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Title: The Little Review, May 1916 (Vol. 3, No. 3)
Editor: Margaret C. Anderson
Author: Various
Release date: March 25, 2025 [eBook #75706]
Language: English
Original publication: Chicago, New York: Apparently none other than the Editor (see above), 1922
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*** 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):
[p. 3]:
... treacle on bread over all these different stylic bases, this
operation requiring ...
... treacle on bread over all these different stylistic bases,
this operation requiring ...
[p. 44]:
... 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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