writer since Vergil. And for him (H. J.) there is but one
civilization—European. He is the cosmopolitan novelist. He describes
Paris as no Frenchman does! Not only Paris, but America, Italy, anywhere
the reader falls into a delicious passivity to the synthesis of nations.
He knows them all and is at home in all. He is the novelist of society.
Society—which is the one grand outrage; it is not pain—it is not pity;
it is society which is the outrage upon personality, the permanent
insult, the punishment to life. As ordinary people we hate it often—as
philosophers and artists we are bitter against it, as hermits we are
simply on the rack. But it is through their little conventionalities
that H. J. discovers people, human beings, in society. He uses these
conventionalities to portray his characters. He hears paeans of
liberation, hells of pity and sorrow, and distress as people signal to
one another across these little conventionalities. He fills the social
atmosphere with rumors and whispers of people toward one another.
In describing city and country he is equally great. He does not paint
with words, but simply transports you there. Read _The Ambassadors_ for
French scenery! Everything is treated sacramentally. He is the Walter
Pater of novelists with an Epicurean sense for little things—for little
things that happen every day.
There is another element in his work that is psychic and beyond—magnetic
and beyond. His people are held together by its vibrations. Read _The
Two Magics_.
H. J. is the apostle to the rich. Money! that accursed thing! He
understands its importance. It lends itself in every direction to the
tragedy of being. He understands the art of the kind of life in which
one can do what one wants. He understands the rich American gentleman in
Europe—touches his natural chastity, his goodness, the single-hearted
crystalline depths of his purity. Read _The Reverberator_.
In the _Two Hemispheres_ we find a unique type of woman—a lady from the
top of her shining head to the tips of her little feet—exquisite, and
yet an adventuress.
This noble, distinguished, massive intelligence is extraordinarily
refined and yet has a mania for reality. He risks the verge of vulgarity
and never falls into it. He redeems the commonplace.
To appreciate the mise en scène of his books—his descriptions of
homes—read _The Great Good Place_. He has a profound bitterness for
stupid people. He understands amorous, vampirish women who destroy a
man’s work. Go to H. J. for artist characters—for the baffled atrophied
artists who have souls but will never do anything.
Read _The Tragic Muse_. Note the character of Gabriel Nash, who is
Whistler, Oscar, Pater all together and something added—the arch
ghost—the moth of the cult of art.
The countenance of H. J. says that he might have been the cruelest and
is the tenderest of human beings. To him no one is so poor, so unwanted
a spirit but could fill a place that archangels might strive for. James
is a Sennacherib of Assyria, a Solomon, a pasha before whom ivory-browed
vassals prostrate themselves. He is the Solomon to whom many Queens of
Sheba have come and been rejected, the lover of chastity, of purity in
the natural state.
He is difficult to read, this grand, massive, unflinching, shrewd old
realist, because of his intellect—a distinguished, tender, subtle spirit
like a plant. And in the end I sometimes wonder whether H. J. himself in
imagination does not stroll beyond the garden gate up the little hill
and over to the churchyard, where, under the dank earth he knows that
the changing lineaments mold themselves into the sardonic grin of
humanity.
The Reader Critic
_William Thurston Brown, Chicago_:
I have just read your article on Mrs. Ellis’s lecture, and I wish to
congratulate you upon its sentiments. Although I did not hear Mrs.
Ellis, some of my friends did, and their report quite agrees with your
judgment.
I must confess I did not expect much from her to begin with. From
interviews and quotations it seemed clear that she was simply one who
had never faced realities frankly. Besides, her rather mawkish
“religiousness” betrayed a mind unfitted to deal adequately with such a
problem.
I wish also to congratulate you upon your recognition of the genuine
worth of Emma Goldman. I had thought you were in danger of making a
fetich of her, but this article shows that you appreciate the things for
which she stands.
I cannot believe that the superiority of Emma Goldman to such people as
Mrs. Ellis—I mean in the discernment of real values—is due to a
difference of psychology, or rather of temperament, but rather to the
difference of point of view from which Miss Goldman has seen the
problems of human life. Her experience as a protagonist of Labor in its
struggle for freedom from exploitation has been a vital factor, I think,
in her development.
All good wishes to THE LITTLE REVIEW.
_Albrecht C. Kipp, Indianapolis_:
Some time ago a friend of yours, and mine, under guise of a Yuletide
remembrance, innocently and unapprehensive of the consequences no doubt,
presented me with a year’s subscription to the magazine which you
purport to edit. Our mutual acquaintance made some point of the fact
that you were, as I aspire to be, a Truth-Seeker, and also alluded, in
passing, to a feminine pulchritude which you possessed, not ordinarily a
concomitant of an intellectual curiosity sufficiently keen to delve to
the bottom of things material and spiritual. I therefore looked forward
with undeniable expectation to a gratification of an insatiable desire
to view the remains of many idols and statues still unbroken, which have
been laboriously erected by the prejudice, credulity and ignorance of
mankind for eons. Permit me to apprise you of my keen disappointment in
perusing what I have found ensconced between the covers of your
magazine.
I was given to understand that you were a quasi-missionary, in the most
elastic sense of that word, and as one who is sincerely trying to fathom
your mission, if one you have, I am writing to ascertain what it may be,
because, owing either to an utter failure of a somewhat impoverished
sense of humor or a too ordinary quantum of common sense, I seem to miss
what you are driving at. If your magazine is designed to interest a
coterie of semi-crazed, halfbaked, “fin de siècle” ideologists, I would
appreciate a recognition of your object. To be quite frank with you,
however, I do not yet consider myself in the proper frame of mind to be
classified in that category of readers without demur. I am only a humble
Searcher for the Truth in Life in all its phases and being congenitally
opposed to the baleful spreading of “Buschwa,” I seem to find my mental
equipoise disturbed by an attempt to diagnose by any rational standard
most of the alleged literary ebullitions which find place in your
REVIEW.
If we were still living in the Stone Age and reading matter of any sort
were still a scarce article, it might be necessary to put up with the
poetical balderdash which you publish. But having the daily newspapers
to contend with and other pernicious thiefs of valuable time, it seems a
heinous offense to a perfectly respectable mind to offer it, the unripe
or overripe, mayhap, products of insane mentalities.
No doubt the fault is entirely that of an unschooled intellect, but at
that, I have to take my mind as it is. Just as it is unable to fathom
this Christian Science drivel, in that same measure does it utterly fail
to be touched by what has appeared in THE LITTLE REVIEW of the past four
months.
Let me assure you that I have made an honest effort to understand your
viewpoint. Unless, however, I am cleared up as to what your aim and goal
may be, I am compelled, in self defense, to request you to kindly
discontinue sending your magazine to me. It may deflour my joy of life
and ruin a saving and virtuous sense of the funny. You are too
kindhearted, I am sure, as our mutual acquaintance informs me, to be an
accessory before the fact to such an ungracious crime.
_Sada Cowan, New York_:
Your article on Mrs. Havelock Ellis was wonderful! Mrs. Ellis failed
here ... just as in Chicago. I admire the clear and concise way in which
you illumined the reason of her failure.
There is so much work to be done it seems wicked that a woman, to whom
the world is so ready and willing to listen, who has the gift of poetic
expression and direct logical thinking, should waste her powers. It is
as though she held understanding and wisdom in her hands—tightly
clenched—then when she should hold out those gifts to the world, she
opened wide her fingers ... here a flash—there a glimmer!—And all
vanishes!
_E. C. A. Smith, Grosse Ile, Michigan_:
I was delighted with your critique on Mrs. Ellis, not that I feel she
fell as short as you seem to think, but because your own article made a
beginning on things which must be said. I also emphatically endorse your
views on enabling the poor to restrict their birthrate, not on
sentimental grounds, but because I know by experience it would be a wise
economy for the state. It is natural for wholesome people to want
children; the rise in the labor market caused by the dropping off in
production by the cowardly and incompetent would be amply compensated by
the reduction in the ranks of economically valueless dependents. It
would take less, per capita, to support orphan and insane asylums,
dispensaries, and jails—not to speak of the wasteful drain of
unestimated sporadic charity. The contention that it would contribute to
immorality is absolutely absurd to anyone who has tried rescue
work—girls have child after child, undeterred by pain or shame, just as
the mentally deficient in other lines injure themselves in their
frenzies.
The only way one has a right to judge life is to look at it from the
inside. Before I read Havelock Ellis I was unable to take this view of
the subjects you so sanely and clearly project on our imaginations.
After laying down his book I found my only shock came from some of the
methods employed in “curing” these unfortunates. From the histories of
cases he cites, I should consider it fair to conclude that the nervous
organization of inverts tended to average below par—as is the usual
medical view. This may be a psychic, not physical, result. Personally, I
cannot see any effect the reading of that material has had on me except
to make me more wisely charitable in my views. It has broadened my
ideals, without weakening them. It has put a new value on normality. It
has not modified my personal theory of love any more than the
not-entirely aesthetic conditions of carrying and bearing my children
did. There are points about that sort of experience—especially the
attitude of the inexperienced—which makes the prude’s attitude to the
whole broad question ridiculous. Another generation will regard ours as
we do the Victorians—my shade will grind its spirit teeth to hear them
laugh.
I am not sure your point of view as a writer rather than a speaker does
not make you overlook legitimate limitations in Mrs. Ellis’s position. A
speaker can often suggest far more than she actually utters; the
conclusions people are inspired to make for themselves are of far
greater value than if they were cast forth with inspired eloquence. To
antagonize an audience by forcing your point is to lose efficiency. In
print one has not the personal element so strongly and immediately to
consider. Perhaps she was subtler than Emma Goldman, but not so much
weaker as you think.
THE LITTLE REVIEW is the most satisfactory source of mental stimulation
I have yet discovered. If I do not always agree with it I at least have
the sense of arguing with a friend whose intellect I respect—never did I
feel that for any other publication. And I love freshness and freedom
and enthusiasm as I love youth itself—they’re the qualities that promise
growth.
_Stella Worden Smith, Monte Vista Heights, Cal._:
For six months or so I have been blessed with the presense of your
LITTLE REVIEW. Many times I have wanted to tell you so. It is a matter
of deep gratitude that at last one can open the pages of a magazine and
feel that sense of freedom and incomparable beauty that one does in,
say, looking out at a sunset across the mountains—and no more hampering!
You give new horizons, fresh inspiration, and revive the creative
impulse that is more likely to be snuffed out than stimulated when one
peruses the majority of our “best” magazines. Forgive me if I seem over
enthusiastic, but it springs from a gratitude born of great need. And
you have filled it.
Your review of Mr. Powys’s lectures have carried me back four years into
a period when I was studying music in New York with a Norwegian singer,
and she and I listened to him at the Brooklyn Institute week by week!
Never will I forget it. And she—well, she is a genius herself, an
interpreter of Norwegian folk songs—and Powys lit her soul until it
flamed forth like a beacon! If you heard his Shelley, I think you saw
the veritable incarnation of that transcendent spirit....
Then I listened to him again in Buffalo, last year, on Keats. And the
audience, mostly women (God forgive them!) seemed like school
children—no, I will not confound such innocent souls with the inert mass
that confronted him! And this is our culture!
I think the spirit of your magazine is to other magazines what Powys is
to other lecturers. He makes you forget that he is such. You become part
of his theme, or is it, _himself_? And so it is I seem both to lose and
find myself when I read the pages of THE LITTLE REVIEW.
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THE EGOIST
Every Number of THE EGOIST Contains an Admirable Editorial
by Dora Marsden
In addition to the regular contributors, James Joyce, Muriel
Ciolkowska and Richard Aldington, the March Number contains an
article on James Elroy Flecker by Harold Monro and poems by Paul
Fort, prince des poètes, and F. S. Flint.
SPECIAL IMAGIST NUMBER
May, 1915
This Number will be entirely devoted—apart from the Editorial—to
the works of the young Anglo-American group of poets, known as
“The Imagists,” and will contain:
Poems by Richard Aldington, H. D., J. G, Fletcher, F. S. Flint,
D. H. Lawrence, Amy Lowell, Harold Monro, Marianne Moore, May
Sinclair, Clara Shanafelt.
A History of Imagism by F. S. Flint.
A Review of “Some Imagist Poets, 1915,” by Harold Monro.
Essays on and Appreciations of the Work of H. D., J. G. Fletcher,
F. S. Flint, D. H. Lawrence, Amy Lowell, and Ezra Pound.
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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.
In “Extreme Unction”, the line “THE GIRL. You don’t _know_?” was
obviously duplicated. After comparison with another edition, the second
occurrence was removed.
In the letters to the Editor (“The Reader Critic”), the Editor seems to
have left spelling variations uncorrected. They are not corrected here
either.
The original spelling was mostly preserved. A few obvious typographical
errors were silently corrected. All other changes are shown here
(before/after):
[p. 32]:
... he sang loudly over the hedge whenever he cause sight of
Marianna’s middy ...
... he sang loudly over the hedge whenever he caught sight of
Marianna’s middy ...
[p. 33]:
... wrong things you dont you can’t remember did ye—did ye
ever kill a kid ...
... wrong things you done you can’t remember did ye—did ye
ever kill a kid ...