THE LITTLE REVIEW
Literature Drama Music Art
MARGARET C. ANDERSON
EDITOR
JUNE-JULY, 1916
Malmaison Amy Lowell
The Philosopher Sherwood Anderson
Song of the Killing of Liars Richard Hunt
Mlle. Poetry Meets Me at the Roscoe Brink
Church
Silhouettes Harriet Dean
Our Migratory Address
Psycho-Analysis Florence Kiper Frank
A Dyptich: Skipwith Cannell
Wonder Song
Scorn
The Deeper Scorn
Hokku Edgar Lee Masters
Poems: Mark Turbyfill
Thin Day
The Rose Jar
The Irish Revolutionists Padraic Colum
Bring Out Your Dead:
Braithwaites Death-Cart Mitchell Dawson
Tree’s “Merchant of Venice” Rollo Peters
Some Imagist Poets, 1916 Mary Aldis
Three Imagist Poets John Gould Fletcher
The Reader Critic
A Vers Libre Prize Contest
Published Monthly
15 cents a copy
MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Publisher
Montgomery Block
SAN FRANCISCO, CAL.
$1.50 a year
Entered as second-class matter at Postoffice, San Francisco, Cal.
THE LITTLE REVIEW
VOL. III
JUNE-JULY, 1916
NO. 4
Copyright, 1916, by Margaret C. Anderson
Malmaison
AMY LOWELL
I
How the slates of the roof sparkle in the sun, over there, over there,
beyond the high wall! How quietly the Seine runs in loops and windings,
over there, over there, sliding through the green countryside! Like
ships of the line, stately with canvas, the tall clouds pass along the
sky, over the glittering roof, over the trees, over the looped and
curving river. A breeze quivers through the linden trees. Roses bloom at
Malmaison. Roses! Roses! But the road is dusty. Already the Citoyenne
Beauharnais wearies of her walk. Her skin is chalked and powdered with
dust, she smells dust, and behind the wall are roses! Roses with smooth
open petals, poised above rippling leaves.... Roses.... They have told
her so. The Citoyenne Beauharnais shrugs her shoulders and makes a
little face. She must mend her pace if she would be back in time for
dinner. Roses indeed! The guillotine more likely.
* * * * *
The tiered clouds float over Malmaison, and the slate roof sparkles in
the sun.
II
Gallop! Gallop! The General brooks no delay. Make way, good people, and
scatter out of his path, you, and your hens, and your dogs, and your
children. The General is returned from Egypt, and is come in a calèche
and four to visit his new property. Throw open the gates, you, Porter of
Malmaison. Pull off your cap, my man, this is your master, the husband
of Madame. Faster! Faster! A jerk and a jingle and they are arrived, he
and she. Madame has red eyes. Fi! It is for joy at her husband’s return.
Learn your place, Porter. A gentleman here for two months? Fi! Fi, then!
Since when have you taken to gossiping? Madame may have a brother, I
suppose. That—all green, and red, and glitter, with flesh as dark as
ebony—that is a slave; a blood-thirsty, stabbing, slashing heathen, come
from the hot countries to cure your tongue of idle whispering.
* * * * *
A fine afternoon it is, with tall bright clouds sailing over the trees.
* * * * *
“Bonaparte, mon ami, the trees are golden like my star, the star I
pinned to your destiny when I married you. The gypsy, you remember her
prophecy. My dear friend, not here, the servants are watching; send them
away, and that flashing splendour, Roustan. Superb—Imperial, but.... My
dear, your arm is trembling; I faint to feel it touching me! No, no,
Bonaparte, not that—spare me that—did we not bury that last night! You
hurt me, my friend, you are so hot and strong. Not long, Dear, no, thank
God, not long.”
The looped river runs saffron, for the sun is setting. It is getting
dark. Dark. Darker. In the moonlight, the slate roof shines palely
milkily white.
The roses have faded at Malmaison, nipped by the frost. What need for
roses? Smooth, open petals—her arms. Fragrant, outcurved petals—her
breasts. He rises like a sun above her, stooping to touch the petals,
press them wider. Eagles. Bees. What are they to open roses! A little
shivering breeze runs through the linden trees, and the tiered clouds
blow across the sky like ships of the line, stately with canvas.
III
The gates stand wide at Malmaison, stand wide all day. The gravel of the
avenue glints under the continual rolling of wheels. An officer gallops
up with his sabre clicking; a mameluke gallops down with his charger
kicking. Valets-de-pied run about in ones, and twos, and groups, like
swirled blown leaves. Tramp! Tramp! The guard is changing, and the
grenadiers off duty lounge out of sight, ranging along the roads toward
Paris.
The slate roof sparkles in the sun, but it sparkles milkily, vaguely,
the great glass-houses put out its shining. Glass, stone and onyx now
for the sun’s mirror. Much has come to pass at Malmaison. New rocks and
fountains, blocks of carven marble, fluted pillars uprearing antique
temples, vases and urns in unexpected places, bridges of stone, bridges
of wood, arbours and statues, and a flood of flowers everywhere, new
flowers, rare flowers, parterre after parterre of flowers. Indeed, the
roses bloom at Malmaison. It is youth, youth untrammeled and advancing,
trundling a country ahead of it as though it were a hoop. Laughter, and
spur janglings in tesselated vestibules. Tripping of clocked and
embroidered stockings in little low-heeled shoes over smooth grassplots.
India muslins spangled with silver patterns slide through
trees—mingle—separate—white day-fireflies flashing moon-brilliance in
the shade of foliage.
“The kangeroos! I vow, Captain, I must see the kangeroos.”
“As you please, dear Lady, but I recommend the shady linden alley and
feeding the cockatoos.”
“They say that Madame Bonaparte’s breed of sheep is the best in all
France.”
“And, oh, have you seen the enchanting little cedar she planted when the
First Consul sent home the news of the victory of Marengo?”
Picking, choosing, the chattering company flits to and fro. Over the
trees the great clouds go, tiered, stately, like ships of the line
bright with canvas.
Prisoner’s-base, and its swooping, veering, racing, giggling, bumping.
The First Consul runs plump into M. de Beauharnais and falls. But he
picks himself up smartly, and starts after M. Isabey. Too late, M. Le
Premier Consul, Mademoiselle Hortense is out after you. Quickly, my dear
Sir! Stir your short legs, she is swift and eager, and as graceful as
her mother. She is there, that other, playing too, but lightly, warily,
bearing herself with care, rather floating out upon the air than
running, never far from goal. She is there, borne up above her guests as
something indefinably fair, a rose above periwinkles. A blown rose,
smooth as satin, reflexed, one loosened petal hanging back and down. A
rose that undulates languorously as the breeze takes it, resting upon
its leaves in a faintness of perfume.
* * * * *
There are rumours about the First Consul. Malmaison is full of women,
and Paris is only two leagues distant. Madame Bonaparte stands on the
wooden bridge at sunset, and watches a black swan pushing the pink and
silver water in front of him as he swims, crinkling its smoothness into
pleats of changing colour with his breast. Madame Bonaparte presses
against the parapet of the bridge, and the crushed roses at her belt
melt, petal by petal, into the pink water.
IV
A vile day, Porter. But keep your wits about you. The Empress will soon
be here. Queer, without the Emperor! It is indeed, but best not consider
that. Scratch your head and prick up your ears. Divorce is not for you
to debate about. She is late? Ah, well, the roads are muddy. The rain
spears are as sharp as whetted knives. They dart down and down, edged
and shining. Clop-trop! Clop-trop! A carriage grows out of the mist.
Hist, Porter. You can keep on your hat. It is only Her Majesty’s dogs
and her parrot. Clop-trop! The Ladies in Waiting, Porter. Clop-trop! It
is Her Majesty. At least, I suppose it is, but the blinds are drawn.
“In all the years I have served Her Majesty she never before passed the
gate without giving me a smile!”
“You’re a droll fellow, to expect the Empress to put out her head in the
pouring rain and salute you. She has affairs of her own to think about.”
Clang the gate, no need for further waiting, nobody else will be coming
to Malmaison tonight.
White under her veil, drained and shaking, the woman crosses the
antechamber. Empress! Empress! Foolish splendour, perished to dust.
Ashes of roses, ashes of youth. Empress forsooth!
Over the glass domes of the hot houses drenches the rain. Behind her a
clock ticks—ticks again. The sound knocks upon her thought with the
echoing shudder of hollow vases. She places her hands on her ears, but
the minutes pass, knocking. Tears in Malmaison. And years to come each
knocking by, minute after minute. Years, many years, and tears, and cold
pouring rain.
“I feel as though I had died, and the only sensation I have is that I am
no more.”
Rain! Heavy, thudding rain!
V
The roses bloom at Malmaison. And not only roses. Tulips, myrtles,
geraniums, camellias, rhododendrons, dahlias, double hyacinths. All the
year through, under glass, under the sky, flowers bud, expand, die, and
give way to others, always others. From distant countries they have been
brought, and taught to live in the cool temperateness of France. There
is the _Bonapartea_ from Peru; the _Napoleone Impériale_; the
_Josephinia Imperatrix_, a pearl-white flower, purple-shadowed, the
calix pricked out with crimson points. Malmaison wears its flowers as a
lady wears her gems, flauntingly, assertively. Malmaison decks herself
to hide the hollow within.
The glass-houses grow and grow and every year fling up hotter reflexions
to the sailing sun.
The cost runs into millions, but a woman must have something to console
herself for a broken heart. One can play backgammon and patience, and
then patience and backgammon, and stake gold Napoleons on each game won.
Sport truly! It is an unruly spirit which could ask better. With her
jewels, her laces, her shawls; her two hundred and twenty dresses, her
fichus, her veils; her pictures, her busts, her birds. It is absurd that
she cannot be happy. The Emperor smarts under the thought of her
ingratitude. What could he do more? And yet she spends, spends as never
before. It is ridiculous. Can she not enjoy life at a smaller figure?
Was ever monarch plagued with so extravagant an ex-wife? She owes her
chocolate-merchant, her candle-merchant, her sweetmeat purveyor; her
grocer, her butcher, her poulterer; her architect, and the shopkeeper
who sells her rouge; her perfumer, her dressmaker, her merchant of
shoes. She owes for fans, plants, engravings, and chairs. She owes
masons and carpenters, vintners, lingères. The lady’s affairs are in sad
confusion.
And why? Why?
Can a river flow when the spring is dry?
* * * * *
Night. The Empress sits alone, and the clock ticks, one after one. The
clock nicks off the edges of her life. She is chipped like an old bit of
china; she is frayed like a garment of last year’s wearing. She is soft,
crinkled, like a fading rose. And each minute flows by brushing against
her, shearing off another and another petal. The Empress crushes her
breasts with her hands, and weeps. And the tall clouds sail over
Malmaison like a procession of stately ships bound for the moon.
* * * * *
Scarlet, clear-blue, purple epauletted with gold. It is a parade of
soldiers sweeping up the avenue. Eight horses, eight Imperial harnesses,
four caparisoned postillions, a carriage with the Emperor’s arms on the
panels. Ho, Porter, pop out your eyes, and no wonder. Where else under
the Heavens could you see such splendour!
They sit on a stone seat. The little man in the green coat of a colonel
of Chasseurs, and the lady, beautiful as a satin seedpod, and as pale.
The house has memories. The satin seedpod holds his germs of Empire. We
will stay here, under the blue sky and the turreted white clouds. She
draws him; he feels her faded loveliness urge him to replenish it. Her
soft transparent texture woos his nervous fingering. He speaks to her of
debts, of resignation; of her children, and his; he promises that she
shall see the King of Rome; he says some harsh things and some pleasant.
But she is there, close to him, rose toned to amber, white shot with
violet, pungent to his nostrils as embalmed rose-leaves in a twilit
room.
Suddenly the Emperor calls his carriage and rolls away across the
looping Seine.
VI
Crystal-blue brightness over the glass-houses. Crystal-blue streaks and
ripples over the lake. A macaw on a gilded perch screams; they have
forgotten to take out his dinner. The windows shake. Boom! Boom! It is
the rumbling of Prussian cannon beyond Pecq. Roses bloom at Malmaison.
Roses! Roses! Swimming above their leaves, rotting beneath them. Fallen
flowers strew the unraked walks. Fallen flowers for a fallen Emperor!
The General in charge of him draws back and watches. Snatches of
music—snarling, sneering music of bagpipes. They say a Scotch regiment
is besieging St. Denis. The Emperor wipes his face, or is it his eyes?
His tired eyes which see nowhere the grace they long for. Josephine!
Somebody asks him a question, he does not answer, somebody else does
that. There are voices, but one voice he does not hear, and yet he hears
it all the time. Josephine! The Emperor puts up his hand to screen his
face. The white light of a bright cloud spears sharply through the
linden trees. “Vive l’Empereur!” There are troops passing beyond the
wall, troops which sing and call. Boom! A pink rose is jarred off its
stem and falls at the Emperor’s feet.
“Very well. I go.” Where! Does it matter? There is no sword to clatter.
Nothing but soft brushing gravel and a gate which shuts with a click.
“Quick, fellow, don’t spare your horses.”
A whip cracks, wheels turn, why burn one’s eyes following a fleck of
dust.
VII
Over the slate roof tall clouds, like ships of the line, pass along the
sky. The glass-houses glitter splotchily, for many of their lights are
broken. Roses bloom, fiery cinders quenching under damp weeds. Wreckage
and misery, and a trailing of petty deeds smearing over old
recollections.
The musty rooms are empty and their shutters are closed, only in the
gallery there is a stuffed black swan, covered with dust. When you touch
it the feathers come off and float softly to the ground. Through a chink
in the shutters one can see the stately clouds crossing the sky toward
the Roman arches of the Marley Aqueduct.
The Philosopher
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
He was an old man with a white beard and huge nose and hands. Long
before the time during which we will know him he was a doctor, and drove
a jaded white horse from house to house through the streets of
Winesburg, Ohio. Later he married a girl who had money. She had been
left a large fertile farm when her father died. The girl was quiet,
tall, and dark, and to many people she seemed very beautiful. Everyone
in Winesburg wondered why she married the doctor. Within a year after
the marriage she died.
The knuckles of the doctor’s hands were extraordinarily large. When the
hands were closed they looked like clusters of unpainted wooden balls as
large as walnuts fastened together by steel rods. He smoked a cob pipe,
and after his wife’s death sat all day in his empty office close by a
window that was covered with cobwebs. He never opened the window. Once,
on a hot day in August, he tried but found it stuck fast, and after that
he forgot all about it.
Winesburg had forgotten the old man, but in Doctor Reefy there were the
seeds of something. Alone in his musty office in the Heffner block,
above the Paris Dry Goods Company’s store, he worked ceaselessly,
building up something that he himself destroyed. Little pyramids of
truth he erected and after erecting knocked them down again that he
might have the truths to erect other pyramids.
Doctor Reefy was a tall man who had worn one suit of clothes for ten
years. It was frayed at the sleeves and little holes had appeared at the
knees and elbows. In the office he wore also a linen duster with huge
pockets into which he continually stuffed scraps of paper. After some
weeks the scraps of paper became little hard round balls and when the
pockets were filled with these he dumped them out upon the floor. For
ten years he had but one friend, another old man named John Spaniard,
who owned a tree nursery. Sometimes in a playful mood old Doctor Reefy
took from his pockets a handful of the paper balls and threw them at the
nurseryman. “That is to confound you, you blithering old
sentimentalist,” he cried, shaking with laughter.
The story of Doctor Reefy and of his courtship of the tall dark girl,
who became his wife and left her money to him, is a very curious story.
It is delicious like the twisted little apples that grow in the orchards
of Winesburg. In the fall one walks in the orchards and the ground is
hard with frost underfoot. The apples have been taken from the trees by
the pickers. They have been put in barrels and shipped to the cities
where they will be eaten in apartments that are filled with books,
magazines, furniture and people. On the trees are only a few knarled
apples that the pickers have rejected. They look like the knuckles of
Doctor Reefy’s hands. One nibbles at them and they are delicious. Into a
little round place at the side of the apple has been gathered all its
sweetness. One runs from tree to tree over the frosted ground picking
the knarled, twisted apples and filling his pockets with them. Only the
few know the sweetness of the twisted apples.
The girl and Doctor Reefy began their courtship on a summer afternoon.
He was forty-five then and already he had begun the practice of filling
his pockets with the scraps of paper that became hard balls and were
thrown away. The habit had been formed as he sat in his buggy behind the
jaded gray horse and went slowly along country roads. On the papers were
written thoughts, ends of thoughts, beginnings of thoughts.
One by one the mind of Doctor Reefy had made the thoughts. Out of many
of them he formed a truth that rose gigantic in his mind. The truth
clouded the world. It became terrible and then faded away and the little
thoughts began again.
The tall dark girl came to see Doctor Reefy because she was going to
have a child and had become frightened. She was in that condition
because of a series of circumstances also curious.
The death of her father and mother and the rich acres of land that had
come down to her had set a train of suitors on her heels. For two years
she saw suitors almost every evening. With the exception of two they
were all alike. They talked to her of passion and there was a strained
eager quality in their voices and in their eyes when they looked at her.
The two who were different were much unlike the others. One of them, a
slender young man with white hands, the son of a jeweler in Winesburg,
talked continually of virginity. When he was with her he was never off
the subject. The other, a black-haired boy with large ears, said nothing
at all, but always managed to get her into the darkness where he began
to kiss her.
For a time the tall dark girl thought she would marry the jeweler’s son.
For hours she sat in silence listening as he talked, and then she began
to be afraid of something. Beneath his talk of virginity she began to
think there was a lust greater than in all of the others. At times it
seemed to her that as he talked he was holding her body in his hands.
She imagined him turning it slowly about in the white hands and staring
at it. At night she dreamed that he had bitten into her body and that
his jaws were dripping. She had the dream three times, then she became
pregnant by the one who said nothing at all, but who in the moment of
his passion actually did bite her shoulder so that for days the marks of
his teeth showed.
After the tall dark girl came to know Doctor Reefy it seemed to her that
she never wanted to leave him again. She went into his office in the
morning and without her saying anything he seemed to know what had
happened to her.
In the office of the doctor there was a woman, the wife of the man who
kept the bookstore in Winesburg. Like all old-fashioned country
practitioners Doctor Reefy pulled teeth, and the woman who waited held a
handkerchief to her teeth and groaned. Her husband was with her and when
the tooth was taken out they both screamed and blood ran down on the
woman’s white dress. The tall dark girl did not pay any attention. When
the woman and the man had gone the doctor smiled. “I will take you
driving into the country with me,” he said.
For several weeks the tall dark girl and the doctor were together almost
every day. The condition that had brought her to him passed in an
illness, but she was like one who has discovered the sweetness of the
twisted apples and could not again get her mind fixed again upon the
round perfect fruit that is eaten in the apartments. In the fall after
the beginning of her acquaintanceship with him she married Doctor Reefy
and in the following spring she died. During the winter he read to her
all the odds and ends of thoughts he had scribbled on the bits of paper.
After he had read them he laughed and stuffed them away in his pockets
to become round hard balls.
Song of the Killing of Liars
RICHARD HUNT
My hands have grown strong
Wanting to clutch throats.
I have looked about me, Love,
And you are the only one
I do not want to kill.
They tried to kill me
When I was young and helpless:
They almost did for me,
And I cannot forgive them.
Whom shall I choke first?—
The minister who told me a piece of bread
Was Christ’s body to be chewed weepingly?
Or my father who nearly frightened me to death
Because I dreamed about a girl?
Then there is my old teacher
Who made me write five hundred times,
“A man’s first duty is to his flag.”
Liars!
First I will insult them
And strip them naked of their lies:
Then I will choke them dead,
And burn their institutions.
There will be nothing left
But the clean earth and some children—
Our child, Love, and a child for it to mate with.
The air they breathe will be pure
For the lies will be all dead.
Mlle. Poetry Meets Me at the Church
ROSCOE WILLIAM BRINK
To a New York poetry society one night with a friend of a friend.... I
had always wanted to see that society. Long have I listened in awe to
the unutterable rhythms of the city itself: the daily ictus of the
workward crowds in the morning, the beat again in the homeward evening,
lyric activity of the weeks rising to a crest like an Elizabethan sonnet
to end in a Saturday-Sunday couplet of application to the heart of man,
involved quatrains of the seasons, free verse epochs and tensions, years
and decades. As I listened to these bigger canticles of New York City I
have wanted to see its poetry society, fancying it some homely cricket
on its communal hearth—my pleasant heart-warming dream. You see, also,
besides listening in on this great, loud city voice, I once wanted to
write poetry myself—but that was long ago before, under penalty of death
by starvation, they took me and put me to work and rediscovered vers
libre.
As I sat beside the friend of a friend, gazing in glad surmise at an
elegant assembly of ladies and gentlemen, the poetry society meeting
came to order. Not since I was fourteen-fifteen, and went to
prayer-meeting because the girl I adored would be there, have I
experienced such emotions as I experienced then.
I don’t suppose you know my particular old white church prayer-meeting.
I used to go, rain or shine, every Friday night, and sit where I could
watch the door admit the pretty upward toss of curls of my affections’
desire. Sometimes she didn’t come and didn’t come. The opening hymn
would be sung and I would hear it not, for my eyes were upon the door.
Another hymn and the preacher would begin to speak with a gentle,
gushing, splashing sound at the mouth, but the door would remain closed;
and knotted, stifling disappointment be clutching at my throat. Another
hymn, and the discussion would be thrown open to the congregation. Well,
the door was stolid; I would slide back from the edge of my chair and
breathe thickly of the resisting air. So late, she would not come now.
To be sure, the congregation was some comfort: there were the frisky
young lady and the frisky middle-aged lady who would pop to their feet
with a squeal of enthusiasm, the deacons and the elders, the sincere
girls, the succinct young men with a duty to perform, the conservatives
and the infirm—all of them to speak. There came one night when there was
rejoicing in heaven’s hour. Somebody had sent a check to pay for a new
coat of white paint for the church. The treasurer arose from his chair
and lifted up the check for all to see. Then were hymns and glad talks
with God and with woman and man. The banks next day refused to honor the
check.
In the New York poetry society meeting appeared no novelty for me. I had
been there before, so it seemed. Then, as of old, the meeting-room was
more charming, the congregation more elegant, but the same, even to the
frisky ones, with an exception in the authors’ literary agent I saw just
a few feet from me. Otherwise the same—a prayer-meeting, the great
American habit, a community impulse boiled down to four-square-wallsful.
As the meeting progressed I knew I had been there before. Absently I
looked toward the door for the pretty upward toss of curls again, but I
caught myself in time. Notices were read—again I looked toward the door,
and stopped. Jokes were made about vers libre; several very interesting
recitations were given; restlessly my eyes wandered doorward again. One
always forms such bad habits when he is young. Poems now were being
read, and criticized. But I had given up: I was looking toward the door
and willing to acknowledge it. But she for whom I looked, came not. Then
the leader with pleasure read a list of several new members—one of them
with the name of a certain rich person, a name I had often seen
associated with the millions of commerce but never with the measures of
verse. An uncrushed sigh of self-congratulation went up over the room. I
took my last look at the stolid door, slid back from the edge of my
chair; gave up. I knew She would not come. My heart beat as of old,
whimsically and sadly. She would not come.
I took my friend of a friend by the hand and sidled out of the room into
the night. A few corners away we came upon a news-stand, full of
magazines, upon every magazine a cover, upon every cover a girl, one and
the same forever and ever. “If She had come, would She have been so
grown that She would have looked like them?” I asked.
“Who come?” asked my friend of a friend.
“The Spirit of Poetry,” says I. “She hadda right, you know.”
American modernity, I bless thee through closed teeth—get thee to thy
prayer-meetings or some Billy Sunday will Carl Sanburg thee.
Silhouettes
HARRIET DEAN
Barn-Yarding
I cannot joyously write little things. Perhaps that is why I write none
at all. The little people about me fill me with disgust. They are
cocksure bantam hens, loose and fertile, laying egg-thoughts carelessly.
The crack of shells is loud, but tiny wet chicks roll out, smaller than
the rest. God forbid that I am of the same breed! If I must linger in
the barn-yard for a few days, studying the swagger of these hens and
silently measuring my own, may I in the end fly away to my
mountain-top—alone in the night. Strut, if I must, but quite alone.
* * * * *
Their voices are splinters of sound which prick my desolation to shreds.
My one great fear is that clumsily they may stumble against my
loneliness. What matter if the tongue be unknown to me! These tone
arrows beat at my door like undesired rain; they hurl themselves against
my tissue walls until I shall go mad with their urgence.
The only true friendliness near me is the blank brick wall of the house
next door. I wrap myself in its unresponsiveness and stop up my ears
with its cold silence that I may have courage to go on with my work.
* * * * *
Flame curtains flap in my grate and send grey indistinctness shivering
and stumbling over my walls.
A dusty mirror in a lonely house waits....
Departure
“And now you, too, must go,” she said to me; I who had already gone,
silently, tenderly lest my steps break the stairs of her heart.
Announcements
_The Migratory Magazine_
We have been invited to spend the summer in San Francisco, so we decided
to carry THE LITTLE REVIEW along and publish it there until October or
November. Then we shall go back to Chicago for a couple of months, and
by the first of the year we plan to establish ourselves in New York,
where all good things seem to turn at last. Our travels have been so
exciting that it was impossible to get out a June issue on the way. (In
all honesty I should add that the chronic low state of the treasury had
even more to do with it.) So we have combined the June and July issues,
as we did last year. Subscriptions will be extended accordingly.
_Charles Kinney’s Article_
Mr. Kinney’s exposure of conditions at the Chicago Art Institute, which
was advertised in the last issue, has not come in time to go in. The
court procedures have taken much of Mr. Kinney’s time. It will be
published in the August issue.
Psycho-Analysis
Some Random Thoughts Thereon
FLORENCE KIPER FRANK
Why not history rewritten from the researches of the Freudians? We have
our economic determinism; why not our psycho-sexual? The tendencies of
the individual studied in their relations to world-breaking and
world-making! Hannibal and his mother, Queen Elizabeth and her nurse,
Frederick the Great and the Oedipus complex!
The priest of the future will be the Inspired Physician. All tendencies
seem so to point. The Christian Scientist and New Thought healers are
vague and emotional answers to this social demand, the psycho-analytic
physician a more sophisticated and precise one. The functions of those
who now minister separately to soul and to body will, as in primitive
society, again be united. The modern medicine-man shall be the priest of
the new order!
To the adolescent, the value of the Inspired Physician can scarcely be
over-stated. Jeanne D’Orge has thus written of the sixteen-year-old
period:
I wish there were Someone
Who would hear confession:
Not a priest—I do not want to be told of my sins;
Not a mother—I do not want to give sorrow;
Not a friend—she would not know enough;
Not a lover—he would be too partial;
Not God—he is far away;
But Someone that should be friend, lover, mother, priest, God all in
one,
And a Stranger besides—who would not condemn nor interfere,
Who when everything is said from beginning to end
Would show the reason of it all
And tell you to go ahead
And work it out your own way.
What of the functions of the physician-priest in marriage! The
possibilities are, to say the least, interesting. As substitute for the
churchly bunk talked at the average churchly ceremony, an intimate
tete-a-tete between, say, the Inspired Physician and the woman. It might
do much to validate the “sacredness” of wedlock. And, incidentally, I
wonder what data the Freudians are going to contribute during the next
ten years to feminism. Ellis states that sexual normality isn’t possible
to determine because there isn’t enough material by which to base a
norm. Especially, says he, is this true of the sexual psychology of
women. Valuable, then, will be the testimony of those who have been
hearing confessions!
One of the most powerful functions of the Catholic Church united with
modern scientific research! I wonder if the need for the confessional
isn’t eternal.
Amazing, isn’t it, that the most remarkable contributions to the study
of personality come out of the modern Prussianized Teutonic empires? On
the one hand men mowed down by the socialized thousands; on the other
this incredibly patient and exhaustive searching into the bewildering
complexities of the individual soul.
Break through the crust of any man as he thinks he is, and you are
plunged into currents undreamed of. And isn’t one amazed at how much
alike we all of us are—and how different!
The Freudian searching into motives is the accredited material of the
novelist; the use of dream symbols the very stuff of the poet. The
successful psycho-analytic physician ought to combine the adroitness of
the fictionist with the imagination of the versifier.
From the standpoint of medical technique Freud and Jung may have
diverged importantly—philosophically the younger man builds on the
Freudian researches and there is no break in the continuity. Freud is
perhaps more valuable to the physician; to the layman Jung opens up a
realm of speculation and discovery more fascinating than that of
Darwinism.
The old sweet mythos, as friend Browning says, has been rediscovered. We
are more wonderful than we thought. We are carrying about in our
compassed personalities all dreams and imaginings. What avails the
modernity of elevators and skyscrapers! You, betrousered one, walking
Michigan Avenue—in your psyche are the ancient Hindus and the dancing
sun-worshippers. You with the hand-bag and that 1916 model frock, do you
truly think you are thinking in terms of American asphalted Chicago?
Indeed! It was the symbolism of the Eleusinian mysteries that was used
in the image which flashed into your mind just then. How was it
recreated? Heaven knows—or Dr. Jung! And in your dreams, when the censor
is quite off guard—how did you, prosaic being, become suddenly the
wildest of poets?
The average man—by that I mean the average man of cultivation—is not at
all cognizant yet of the large significance of the psycho-analytic
studies. He thinks them some libidinous sex-stuff come out of Germany,
or perhaps one of the many new methods to be tried on the insane and the
neurotic. Their immense import for the normal (whatever _he_ is!) he has
not yet understood. It will take perhaps another five years, for the
discoveries of psycho-analysis to penetrate the popular consciousness.
Perhaps less—for some Augustus Thomas (God save us from such!) may
before then write a play about it.
A Dyptich
SKIPWITH CANNELL
Wonder Song
No man who borrows
Should return the exact debt;
Let him return more,
Or let him return less.
I borrowed twelve dollars
From a rich uncle of mine:
I paid him back a hundred’s worth of poetry.
He is not satisfied.
I am not forgotten.
I borrowed from a stranger
An old coat full of lice;
The cloth became strong serge,
The lice became buttons.
The stranger
Wanted his old coat back again,
He got an old joke instead
And went away laughing.
I gave my God some second-hand prayers,
Prayers that were used and fingered and worn;
In return He gave me
My heart’s desire.
I gave my God all the love that’s in me....
He put it in His pocket,
Absently,
With talk of the weather:
He’s a wise God, knowing His own worth.
No one who borrows
Should make exact payment;
If he does as I say
He’ll be remembered forever.
Scorn
I will not lay bricks for the homes of other men;
I prefer to fell trees in the forest,
To fell them and let them lie.
If I go to the forests, I will starve;
If I lay bricks for those others,
They will feed me soup and black bread and onions.
I will fell trees
Angrily,
And I will let them lie.
The Deeper Scorn
I will lay many bricks:
And that I may lay them better,
I will take their bread and their soup ...
Courteously returning thanks
For the wages they offer....
I will lay many bricks,
And in a straight row,
As befits one who has knowledge of his freedom.
Hokku
EDGAR LEE MASTERS
I lift my eyes from the humus
Up the sea-green stalk to the flower.
The base of the petals is red as blood;
But I cannot see the line that divides
The rim of the petals from the sun light.
Poems
MARK TURBYFILL
Thin Day
Bright, alert,
Arise these wild blue buds
Above this crystal jar.
But they have no soul,
And bear no sweetness
On their lips.
Oh pity of azure days
Like these blue flowers!
We cannot endure in their thinness:
Our hearts sink
Through their petal-gauze.
The Rose Jar
O Earth,
You have brought me out too soon!
He whom I love
Still clings upon the branch,
Firm, a slender bud.
But you have spread me wide.
Take these broken leaves,
Now fallen from the core.
(O Earth,
You have brought me out too soon!)
Drop them into your Jar
For him who shall surely pass this way,
At last!
The Irish Revolutionists
PADRAIC COLUM
The British Government, which was quite willing to exploit the sympathy
felt here on the premature death of the young English poet, Rupert
Brooke, shot to death three Irish poets, Padraic Pearse, Thomas
MacDonagh, and Joseph Plunkett.
Not only in Ireland, but the whole world is at a loss by the extinction
of these three brave, honorable, and distinguished lives.
The English illustrated journals that have just come to New York enable
us to estimate by a contrast the world’s loss. They have published the
photographs of the Irish revolutionary leaders; and with them they have
published the photograph of the man who ordered their execution, General
Maxwell. On one side they give you intellectual and spiritual faces—the
faces of men who liberate the world. On the other side they give you a
heavy, non-intellectual, non-spiritual face—the face of a man who could
never liberate himself.
The vision and the aspiration of Pearse, MacDonagh, and Plunkett is on
record for the world to know. A man cannot lie when he speaks of his
vision or his aspiration in poetry. We know what Padraic Pearse thought
of personal life. He has recorded it in his poem _To Death_, which has
been translated from the Irish:
I have not gathered gold;
The fame that I won perished;
In love I found but sorrow
That withered my life.
Of wealth or of glory
I shall leave nothing behind me
(I think it, O God, enough!)
But my name in the heart of a child.
And what vision of life had Thomas MacDonagh? We know, for it is in his
poem _Wishes For My Son_:
But I found no enemy,
No man in a world of wrong,
That Christ’s word of Charity
Did not render clean and strong—
Who was I to judge my kind,
Blindest groper of the blind?
God to you may give the sight
And the clear undoubting strength
Wars to knit for single right,
Freedom’s war to knit at length;
And to win, through wrath and strife,
To the sequel of my life.
But for you, so small and young,
Born of Saint Cecilia’s Day,
I in more harmonious song
Now for nearer joys should pray—
Simple joys: the natural growth
Of your childhood and your youth,
Courage, innocence, and truth:
These for you, so small and young,
In your hand and heart and tongue.
And we know the vision of life that Joseph Plunkett had—it was the same
vision that the great mystics and the great religious had. It is in his
poem _I See His Blood Upon the Roses_:
I see his blood upon the rose
And in the stars the glory of his eyes,
His body gleams amid eternal snows,
His tears fall from the skies.
I see his face in every flower;
The thunder and the singing of the birds
Are but his voice—and carven by his power
Rocks are his written words.
All pathways by his feet are worn,
His strong heart stirs the ever-beating sea,
His crown of thorns is twined with every thorn,
His cross is every tree.
These three men had a vision for their country that could not be
expressed in a proclamation, no matter how nobly worded that
proclamation might be.
Padraic Pearse gave all his thought and all his effort to bring back a
chivalry to Ireland—the Heroic Age of Celtic History, when, as he said,
“the greatest honor was for the hero with the most childlike heart, for
the King who had the largest pity, and for the poet who visioned the
truest image of beauty.” The first thing you saw when you entered his
school in Cullenswood House was a fresco representing the boy Cuchullain
taking arms. The Druid has warned him that the youth who takes arms that
day will make his name famous, but will have a short life. And written
round the fresco, in the old Irish words, was Cuchullain’s answer, “I
care not if my life have only the span of a day and a night if my deeds
be spoken of by the men of Ireland.” This was the spirit that Padraic
Pearse sought to kindle in his boys—this was the spirit that he tried to
bring back again into Ireland.
Thomas MacDonagh strove to create an Ireland that would be free as his
intelligence was free, as eager for deeds as he himself was eager. Those
who knew MacDonagh in his literary expression thought of him as a poet
with a tendency towards abstractions, as a scholar with a bent towards
philology. Those who knew him intimately knew him as a man who was the
best of comrades. And they knew that there was something in MacDonagh
that he never expressed. What was fundamental in him was an eager search
for the thing to which he could give the whole devotion of his life. He
found it in his vision of the Irish Republic.
Joseph Mary Plunkett strove to bring back the spirit and the defiance of
the martyrs. He came of a family whose name has been in Irish history
for six hundred years. The proudest memory of his people was the memory
of martyrdom. The last priest martyred in England—the Venerable Oliver
Plunkett—was of his blood.
These men, with their comrades—the good and brave Connolly, who gave all
of his will and all of his ability to the workers of Ireland, the
upright Eamonn Ceant, the soldierly O’Rahilly, the adventurous MacBride,
Shaun MacDermott, “kindly Irish of the Irish,” and the others—have done
a great thing for our country at this great moment of history.
They have made Ireland not a British question but a European question.
They have shown us that the country should be redeemed by the heroic
spirit as well as by the political intelligence.
They have belittled danger and death for generations of Irish
nationalists.
Bring Out Your Dead
Braithwaite’s Death-Cart
_The Poetry Review of America, edited by William Stanley
Braithwaite, Cambridge, Massachusetts._
The plague being upon us—God knows whence it came—the plague being upon
us, poisoning men and women, and turning them into minor and sub-minor
poets, and catching some in their youth so that they can never become
men and women—the plague being upon us, I suppose there must be men
brave enough to fashion death-carts for the corpses. It is a sanitary
precaution. The more carts the better. The builders should be commended;
the drivers medalled and ultimately pensioned. We should not bother much
about the wheels—how they bang and rattle. Let the corpses leer and
quarrel. But keep the carts well burdened and speed them to the pyres of
oblivion.
This is not criticism, but the exaggeration of bitterness; and you, Mr.
Braithwaite, should not complain if our lips writhe back at the cup
which you have held out to us and if our tongues are twisted to a
sincerity that sounds like malice. When _Contemporary Verse_ issued from
Philadelphia like an ancient tumbril reconstructed by children we
laughed and said, “God speed you while you last.” But when rumors came
of a new poetry magazine in Boston we waited with the wonderful hope of
eager youth. Ah, the new Poetry Review! The new Poetry Review! And what
have you done? You have given us the old doll without even new tinsel.
Do you wonder that I would smash your doll and tear its frayed and
tawdry clothing?
“To serve the art we all love,” you say. Does Benjamin R. C. Low serve
it with sentimental buncombe like _Jack O’Dreams_? Does Amelia Josephine
Burr serve it with a library tragedy like _Vengeance_? And you, Mr.
Braithwaite, do you serve it by writing a muddled article on _The
Substance of Poetry_? The bad grammar and proofreading can be forgiven,
but who can cleave his way through the jungle of incoherent thought? And
I may add seriously that Mr. Edwin F. Edgett, with his puerile remarks
about Shakespeare, sounds very much like your younger brother.
There is the beginning of service in the competently written criticisms
by Messrs. Untermeyer, O’Brien and Colum, and especially in the
tantalizing quotations in fine print from Donald Evan’s new book _Two_
_Deaths in the Bronx_. Amy Lowell contributes a short story in her
recent colloquial vein and Sara Teasdale a sincere lyric.
If live men and women have been sand-bagged and put in the death-cart,
let them awake and revive the corpses of their companions. Let them turn
the cart into a tally-ho and gallop on with daring and exuberance,
cracking a whip at critics.
I do not know your age, Mr. Braithwaite, but I feel that I have the
wisdom of greater youth. You have not quite killed hope in me, for I
know your true devotion to your work. What will you give us in the
forthcoming numbers of your magazine?
MITCHELL DAWSON.
Herbert Tree’s “_Merchant of Venice_”
Could I invent some acid, bitter-stinging speech, some new tongue far
beyond English in sharpness, I might begin to describe the spectacle of
incredible vulgarity—of miserable intent and culmination—which is to be
viewed upon the New Amsterdam stage this month. English shrinks—becomes
the prattled language of babes—at thought of it.
Is the great wind which has blown the dust from the theatres of Germany,
bearing Craig and Reinhart and Barker upon its back, echoing even here
in America, to be completely discounted, silenced, by this vulgarian,
this soulless, thoughtless, casual, shambling buffoon?
To _The Merchant of Venice_—a rambling, untidy comedy at best, a play
for reading, or only to be played by a man of genius—he brings a
graceless cast, a marvelous pot-pourri of music (tom-toms for “Morrocco”
and Spanish jingles for “Arragon”), a quite distended and “improved”
version of the original play, himself (God save us), and a theory of
decoration quite incomprehensibly fearful. Brown palaces shaking to the
conversation of the players—brown palaces with hangings of decayed
green, a sham, paper Venice, elaborately stenciled, a Portia in
landlady’s pink, a Jessica (a spirited Cockney girl) in Turkish costume,
roysterers garbed with all the delicate art of Timbuctoo, a Shylock in
old dressing gown. No detail, no fragment of the picture of vulgarity is
lacking—from red-plush curtains to modern rattle-jacks for the Carnival,
from mouthed speeches to maudlin groupings—a complete whole.
This to an apparently delighted audience, to a receptive press.
Barker departed from America, a semi-success, embittered towards us.
_The Weavers_, finely played and brilliantly produced, clung to the
shadow of an audience at the Garden Theatre, got as far as Chicago and
failed completely there. The two great things in the theatre of the past
year trodden out of sight of the easy public at the absurd and dolorous
prancing, at the loud cajoling of popularity of bourgeois neighbor Tree.
How long is the theatre to cling to ragged precedent; to these mournful
gentlemen of a dusty yesterday, raving through their paper and lattice
Venices, showing us their entrail-colored Belmonts, barring sun and
light and poetry and singing from the song-starved people of America?
ROLLO PETERS.
Some Imagist Poets, 1916[1]
MARY ALDIS
It is a matter of speculation why six poets of widely dissimilar
viewpoints, if similar technique, should choose to band themselves
together to publish in a yearly anthology selections from their works.
An examination into the prefaces and poems of the three anthologies sent
forth by the Imagists and a study of various articles on the subject by
individual members of the group fail to give adequate explanation.
The principle tenets of Imagism, i. e., clear presentation, the
abolishing of outworn phrases and extra adjectives, the necessity of
rhythm in all poetry, the absence of reflective comment, are those
common to most of the modern serious writers of verse; and although the
Imagists have done well to lay fresh emphasis on the difficulty and
desirability of putting these tenets into practice, this hardly
constitutes a new school. As for a definite understanding of the term
Imagism, God help the man who thinks he can explain to another its
meaning.
The Imagists, all six of them (there were more in the first anthology,
but seemingly some fell from grace), write poetry. That they choose to
employ a sub-title need not concern us; nor does their exposition of
certain theoretical ideals. What does concern us is the quality of the
poems they write. If it seems well to these six poets to publish
together a collection of chosen poems, let us pay our seventy-five cents
for the modest green paper volume, to read and re-read those that please
us best; or, let us go our way untroubled, giving our affection to safe
and sure collections—Rittenhouse, Braithwaite, or even good Edmund
Clarence Stedman.