THE LITTLE REVIEW
Literature Drama Music Art
MARGARET C. ANDERSON
EDITOR
JANUARY-FEBRUARY, 1916
Poems: H. D.
Late Spring
Night
A Deeper Music Margaret C. Anderson
Blue-Prints: Harriet Dean
Debutante
The Pillar
The Pathos of Proximity Alexander S. Kaun
Solitude David O’Neil
The Novelist Sherwood Anderson
Asperities: Mitchell Dawson
Threat
In Passing
Teresa
Amy Lowell’s Book F. S. Flint
The Picnic Marjory Seiffert
Editorials and Announcements
“American Art” “The Critic”
Photography C. A. Z.
Book Discussion
The Reader Critic
Published Monthly
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MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Publisher
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THE LITTLE REVIEW
Vol. II
JANUARY-FEBRUARY, 1916
No. 10
Copyright, 1916, by Margaret C. Anderson
Poems
H. D.
Late Spring
We can not weather all this gold
Nor stand under the gold from elm-trees
And the re-coated sallows.
We can not hold our heads erect
Under this golden dust.
We can not stand
Where enclosures for the fruit
Drop hot—radiant—slight petals
From each branch.
We can not see:
The dog-wood breaks—white—
The pear-tree has caught—
The apple is a red blaze—
The peach has already withered its own leaves—
The wild plum-tree is alight.
Night
The night has cut each from each
And curled the petals back from the stalk
And under it in crisp rows:
Under at an unfaltering pace,
Under till the rinds break,
Back till each bent leaf
Is parted from its stalk:
Under at a grave pace,
Under till the leaves are bent
Back till they drop upon the earth,
Back till they are all broken.
O night,
You take the petals of the roses in your hand,
But leave the stark core of the rose
To perish on the branch.
A Deeper Music
MARGARET C. ANDERSON
A piano, alone on a stage; shadowed light around and above it; ivory and
ebony moving out of the shadow; and the silence that hangs there before
the musician plays. There is nothing like it in the world,—nothing more
wonderful....
* * * * *
There are “revolutions” going on in all the arts. The revolution in
poetry is coming in for a lot of discussion, so that even the layman is
conscious of it. His feeling about it is that some effeminate beings
called Imagists are trying to emasculate the noble art of poetry. But
the thing is happening right under his nose and he is careful to keep
posted, in order to be able to defend his favorite theory. As for the
stage, he knows that Gordon Craig and Rhinehart have been using screens
instead of marble pillars painted against red velvet curtains. In
painting he knows all about the cubists and futurists; he even knows
that the donkey’s tail story was something of a joke. In sculpture he
has heard of an unreasonable reaction from Rodin, and he has probably
seen Brzeska’s head of Ezra Pound. In the ballet he has a rather clear
idea of why the old classical form wouldn’t serve; perhaps because the
Russians have demonstrated so clearly what it was they could do with the
new form. In opera he thinks very little is happening. He is right.
But the slowest revolution of all—and the most interesting—is that which
is just beginning in the art of the piano. It is the slowest because it
is not the public alone that is bound to the old form. The masters
themselves have not visioned toward a need that would make a new form
inevitable. The need is—a deeper music. And it is the most interesting
because the convention that has bound the piano,—virtuosity,—is a more
worthy convention than that which has restricted any of the other arts.
There is a universe of the arts in the piano. But it is not a universe
now. It is a stunt. The piano has been used for stunts for years and
years and years. It will go on being used that way for years. Well, I am
the last one to deprecate the art of these stunts. I think they are
beautiful—some of them. I think they have their place. But they have
served it too well. I love them more than I love all the opals and
rubies and sapphires and emeralds and topaz and amethyst and pearl a
jeweller can dip his fingers into and spread out for your dazzled
senses. But I love poetry more than jewels. And I love music more than
poetry. In the music of the piano you get the best illustration that
music is a thing beginning and ending in itself, a thing not of story or
image but of sound, a thing that must be understood quite simply in its
own terms,—as Hiram Kelly Moderwell puts it, a thing that must be heard
and not seen. And in the revolution that is beginning you get this first
pure principle combined with another; that the music of the piano must
reach to the passion of life. This is quite different from saying that
music must be a dramatization of human life. It is merely saying that
ballet dancing could never have produced an Isadora Duncan.
I imagine that Harold Bauer must have said something of this sort to
himself. He has certainly said it on the piano. His attitude toward the
piano has this sort of prophecy in it. It is a matter of the beauty of
sound. The methods of approach of all the “masters” have been the same.
They have imposed something upon the piano. But Bauer has approached the
handling of the piano as Debussy approached composition—or Schönberg.
When Schönberg wrote that “the alleged tones believed to be foreign to
harmony do not exist; they are merely tones foreign to our accepted
harmonic system”, and that “tonality is not a hard and fast compulsion
directing the course of music but a concept which makes it possible for
us to give our ideas the requisite aspect of compactness”, he was saying
practically what Bauer has suggested about the touching of the piano:
that virtuosity is only a means to an end, that the springs of the art
have been drying up, and that until the musician can _hear_ better he is
not worthy of the sounds the piano has to give him. You can’t play César
Franck with the same hands you use for Liszt. You must change your hands
into different “feelers”. The piano will give you the quality of almost
every instrument. It is as though Bauer had said: “They call this an
instrument of percussion. They have laid down its limitation. But I
doubt very much whether it will stay within that limitation. I suspect
it does not stop there but goes on into a realm where sound is of
infinite development.” That is why you hear an organ when he plays César
Franck; that is why you realize how the Imagists have worked when he
plays Debussy; that is why you get a sense of painting in all his music.
Bauer puts on the sound like paint. He knows, as Romain Rolland has
said, that every art tends to become a universe in itself; that music
becomes painting and poetry, that painting becomes music, etc. And Bauer
is not a genius. He has merely suggested what will happen to the piano,
and paved the way for an openness of mind about it. He has made a good
many people gossip of how his scales won’t compare with those of the
other great ones; but he has made a good many more suspect that there
has been something lacking in the ultimatums of the piano athletes. He
has done many simple and dynamic things to bring the piano into its own.
But the full achievement of this will go beyond what has been heard yet
anywhere; and the man who does it will be scorned as the greatest fool
or madman of his time before it is fully understood. It doesn’t matter.
The thing will happen—I hardly know how. I hardly even know words with
which to tell what it will be like. It can only be told on the piano.
In his _Spiritual Adventures_ Arthur Symons has a story of a musician
who says more true things about the piano than I have ever found
anywhere else. One of them is this: “Most modern music is a beggar for
pity. The musician tries to show us how he has suffered and how hopeless
he is. He sets his toothache and his heartache to music, putting those
sufferings into the music without remembering that sounds have their own
agonies which alone they can express in a perfect manner.” This is where
the “lions and panthers of the piano” have failed most: they have not
loved the sounds enough. They have not allowed each sound its full life.
This is the real reason why the piano has stopped short of itself. They
might almost as well have played bells. You can strike bells which will
bring out any number of tunes, loud or soft, with every possible variety
of phrasing. _But your interest will be in the tune rather than in the
sound._ You can’t limit the piano to the tunes that can be played upon
it. You don’t treat a violin that way, nor an organ. And of course you
can register a piano almost as fully as an organ with the “stops” that
are in the ends of your fingers. How fascinating it is, and how
wonderful!
But most piano recitals are like recitations—or some sort of performance
on a school platform. Their beauty ends with the beauty of style,
phrasing, finish, tone, taste. It is diction rather than music. It is
science. Busoni is not a prophet; he is an orchestra. Hofmann loves
style more than he does sound. Godowsky loves patterns more than sound.
Gabrilowitsch loves delicate sounds intensely, but has no feeling for
the sounds of great chords. Zeisler loves rhythm more than sound. And so
on. Paderewski loves the piano. He is genius, pure and simple—though of
course there is nothing less pure or simple. He may do what he
likes—break sounds into bits, crack them like nuts. It doesn’t matter.
He never fails to communicate a mood to the instrument—the mood of his
personal equation. And that is art. “Przybyszewski playing Chopin”—that
would also be art. What have the excellent piano concerts you hear to do
with art, with inspiration? Piano playing is certainly something to be
surpassed. Music is the thing! And that means ecstasy, madness,
divinity,—the beauty upon which all the ends of the world are come. The
design of sound.... Each sound that comes out of the piano is something
alive....
* * * * *
And now for the interesting part.
When I talk of the “new music”—which will be different from Debussy and
Schönberg and all the rest of them—I am not talking of how far beyond
the limits of known harmony, or the anarchy which disregards any
harmonic system, we shall go. Undoubtedly, as far as all that is
concerned, “some day some one will dig down to the roots and turn up
music as it is before it is tamed to the scale.” This seems to me a
settled fact. But I am much more interested in the piano itself and the
deliverer who is to set it free from the lie which has grown up around
it and make it vibrate to a truer color. It is all in the plane of
vibration, I believe. It will come about in three ways: through the
mechanical development of the piano, through a new type of music, and
chiefly through the new type of pianist.
You will have your Mason and Hamlin—(this is not advertising; it is
merely a conviction)—you will have that great dark-winged-victory
standing alone on a stage; you will care a great deal about the color of
the light around and above it—the tones of the walls within which your
beautiful sounds are to live; you will touch that ivory and ebony—oh,
there are no words! You will _see_ those sounds against the color....
You may write a program for your audience—something like this:
I believe the right technical approach is simply a different are
the most beautiful there are anywhere in the world—more beautiful
than the wind in trees or the moan in the sea or the silence that
is heard on deserts;
I believe that these sounds live only by a certain magic of
invocation. There are no rules for them—unless perhaps you want
to read Bergson.
I believe the right technical approach is simply a different kind
of friendship—or love affair—with each sound.
I believe that tone goes way beyond the range between pianissimo
and fortissimo, between legato and staccato, etc. Tone is
radiance, eagerness, light, darkness, devastation, something that
melts, something that cries and burns, something that shatters.
I do not believe in playing “programs”—ending with a blaze of
Liszt. I couldn’t play the _Campanella_ to save my life, but I
don’t see that it matters.
I do not believe in “program” music—beginning with Bach (now that
the public has learned to applaud him) and ending with Liszt. I
couldn’t play the _Campenella_ to save my life, but I don’t see
that it matters.
I do not believe in nature music—babbling brooks and warbling
birds. I believe in nature mood, just as I do in the mood of all
great phenomena.
The music I have made will be sometimes merely the curve of a
mood—like the curve of line in Watts’s _Orpheus and Eurydice_; or
merely the design of a color or a scent. But always it will keep
close to two fundamentals: that “hard gemlike flame” and the
rhythm of sex.
All this will come under the classification of those things which are so
worth knowing that they can never be taught. It will belong to that
individual who can say the new word—his own word. It will make the piano
something we have scarcely dreamed of. It will make up an art that has
nothing to do with the four walls of a room. It could not be set to
“Questions and Answers” in _The Ladies’ Home Journal_. It will have
little to do with accomplishment, but everything to do with that which
is of all things the highest manifestation of life.
Blue-Prints
HARRIET DEAN
Debutante
You are a faded shawl about the shoulders of your mother. A puff of wind
catches at your fluttering edge to jerk you away. But she draws you
close, growing cold in the warm young breeze. She holds you with her
shiny round pin, as all young ones are clasped to old by round things
grown shiny with age.
In your wistful tired eyes I see the trembling of her shawl as she
breathes.
The Pillar
When your house grows too close for you,
When the ceilings lower themselves, crushing you,
There on the porch I shall wait,
Outside your house.
You shall lean against my straightness,
And let night surge over you.
The Pathos of Proximity[1]
ALEXANDER S. KAUN
[1] _The Works of Oscar Wilde in 13 volumes. Ravenna edition. New
York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons._
Pull down the shades. Turn out the lights. So. We do not want loud
electricity. We shall have a jewelled light. For I am rich to-night.
Come, let us recline on Bagdad cushions and Teheran rugs (“Only savages
sit”, Mme. Zinovyeva, the Russian Lesbian, told us), and I shall scatter
over the fantastic patterns jewels and stones. How softly they illumine
the thick dark—these varicolored glowflies, these streams of wine,
emerald wine, and amethyst wine, and wine of topazes “yellow as the eyes
of tigers, and topazes pink as the eyes of a wood pigeon, and green
topazes that are as the eyes of cats”, and wine of opals “that burn
always with an icelike flame”, and wine of onyxes that are like “the
eyeballs of a dead woman”, and wine streams of sapphires and chrysolites
and rubies and turquoises and ambers and pearls.... I am rich to-night,
and we shall bathe our eyes in quivering rainbows, and our fingers shall
wander lightly through dimly-jewelled ripples, stirring up old visions,
exotic unhuman faces, enchanting monsters, dancing rhythmic words,
fantastic moonlit thoughts.
What songless tongueless ghost of sin crept through the
curtains of the night?
“In exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of
the world are passing in dumb show before us. Things that we have dimly
dreamed of are suddenly made real. Things of which we have never dreamed
are gradually revealed.”
Lift up your large black satin eyes which are like cushions
where one sinks!
Fawn at my feet, fantastic Sphinx, and sing me all your memories!
A symphony of memories. A life as brilliant and as swift as a meteor. A
life of no shadows. Sun and flowers. A continuous rainbow. An Apollonian
race over iridescent rose-and-azure-clouds. A sudden plunge over hideous
precipice. The song broken. Yet the chord vibrates.
Uneasiness. The moon filters through the stained embrasure.
Regardez la lune ... On dirait une femme qui sort d’un tombeau.
Elle ressemble à une femme morte. On dirait qu’elle cherche des
mortes.
... Elle ressemble à une petite princesse qui porte un voile
jaune, et des pieds d’argent. Elle ressemble à une princesse qui
a des petites colombes blanches.... On dirait qu’elle danse.
... On dirait une femme hystérique, une femme hystérique qui va
cherchant des amants partout. Elle est nue aussi. Elle est toute
nue. Les nuages cherchent à la vêtir, mais elle ne veut pas. Elle
chancelle à travers les nuages comme une femme ivre....
... Cachez la lune! Cachez les étoiles!
No, it is not the moon that causes the uneasiness. It is that Egyptian
scarabæus in lapis lazuli that bedims the scattered jewels and enveils
me in sadness. An image beckons to me out of the ultramarine glimmer, an
image of a king, a lord, possessor of a golden tongue and of a
scintillating mind, yet an image repulsive in its carnal vulgarity, its
dull inexpressive eyes, its fat jowl, its unreserved mouth. On a stout,
democratic finger guffaws the scarabæus.
* * * * *
Lights! Turn on the lights.
I have been sybariticizing with thirteen beautiful little volumes of
Oscar Wilde, recently published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons. It is a useful,
although often painful, ordeal—ventilating the store-room of your old
gods. There was a time when I worshipped Wilde unqualifiedly. As a
freshman I wrote a pathetic paper in which I demanded the canonization
of the author of _De Profundis_. Alas, I have come to discern spots on
the sun.
As a decorative artist Wilde has no flaws. The perfect design applied in
his multifarious productions makes one compare him to the titans of the
High Renaissance: Nihil tetigit quod non ornavit. The graceful form
justifies even his obvious moral-fairy-tales, even his unoriginal,
Keats-esque and Poe-esque poems. It is for the style that we accept his
_De Profundis_, that insincerest attempt for sincerity. But Wilde strove
for more than mere external artistic effect. In his critical essays he
lifted the critic to the heights of co- and re-creation, and instructed
him to demand from a work of art eternal values. “The critic rejects
those obvious modes of art that have but one message to deliver and
having delivered it become dumb and sterile, and seeks rather for such
modes as suggest reveries and moods and by their imaginative beauty make
all interpretations true and no interpretation final.” We, his disciples
in aesthetic valuations, come to our master with his own criterion, and
find him on more than one occasion grievously wanting in the
requirements that he had set up for the artist. He either has no message
to deliver, as in his clever plays, or he delivers his message in such
an outspoken way that no field is left for suggestion or imaginative
interpretation. He had transgressed Mallarmé’s maxim—“To name is to
kill; to suggest is to create” not only in _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_,
the work that belongs to the crushed, semi-penitent Wilde; he committed
this unpardonable sin in his masterpiece, _Salomé_! That wonderful
harmonious ghastliness, woven out of moods and motives, surcharged with
suggestive tragedy and fatalism, suddenly breaks into a criminal
vulgarity through the introduction of a “real” dead head, which drives
away illusion and atmosphere, and strikes your nostrils with the odor of
theatrical grease paint.
The rehabilitation of Oscar Wilde was imposed upon the Anglo-Saxon world
by the continent, especially by Germany, the expropriator of English
geniuses, where the production of Wilde’s plays has rivalled in
frequency those of Shakespeare. I know of a German pundit who chose as a
topic for his doctor’s dissertations “The Influence of Pater on Oscar
Wilde”. But continental depreciation is as fast as Anglo-Saxon
appreciation is slow. Neue Zeiten, neue Vögel; neue Vögel, neue Lieder.
European literature in recent decades has had more meteors than stars.
Wilde’s flash is rapidly vanishing. You may call me a Cassandra, but I
venture a prophecy that soon Wilde will find his peaceful place in
American colleges alongside with Austen, Eliot, Meredith, etc.
_Salomé_ will always remain one of the world’s great symphonies,—a
symphony in which the motive of doom rends your soul from the first
sound to the last. _Poems in Prose_ will never lose their charm as
ivory-carved bits of ideal conversation—the art in which Wilde was
supreme, the art that is almost unknown in this country where it is
substituted by talk. His other works are doomed to be time’s victims.
Not because they are worthless, but for the reason of their
adaptability. One must be a prophet, a Nietzsche, who hurls his seeds
over many generations, in order to endure. Wilde was aware of this
danger, and he wished to be misunderstood, but he lacked the profundity
for such a merit. He did not mirror his age; but he had realized the
potentialities of his age, had popularized them to such a degree that
they have become the possession of the crowd. We are not any longer
dazzled by the clever witticisms in his _Plays_; they have become almost
commonplace. Even the graceful, radiating _Intentions_ appear to us
somewhat obvious. Why?—It is the pathos of proximity! Wilde’s paradoxes,
_mots_, theories, have proven so appropriate, adaptable, and digestible
for our age, that it took only one decade to absorb them into our blood
and marrow. Cleverism for the sake of cleverism has come to be an
epidemic in our days; cleverists find Wilde an inexhaustible source for
parasitic exploitation. Our Hunekers (and under this appellative I have
in mind the legions of our omniscient boulevardiers-critics) don a
Wildesque robe, and have little trouble in passing as genuine before the
good-natured public. Unfortunately the constitution of the Hunekers is
too weak to absorb Wilde’s big truths; they prefer the digestible chaff.
Adaptability spells forgetability. Crime and punishment.
Solitude
DAVID O’NEIL
Youth!
If there be madness
In your soul,
Go to the mountain solitudes
Where you can grow up
To your madness.
The Novelist
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
The novelist is about to begin the writing of a novel. For a year he
will be at the task and what a year he will have! He is going to write
the story of Virginia Borden, daughter of Fan Borden, a Missouri river
raftsman. There in his little room he sits, a small, hunched-up figure
with a pencil in his hand. He has never learned to run a type-writer and
so he will write the words slowly and painfully, one after another on
the white paper.
What a multitude of words! For hours he will sit perfectly still,
writing madly and throwing the sheets about. That is a happy time. The
madness has possession of him. People will come in at the door and sit
about, talking and laughing. Sometimes he jumps out of his chair and
walks up and down. He lights and relights his pipe. Overcome with
weariness he goes forth to walk. When he walks he carries a heavy
walking stick and goes muttering along.
The novelist tries to shake off his madness but he does not succeed. In
a store he buys cheap writing tablets and, sitting on a stone near where
some men are building a house, begins again to write. He talks aloud and
occasionally fingers a lock of hair that falls down over his eyes. He
lets his pipe go out and relights it nervously.
Days pass. It is raining and again the novelist works in his room. After
a long evening he throws all he has written away.
What is the secret of the madness of the writer? He is a small man and
has a torn ear. A part of his ear has been carried away by the explosion
of a gun. Above the ear there is a spot, as large as a child’s hand,
where no hair grows.
The novelist is a clerk in a store in Wabash Avenue in Chicago. When he
was a quite young man he began to clerk in the store and for a time
promised to be successful. He sold goods, and there was something in his
smile that won its way into all hearts. How he liked the people who came
into the store and how the people liked him!
In the store now the novelist does not promise to be successful. There
is a kind of conspiracy in the store. Although he tries earnestly he
continues to make mistakes and all of his fellows conspire to forgive
and conceal his mistakes. Sometimes when he has muddled things badly
they are impatient and the manager of the store, a huge, fat fellow with
thin grey hair, takes him into a room and begins to scold.
The two men sit by a window and look down into Wabash Avenue. It is
snowing and people hurry along with bowed heads. So much do the novelist
and the fat grey-haired man like each other that the scolding does not
last. They begin to talk and the hours pass. Presently it is time to
close the store for the night and the two go down a flight of stairs to
the street.
On the corner stand the novelist and the store-manager, still talking.
Presently they go together to dine. The manager of the store looks at
his watch and it is eight o’clock. He remembers a dinner engagement with
his wife and hurries away. On the street car he blames himself for his
carelessness. “I should not have tried to reprimand the fellow,” he
says, and laughs.
It is night and the novelist works in his room. The night is cold and he
opens a window. There is, in his closet, a torn woolen jacket given him
by a friend, and he wraps the jacket about him. It has stopped snowing
and the stars are in the sky.
The talk with the store-manager has inflamed the mind of the novelist.
Again he writes furiously. What he is now writing will not fit into the
life-story of Virginia Borden but, for the moment, he thinks that it
will and he is happy. Tomorrow he will throw all away, but that will not
destroy his happiness.
Who is this Virginia Borden of whom the novelist writes and why does he
write of her? He does not know that he will get money for his story and
he is growing old. What a foolish affair. Presently there may be a new
manager in the store and the novelist will lose his place. Once in a
while he thinks of that and then he smiles.
The novelist is not to be won from his purpose. Virginia Borden is a
woman who lived in Chicago. The novelist has seen and talked with her.
Like the store-manager she forgot herself talking to him. She forgot the
torn ear and the bald spot where no hair grew and the skin was snow
white. To talk with the novelist was like talking aloud to herself. It
was delightful. For a year she knew him and then went away to live with
a brother in Colorado where she was thrown from a horse and killed.
When she lived in Chicago many people knew Virginia Borden. They saw her
going here and there in the streets. Once she was married to a man who
was leader of an orchestra in a theater but the marriage was not a
success. Nothing that Virginia Borden did in the city was successful.
The novelist is to write the life-story of Virginia Borden. As he begins
the task a great humbleness comes over him. Tears come into his eyes. He
is afraid and trembles.
In the woman who talked and talked with him the novelist has seen many
strange, beautiful, unexpected little turns of mind. He knows that in
Virginia Borden there was spirit that, but for the muddle of life, might
have become a great flame.
It is the dream of the novelist that he will make men understand the
spirit of the woman they saw in the streets. He wants to tell the
store-manager of her and the little wiry man who has a desk next to his
own. In the Wabash Avenue store there is a woman who sits on a high
stool with her back to the novelist. He wants to tell her of Virginia
Borden, to make her see the reality of the woman who failed, to make all
see that such a woman once lived and went about among the women of
Chicago.
As the novelist writes events grow in his mind. His mind is forever
active and he is continually making up stories about himself. As the
Virginia Borden whom men saw was a caricature of the Virginia Borden who
lived in the mind of the novelist, so he knows that he is himself but a
shadow of something very real.
And so the novelist puts himself into the book. In the book he is a
large, square-shouldered man with tiny eyes. He is one who came to
Chicago from a village in Poland and was leader of an orchestra in a
theatre. As the orchestra leader the novelist married Virginia Borden
and lived in a house with her.
You see the novelist wants to explain himself also. He is a lover and so
vividly does he love that he has the courage to love even himself. And
so it is the lover that sits writing and the madness of the writer is
the madness of the lover. As he writes he is making love. Surely all can
understand that!
Because sexual love is the most useful and common type of
excitement we are apt to think it necessary to life, when the
truth is that it is excitement itself which is life’s
essential.—_Rebecca West._
Asperities
MITCHELL DAWSON
Threat
If you should come into my cave
Bringing molded beads of sunlight
For offering—
I would trample your beads
And crush you
With that great bone of darkness
Which I have gnawed for years
And which has left me
Meagre as a gnarled root.
In Passing
One moment—
Your friend
Has squeezed great drops from you
Upon his palette;
With your color he has wrought—
Masterpieces, you say?
But the empty tube
Grown flat in his hand,
Will he hold it or pick up another,
Your friend—
Teresa
Do you remember Antonino—
Swift-winged, green in the sun?
Into the snap-dragon throat of desire
Flew Antonino.
Snap!...
The skeleton of Antonino has made
A good husband, a good provider.
Amy Lowell’s New Book
F. S. FLINT
Amy Lowell has sent me her book, _Six French Poets_,[2] who are: Emile
Verhaeren, Albert Samain, Remy de Gourmont, Henri de Régnier, Francis
Jammes, and Paul Fort; and it occurs to me that I must be her severest
critic—are we not rivals? When, in the summer of 1914, before the war
was dreamed of, she told me over her dinner-table of her intention to
write this book and of the names of the poets she had chosen, I objected
to Samain. Samain, I said, was exquisite, but not important; and he
could only be read a few pages at a time without weariness. Stuart
Merrill and Francis Vielé-Griffin, I went on, are both more considerable
poets; and both are Americans; and since you insist on including Remy de
Gourmont as one of your poets, you might increase your number to seven,
in many ways an appropriate number where poets are concerned; and so on.
But she only motioned the waiter to fill my glass with champagne; and
what can a man do against such argument and such a will? And now, even
if I wished to damn her book (I do not), she will have already heaped
coals of fire upon my head in her preface, where she says kind things
about me because I happened to mention the names of one or two books to
her, information she did not really need.
[2] _Six French Poets, by Amy Lowell. New York: Macmillan
Company._
Miss Lowell states that she has “made no attempt at an exhaustive
critical analysis of the various works” of her poets. “Rather, I have
tried to suggest certain things which appear to the trained poet while
reading them. The pages and pages of hair-splitting criticism turned out
by erudite gentlemen for their own amusement has been no part of my
scheme. But I think the student, the poet seeking new inspiration, the
reader endeavoring to understand another poetic idiom, will find what
they need to set them on their way.” That is so: this book contains six
causeries in which Miss Lowell tells you why she loves these poets, and
what she loves about them, interrupting her talk every now and then to
read some poem to you which illustrates her meaning, introducing every
now and then a fragment of biography to correspond with the stage of the
poet’s work to which she has brought you, or stopping every now and then
to pick out rare phrases and rare music of words for your especial
delight. No one, I suppose, will have listened to Miss Lowell’s causerie
in so happy a setting as the sitting-room on the third floor of a hotel
in Piccadilly in which she talked to us in the August of 1914. Through
the long French window open in the corner could be seen the length of
Piccadilly, its great electric globes, its shining roadway, and, on the
left, the tops of the trees of Green Park, dark grey in the moonlight;
the noise of the motorbusses and of the taxis reached us in a muted
murmur, and at the corner of the park opposite, beneath a street lamp,
stood a newsboy, whose headlines we strained our eyes from time to time
to catch. It was in this tenseness created by the expectation of news
that Miss Lowell read Paul Fort and Henri de Régnier to us (she reads
French beautifully); and it is the emotion of those evenings, more than
anything else, that her book brings back to me. This is not criticism, I
know; but I am a critic displumed. I have quoted Miss Lowell’s statement
of her aims; let me now give my impression of what she has done. You can
take up her book, and read it from beginning to end without weariness or
boredom; you will be continually interested, continually delighted,
continually moved. Miss Lowell’s method of quoting whole poems and long
poems as well as detached and beautiful fragments has filled her book
with an emotional content that almost makes me afraid to open it; the
fear of too much beauty. And, finally, she has flattered the sense of
personal superiority in us all by allowing little slips to remain where
we may find them, and preen ourselves on our cleverness. When you have
absorbed all these sensations, you will have come to Appendix A, which
is 140 pages of the finest translations into English that exist of the
six poets in question, or, it might truly be said, of the French poets
of the symbolist generation. In these translations, Miss Lowell has
rarely been tempted away from prose, and you have only to compare her
work with the work of other translators to be immediately aware of how
much she has gained by her prudence, her artistry had better be said.
That Miss Lowell had all the equipment for a task of this kind, her own
two books of poems left no doubt at all. In them you will find the same
delight in beautiful word and phrase which has undoubtedly led her to
modern French poetry as to a friendly country, and to the achievement in
these translations. If she had done nothing more than just publish
these, she would have earned our gratitude; but she offers them to you
as the least of her book (as an appendix!) after you have been amused,
interested, instructed and moved. I can conceive of no greater
pleasure—my pleasure in the book is of a different kind—than that of the
lover of poetry who reads in Miss Lowell’s book about modern French
poetry for the first time; it must be like falling into El Dorado. I
should add that the book contains an excellent signed photograph of each
poet.
The Picnic
MARJORIE SEIFFERT
Here they come in pairs, carrying baskets,
Pale clerks with brilliant neckties and cheap serge suits
Steering girls by the arm, clerks too,
Pretty and slim and smart
Even to yellow kid boots, laced up behind.
They take the electric cars far into the country;
They descend, gaily chattering, at the Amusement Park.
Under the trees they eat the lunch they have carried—
Potato salad and boiled sausages, cream puffs, pretzels, warm beer.
They ride in the roller-coaster, two in a seat—
Glorious danger, warm delicious proximity!
The unaccustomed beer floods their veins like heady wine,
And smothered youth awakens with shrill screams of joy.
The sun sets, and evening is drowned in electric lights;
Arm in arm they wander under the trees
Everywhere meeting others wandering arm in arm
In the same wistful wonder, seeking they know not what.
They have left the park and the crowds, the stars shine out,
A river runs at their feet, behind them a leafy copse,
Away on the other shore the fields of grain
Lie sleeping peacefully in the starlight.
Tonight the world is theirs, a legacy
From those who lived familiar friends with river, field and forest—
Their forebears—
Through the night the same earth-magic moves them
That swayed those ancient ones, long dead—
And these, too, lean and drink,
Drink deeply from the river, the flowing river of life.
Slowly they return to the crowds and the brilliant lights,
Dazzled they look aside, silently climb on the cars—
They cling to the swaying straps, weary, inert, confused.
The lurching car makes halt, they are thrown in each other’s arms,—
Alien and unmoved they sway apart again,—
The car moves on through the fields and suburbs back to the town.
They leave the car in pairs, the picnic baskets
Rattling dismally plate and spoon and jar.
Each clerk takes his girl to her lodgings in awkward silence,
Indeed their eyes have not met since by the river
Those wondrous moments
Linked them to earth and night, not to each other.
They look askance,—“Good-night”—the front door closed.
They do not meet again except by chance.
Editorials and Announcements
_Wanted: Some Imaginative Reason_
“Nietzsche was an individualist, a hater of the State and of the
Prussians, a sick man, a great artist in words to be read with delight
and—your tongue in your cheek.” This is from John Galsworthy’s “Second
Thoughts on this War” in the January _Scribner’s_. And so it goes on: he
identifies Nietzsche with the new German philosophy (which the poor man
would have hated as he did Prussianism), he talks of the Will to Power
and the Will to Love as two forces at opposite poles (quite in the
manner of the Chestertons), and he derides Shaw’s clear-headed
understanding that there is no real struggle of ideals involved in the
war as the statement of a brilliant intellect with “no flair, no
feelers, none of that instinctive perception of the essence and
atmosphere of things which is a so much surer guide than reason.” These
things are heart-breaking. If the artists can not understand the
prophets of their time why should we expect the masses to do so?
_“Homo Sapiens” Is Obscene!_
Anthony Comstock’s successor, John Sumner, has arrested Alfred Knopf for
publishing Przybyszewski’s _Homo Sapiens_. It was suggested that
magistrate Simms read the book before passing judgment. The assistant
district attorney protested that “no such cruel punishment be imposed on
the court”; but Mr. Simms promised to try it.
* * * * *
_P. S._ Since writing the above something has happened which my brain
still refuses to believe. I have just been told that Mr. Knopf has
pleaded “guilty” to this asinine charge, in order to avoid the expense
and the publicity, and that _Homo Sapiens_ will no longer be circulated
in this country. If it is true it is the most inexcusably ridiculous
thing that has happened for many months. It is incredible!
“_The World’s Worst Failure_”
Read Rebecca West’s brilliant articles in _The New Republic_.
_Margaret Sanger and the Issue of Birth Control_
Nothing makes me so positively ill as the average radical. The average
conservative is a ghastly figure, but at least he is true to type. The
average radical is a person who professes to believe something that he
does not believe. If he did, he would be in trouble. No one gets into
more involuntary trouble than the splendid fools who think they can do
quite simply what they believe in, and who proceed to do it.
Margaret Sanger’s trial is set for the twenty-fourth of this month. She
is under three indictments, based on twelve articles, eleven of which
are for _printing the words_—“prevention of conception.” It is these
words which are regarded as “lewd, lascivious, and obscene.”
Many “radicals” have advised Mrs. Sanger that the wisest thing to do is
to plead guilty to this “obscenity” charge and to throw herself upon the
mercy of the court—which would mean that she could get off with a light
sentence or a small fine. And what would become of her object, which has
been to remove the term “prevention of conception” from this section of
the penal code, where it has been labelled as filthy, vile, and obscene?
No revolution has ever been started by evasion. No one wants Margaret
Sanger to be a martyr. _The point is that every one must see to it that
she is not made a martyr._ There is no other way out of these issues.
You can’t really believe in a thing without knowing that some time you
will have to fight for it. Margaret Sanger is taking the stand that her
type always takes—just because it is the type that insists on believing
hard. _We_ should do all the rest. If you will wire your protest to the
District Attorney, office of U. S. Marshal, Post Office Building, New
York City, it will help. You may write Margaret Sanger, or send
contributions to her, care of Ethel Byrne, 26 Post Avenue, New York
City. Please, please do it!
_The Russian Literature Group_
The introductory lecture, which took place January 14 and was rather
well attended, will be followed by a series of talks on characteristic
features in Russian literature. The pivots of the discussion will be
Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and the
moderns. Mr. Kaun presents the point of view of a Russian, not that of a
foreign student.
The next lecture will be Friday, February 11, at 8:30 P. M., in room
612, Fine Arts Building.
American Art
(An Indefinite Comment)
I report, without regret, my inability to present a definite article
about the Annual Exhibit of American Painters and Sculptors. Not that
the exhibit is vague—American art is a definite thing: travelling
collections, annual exhibits, “friends” and organizations have made it
so. But visit after visit left me without words. The feelings I did have
were alternately those of amusement, anger, disgust, indifference, mild
excitement, and most of the time: “Oh well, what’s the use?”
In this exhibit the only thrills or “artiste emotions”—such as one
demands of art—were very minor notes and immediately they were
felt—thump! (Register amazement and then anger.) You come across
something good: its neighbors and surroundings deaden its appeal. Thus,
Massonovich’s _Moon-Dark_—poet’s magic! But alas! it is the only
landscape in the exhibit. Next to it is Oliver D. Grover’s Italian
platitude, near it a Redfield—“blast” his “school” of landscapes,
please, someone! Peyraud, Stacey, Butler—oh, what emptiness! The Inness
Room cuts into the exhibit separating two rooms from the rest of the
galleries. Passing through it one is reminded of the Inness
tradition—how it has been ignored! Or at least how his spirit has been
ignored. Monet, Renoir, Manet, and some other modern French are hanging
elsewhere in the Institute; and then there is Whistler; and again recall
Inness; Massonovich, on you rests the perpetuation, not of “American
Landscape” but of that spirit we shall always be searching for in
landscapes, if landscapes we must have. One parting remark about
landscapes. Hayley Lever comes in for some praise and much scolding. He
has a good color sense, but strength and virility in composition seem to
be lacking. Recall what Jerome Blum has done and you will understand why
this half-way person ought to be jolted.
And the portraits. One of Katherine Dudley’s
decorative-German-poster-“Every Week” cover-design-women, is now the
property of the “Friends”—“American Art as it was in the early part of
the twentieth century”. Yes, indeed, to represent it clearly to
posterity you must include at least one of the numerous society
dilettantes. However, Gordon Stevenson, Blows, Henri, and Davey as
portrait painters are worth watching.
And the rest of the show? Most of the exhibitors have been represented
for years. Their pictures are all so familiar. Many of the paintings
have appeared year after year. Birge Harrison has a rather atmospheric
beach scene; Beal, Albright, Dougherty, Hassam, Sargent, Mary Cassatt,
Symons, Ballin, Weir, Schofield. All are familiar and recognised in the
Market Place. These people are standing still. I imagine they are old:
grey without magnificence. And being haunted by the truth of that
lingering statement that there is no such thing as an old _artist_—why,
dare we say that they are _not_ artists?
Sculptor? There is none.
American Art?—To the Annual Exhibit, Ladies and Gentlemen, for a
definite demonstration!
“The Critic.”
Photography
“My, isn’t that real! Just as it really is! My dear, haven’t you often
seen Grant Park just like that?—a little changed, of course.”... She who
had spoken was considered not a high-brow but just a good normal
cultured woman. Not being a fanatic about art, or anything else, for
that matter, she knew absolutely what she was talking about. The thing
she was talking about was a painting of Grant Park by Frank C. Peyraud
looking east from the top of some Michigan Boulevard office building....
It was indeed “real.” Peyraud’s one-man exhibit at the Art Institute
shows him up for what he is—an imitator without imagination, a
reproducer, a copyist of nature in her most obvious moods. Not an artist
or a creator his landscapes are all “real,” “true-to-life” and they are
all enjoyed.... The Public knows where the originals are and the
association and comparison gives them pleasure and the artist fame....
* * * * *
“Oh, _how_ clever, and can’t you just hear the policemen, and the
buggy-wheels and the bark of the dogs and the grind-organ! Oh, its just
wonderful what they can do in music and with an orchestra. I _would_
like to hear that played again!” A woman speaks—not the one referred to
above but one who holds the same position in her set towards music as
her friend towards “art” in her circle.... Of course, she can appreciate
music, when it is so natural and real.... Carpenter is to be
congratulated: the percussions are given a splendid and unusual chance
to show their versatility—it is they, it seems to me, and they alone who
benefit by this splendid display of music.
“My dear, I just love Stevenson and you know, my dear, those places in
his novels are _so_ real—you can just see them so plainly. Of course,
I’ve never been in Scotland or England or France or, my dear, even in
New York but really Stevenson is so descriptive, his stories are _so_
gripping it really is as good as traveling. And I have a lovely new
book,[3] just out with beautiful pictures and awfully dear binding,
showing how the places Stevenson describes actually exist! You know this
book amounts to a liberal education—it’s just the same as going abroad.
I just adore places and scenes and travel in books—don’t you? And
Stevenson,” she ended with a sigh, “is _so_ romantic.” Which reminds me
of a line of the Intolerable Wilde’s in a letter from Reading—“I see
that romantic surroundings are the worst surroundings possible for
romantic writers.” ... “And, my dear, it brings Art so close to everyday
life, does it not?—to have artists portray for us our everyday
surroundings and show us how nice they are.”
[3] _On the Trail of Stevenson by Clayton Hamilton._ _New York:
Doubleday, Page and Company._
Long, long ago one Woman spoke to an Artist—will her type _never_ become
extinct?
“But, Mr. Turner” (Artist; contemporary of John Ruskin) “I never saw
such colors in a sky in all my life.”
“My dear madam,” he returned, “don’t you wish you had?”
—C. A. Z.
Book Discussion
A Brilliant Enemy
_Modern Painting, by Willard Huntington Wright. New York: John
Lane Company._
It is a hard book. None of Clive Bell’s sunny cynicism, none of
Kandinsky’s colorful musicalness; surely nothing in common with the
watery ecstacies of our official Chicago modernist, Arthur Jerome Eddy.
While reading the voluminous book I experienced an uneasy, an uncertain
feeling in regard to the author: to hate him, or just to dislike him?
Let me confess that when I turned over the last page I lowered my head
in respect for a brilliant enemy.
It is a hard book, brothers-dilettanti. It gives us a merciless
thrashing, we who love without being able to state why and wherefore. We
are ordered to go to school, children, to study chemistry and color, to
approach a work of art as scientifically equipped as a surgeon venturing
to operate on a human body. As a reward we are promised the bliss of
unadulterated aesthetic emotion. Ah, that aesthetic emotion! For a time
we believed that it was possible to grasp that slippery “blue bird” by
following Clive Bell’s maxim on the significance of form. Alas, this
theory is obsolete. Color itself should become form, proclaims Mr.
Wright, and he quotes the manifesto of his beloved Synchromists: “In our
painting color becomes the generating function. Painting being the art
of color, any quality of a picture not expressed by color is not
painting!”