye have not known me. I am life, I am splendor, I am eternity. Ye deny me as ye lay your hands upon me. Remain afar off; then may I be in you. I will keep you slaves; thus only shall I live.

Also sprach Zarathustra!

Poems

DAPHNE CARR

Welt Schmertz

I have crushed so many roses

That my hands

Drip with red fragrance.

But I would crush to death against my breast

The wind

That is raging drunk with the perfume of all flowers.

I have bathed in a hundred cool springs—

Still I am burning.

I would plunge into the ocean,

Diving down and down

To find myself

Freshly fluid

As a wave.

Prisoners

A wind runs through the room,

And leaps out of the window.

The white curtain springs after

Fluttering out.

But it is fastened tight inside.

My love kisses me

And goes

Waving good-bye

And laughing.

Am I also held fast in this room?

Leo Ornstein

MARGARET C. ANDERSON

Nietzsche thought Wagner was the artist of decadence; Arthur Symons thinks he was a unique genius. Nietzsche regarded him as the great corrupter of music:—“he has made music sick”; Symons says that to find a parallel for Wagner’s achievement we must look back to the Greeks, to the age of Æschylus and Sophocles. Each one proved his point. It’s a bit confusing, and you begin to wonder what Art is.

Have you ever found a definition of aesthetic values that will hold through the whole art miracle? I never have and never expect to. Even in Pater’s The School of Giorgione you are merely told that since all art constantly aspires toward the condition of music, toward that perfect identification of matter and form, the chief function of aesthetic criticism is to estimate the degree in which all the arts approach to musical law. But musical law is constantly changing; and the criterion of the degree to which matter and form become identical will be a sort of sliding scale. And what every one wants to know is how to gauge that scale. Can you think of a single art judgment in the whole realm of aesthetics that you can use as an infallible touchstone; with which you can make a mediocre poet realize why his work is bad instead of good? You can make him realize, by the desperate wildness with which you shriek “It’s not well done”, that something is wrong; but to save your life you can’t convince him that you are talking about anything except your own instinct—as you aren’t; and of course he feels that his instinct may be just as good as yours—which of course it can’t! Suppose you choose one of the best definitions ever thought of,—Mérimée’s “all art is exaggeration à propos”; you find that you’re just as badly off as before: by what standard is the à propos measured?

It was in this frame of mind that I heard Leo Ornstein’s music. First he came one night and played for us alone, on our Mason and Hamlin, in a half light and an atmosphere of intense excitement. None of us had decided beforehand that we should want to laugh or hiss or throw things at him, as they did in London two years ago. We expected something beautiful and we got it. He played his Impressions of the Thames, which he afterward described as a river of “towers and turrets and stars, of dark rushing water, of bridges and buildings, of desolate muddy banks, and then something which you cannot bear to look at any longer.” I can’t “see” music, so I only know that it was sound which interested and pleased and shook me. Then he played his Funeral March, which had something dark and vast in it; then some Ravel, the music of which interested me more than his playing of it; and finally the Schumann Arabesque, which he did so beautifully that I thought “Here is a man who plays just as he wants to, and probably comes nearer to what Schumann would have liked than all the strict interpreters with their flawless ‘taste’ have done.” It seemed to me that Ornstein did what he did with it—stretched its slenderness to a lovelier curve—in the interest of the piano; and that is the very best thing anyone can do with written music for the piano, even if the pedagogues can’t beat time to it.

So at the end I was beginning to think: perhaps this is the man who is to bring to the piano that something it still needs.

But the next morning, at his recital, I made an interesting discovery. Ornstein has brought nothing to the piano. He has brought something to the world of music: compositions which show that the piano music is more pliable than we had thought, and interpretations which show an exaggeration à propos. To the piano, as an instrument, he has brought what all the others have brought: virtuosity—and in this case a not exceptional virtuosity. This may sound like hair splitting, but it really is not.

Ornstein has done this: he has written some very interesting music, and he plays it as most composers of talent—perhaps of genius—would play their things if they had studied the piano as thoroughly as he. What is there in this to cause hysterics? The fact that it sounds different from the music you have been hearing? But that would seem to be a reason for interest, not merely for mirth. This reaction belongs in the same plane with patriotism and duty:—you laugh at what is strange, you love what is familiar, you obey what has been tested:—the three ready-made emotions, with which you can escape most effectively from art and life. So they howled at Ornstein. Two respectable women sitting near me, who would not have dared—what do I say? who would not have been able—to laugh at a minister’s treatise on good and evil or a president’s speech on loyalty to a flag, were so convulsed over Ornstein’s Impressions of the Thames that they moved their seats to the rear of the theatre where they could not be watched,—where they could merely disturb the pianist by their audible snortings. The critics have done the same thing—laughed at Ornstein’s own music and criticised scathingly his manner of playing familiar music. Ornstein’s interest, I am sure, is chiefly in what he has to say, and second in the way he says it. He is a composer-virtuoso. I had hoped he would be a piano-lover. That is the kind of artist I am looking for with more interest than I have for anything else in this world.

As for Ornstein himself, I think he is a sincere person who means to go on doing his work. I sometimes judge the sensitiveness of a nature by the intensity of expression that moves across the cheek-bones. You might look carefully at Ornstein’s face instead of judging him by the fact that his hair falls into his eyes when he plays. Of course he has been indiscreet enough to mention that he does not like Beethoven. Why that is unforgivable I can’t imagine. A man may surely like what he pleases. The high genius of a Mozart or a Haydn is a thing he feels intensely. He admires Chopin deeply as an artist who could do one thing very well and was content to let it go at that. Grieg he thinks is not a worthy mouthpiece for all that Norway has to give a musician. He loves Debussy, but thinks that Ravel is the greater man: “Debussy stands beside a pond and tells you beautifully of all he sees there; Ravel plunges into the pond and gives you the life of it.” Stravinsky and Scriabine are the two he cares for most, as I remember. “Schönberg has worked out his theory before he has worked out his art.” Something of that sort might apply to Ornstein himself, as in the case of his Chopin Nocturne in E Flat: I disliked his “exaggeration” in it as much as anything I have ever heard on a piano.

Oh, does no one realize what the unique beauty of a piano is, and that there are secrets of sound in it which have not yet been touched upon?

Nocturne

(From the French of Paul Verlaine)

CLARA SHANAFELT

Your soul is like a lovely garden place

Where masque and bergamasque move graciously,

Playing the lute and dancing, yet of face

Half sad beneath their guise of fantasy.

The while they sing in minor key

Love conquering, life opportune,

They seem to doubt their own felicity—

Their song floats faintly upward in the moon,

In the clear moonlight, sad and fair,

That makes birds dream where dim boughs sway,

And fountains sigh their rapture on the air

From marble pools—the tall slim fountain spray.

White Mists[1]

There are grey stone rat-traps on the earth

Where human beings are put to die

By other human beings.

They die hour after hour, a million million times,

And still face death....

There is blue air between the clouds and the earth

Which they once saw;

There are gold stars,

And suns that come up red,

And trees that turn to purple in the evening—

But they cannot remember....

Now their days are bundles of soiled rags,

Their nights are stone....

I dare not think of them:

It drives me toward the whiteness of insanity.

M. C. A.

[1] In the year of our Lord 1916 Emma Goldman was sent to jail for advocating that “women need not always keep their mouths shut and their wombs open.” Some extracts from letters written during her fifteen-day sentence appear on the next page.

Letters from Prison

EMMA GOLDMAN

Queen’s County Jail,
Long Island City, New York.
April, 1916.

What am I doing? I am watching human misery. There is no misery so appalling as imprisoned misery. It is so helpless, so humiliated.

Yes, I think the prisoners do love me, at least those who have been thrown in with me. It is so easy to get their love. The least bit of kindness moves them—they are so appreciative. But what can one do for them?

Do you remember that passage from Galsworthy’s Justice in which some one says to Falder: “No one wishes you harm”? Therein lies the pathos. No one wishes these social victims harm. The Warden and Matron here are exceptionally kind. And yet the harm, the irreparable harm, is done by the very fact that human beings are locked up, robbed of their identity, their self-respect, their self-hood.

Oh, I am not sorry I was sentenced. In fact I am glad. I needed to get to these pariahs who are the butt of all the horrors. It would be well if every rebel were sent to prison for a time; it would fan his smouldering flame of hate of the things that make prisons possible. I am really glad.

... We are awakened at six and unlocked at seven in the morning. Then comes breakfast, of which I have so far eaten only oatmeal with what pretends to be milk. The coffee or tea I have not managed to get down. At seven-thirty we are taken out into the yard. I walk up and down like one possessed, to get the exercise. At eight-thirty we are back, and the women keep themselves busy scribbling; but my girls will not let me do that; I must talk to them. (The Warden, by the way, is reading my Anarchism, and the Matron my Social Significance of the Modern Drama). In fact, I seem to have more devotion here than on the outside. At eleven we have dinner, and at four in the afternoon supper—which I will describe to you when I come out. Then we are locked up until seven A. M.—fifteen hours, the hardest of all to bear. Do you remember the line in The Ballad of Reading Gaol: “Each day a year whose days grow old”? To me it is “each night a year whose nights grow long”. I have always loved the night, but jailed nights are ghastly things.

The lights are on until nine P. M., and we can read and write all day—which is a god-send. Also this prison is one of the cleanest in the country.

... What on earth have I done that people should go into such ecstasies? No one raves because you breathe; why rave if you take a determined stand when that means the very breath of life to you? Really I feel embarrassed with all the love and devotion and adulation for so little a thing, so infinitesimal compared with the truly heroic deeds of the great souls. My only consolation is that the fight is not at an end and that I may yet be called upon to do something really great. But for the present it is hardly worth the fuss.

Today is Sunday and we were taken out to the yard for a walk. It was a glorious day, marred only by the monotony of the stripes and the spiritless slouching figures. Yet the sky excluded no one; its glorious blue spread over them all, as if there were no sorrows in all the world and man was never cruel to his kind.

The days pass quickly between the study of my fellow prisoners, my letters, and other writing. The evenings are taken up with reading. But jailed nights are so oppressive. They lie like stone upon your heart. The thoughts, the sobs, the moans that emerge like pale shadows from every human soul. It is stifling. Yet people talk of hell. There is no more threatening thing in all the world than the hell of jailed nights.

Good morning. Another crazing night has gone....

Off The Turnpike

AMY LOWELL

Good ev’nin’, Mis’ Priest.

I jest stepped in to tell you Good-bye.

Yes, it’s all over,

All my things is packed

And every last one o’ them boxes

Is on Bradley’s team

Bein’ hauled over to th’ station.

No, I ain’t goin’ back agin.

I’m stoppin’ over to French’s fer to-night,

And goin’ down fust train in th’ mornin’.

Yes, it do seem kinder queer

Not to be goin’ to see Cherry’s Orchard no more,

But Land Sakes! When a change’s comin’,

Why, I allus say it can’t come too quick.

Now, that’s real kind of you,

Your doughnuts is always so tasty.

Yes, I’m goin’ to Chicago,

To my niece,

She’s married to a fine man, hardware business,

And doin’ real well, she tells me.

Lizzie’s be’n at me to go out ther fer the longest while.

She ain’t got no kith nor kin to Chicago, you know.

She’s rented me a real nice little flat,

Same house as hers,

And I’m goin’ to try that city livin’ folks say’s so pleasant.

Oh, yes, he was real generous,

Paid me a sight of money fer the Orchard,

I told him ’twouldn’t yield nothin’ but stones,

But he ain’t farmin’ it.

Lor’, no, Mis’ Priest,

He’s jest took it to set and look at the view.

Maybe he wouldn’t be so stuck on the view

Ef he’d seed it every mornin’ and night for forty year

Same’s I have.

I dessay it’s pretty enough,

But it’s so pressed into me

I c’n see’t with my eyes shet.

No. I ain’t cold, Mis’ Priest,

Don’t shet th’ door.

I’ll be all right in a minit.

But I ain’t a mite sorry to leave that view.

Well, maybe ’tis queer to feel so,

And maybe ’tisn’t.

My! But that tea’s revivin’.

Old things ain’t always pleasant things, Mis’ Priest.

No, no, I don’t cal’late on comin’ back,

That’s why I’d ruther be to Chicago,

Boston’s too near.

It ain’t cold, Mis’ Priest,

It’s jest my thoughts.

I ain’t sick, only—

Mis’ Priest, ef you’ve nothin’ ter take yer time,

And have a mind to listen,

There’s somethin’ I’d like ter speak about.

I ain’t never mentioned it,

But I’d like to tell yer ’fore I go.

Would yer mind lowerin’ them shades,

Fall twilight’s awful grey,

And that fire’s real cosy with the shades drawd.

Well, I guess folks about here think I’ve be’n dret’ful unsociable.

You needn’t say ’taint so, ’cause I know diff’rent.

And what’s more, it’s true.

Well, the reason is I’ve be’n scared o’ my life.

Scared ev’ry minit o’ th’ time, fer eight year.

Eight mortal year it is, come next June.

It was on the eighteenth of June,

Six months after I’d buried my husband

That somethin’ happened ter me.

Maybe yer’ll mind that afore that

I was a cheery body.

Hiram was too,

Allus liked to ask a neighbor in,

And ev’n when he died,

Barrin’ low sperrits, I warn’t averse to seein’ nobody.

But that eighteenth o’ June changed ev’rythin’.

I was doin’ most o’ th’ farmwork myself,

With jest a hired boy, Clarence King ’twas,

Comin’ in fer an hour or two.

Well, that eighteenth June

I was goin’ round,

Lockin’ up and seein’ to things fore I went to bed.

I was jest steppin’ out to th’ barn,

Goin’ round outside ’stead of through the shed,

’Cause there was such a sight of moonlight

Somehow or another I thought ’twould be pretty outdoors.

I got settled for pretty things that night, I guess.

I ain’t stuck on em no more.

Well, them laylock bushes side o’ th’ house

Was real lovely.

Glitt’rin’ and shakin’ in the moonlight,

And the smell o’ them rose right up

And most took my breath away.

The colour o’ the spikes was all faded out,

They never keep their colour when the moon’s on ’em,

But that smell fair ’toxicated me.

I was allus partial to a sweet scent,

And I went close up t’ th’ bushes

So’s to put my face right into a flower.

Mis’ Priest, jest’s I got breathin’ in that laylock bloom

I saw, layin’ right at my feet,

A man’s hand!

It was as white’s the side o’ th’ house,

And sparklin, like that lum’nous paint they put on gateposts.

I screamed right out,

I couldn’t help it,

And I could hear my scream

Goin’ over an’ over

In that echo behind th’ barn,

Hearin’ it agin an’ agin like that

Scared me so, I dar’sn’t scream any more.

I jest stood there,

And looked at that hand.

I thought the echo’d begin to hammer like my heart,

But it didn’t.

There wus only th’ wind,

Sighin’ through the laylock leaves,

An’ slappin’ them up agin’ the house.

Well, I guess I looked at that hand

Most ten minits,

An’ it never moved,

Jest lay there white as white.

After a while I got to thingin’, that o’ course

’Twas some drunken tramp over from Redfield.

That calmed me some,

An’ I commenced to think I’d better git him out

From under them laylocks.

I planned to drag him inter th’ barn

An’ lock him in ther’ till Clarence come in th’ mornin’.

I got so mad thinkin’ o’ that all-fired brazen tramp

Asleep in my laylocks,

I just stooped down and grabbed th’ hand and give it an awful pull.

Then I bumped right down settin’ on the ground.

Mis’ Priest, ther’ warn’t no body come with the hand.

No, it ain’t cold, it’s jest that I can’t bear thinkin’ of it

Ev’n now.

I’ll take a sip o’ tea.

Thank you, Mis’ Priest, that’s better.

I’d ruther finish now I’ve begun.

Thank you, jest the same.

I dropped the hand’s ef it’d be’n red hot

’Stead o’ ice cold.

Fer a minit or two I jest laid on that grass

Pantin’.

Then I up and run to them laylocks

An’ pulled ’em every which way.

True as I’m settin’ here, Mis’ Priest,

Ther’ warn’t nothin’ ther’.

I peeked an’ pryed all about ’em,

But ther’ warn’t no man ther’

Neither livin’ nor dead.

But the hand was ther’ all right,

Upside down, the way I’d dropped it,

And glist’ning fit to dazzle yer.

I don’t know how I done it,

And I don’t know why I done it,

But I wanted to get that dre’tful hand out o’ sight.

I got in t’ th’ barn, somehow,

An’ felt roun’ till I got a spade.

I couldn’t stop fer a lantern,

Besides, the moonlight was bright enough in all conscience.

Then I scooped that awful thing up in th’ spade.

I had a sight o’ trouble doin’ it.

It slid off, and tipped over, and I couldn’t bear

Ev’n to touch it with my foot to prop it,

But I done it somehow.

Then I carried it off behind the barn,

Clost to an old appletree

Where you couldn’t see from the house,

An’ I buried it,

Good an’ deep.

I don’t rec’lect nothin’ more o’ that night.

Clarence woke me up in th’ mornin’,

Hollerin’ for me to come down and set th’ milk.

When he’d gone

I stole roun’ to the appletree

And seed the earth all newly turned

Where I left it in my hurry.

I did a heap o’ gardenin’

That mornin’.

I couldn’t cut no big sods

Fear Clarence would notice and ask me what I wanted ’em fer,

So I got teeny bits o’ turf here and ther,’

And no one couldn’t tell ther’d be’n any diggin’

When I got through.

They was awful days after that, Mis’ Priest,

I used ter go every mornin’ and poke about them bushes,

And up and down the fence,

Ter find the body that hand come off of.

But I couldn’t never find nothin’.

I’d lay awake nights

Hearin’ them laylocks blowin’ and whiskin’.

Finally I had Clarence cut ’em down

An’ make a big bonfire of ’em.

I told him the smell made me sick,

An’ that warn’t no lie,

I can’t a’ bear the smell on ’em now.

An no wonder, es you say.

I fretted somethin’ awful about that hand.

I wondered could it be Hiram’s,

But folks don’t rob graveyards hereabouts.

Besides Hiram’s hands warn’t that awful, starin’ white.

I give up seein’ people,

I was afeared I’d say somethin’.

You know what folks thought of me

Better’n I do, I dessay,

But maybe now you’ll see I couldn’t do nothin’ diffrent.

But I stuck it out,

I warn’t goin’ to be downed

By no loose hand, no matter how it come ther’.

But that ain’t the worst, Mis’ Priest,

Not by a long way.

Two years ago Mr. Densmore made me an offer for Cherry’s Orchard.

Well, I’d got used to th’ thought of bein’ sort o’ blighted,

And I warn’t scared no more.

Lived down my fear, I guess.

I’d kinder got used t’ the thought o’ that awful night,

And I didn’t mope much about it.

Only I never went out o’ doors by moonlight;

That stuck.

Well, when Mr. Densmore’s offer come,

I started thinkin’ about the place

An’ all the things that had gone on ther’.

Thinks I, I guess I’ll go and see where I put the hand.

I was foolhardy with the long time that had gone by.

I knew the place real well,

Fer I’d put it right in between two o’ the apple-roots.

I don’t know what possessed me, Mis’ Priest,

But I kinder wanted to know

That the hand had been flesh and bone, anyway.

It had sorter bothered me, thinkin’ I might ha’ imagined it.

I took a mornin’ when the sun was real pleasant and warm,

I guessed I wouldn’t jump for a few old bones.

But I did jump, somethin’ wicked.

Thar warn’t no bones!

Thar warn’t nothin’!

Not even the gold ring I minded bein’ on the little finger.

I don’t know ef there ever was anythin’.

I’ve worried myself sick over it.

I be’n diggin’ and diggin’ day in and day out

Till Clarence ketched me at it.

Oh, I knowed real well what you all thought,

An’ I ain’t sayin’ you’re not right,

But I ain’t goin’ to end in no country ’sylum

If I c’n help it.

The shiv’rin’ fits come on me sudden like.

I know ’em, don’t you trouble.

I’ve fretted considerable about the ’sylum,

I guess I be’n frettin’ all the time I ain’t be’n diggin’.

But anyhow I can’t dig to Chicago, can I?

Thank you, Mis’ Priest,

I’m better now. I only dropped in in passin’!

I’ll jest be steppin’ along to French’s.

No, I won’t be seein’ nobody in the mornin’,

It’s a pretty early start.

Don’t you stand ther’, Mis’ Priest,

The wind’ll blow yer lamp out,

An’ I c’n see easy, I got aholt o’ the gate now.

I ain’t a mite tired, thank you.

Goodnight.

Potatoes in a Cellar

R. G.

I am not here to harry institutions, to prod up mummies swathed in red tape and embalmed in routine and respectability, nor am I here to bury the unburied dead.

People say, “Why do you jump on the Art Institute for becoming a trade school? It is only following the tendencies of the times. Art is like everything else.” There you have it!—the whole trouble. There is no consciousness of art, no consciousness that art is beyond all these things—that it is as the sun to the earth, and if it were to fail us we should grow like potatoes in a deep cellar.

It is only when art students say, “This is not what we sought. Where shall we go, what shall we love, what do, to find what we sought?” that the Art Institute is brought into it, and then only to serve as an example of the lack of art consciousness everywhere, and to emphasize the fact that the artist has no place in this land of wasteful virtues.

An artist almost disgraces the family into which he is born, he is pitied a little by outsiders, he is left alone. At last, when he can stand it no longer, he breaks the parent heart, and goes out full of high hope to find his own kind and to keep his own faith. After a short time he finds the art school very much like a factory; he learns to do his piece, when he had thought to create a new beauty, and he finds, too, that he is still an outcast for his beliefs and desires.

More than ninety-nine percent of the students who study art never qualify as artists. We are all born into the world creators. In the interval some wander into by-paths, play nicely upon the piano or violin, do art, or write poetry. Maiden aunts and fond grandmas proclaim them geniuses, all the time praying that they do not become artists. When love comes, they leave the by-paths to fall into lock step on the old worn way.

It is not what is accomplished on these journeys along the outposts of art, but it is the experience that counts. If they have met there one or two who stirred their senses with the impression of bearing a “fragile and mighty thing,” who could rise above the earth and shout in a flamelight of joy, or fall upon the earth and moan with the dark trouble of Things; if they have caught from these a quickened sense of Life, and learned a broader observation and consciousness of beauty; even though they cannot create as the artist creates—still from this experience they should feel the power to create a new life for those whom they in their turn may meet. If they would so much as teach the children, not the old formidable “Fear God and keep his commandments,” but rather

“Find in every foolish little thing that lives but a day

Eternal Beauty wandering on its way”

we should grow a race with a deep desire for the “free, unsullied things which never fail and never can decay.”

The Artist knows as surely as though he walked with God upon those six days of creation that this He made and nothing more—but here He made all. Other men fill in the gap between what they are and what they feel they could be, what they long for and cannot find, what they attain and aspire to, with Religion. Then, walled in with the belief of finding completion in a future life, they live on unconscious of the passionate splendor and ecstasy of this life. The artist, realizing that here we must live our life and our immortality, cries out to men to know all, to feel all, to be all here, and he strives with his whole soul, gives up his life to show men what he has seen. But the turning of great wheels, the blasts of furnaces, and the straining of millions of human beings that a few may be comfortable, drown his voice. And because he does not take part in this great struggle for physical contentment, does not live the cramped, dwarfed life of society, there is no place for him in modern life. Even though the wisest seem deceived, still the artist must believe that a consciousness of Art will come, and that even the most stupid will sometime know that he must have Art before bread.

I know—for I have experienced it and perhaps experienced little else!—that art is of more value than truth.—Nietzsche.

New York Letter

ALLAN ROSS MacDOUGALL

(The Poetry Society of America Meets and I Attend, Taking with Me a Sense of Humor.)

There is, in this city, a Poetry Society. Once a month they gather together at a handsome club to talk and be talked to. Once a year they foregather at a grand hotel for a handsome dinner and some more talk.

I am inquisitive, God help me! He and good training have made me so. To gratify my curiosity concerning the makers of American poetry, I asked Master Witter Bynner, one of their band, to take me to their monthly meeting at the National Arts Club. I ache still from suppressed laughter. (Dear sense of humor, what would I do without you when I visit the habitations of the pretentious and the congregation of the hum-bugs?)

It is the custom of this body of—of—the word I want will come to me later. It is their custom, I say, to ask for unpublished verse to be read aloud to the assemblage. The reader of the evening was Witter Bynner. Now Mr Bynner is a poet with a fine, vibrant voice and a rare appreciation for pause and effect, but when he read the verse of those anonymous poets such feeling did he put into them that his legs quivered and showed great emotion. That distressed and distracted me.

After each poem was read it was criticized by the audience. Criticism of a certain type is the easiest thing in the world. That type, that petty, empty, wordy type, was present in all its glory. Its chief exponent was one Shaemas O’Sheel, a wordy fellow loving the sound of his own voice and giving vent to many empty phrases with much gusto and argumentative fervor. Mr O’Sheel once wrote and had published in a book this plaintive thing:

My song is such a little thing

Oh, such a little thing!

It is not loud; it is not long,

And wherefor should I sing?

Echo answers, Wherefor?

Another fellow who fancied himself as critic was a youth named Joyce Kilmer. Perhaps you have heard of him. He is the author of charming conceits, in verse, on trees and delicatessen stores. He has also written some sweet roundels and ballades. Incidentally he is a member of the staff of The New York Times. Occasionally he makes excursions to Women’s Clubs and other intellectual organizations to tell them all he knows about poetry. God save him! And God save me from ever hearing another night of such criticism from ponderous youths and knowing old maids!

After the reading of the poems, and the stupid remarks that followed the reading, there came what was called the “social intermission”. During this time insipid punch and silly little biscuits were served to as many of the mob as could grab them, and a noise as of a host of parrots in a small place filled the room. (Curious what bad punch will do to good, respectable people!) Following the excitement of the jabber and the near-wine the audience settled down to be sobered up by the reading of two seeming epics by Cale Young Rice. Mr Rice is dull—oh, very dull he is. Not only so, but his verse is—I won’t say; and he reads it with the voice of the spirit of a one-time virtuous Methodist minister chanting a prayer in the coolest part of Hell.

So he read his dreary interminable poems. So I had visions of all the precious Sundays my Presbyterian parents had forced me to waste. That vision passed and I still heard the whining drone. Back to my mind again where I had vicious thoughts of the tortures I would like to play upon bad poets who write bad verse and read it with bad accent and bad voice to good harmless people. By the time I had thought out and perfected a most amazing and subtle form of torture for such disturbers of human happiness, the dismal noise had stopped. Some day....

After the effort of the Rice man, Laurence Houseman read some of his fanciful poems. They were welcome. A Spring wind among the reeds after a prolonged dull thaw.

Poetry flourishes in America.

The poets are paid well by the Magazines; and strange women dine and wine them and pay them sweet homage.

The majority own and sport dress suits. They are eminently decent and respectable.

Poetry readings are now a well-attended form of afternoon time-killing.

Poetry flourishes.

THE PASSING OF FORBES-ROBERTSON

The stops are in. The organ is closed. For forty years it has “discoursed much excellent sweet music.” Now the organist is weary, and would fain rest. He has played many things and played them well. A gentle sweet melody like Mice and Men was made more sweet by his playing; and even if he did sometimes play a popular tune like The Third Floor Back were we not the more thrilled and moved when we heard the beauty of his playing of the symphony of Hamlet?

On Saturday, April 22, I watched, now from the wings, now from a side box, the last public performance of this artist’s Hamlet. Oh that I could write as well as I feel; that my words had the strength and the bursting keenness of my emotions. Then might I tell something.

Have you seen the sudden brilliant leap of a flame sometimes before it finally goes out? There was the same sort of spurt in that past performance. I had seen Robertson play Hamlet a year ago; in Brooklyn a week before I had watched him wearily play his part, and by the comparison I understood the effort involved in the brilliancy of his playing that day. There was a heart-bursting poignancy about his swan song. I cried with the Queen: “Oh Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain!” And when at the end of it all he sat there on the throne of Denmark with that unforgettable look, purged from all the suffering and weariness; and when they bore him off to the music of Tchaikovsky’s Dead March, what could a feeling mortal do but—but—I cannot tell what I did.

“The rest is silence.”

“Good night, sweet prince.”

Amber Monochrome

MARK TURBYFILL

I pass

Outside into the amber night.

A lamp within

Prints shadow-flowers

On the stiffness of an amber screen.

My dream is like that—

An amber scheme

Straining through cold, stiff screens.

Three Imagist Poets

JOHN GOULD FLETCHER

I.

The question is being asked, re-asked and debated, What is Imagism? The fact that this question is constantly raised anew proves that it is not an academic one. For if we are to see clearly the underlying principles of the new poetry, and to understand the relationship of the group which call themselves the Imagists to those principles, we must first disassociate Imagism, strictly speaking, from all that body of verse now being produced in the free-verse forms. As a critic not long ago pointed out, vers libre and Imagism are not to be confused. Vers libre can be produced and has been produced which is not Imagistic, but realistic, symbolistic, or merely dull. Imagism is an attitude of mind which can appear just as well under the guise of metre and rhyme, or prose, as in verse itself. What, then, is Imagism?

Briefly, the doctrine we call Imagism has four cardinal points or principles. The first of these concerns presentation of the subject. The Imagist aims to present his subject as an image; that is to say, he presents the sum-total of the emotions in any given subject in such a way that the reader experiences the self-same emotions from them. To do this it is necessary for the Imagist to regard his subject-matter from its most imaginative aspect, and to present it visually. For the reader, not having experienced the emotion which moved the author to create his poem, is incapable of grasping that emotion save through a direct and complete appeal to his imagination through his higher senses of sight and hearing. By stimulating these senses, through appropriate choice of words, the Imagist aims to arouse the reader to such a pitch that the reader re-creates imaginatively for himself the emotional complex which gave birth to the poem. Imagism is, therefore, first of all a means of arousing the emotions through the imagination. The Imagists must therefore be sharply distinguished from the realistic school, and also from the symbolists of the nineteenth century, from which latter they have, in some sense, derived. Through the constant insistence on emotion as the underlying essence of poetry, the Imagists approach closely to the Elizabethans of the sixteenth and the early romantics of the nineteenth century.

The second principle of Imagism concerns style. The Imagists desire to accomplish that renovation of the English language which is always periodically necessary if good poetry is to continue to be created in it. The Imagists have certain prejudices against inversions, clichés, journalese, highfalutin bombast, literary jargon, messy padding with adjectives. Each word must be an exact word, that is to say the sole word necessary for its particular place and purpose in the poem. This careful consideration for style relates the Imagists to the classicists of the eighteenth century, who undoubtedly rescued the English language from the absurdities of the “metaphysical” school. The Imagists also insist on it as a useful check to too great an exuberance of imagination.

The third principle of Imagism concerns form. The rhythmical form of the poem should not be a mere empty pattern, but should follow, as far as possible, the ebb and flow of the emotion throughout the poem. It should be an integral part of the poem itself, as indissoluble from it as the substance of the words themselves. Therefore the Imagists hold that the theory and practice of vers libre is necessary, although they do not go so far as to demand it in every case, or to say that rhyme and metre have not their uses. In their desire to create a full emotional range of rhythmical nuances, inclusive of both rhyme and metre as well as freer rhythmical figures, the Imagists derive direct from the first great romantic poets of England—Blake and Coleridge.

The last principle of Imagism concerns the attitude of the artist to life. The artist should realize that if he is not to be the slave of life he must not attempt to be its judge. He must not obtrude his petty personal judgments and vanities between the reader and the subject he writes about. He must not, in short, moralise about life, or gush over it, or make others feel anything else except what he has felt about it. In this respect the Imagist poets are in very firm reaction against the sentimental and pious optimism of the mid-nineteenth century, against the equally sentimental and fallacious aestheticism of the eighties and nineties, and—it may be added—against a good deal of the wishy-washy suggestiveness and sex-obsession that seems to be getting the upper hand of so many writers of today. The Imagist does not weight the balance, either for “morality” or “immorality”: he states, and lets the reader draw his own conclusion.

With these four principles in mind, we may now ask ourselves how the Imagists have carried them into practice. For practice is, after all, the supreme test of any theory of art. There are signs that Imagism is getting itself taken more seriously, not as a mere passing fad, but as something that has at least established certain guide-posts and land-marks for future poets, who wish to renew the traditions of good writing. I maintain that it has done more. It has permitted three poets, at least, to start from the same principles and to produce among them a very respectable body of poetry, which in each case is filled with the individual flavour of the personality who wrote it. That the Imagist principles should display such applicability and elasticity is, I maintain, very remarkable. We shall now see who these three poets are.

II.

Mr Richard Aldington, the first of the three to be considered, has recently brought together some thirty of his poems in a small volume, entitled Images. That this selection does not represent all of Mr Aldington’s work, must be apparent to all who are familiar with it. His long poem, Childhood, is not here; nor is his other long poem on the war, which surely deserves mention as being one of the few really humorous war poems ever written. To come to the shorter pieces, surely all admirers of Mr Aldington’s talent must deplore the absence of Daisy, Round Pond and The Poplar—the latter one of the most beautiful poems he has ever written. But whether Mr Aldington has omitted these pieces from a too severe critical judgment, or whether because they seem to interfere with the unity of his book, the fact remains that they were omitted, but that enough is left to give nearly all sides of his achievement.

Mr Aldington is a sophisticated, a cultivated, even a bookish poet. He has translated Anyte of Tegea, the Latin Poets of the Renaissance, and even that astounding farrago of poetry and buffoonery called Les Chansons de Maldoror. Recently he has given us, in the columns of The Egoist, a glimpse at his library which ranges from Euripides, via Apuleius, Hooker and Crowley, to Ford Madox Hueffer! “And is it for this I have laboured?” he cries. “To be the object of derision of some bibliophile looking at his books as cynically and disgustedly as I look at mine?”

No, it is not for this. It is for a handful of strange and satisfying poems that Mr Aldington has laboured. Every artist knows that it takes a great deal of life, an immense amount of experience and appreciation, to make even a little art. Life is like a many-faceted prism. We must walk around it, observe it on every side, see it not as we ourselves would care to see it, but as others have seen it, before we can induce it to show a new side to our efforts, to cast a few rays which it has not already cast before. Matthew Arnold, who was one of the few English critics able to look at literature from the standpoint of its historical development, declared that poetry was a criticism of life. And so it is. The task of a modern poet is not to shut his eyes to the past, but to see the work of the generations that preceded him as an uncompleted structure, the living intention of whose builders is again born in him, and seeks fruition in the additions he can make to it. In this sense Mr Aldington is a modern poet. He is a poet for the well-read, intelligent, cultivated man or woman.

The first poem of his I can remember seeing in print was the one entitled Choricos:

The ancient songs

Pass deathward mournfully.

Cold lips that sing no more, and withered wreaths

Regretful eyes, and drooping breasts and wings,

Symbols of ancient songs,

Mournfully passing

Down to the great white surges

Watched by none—

And we turn from the Kyprian’s breasts,

And we turn from thee,

Phoibos Apollon—

And we turn from the fiery day,

And the lips that were over-sweet;

For silently,

Brushing the fields with red-shod feet,

With purple robe,

Searing the grass as with a sudden flame,

Death,

Thou hast come upon us.

O Death,

Thou art the silence of beauty,

And we look no more for the morning,

We yearn no more for the sun—

We kneel before thee;

And thou, leaning towards us,

Caressingly layest upon us

Flowers from thy thin cold hands,

And smiling as a chaste woman,

Knowing love in her heart,

Thou seelest our eyes

And the illimitable quietude

Comes gently upon us.

There is nothing in all the literature I know which can be safely set beside this poem (of which I have only quoted a few fragments) except a few lines of Leopardi:

In te, Morte, si pose

Nostra ignuda natura;

Lieto, no, ma sicura

Del antico dolor.

Other than that, it is unique. And since it is the fashion to despise a poet because he does not write of aeroplanes and locomotives and socialism, but of the eternal verities of life, death, beauty, irony, let us first of all brush away the shallow assumption that Mr Aldington is an imitator of the classics and that all his work seems a derivation from the Greek.

The mood of the poem from which I have just quoted is not a mood which can be found in any Greek poet, or which any Greek would ever have understood. I have quoted enough to show what that mood is. It is a mood of mutability, of the sadness that arises in us when we see the instability of all earthly things. The first Occidental poet who ever expressed this mood, to my knowledge, was François Villon. In the East, of course, it was felt and expressed much earlier. For one must have seen kingdoms pass away and empires crumble to the dust and “the owl sing his watch-song from the towers of Afrasiab” before one can feel this mood, which Mr Aldington has here so beautifully and poignantly expressed.

Throughout his poetry Mr Aldington has frequently given us this emotion of a civilized man, a modern, brought face to face with some beautiful fragment of the past. Thus he cries to a Greek marble:

I am thy brother,

Thy lover of aforetime crying to thee,

And thou hearest me not.

Surely no one would contend that a Greek could ever have said this! And in some quite recent poems we have the same feeling applied to the Renaissance, and even to modernity:

I turn the page and read:

“I dream of silent verses where the rhyme

Glides noiseless as an oar.”

The heavy, musty air, the black desks,

The bent heads and the rustling noises

Vanish—

The sun hangs in the cobalt sky

The boat drifts over the bare shallows—

The oleanders drop their rosy petals on the lawns

And the swallows dive and swirl and whistle

About the cleft battlements of Can Grande’s castle.

Or take this:

London, (May, 1915)

Glittering leaves

Dance in a squall:

Above them, bleak immovable clouds.

A church spire

Holds up a little brass cock

To peck at the blue wheat fields—

A pear tree, a broken white pyramid,

In a dingy garden, troubles one

With ecstasy—

And I am tormented,

Obsessed,

Along all this beauty.

With a vision of ruins,

Of walls tumbling into clay.

Such a poet is not what we vulgarly choose to call an optimist. No! Let us admit once for all, Mr Aldington is a pessimist. (So, by the way, were Sophocles and Leopardi and Shakespeare when he wrote King Lear, and Mr Thomas Hardy, to mention only a few; but I have never heard they were worse poets for it.) At times he gives us a very bitter dose indeed to swallow, as in his Childhood, Cinema Exit, or In the Tube. Yet he is not devoid of humour, playful and fantastic. Witness The Faun Sees Snow for the First Time, the Interlude, the Evening (a beautiful grotesque which I am tempted to quote), or for a grimmer note the conclusion of Lesbia. He will not admit that life is altogether without compensations. Herein he is honest. He even admits sentiment as a compensation, and he treats it delicately, fastidiously, with an unexpected touch of purely fourteenth-century feeling in the following piece:

After Two Years.

She is all so slight,

And tender and white,

As a May morning.

She walks without hood

At dusk. It is good

To hear her sing.

It is God’s will

That I shall love her still

As he loves Mary.

And night and day,

I will go forth to pray

That she love me.

She is as gold;

Lovely, and far more cold.

Do thou pray with me,

For if I win grace

To kiss twice her face

God has done well to me.

Altogether an unusual poet. One who never takes up the pen except when he has something individual to say, and whose utterance is at times so varied as to make him almost bafflingly individual. But not a Greek, although he has written finely on Greek themes. A modern? Yes; and not only a modern but, au fond, a Romantic. Remember the conclusion of the beautiful Night Piece:

“Very faint and shrill and far away the whistle sounds—more like a wild bird than ever. And all my unsatisfied desires and empty wishes and vague yearnings are set aching by that thin tremulous whistle—the post-horn of the Coach of Romance.”

(For lack of space, Mr Fletcher’s article will be concluded in the June issue.)

Rossica

ALEXANDER S. KAUN

It is still on—the Russian invasion.

Across the ocean the triumphant Prussian drives a hedge into the heart of Russia. With blood and iron and fire Efficiency celebrates its victory over Nihilism.

And we, the neutrals, the note-writers, attempt to thwart the grand march of Efficiency by delivering shells to the port of Vladivostok. Shells that do not always explode, despite their “moderate” prices.

In exchange we are getting thoughts, ideas. Unobstructed by Krupps or U’s or Zeppelins, they invade our peaceful shores, and intend to stay.

Woe to the Chambers and Herricks and Pooles and Dreisers and McCutcheons and other best sellers! The enemy is raining in torrents, in avalanches. What if the good, good public will be forced to taste the new food. What if after having tasted it they will rebel and demand real meat thereafter, rejecting as indigestible the canned affairs and the oleomargarine surrogates. What if....

No danger, I am assured by my friend who has great faith in the uncorruptible taste of the American public.

Surely no one will accuse the American publishers of being pure idealists or Ford-like fanatics who are ready to squander their hard dollars for propaganda purposes. Surely those gentlemen know their market and adjust the supply to the demand. The extraordinary deluge of Russian literature is evidently a paying proposition.

It is gratifying. We need the injection of new blood into our anemic literature.

New blood. Not even Gogol is too old for us. No matter that he died in 1852. His Dead Souls, Tarass Bulba, and just published stories[2] belong to the category of works that do not age in spite of their technical flaws. If you use this perspective, The Mantle will loom up as the peak of Russian realism. “We have all come out of The Mantle”, admitted Gogol’s disciple, Dostoevsky. If in that tale we recognize the forerunner of the relentless soul-vivisectionists of the later days, we get in the other stories a glimpse of the mystic Gogol, the poet of Goyaesque witches and devils. Do not read Viy before bed-time lest you go through a heavy nightmare.

It is an enormous leap from Gogol to Korolenko[3], Gorky[4], and Kuprin[5]. These are living authors, although they belong rather to the past century in their motives and modes. Vladimir Korolenko is a writer whose very name causes the heart of every Russian to beat with emotion. Not for the greatness of his art: as an artist he ranks among the lesser. It is the charm of his personality that places him far above all his colleagues. His long years of exile in Siberia, his never-flagging championship of the oppressed classes and races, his tireless encouragement of the young beginners, and his smile, the deep, broad smile that flows like a sunny stream through his writings, have endeared him to his countrymen beyond parallel. Korolenko is the bridge between the heroic, idealistic seventies and the ultra-individualistic moderns. His stories are not idylls, yet they smile; he deals with tragedies, describes horrifying situations, but he bears no ill feeling for the universe, he loves it with all its evils and follies, loves it with that keen understanding which spells forgiveness. Gorky tells us that he owes to Korolenko not only his discovery and introduction to the public, but also his style. I seldom trust an author’s self-criticism. Gorky differs from his alleged teacher in his style as well as in his philosophy. Korolenko is gentle, mild, refined, loving, forgiving. Gorky is rude, loud, hating, revenging. Both have known misery and hardships, both have rubbed shoulders with the humiliated and down-trodden. But Korolenko came out of the crucible with a radiant smile, with universal compassion and sympathy. Gorky neither forgets or forgives. His body and soul shriek out vengeance for man enslaved, maimed, bestialized. Korolenko and his “disciple” both exalt human personality, but the first does so indiscriminatingly, wholesalely, while Gorky glorifies only the strong, proclaims the “beauty of power”, and scorns the weak worms, the lazy adders who are content to stagnate in the mire. Gorky’s philosophy may appeal to us who have drunk from the waters of Zarathustra, but Korolenko’s art is purer, free from preaching, and hence more convincing.

Alexander Kuprin has been hailed as an anarchist, a free-love preacher, a social reformer, a cynic, a retrograde, and what not. He may be all these, or none, or more. Of all the Russian writers he is the only true, unaffected Dionysian. His love for women, for wine, for horses, for nature—in a word, for life, is spontaneous and elemental. None of the hectic morbidity of the consumptive Artzibashev. Kuprin is a healthy artist with an enormous eye. He sees to the bottom the mind of man and animal, of the thief and the intellectual, of the empty military officer and of the street-woman, of the artist and of the gambler, and he makes us see what he sees with a cheerful gracefulness, with no other purpose but the presentation of his sweetheart, life. His novel, The Duel, stirred Russian society as a vigorous indictment of militarism, a picture of the dehumanizing garrison life. Kuprin guffawed at that accusation over a glass of vodka, as he is usually drawn by cartoonists. Far be it from him to advocate or condemn. He rejoices in all his heroes, whether they be garrison dummies, or artistic pickpockets (The Outrage), or Japanese spies (Captain Ribnikov), or petty philistines (The River of Life). He floats upon the “river of life”, observes, absorbs, delights, and chuckles at the very fact of his existence. “Even if I were to fall under a railway train, and were left lying on the line with broken and bleeding limbs, and any one were to ask me if life were beautiful, I should none the less, and even by summoning my last remains of strength, answer enthusiastically, ‘Ah, yes, even now life is glorious!’” (The Duel).

From the charming, lithe, joyous Kuprin I pass reluctantly to a book on the lugubrious “cruel genius”, Dostoevsky[6]. It is deplorable that the publisher who has given us the excellent translation of Dostoevsky by Constance Garnett should throw on the market such a mediocrity as Mr. Soloviev’s work, as if there were not excellent books on the novelist written by Merezhkovsky, Volynsky, Vladimir Solovyov, Veresayev! Mr. Soloviev presents the accepted view of Dostoevsky as the preacher of repentance and atonement, the retrograde, the pillar of church and autocracy. Superficially, the view appears to be correct. Dig deeper into the chaotic, epileptical soul of the author of Crime and Punishment, gaze into the abysses of the dual characters of Raskolnikov, Prince Myshkin, Stavrogin, Svidrigailov, the Karamazovs, fling your imagination into the hellish crater of the novelist’s mind, and Mr. Soloviev’s symmetrical structure evaporates like mist. Again I ask, Why are such useless school-exercises reproduced by intelligent publishers? Why should such a fine translator as Mr. Hogarth waste his energy on puerilities?

The same Whys can be applied to another recent publication[7], Doroshevich’s impressions. Doroshevich is the most popular journalist in Russia, a witty, entertaining feuilletonist, who employs an original staccato rhythm. But there is no reason under the sun to translate his reportorial impressions of the war fugitives, written for a Moscow daily paper. Their value is purely local. How can we be interested in the management of the Russian relief-points, or their mismanagement? True, at times Doroshevich flashes brilliant impressionistic colors, as in describing the fugitives’ bonfires in the forest. But the rare gems do not justify the journalistic heap.

I am uneasy about these fallacies of the publishers. Few though they are, they may serve the part of a spoonful of vinegar in a pot of honey.

[2] The Mantle and other stories, by Nikolai Gogol. New York: Frederic A. Stokes.

[3] Makar’s Dream and other stories, by V. Korolenko. New York: Duffield.

[4] Twenty-six Men and a Girl, by M. Gorky. New York: Frederic A. Stokes.

[5] The Duel, by A. Kuprin. New York: Macmillan.
The River of Life, by A. Kuprin. Boston: John W. Luce.

[6] Dostoevsky, by Evgenii Soloviev. New York: Macmillan.

[7] The Way of the Cross, by Doroshevich. New York: G. P. Putnam.

The Independent Exhibition

LUPO DE BRAILA

The rich aunt with whose aid the Chicago Society of Artists has managed, up to the present, to check all artistic impulses in this city, has lost her magic attraction and power. Her golden smiles and soft pillows have failed lately to captivate and hold. There is a new breed of young artists. They seem to be an energetic lot, and decline to live in the future of promises; and, what is more horrible, they decline to flirt with the rich aunt through the aid of the honorable society.

For many years she was the bubbling liquid within the life-giving bottle. The magic corkscrew was in the safe, the combination known to the initiated few. According to these few, young artists had to go through a certain process of taming and self-effacement before they were gradually given the secret. A certain amount of artistic ignorance plus an ability to pull strings was required of every aspirant. A soft backbone bent by many kicks was also one of the main requirements. “Don’t knock, you’ll break the magic bottle” was their watchword. If you dared to ask questions concerning the sacred duty of the initiated few, you aroused a hatred that took years to melt,—a hatred that seemed impossible in such delicate souls. The few artists who refused to be tamed left the city and have settled in other parts.

And the philanthropic aunt, like all true philanthropists, acquired all she could get and paid the minimum price. The paying was usually accompanied by a lot of pompous actions and was supposed to be received like a first-class iron cross by a common soldier. You see, the young talented artist was actually compelled to bribe the art patron to get to the secret of the combination, and was compelled to listen to all kinds of insults besides. Here are a favorite few: “I have discovered him”; “I helped him to get where he is now”; “If it were not for me....” The artist was also used as a rare orchid at their dinner tables and as Chinese embroidery at unusual occasions. I know one of these patrons who even resorted to threats, when a young and independent sculptor refused to be “discovered.” And such creatures pose as art patrons and connoisseurs, and hold the combination to the life-giving bottle of this city.

As a matter of fact, almost all the prestige and almost all the artistic knowledge possessed by these same patrons was given them by their so-called protegees at starvation prices. However, the patrons are hardly to be blamed for this state of affairs. They were made by well-meaning but mediocre artists whose highest ambitions were foggy imitations of a certain kind of realism practiced abroad when my grandmother’s dolls used up most of her time. The saddest or funniest side of this spectacle is that the patrons have, for the last few years, advanced in understanding beyond the possibilities of the artists who have made them. As you can easily see, a most discouraging and impossible state of affairs. It reached its climax at the last Chicago Artists’ exhibition, when those in control, to use a popular saying, rubbed it in. It was a show of the aged and crippled, and prizes were awarded on the basis of an Old-Age Benefit. It was a slow sickness and positive in retarding all artistic endeavor in this city.

But like a clear and promising path in this dark jungle comes the first International Exhibition of Independent Artists. It is a jury-free exhibition, and every man is allowed to hang two paintings, provided he pays for the space. And it was a strong indictment against the old order. It showed how thoroughly it has managed to kill all originality and individuality in the younger artists. In spite of the fact that it was a jury-free exhibition you could easily see that almost everyone had painted with this little thought in the back of his head: This must please Messrs. Albright, Juergens, and Company. To pick out the few who made a good showing this time would be unfair to the rest. The whole show was conceived and arranged in six weeks, and to me it was more interesting and held more promise than any other show held in this city.

It is a young oak whose knotty branches, like playful fists, shoot in unexpected directions. It grows up near a grey solemn mausoleum. The mausoleum acts as if it does not notice the sturdy youngster; but it knows in its heart, if it has one, that it will soon be hidden in the shadow of this tree’s branches. Virile roots will crack the walls and decay will be the deserved fate.

The Reader Critic

SHE IS NO FRIEND OF OURS!

Arthur Davison Ficke, Davenport, Iowa:

Will you be so kind as to ask your friend, “Virginia York”, to refrain from re-misprinting for a third time, a bit hacked from my Café Sketches? If she finds the poem so interesting, why does she not print it in its entirety, and correctly? Then perhaps her readers could decide just where the joke lies—in the light of “Virginia York’s” Olympian pronouncement that “maybe you think this is funny, but certainly it is not intended to be.” Just because a little learning would be dangerous for her, I shall never disclose to her what the poem was intended to be. Besides, she wouldn’t believe me; for her, a thing has to be either Lear or Charley’s Aunt, evidently.

I have harbored doubts as to the value of vers libre; but now they are gone. For I see that it does shut out a certain type of mind.

Harriet Dean’s Pillar is admirable! Also Sandburg’s four.

Tell your “sixteen year old boy” that his poem is damn interesting—but to cut out the “only sixteen” and “one could not expect me to know much about poetry” stuff. At sixteen most of us had read all the poetry in existence, and were busy writing epics that were to re-make the world. Tell him to stop being a sixteen-year-old worm, and to get up on his hind legs and bite the stars. Tell him to write arrogantly of this “charming” world he sees. It’s time enough to be humble when one is old.

THE PROPHET IN HIS OWN COUNTRY.

Daphne and Michael Carr, Columbia, Missouri:

We have been greatly enraged by reading Mr Charles Zwaska’s article, An Isaiah without a Christ, in the April number of The Little Review. It reminds us of a review of the same book in Judge. It ran something like this: “Vachel Lindsey has out a new book on the Art of the Moving Picture. It might be all right, but for the fact that the movie can never be Art.” In just the same sententious way Mr Zwaska seems to be peeved that Lindsay should suggest the possibility of art in a thing which is at present clumsily done. Some one has said that when Miriam led the women of Israel to a dance of rejoicing, all of the women who were too fat or too stiff to dance stood back and deplored the immodesty of their nimble sisters. Perhaps Mr Zwaska is too fat, or too stiff, or too old. I don’t know: may be he is so young that he still creeps and doesn’t think of dancing. For Lindsay has sung out humanly and delightfully a more acceptable ideal of democracy than any American has yet sung. The rest of us would-be artists are creating things that can appeal to a small number. Lindsay is chanting to all America, and all America is listening—we, the artists, as well as the littlest country school-boy.

“Says the swift black horse

To the swift white horse:

‘There goes the alarm

There goes the alarm.

They are hitched, they are off,

They are gone in a flash,

And they strain at the driver’s iron arm.’”

We shout it when the fire-engines fly down the street. We croon the moon poems together in the evenings, and we chant The Santa Fé Trail as we tramp across country.

Mr Zwaska seems to catch a glimmering of the fact that Lindsay is a rhyming poet, because he is singing to all the people. Why does he not apply this a little farther? Lindsay’s message, as I catch it, is this:

The Moving Picture has in it possibilities of a great art. Furthermore, it is for all America, for every farm boy, for every little dish-washer as well as for every millionaire. Let us make this art as perfect, as inspiring, as possible, since it has a wider influence, be it good, bad, or indifferent, than any other art in the history of humanity. The exquisite Parthenon, Sophocles’s tragedies performed in the theater of Dionysus, were for the Athenians, and for such as could reach Athens. Fortunately, that included a large percentage of the Greeks. But how many Americans, proportionately, can see such wonders as New York has to offer?

When a moving-picture as perfect as the Parthenon has been produced there need be no soul in America who has not seen it.

This being the ideal, we proceed toward its realization. Lindsay points out some means of attaining beauty in the moving-pictures. The producers can, he says, learn from the painters beauties of composition, of symbolism, of mood. Beautiful sculpture can teach the rhythm, the speed, the grace of motion. And architecture will help to interpret big social emotions, such as patriotism and religion in terms of crowds, pageantlike, of landscapes, and, upon occasion, of architecture itself.

But here Mr Zwaska objects. He says that Lindsay is making the moving-picture a parasite on the other arts. I am not going to quote Noah Webster, or Dr Johnson, but it is generally understood that a parasite is an organism that steals its life from its host, weakening the host thereby. Has Mr Lorado Taft, or Mr Frank Lloyd Wright, or Mr Jerome Blum, been robbed of any tittle of artistic ideas, or of artistic technique, or of admiration by Lindsay’s book, or by the producers who have tried so ineffectually to follow his suggestions? I don’t want to quibble with metaphors, but if horticulture is to be the basis of them I should rather say that Lindsay proposes to burbank a wonderful new nectarine art by crossing painting, sculpture, architecture, and pantomime.

At present the difficulty is that there is no one in the producing field with the artistic training, and feeling, and the burning genius withal to produce a wonderful film. Max Reinhardt or Gordon Craig could do it, but even they would be working against the difficulties of a new medium. D’Annunzio did pretty well with Cabiria but——Have you ever read Aeschylus’ Suppliants? It was the first and afterwards came Electra and Œdipus.

Well, along in his article Mr Zwaska grows boisterous at Lindsay who has, supposedly working on a suggestion from his friend, James Oppenheim, spoken of the possibility of a highly symbolic film production of The Book of the Dead. And this because Mrs Moore of Chicago, has worked out beautiful dances, and costumes and libretto for a stage production of the wonderful Nile and Sun myth. Bless Mrs Lou Wall Moore! We love her and her devotion. We have been wonder-struck by the loveliness of her Egyptian costume designs. When she does produce The Book of the Dead we will, Fate permitting, make a pilgrimage from this movie-ridden Missouri town to see it wherever it may he. And I know that we will be rejoiced to be able to do so. But I am sure that dear Mrs Moore would be the last person to object to a film production of The Book of the Dead, IF the production be a beautiful one. For, as Lindsay iterates and reiterates, the stage and the moving-pictures MUST be different. Mrs Moore’s production will have “the splendor of color, space, height, distance, and most magical of all, the voice.” And the worthy moving-picture production, when it arrives, will have, in black-and-white symphony, the infinite depths of the sky, waving palm branches, the width of the desert, and above all, beautifully controlled actors, streaming hundreds, directed and co-ordinated as was the Diaghileff corps-de-ballet. And this beauty will travel all over the country, touching, among others, this drama-starved town of Missouri, where we suffer for want of visual beauty.

Mr Zwaska deplores the lack of composition—“moving lines” he calls it—in the moving pictures. He says that he has seen it “only in the flight of gulls (unconscious actors) or in pictures of rivers and trees, and the sea; in short—Nature. But Nature is Nature” wailed Mr Zwaska. And pray, why pervert the facts you bring forth? If the cinematograph can record the beautiful motion of the birds, can it not equally well record the beautiful motion of humans when the producer has learned to direct his actors as M. Fokine directs his dancers? There is room for Art.

Why—why, in the name of all that is lovely, must people howl at any expression of belief in possibilities of a new art? The moving-picture is Shakespearean, Hugoesque, Zolaesque, in its method. We see through it not only Antony and Cleopatra, but the two great hungry struggling groups that each impersonates. We see not only the typical coal-miner and his typical sorrows; we see the mass of his comrades under the same oppression, the same evil conditions. We see better, because more swiftly, than Hugo could paint it with his wonderful vocabulary, Notre Dame de Paris, the symbol, the social motif which embodies in a unity all that the story tries to show of the beauty, the horror, the fate, and the aspirations of the pre-Renaissance, an ever-present condition behind the actors. Are such possibilities to be shoved aside and denied a place among the arts where pageantry is admitted? Is the fact that thousands of bad, atrociously bad, films are turned out to discredit the few well-constructed, symbolic film-plays? Look at our abominable American poster-makers. Does this discredit Mr Blum, whose praises we hear sung?

There is one really vital criticism in Mr Zwaska’s hectic article. That is, upon Lindsay’s “too ruthless a theory” of no music in the movie theater. From the first we shied at that. We are surprised at the author of poems to be read aloud. Another of our admirable countrymen, who qualifies not only as a sociologist, but as a philosopher and a poet, has his say on the subject quite incidentally. I speak of Max Eastman, who, in his Enjoyment of Poetry, says, “I have yet to find one in which the reality of the pictures is not enhanced with the beating of an old piano. Nobody notices the piano, nobody remembers what the piano plays, or how badly, but there it is, always keeping up a metre.” The audiences’ “voluntary mind is on the canvas but the music slips all the deeper into their beings, and it makes them live the pictures.” I can well believe Mr Zwaska’s account of the after-midnight picture show. Granted that most picture-show music is terrible, that the electric piano is agonizing, that it is deeply shocking to hear the Miserere when sweet Mary Pickford is acting the Un Bel Di Vedremo scene in Butterfly, the music is far less dreadful than silence, and we talk through it all the same. I do not know a possible remedy, but it is worth the thought of every person interested or disgusted. This is merely one of Vachel Lindsay’s acknowledged “paw paws.”

So here we are at the end of our wrath. And here’s a cheer and a hearty greeting for Lindsay, who is scaling the Pike’s Peak of idealism. And here’s congratulations to Mr Zwaska for directing a few more telescopes at him.

FOR THE BRAHMINS.

A Poet, Chicago:

I am sick of hearing Chicago audiences go into raptures over Brahms. Here is my impression of him as I listened to the last concert of the Chicago Symphony: Symphony No. 4, E Minor, Opus 98.

First Movement:
Milk and Liver.
Second Movement:
Bed-bugs crawling over the body of a fat burgher. Occasionally he snorts sonorously (’cellos).
Third Movement:
Ten-ton joviality—beer, cheese, saurkraut, ham. Grazioso—Ach, du lieber Augustine! The end suggests his Academic:
Fourth Movement:
a. Hungarian dancing—(Brahms’ only successful field).
b. Falls into pompernickel sentimentalism.
c. The German policeman (trombones).
d. More liver.
e. Gas.

Yours Sylph-fully:

Please let me “register” my appreciation of your April number. I read the extract from The Interstate Medical Journal with intense purposefulness, have ordered Vance Thompson’s “epoch-making book, Eat and Grow Thin”, and begin to feel that I am getting even more than I subscribed for.

Incidentally, didn’t you love Carl Sandburg’s Gone? Chick Lorimer! What a name! It makes one almost sorry to be “respectable”, somehow—it’s so full of gayety and courage!

Statement of Ownership, Management, Circulation, Etc., required by the Act of August 24, 1912
of THE LITTLE REVIEW published monthly at Chicago, Ill. for April 1st, 1916.

Editor, Margaret C. Anderson, 834 Fine Arts Building, Chicago.

Managing Editor, Same

Business Manager, Same

Publisher, Same

Owners: (If a corporation, give its name and the names and addresses of stockholders holding 1 per cent or more of total amount of stock. If not a corporation, give names and addresses of individual owners.)

Margaret C. Anderson
834 Fine Arts Building, Chicago

Known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders, holding 1 per cent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities: None.

MARGARET C. ANDERSON,

Sworn to and subscribed before me this 31st day of March, 1916.

MITCHELL DAWSON, Notary Public.
(My commission expires December 20, 1917.)

ART SCHOOL or
ART FACTORY
WHICH?

Charles A. Kinney’s story of his fight for individual rights in the Art Institute:

A few of the topics Mr. Kinney will discuss:

The seven cases in the law courts—what they mean to students and faculty.

The Art Student Fellowship organization—why it was forced on the students of the Institute.

Why faculty members were forced to support it on penalty of losing their positions.

Organization and discipline, or art spirit? Which is most essential in an art school?

Student activities—shall the Dean or the students control them?

Art Schools—shall men trained in Business or men trained in Art control them?

What encouragement is there for sincere artists?

When at least half the scholarships are awarded because of influence and favoritism rather than meritorious work?

When faculty members of the Institute have practically no independence?

Mr. Kinney’s article will appear in the June issue of The Little Review.

THE FLAME

A JOURNAL FOR THE NEW AGE

Irwin Granich and Van K. Allison, Editors.
3 Bellingham Place, Boston, Mass.

“The Flame” is to be a monthly journal of revolution, soon to take life. It is to burn against oppression and authority everywhere, and is to be as pure and merciless as the flower of light after which it is named.

We want you to help us make “The Flame.” It is not to be one of those vehicles for the delivery of the vast thoughts of an unrecognized “genius,” but a little forum where every revolutionist of high heart and purpose can speak. We can pay nothing, of course. Cartoons, poems, stories, sketches, tracts, philosophies, news reports—all will be welcomed.

No creed or philosophy will be barred from our columns if only its devotee writes in a beautiful and furious and yes-saying gesture. The editorials will be flavored by the anarchy of the publishers.

THE DRAMA For May Offers Two Plays

REMY DE GOURMONT, whose dramatic work has never been accessible in English. The translation has been made by the celebrated Imagist poet, RICHARD ALDINGTON, who contributes also a skillful critique of de Gourmont’s work. The plays are printed by an authorization given a few weeks before the playwright’s death.

Among the other articles is one by Alexander Bakshy, an associate of the Russian producer, Meyerhold, on The Cinematograph as Art. In this the author shows that the great field open to the “movies” has not even been discovered by the film producer of today.

Mr. Charles Lemmi contributes a brilliant discussion of The Italian Stage of Today, not so much a study of the individual plays as an attempt to analyze and explain the forces in the present-day Italian theatre.

The Hull House Players, an organization of more than local fame, is the subject of a brief history by the founder and director, Laura Dainty Pelham.

Many other articles on the current problems of the drama, reviews and bibliographies complete the number.

736 Marquette Building
CHICAGO

Three Dollars Per Year

Two Dollars Per Year to Members of The Drama League of America

Seventy-five Cents Per Copy

Piano Triumphant

The artistic outgrowth of forty-five years of constant improvement—a piano conceived to better all that has proven best in others.

GEO. P. BENT GRAND

Could you but compare it with all others, artistically it must be your choice. Each day proves this more true.

Geo. P. Bent Grand, Style “A”—a small Grand, built for the home—your home.

Geo. P. Bent Company

Manufacturers of Artistic Pianos
Retailers of Victrolas
214 South Wabash Avenue, Chicago

Transcriber’s Notes

Advertisements were collected at the end of the text.

The table of contents on the title page was adjusted in order to reflect correctly the headings in this issue of The Little Review.

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

- ... treacle on bread over all these different stylic bases, this operation requiring ...
... treacle on bread over all these different stylistic bases, this operation requiring ...

- ... What encouragement is there for sincere artists ...
... What encouragement is there for sincere artists? ...

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LITTLE REVIEW, MAY 1916 (VOL. 3, NO. 3) ***

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Table of Contents

- The Little Review

- Three Flesh-tints

- The Incense Burner
- The Goldfish in a Bowl
- A Nude

- “The Compleat Amateur”

- I. “Le Style fait l’homme”

- II. “Means to an End”

- III. Personality, or, as some authorities have it: Individuality

- IV. The Mission of Amateurism

- Three Japanese Paintings

- I. Dream of a Chinese Landscape (A Screen by Soga Shubun)

- II. Dream of a Chinese Rock Promontory (A Screen by Sesshu)

- III. The Golden Symphony (A Screen by Sotatsu)

- The Struggle

- A Mischievous Rhapsody of the First Recurrence

- Poems

- Welt Schmertz

- Prisoners

- Leo Ornstein
- Nocturne
- White Mists[1]
- Letters from Prison
- Off The Turnpike
- Potatoes in a Cellar

- New York Letter

- THE PASSING OF FORBES-ROBERTSON

- Amber Monochrome

- Three Imagist Poets

- I.

- II.

- London, (May, 1915)

- After Two Years.

- Rossica

- The Independent Exhibition

- The Reader Critic

- SHE IS NO FRIEND OF OURS!

- THE PROPHET IN HIS OWN COUNTRY.

- FOR THE BRAHMINS.

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE