Joe’s” estimate._
Villon’s Epitaph[3]
WITTER BYNNER
I who have lived and have not thought
But gone with nature as I ought,
Letting good things occur,
And now amazed and cannot see
Why death should care so much for me.
I never cared for her.
Scarron’s Epitaph[3]
WITTER BYNNER
He who now lies here asleep
None would envy, few would weep:
A man whom death had mortified
A thousand times before he died.
Peaceful be the step you take,
You who pass him—lest he wake.
For his first good night is due.
Let poor Scarron sleep it through.
[3] From the French of François Villon.
Editorials and Announcements
_Our Credo_
I have lost patience: people are still asking “What does THE LITTLE
REVIEW stand for?” Since we have been so obscure—or is it that people
have been so dull?—I shall try to answer all these plaintive queries in
a sentence. May it be sufficient: I cannot “explain” every day why the
sunrise seems worth while or, as Mr. Hecht would say, why the brook
rises from the rocks.
THE LITTLE REVIEW is a magazine that believes in Life for Art’s sake, in
the Individual rather than in Incomplete people, in an age of
Imagination rather than of Reasonableness; a magazine that believes in
Ideas even if they are not Ultimate Conclusions, and values its Ideals
so greatly as to live them; a magazine interested in Past, Present, and
Future, but particularly in the New Hellenism; a magazine written for
Intelligent people who can Feel; whose philosophy is Applied Anarchism,
whose policy is a Will to Splendor of Life, and whose function is—to
express itself.
_Mr. Comstock’s Dismissal_
This great blessing comes sooner than we could have expected, and yet,
as _The Chicago Tribune_ remarks, it is belated by about forty years.
Mr. Comstock has been Post Office Inspector all that time. I remember a
few years ago in New York hearing an interesting woman send a group of
people into paroxysms by the passionate childish seriousness with which
she said, “I wish Anthony Comstock would die!” Now that the government
has accomplished this desideratum, it is almost time for it to be
congratulated. I wonder how long it will be before this same government
can “see its way clear” to suppressing the agent provocateur and letting
his victims go free, or—well, never mind: it is beyond hoping.
“_Succession_”
When one of my friends fails to like Ethel Sidgwick’s _Succession_ I am
left in a predicament: on what basis are we henceforth to understand
each other? Succession goes so deep into music, into personality, into
life that has its foundations in art.... You can explain all the
subtleties of your most difficult emotions by referring to how Antoine
felt on page so and so. How does one live without Antoine?
_The Strike_
And God said: “Let there be!” And there was.
And when the modern god, the omnipotent Proletariat, says: “Let there
not be!” ...
You say the strike of the Chicago car men is of purely local
significance. You crack jokes about the pleasure of walking and about
the adventure of jitney-rides. You are calm and complacent, you blind
and deaf men and women dancing on a dormant volcano.
You are right. Your complacency is justified. Why fear the
million-headed mule who has borne his yoke for centuries? He
grumbles?—Oh, it’s a trifle: just fill his flesh-pot, and he will take
up anew with bestial delight his eternal task of enriching the few at
the expense of his blood and marrow.
But fear the eruption of the volcano! For it will not remain dormant
forever. Have we not witnessed the spasmodic awakenings of the giant?
Recall the achievement of the Russian proletariat in 1905. Did it not
wrest concessions from the obstinate Czar by means of a passive
revolution? Recall the general strike in Belgium. Did it not cripple its
commerce and industry for months?
The strike of the Chicago car men is pregnant with potentialities. It is
a symptom of a refreshing storm. Those who produce everything and
possess nothing have slept long in ignorance of their power. But they
are slowly awakening. And when they become aware of the magic wand in
their hand, whose passive motion can stop the wheels of the universe....
Take heed, O merrymakers at Belshazzar’s feast. Behold the MENE, TEKEL,
PERES on the wall.
K.
“_The Country Walk_”
A young Englishman by the name of Edward Storer—I am assuming that he is
young and that he is English—has protested effectively against the
condition which decrees that a piece of writing, a painting, a sculpture
has to be judged as a commodity _before_ it can be judged as a work of
art by issuing little four-page leaflets containing portions of his work
denied publication by the commercialism of the times. The first, which
is called _The Country Walk_, has some quite uninspired though rather
charming prose poems in it. _The Lark_, for instance:
Out of the young grass and silence you arise, frail bird,
spinning upwards to the sky. Faster beat the wings, and shriller
is the voice, and soon you are lost in the high blue, so that
scarcely can I hear your voice or see the maddened flutterings of
your wings.
Then suddenly all is silent, and softly you drop to earth again
to rest your aching body against the good brown earth.
_The June-July Issue_
On account of being so late with our May number we have decided to
combine the June and July and thus come out promptly again on the first
of the month. Subscriptions will be extended accordingly.
_Edgar Lee Masters_
In the August issue there will be a new poem by Edgar Lee Masters,
author of _The Spoon River Anthology_, and also a photogravure portrait
of the poet which has just been taken by Eugene Hutchinson.
The Submarine
(_Translated from the Italian of Luciano Folgore by Anne Simon_)
It sinks. In the twilight of the water
the conquered submarine
falls straight to the bottom
and seems like a black corpse
thrown to the coral below,
thrown to the tomb that devours
with liquid joy
the refuse and remains of the old world.
The propellers, devourers of motion,
buzz no more,
the rudder has ceased turning,
the prow no longer points its sharp beak,
but the submarine extends itself
on the viscid bed,
and a multitude of unknown
fish, coral and sea-nettles
try to enter the closed apertures.
And yet once you leaped in the sun
like a sentinel of burnished steel
shining in the distance,
and then rapidly returned to the green gorge
where the sun never reaches,
but where you find
the tremendous task
that is always with you and that whispers courage
in the void of your soul.
And once with your agile metallic prow
you agitated the green water
all around your shining body,
and you did not feel the torments
of the winds nor the black
clouds of the hurricane
that remained like spiteful women
in a corner of the horizon,
with hair dishevelled and the eye eager
to spy below, from the firmament,
the lost, the shipwrecked, the unknown
that have no pilot.
Once from your sonorous sides,
quietly, but vigilant and mad,
the torpedo shot out,
making its track in silence,
and carrying
within its thin body
death, and the infinite
power of dynamite.
As you passed the sharks fled,
as you passed the corals
suspended their tenacious and clumsy work,
and the fish with rapid movement
swam away.
You seemed like an enormous monster
of a fantastic destiny
and yet you are only a light submarine,
a slender ship
that the blow of a beam
could sink, that a whirlpool could submerge
in the abyss.
I do not know your story,
but I will sing your glory
that is part of the desire
of audacious men.
Submarine, Destiny may have willed
you to sink silently,
and remain lost forever in the viscid bed of the sea-weed,
(O submarine, able to challenge the unconsciousness of the seas
and the impotence of the lighthouses,)
but you are alive and strong;
there is no death, but only an appearance
of death that remains. Destiny
newly moulds you
in a long phantom
and you are run, submarine,
by the courage of men
who, in the unfathomable silence of the water,
are piloted
by the will of the strong.
New brothers will arise
and pursue you
because your shining back
carries a banner, not tri-colored,
nor French,
but the only color
that dazzles;
the banner of the battle
that amidst disasters combats
with this ferocious mystery
that is foolishly determined to shut us out
from the doors of Nature.
Blaa-Blaa-Blaa
I am sick of words—spoken words—verbal refuse thrown off by the mental
hypochondriacs who imagine themselves suffering from thought and
afflicted with ideas.
I am sick of the artificial inanities of the drawingroom—the polite
poppycock, the meaningless, emotionless enthusiasms. I often have
entered a room where male and female husks sat, their faces wreathed in
empty grimaces—animated masks discharging automatic phrases—and wished
to God I was dumb and could be forgiven for silence. Listening is not so
bad because one doesn’t have to listen.
I am sick of the salon-like groups who gather for the purpose of
thinking aloud and then forget to think and make up for it in noises.
Monotonous varieties, dropping pop-bottle gems from their lips, each
individual amusing and delighting himself beyond all understanding with
his sterile loquaciousness. Here in the salon groups, the discursive
congregations which come together in all manner of odd places and all
manner of regular places, garrulity approaches torture. Here the
professional discourser flops and waddles about in his own Utopia. He
doesn’t crave understanding but attention. As for truth, as for taking
the pains to express his innermost reactions to a subject, this is
impossible. The discourser doesn’t know what he thinks, doesn’t know
what the truth is until he starts discoursing. And then he discourses
himself into a state of mind. I have heard him discourse himself into
the most startling convictions; into matrimony and out of it into
religion and out of it, into and out of every variety of
damn-foolishness imaginable.
Persons who use written words instead of spoken words as the parents of
their thought suffer from the same hypnosis. But in writing this is
commendable. It is commendable for a writer to be insincere if he can be
more logical and enlightening as a result. The result may be _De
Profundis_ or _Alice in Wonderland_. It is my notion that men are
sincere only in their appetites. A man craves food and woman and other
stimulants with unquestionable sincerity. But in the realm of thought I
have arrived at the conclusion that sincerity is an inspired and not
inspiring condition of the mind.
I am sick of the blaa-blaaing hordes, from the smirking “supes” of the
let’s-adjourn-to-the-other-room species to the simpering cacophonists of
the Schöngeist nobility.
I am sick of the open mouths, the trailing sentences dying from
weakness, the painstaking use of wrong words and the painstaking use of
correct words; of the stagnated humor of deodorous sallies.
I am sick of the Argumentatives, people with an irritating command of
phrases, who balance paradoxes on their noses and talk backwards or
upside down with equal lucidity; who must be contradicted or they
suffer; who rumble bizarrely from the depths of every philosophical
sub-cellar they can ferret out in order to be startling; who shriek and
howl and wail and protest and—the Devil take them—tell the truth and
make it impossible to believe. Their only reason for talking is to
impress. They are as noisy as cannon and as effective as firecrackers.
I am sick of the delicate, searching souls who prick themselves with
their own words, who operate on fly specks, who grope and search and
struggle for fine and truthful things, who deal in verbal shadings
intelligible only to themselves—and then not for what they said but for
what they meant to say or desired to say or wouldn’t say for the world.
I am sick of their kinsmen, of the surgical tongues who dissect, who
vivisect and auto-sect.
I am sick most of all of my own talk. But I continue to talk. I talk out
of boredom and manage only to increase it. I talk out of vanity and
spread disillusionment. I talk out of love and have to apologize. A
victim of habit, I continue speaking, although I know the spoken word is
the true medium of misunderstanding. Words, words, they keep tumbling
out of my mouth and blowing away like dust before the wind. A pock on
them.
There have been revolutions in literature, authors have changed the size
and construction of the novel, publishers have changed the color of
their bindings, poets have changed the form of their poetry and the
essence of its style, thinkers even have altered slightly the trend of
their thought. Music, painting, decorating, carving—everything changes
with time except talk, which only increases. What a staggering
illustration of the theory that it is only the weak things which
survive. For talk is the commonest of weaknesses. Blaa, blaa, blaa—why
not a revolution? What ails the radicals? Do they not realize that the
time is ripe? They have changed the moral forms, the literary forms, why
not the spoken forms? Why not a substitution of expressive grunts and
whoops and growls and chuckles and groans and gurgles and whees and
wows? Or is this matter one not for the radical but for
“The Scavenger.”
The Nine!—Exhibit!
Sometime in the winter a rumor got about that nine artists of Chicago
were to form themselves into a group and hold an independent exhibition.
At once the other artists were divided into two factions, those who
jeered and those who applauded, those who said unpleasant things and
those who had the enduring hope that at last something better was to be
done in our exhibitions.
The Great Nine, as the group began to be called—whether by themselves or
by others, it matters not: the phrase is a handicap—consists of Frederic
C. Bartlett, William Penhallow Henderson, Lawton Parker, Karl Albert
Buehr, Louis Betts, Charles Francis Browne, Ralph Clarkson, Wilson
Irvine, and Oliver Dennett Grover. They were too generous in their
number. Five, and there would have been no comment; nine, and there was
aroused indignation, criticism, and a “show us” spirit which should have
put the Nine on their mettle and made them give a stunning and silencing
show.
On May thirteenth, after one postponement when expectation was tense,
the exhibition opened. What had we? A new setting and old stuff!
One of the East Galleries had been chosen. William P. Henderson designed
and executed the room. He made a piece of work having faults but being
the best thing about the exhibition, a contribution in itself. The walls
with their subtle color, divided into spaces by pilasters of deep
wistaria, red, and gold, rising on slender stems and blossoming out
above; the screen of red at one end with the Zettler torso against
it—they complimented themselves upon using this; the beautiful vases;
and the green of the trees made a room too obtrusive for pictures, or
one in which pictures are intrusive.
Were the setting less self-sufficient, still there are many things to be
said. The sophisticated, almost exotic, color of the walls, emphasizing
in the work of some all that is crude and materialistic in execution or
interpretation, makes their work appear to less advantage than would the
usual bleak gallery. And why so many pictures? Why not one picture in
each space and that the best each artist could offer? How much more
satisfactory the room would then be. Anyone who follows exhibitions will
agree that each exhibitor has shown better work at other times.
Frederic Bartlett’s group is in many ways the best, and holds its own in
the room. Surpassingly beautiful in color are Mr. Henderson’s things.
The little nude is exquisite, but he should not easily be forgiven his
portrait of Florence Bradley, even if it is not meant as a character
study. However, he is one of the artists who can do more than put paint
on canvas. He can make Art in many ways, as men did in the “high white
days” of art.
The artists themselves have seen from this first effort wherein they
have failed. This grouping must have been a very arbitrary one. Let us
hope that a group founded on mutual endeavor and on equal ability will
continue the effort to make our exhibitions comparable in some degree
with the best European efforts.
Chicago has now so many artists that it is impossible for them all to be
gathered into the old Chicago Society. There should be many societies.
Competition and co-operation among them would make the art life here
less anemic and super-sensitive and bigoted.
R.
Book Discussion
THE APOTHEOSIS OF PETTINESS
_One Man, by Robert Steele. New York: Mitchell Kennerley._
“There is nothing which reflects the smugness of a people so much as the
manner and temperament of its vice. And the temperament of American vice
is more distinctly and monotonously bourgeois than any of its
virtues”—from Ben Hecht’s “Phosphorescent Gleams” in the May LITTLE
REVIEW. I have pondered over this maxim while reading Mr. Steele’s novel
which is hailed by the critics as “the essence of America.” The hero is
essentially American, horribly so. If the “average” type of any nation
is repulsive, the American “Average” is a thousandfold more so. For he
is more petty than vicious. The “one man” gives a confession of his
life, full of puny deeds, from committing petty larceny to “picking up”
a girl in the street and taking her to a “swell” hotel. The nauseating
details have the flavor of the adventure stories which you may hear at a
gathering of travelling salesmen in a provincial hotel lobby. What makes
the boring Odyssey intolerably loathsome is its note of syrupy Christian
penitence which the hero expresses after each penny-crime by falling on
his knees and praying to his convenient god for forgiveness.
The book has been hailed as a masterpiece. It is as far from a
masterpiece as a lewd “photo” is from art. The facts may be true, even
autobiographical, as some critics presume; the confessions will furnish
good material for Billy Sunday and his lesser brethren. But photography,
even if it be pornography, is not art. Let me quote the ever-new Edgar
Poe: “Art is the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature
through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of
what _is_ in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of ‘Artist.’ ...
We can, at any time, double the true beauty of an actual landscape by
half closing our eyes as we look at it. The naked Senses sometimes see
too little—but then _always_ they see too much.” I blush at the
necessity of digging up ancient truths, but, my dear friends, read the
reviews of Mr. Steele’s novel and you will admit with me the crying need
of teaching the American critics the A-B-C of art.
ICY OLYMPUS AND THE BURNING BUSH
_The Need for Art in Life, by I. B. Stoughton Holborn. New York:
G. Albert Shaw._
_The Spirit of Japanese Art, by Yone Noguchi. New York: E. P.
Dutton and Company._
The complete man must consist of three essential fundamentals—the
Artistic, the Intellectual, the Moral (mark the initials: aim!); man’s
aim should be the full expression of his tripartite nature; he must not
leave out any of the three sides, nor develop any one at the expense of
the rest. Unfortunately our age has achieved only two-thirds of the
diagram, the I and the M, remaining wretchedly poor in the A part. When
we look back we find that in the Renaissance period the A and I were
overdeveloped, with the total lack of the M side. The Middle Ages
present the presence of A and M and the absence of I. It is the Greek
ideal we must look for in our endeavor for the complete expression of
man. The Greek gentleman, the καλος κάγαθος, the reserved, the
moderately good, the not excessively just, the harmonious, the
symmetrical—he shall be our standard, our criterion for the completeness
of being. Is not Mr. Holborn clever and Olympian and icy-cold?
Now listen:
The evening had already passed when I returned home with that
hanging of Koyetsu’s chirography under my arm. “Put all the
gaslights out! Do you hear me? All the gaslights out! And light
all the candles you have!” I cried. The little hanging was
properly hanged at the “togonoma” when the candles were lighted,
whose world-old soft flame (wasn’t it singing the old song of
world-wearied heart?) allured my mind back, perhaps, to Koyetsu’s
age of four hundred years ago—to imagine myself to be a waif of
greyness like a famous tea-master, Rikiu or Enshu or, again,
Koyetsu, burying me in a little Abode of Fancy with a boiling
tea-kettle; through that smoke of candles hurrying like our
ephemeral lives, the characters of Koyetsu’s writing loomed with
the haunting charm of a ghost.
It is painful for me to stop quoting the religious ravings of dear
Noguchi. And all this pathos is about a bit of old Japanese writing! I
can see the indignant Mr. Holborn’s moderate condemnation of the
Oriental’s unreserved passion, canting the cold-beautiful Μηδὲν ἄγαν
(nothing in excess). But, O forgive me, Olympian gods, I must come back
to the Burning Bush where Yone Noguchi worships Hashimoro, Hiroshige,
Kyosai, Tsukioka, Utamaro, and other such rhythmical names; I am aware
of the abyss of excess that yawns before me, but the exotic wine is so
luring, so intoxicating, the call of the Orient is so irresistible—I
plunge:
I will lay me down whenever I want to beautifully admire Utamaro
and spend half an hour with his lady (“Today I am with her in
silence of twilight eve, and am afraid she may vanish into the
mist”), in the room darkened by the candle-light (it is the
candle-light that darkens rather than lights); every book or
picture of Western origin (perhaps except a few reprints from
Rossetti or Whistler, which would not break the atmosphere
altogether) should be put aside. How can you place together in
the same room Utamaro’s women, for instance, with Millet’s
pictures or Carpenter’s _Towards Democracy_? The atmosphere I
want to create should be most impersonal, not touched or scarred
by the sharpness of modern individualism or personality, but
eternally soft and grey; under the soft grey atmosphere you would
expect to see the sudden swift emotion of love, pain or joy of
life, that may come any moment or may not come at all.
I recall an evening at “The Vagabonds,” where some ultra-modern
paintings were exhibited and bravely discussed. An idiotic friend of
mine suggested that the Vagabonds pass an evening in contemplating the
canvasses in absolute silence. The obliging chairman, who is a fair
parliamentarian, had the suggestion voted upon with the result of one
vote in favor of it. I recall that evening in connection with Noguchi’s
lines about Koyetsu:
What need there be but prayer and silence? There is nothing more
petty, even vulgar, in the grey world of art and poetry, than to
have a too-close attachment to life and physical surroundings; if
our Orientalism may not tell you anything much, I think it will
teach you at least to soar out of your trivialism.
I refuse to say any more about the book, for I am tempted to quote him
all the way through. If you wish to forget yourself and your
environment, to melt away in the unreal atmosphere of Japanese
prints—read Yone Noguchi’s little book.
K.
THE SLAV IN CONRAD
_Victory, by Joseph Conrad. New York: Doubleday, Page and
Company._
The Slavs are not adventurous people in the Western sense of the word;
for the most part an inland race spread over the great monotonous Plain,
they are inclined for melancholy introspective searchings and spiritual
struggles rather than for actual physical adventures. Their writers need
not create for their heroes an atmosphere of dizzying stunts and
elemental cataclysms; they find sufficient dramatic “plot” in the soul
experiences of the restless yearning men and women who dwell not on a
South Sea island but in ordinary cities and villages, fighting their
human fights, wrestling with God and man, gaining their ephemeral
victories, but more often suffering defeats. Yet, despite their lack of
adventurousness, the stories of the Russian and Polish writers, from
Dostoevsky to Kuprin and from Orzezsko to Zeromsky, have seldom caused a
yawn in their reader.