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| author | nfenwick <nfenwick@pglaf.org> | 2025-03-24 22:21:05 -0700 |
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| committer | nfenwick <nfenwick@pglaf.org> | 2025-03-24 22:21:05 -0700 |
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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d7b82bc --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +*.txt text eol=lf +*.htm text eol=lf +*.html text eol=lf +*.md text eol=lf diff --git a/75706-0.txt b/75706-0.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5924ee6 --- /dev/null +++ b/75706-0.txt @@ -0,0 +1,2335 @@ + +*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75706 *** + + + + + + THE LITTLE REVIEW + + + Literature Drama Music Art + + MARGARET C. ANDERSON + EDITOR + + MAY, 1916 + + Three Flesh-tints: Ben Hecht + The Incense Burner + The Goldfish in a Bowl + A Nude + “The Compleat Amateur” Harold Bauer + Three Japanese Paintings: Arthur Davison Ficke + Dream of a Chinese Landscape + Dream of a Chinese Rock Promontory + The Golden Symphony + The Struggle Sherwood Anderson + A Mischievous Rhapsody of the + First Recurrence + Poems: Daphne Carr + Welt Schmertz + Prisoners + Leo Ornstein Margaret C. Anderson + Nocturne (from Paul Verlaine) Clara Shanafelt + White Mists M. C. A. + Letters from Prison Emma Goldman + Off the Turnpike Amy Lowell + Potatoes in a Cellar R. G. + New York Letter Allan Ross Macdougall + Amber Monochrome Mark Turbyfill + Three Imagist Poets John Gould Fletcher + Rossica Alexander S. Kaun + The Independent Exhibition Lupo de Braila + The Reader Critic + + Published Monthly + + 15 cents a copy + + MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Publisher + Fine Arts Building + CHICAGO + + $1.50 a year + + Entered as second-class matter at Postoffice, Chicago + + + + + THE LITTLE REVIEW + + + VOL. III + + MAY, 1916 + + NO. 3 + + Copyright, 1916, by Margaret C. Anderson + + + + + Three Flesh-tints + + + BEN HECHT + + + The Incense Burner + + A bending flower rises from its mouth + And sways like the vein of a zephyr. + Threads of moonlight float entangled over it, + Delicate as the breath of a dying woman. + Souls come whispering from its ancient lips, + Laden with thin secrets, + And torn by the long nails of idiot Gods.... + Pale dancers arise, whirling listlessly, + Expiring in a writhing languor. + Heavy-lidded eyes crawl out and open vacantly and close.... + Dried whisps of water break into blue wings. + A sleeping woman’s arm reaches up and curves into a sigh + And scratches at the air with opalescent claws. + Dead pearls drift in a dead circle—till, quivering, + A slow finger rises, balancing a grey moon on its tip. + And then a severed face squeezes out and lolls to and fro, + Its washed purple lips leering with a grotesque sin. + + + The Goldfish in a Bowl + + A tiny shimmering courtesan + Dressed in red spangles, + Weaves a monotonous thread of painted rubies + Through the stagnant curtains of her room. + + Stifling under faint rags, + A dumb enchanted nightingale + Tosses in droll anguish, + Dreaming of the sapphire roses and the crystal fringe and the topaz + silks + That were her lovers. + + + A Nude + + The rich brocade of night, + Sewn with the red dust of roses + And the topaz breath of the sleeping sun + Hangs from the cool ivoried silk of her shoulders. + + The winged beacons of her breasts + Gleam with golden moonlight. + And her eyes are like purple bosomed birds + That circle and beat against the azure gloom. + + Her nakedness is an opal mirror, + Quivering with splintered images. + Her nakedness is a white kiss. + Burning on the shadowed lips of the night. + Her nakedness is the flowing of ghostly water + Under fierce moons— + The poplar silver of the wind that dances in the gardens at night. + + Her nakedness is the golden fabric woven out of bloody grapes + And the dead mists of incense. + + + + + “The Compleat Amateur” + + + or + How Not to be An Artist + + HAROLD BAUER + + (_No, I cannot write you an article. And I add to this the + expression of my fervent hope that no Amateurs are going to be + allowed to scribble for_ THE LITTLE REVIEW. _Speaking as a + subscriber, I haven’t the least desire to read any of H. Bauer’s + clumsy attempts to express himself in a medium that is foreign to + him. Let him stick to his business.... You must write the article + you have in mind yourself. From the depths of your artistic + intuitions draw forth the material and give away the secrets—which + are no secrets. Moreover, don’t confine yourself to music, much less + to piano playing; take in the whole field of art and call it “The + Compleat Amateur, or, How Not To Be an Artist.” I suggest the + following headings.—Extract from a letter of the Author._) + + + I. “_Le Style fait l’homme_” + +If you want to become an author, give up your life to the study of +calligraphy, if a painter, devote yourself to the manufacture of paints +and brushes, if a composer, commit to memory the number of notes in +every standard classical work, and if a singer or instrumentalist, spend +your whole energy in the establishing of a “sound technical foundation.” +Emotional expression can then, if desired, be subsequently smeared like +treacle on bread over all these different stylistic bases, this +operation requiring neither skill nor expression. + + + II. “_Means to an End_” + +The amateur must learn that technique represents an obstacle to be +overcome and a set of tools to be acquired. It has nothing to do with +expression. Only an imaginative artist like Maeterlinck would suggest +that the road along which the student travels towards his destination is +in reality a link, a connection joining one with the other—an umbilical +cord partaking of the nature and attributes of both traveler and goal. +To a perfectly rational person the road is merely a distance to be +covered, a separation. + + + III. _Personality, or, as some authorities have it: Individuality_ + +This is the greatest asset of the Amateur. An artist is like everybody +in the world. The book we read, the picture we see or the music we hear +which renders tangible our own dimly-felt thoughts and emotional +stirrings shows that we are in reality one with the artist and with the +universe of which these expressions are but reflections of unseen and +unheard forces. An artist combines the power and responsibilities of the +aristocrat with the feelings of an anarchist, he is the guardian of +privilege and the destroyer of authority, the leveler of barriers and +the creator of the superman, the leader and the servant of humanity and +... the Arch Enemy of the Amateur! The artist is like all humanity, but +the Amateur is not like the Artist. The Amateur must hang on for dear +life to his precious soul and resist to the last gasp the incursions of +any outside force in which he can trace the semblance of his own nature, +for if anything gets in something may get out and he won’t be able to +sort himself out afterwards. Hence the Amateur must be an Individualist; +otherwise he is doomed to extinction. The Amateur’s business is to +interpret the universe in terms eternally incomprehensible to anyone but +himself, and to compromise with the necessity for intercourse with his +fellow-creatures by the adoption of an artificial language which can +convey thoughts and feelings of a superficial character, but nothing +more. + +The tale that points a moral, the picture that suggests a tale, and the +music that evokes a picture; these are the vehicles for “personality” +and your fine amateur must cultivate the pride that the realization of +an exclusive understanding of these things gives. If Hamlet had been an +amateur instead of being an artist he would never have suggested that a +cloud was like a camel, a weasel, or a whale; he would have pointed out +its resemblance to a mathematical calculation or a treatise on political +economy, and Polonius would have been far more impressed—for this would +have shown Great Individuality. + + + IV. _The Mission of Amateurism_ + +A true Amateur must learn the value of success, the immense importance +of achievement, the inward meaning of gratified self-conceit. Praise +from small minds represents the highest possible attainment of +accomplished Amateurism. The object of Amateurishness is, like the +puzzle pictures in the daily papers, to present a pretty little problem +with a perfectly simple and obvious solution, thus giving effortless +pleasure and satisfaction to all concerned. + +The opportunities afforded by collective Amateurism for the repression +of Art are invaluable and as the study of the subject is within the +reach of all, including those who are congenitally afflicted with +artistic talent, it devolves upon everyone who holds the opinion that +this is the best of all possible worlds, to make it his life’s +occupation and aim to be a “compleat amateur”. + + + + + Three Japanese Paintings + + + ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE + + + I. + Dream of a Chinese Landscape + (_A Screen by Soga Shubun_) + + Mists are rolling + Over the grey mountains, + Over the quiet waters + And marshy shores— + Rolling up into valleys + Where pagodas rise,— + Rolling over slopes + Along whose crests + Monasteries dream. + Wild geese soar + Above the marshes + In downward flight— + In flight from unknown shore + To unknown shore. + Over all + Mists are swaying. + + The shadowy bridge + And wandering roadway, + The dark gnarled tree by the road + And the pale tree afar, + Are touched with doubtful mists + Or emergent from lifting mists,— + Trembling in mist; born of mist; shadows.... + O mountains, shores, and streams! + Beautiful transient illusion! + Mortal world, dream world, + Vanishing into mist, into mist only! + + + II. + Dream of a Chinese Rock Promontory + (_A Screen by Sesshu_) + + Across quiet waters, far off, + Faint, misty mountains unfold in limitless ranges, + Guarding some dream-world,— + Some dim and tranquil world of golden pagodas, + Lawns and pools, terraces and deep groves, + Vermilion palaces, and peacock-haunted gardens. + + But that is afar; + And the quiet waters lie between. + + Here at our feet + Rises out of the quiet water + Stormily, ridge by ridge, + Buttress by buttress, + Cliff beyond cliff beyond cliff, + The jagged headland. + + Here, + Gigantic, primeval, + Juts the grey promontory. + It is bleaker than death, though temples deck it; + Starker than ice, though pines bestrew it; + Inhuman, though the village at its base + Humanly nestles. + + With writhing turrets, + With dizzy gulfs, + With winding abysses + And cloven brinks, + The rock rises + In ripples, in waves, in spires— + It rises fiercely, with an appalling passion,— + An apparition of dark monstrous life,— + And foaming up at last to its highest crest + Stands frozen + To freeze the blood of generations. + + + III. + The Golden Symphony + (_A Screen by Sotatsu_) + + Golden clouds, and a golden bridge + Lifting in a great arc, swinging in a high arc, + Under clouds of gold, over clouds of gold,— + From the long slow curve of a golden shore + Across wide spaces of dark river!... + And behold! a drifting miracle— + Behold the long steady advancing prow + Of a golden boat, heavier than the sun, + Quiet upon the dark river; bearing two lovers + In robes of state, intricate, luminous, + Upon this dim river—where the great arc + Of the bridge from clouds into clouds + Swings, from golden shore to golden shore, + From the gold earth to the gold heaven. + + + + + The Struggle + + + SHERWOOD ANDERSON + +The story came to me from a woman, met on a train. The car was crowded, +and I took the seat beside her. There was a man in the offing, who +belonged with her,—a slender, girlish figure of a man, in a heavy brown +canvas coat such as teamsters wear in the winter. He moved up and down +in the aisle of the car, wanting my place by the woman’s side, but I did +not know that at the time. + +The woman had a heavy face and a thick nose. Something had happened to +her. She had been struck a blow or had a fall. Nature could never have +made a nose so broad and thick and ugly. She talked to me in very good +English. I suspect now that she was temporarily weary of the man in the +brown canvas coat, that she had travelled with him for days, perhaps +weeks, and was glad of the chance to spend a few hours in the company of +some one else. + +Everyone knows the feeling of a crowded train in the middle of the +night. We ran along through western Iowa and eastern Nebraska. It had +rained for days and the fields were flooded. In the clear night the moon +came out and the scene outside the car-window was strange and in an odd +way very beautiful. You get the feeling: the black bare trees standing +up in clusters as they do out in that country, the pools of water with +the moon reflected and running quickly as it does when the train hurries +along, the rattle of the car-trucks, the lights in isolated farmhouses, +and occasionally the clustered lights of a town as the train rushed +through it into the west. + +The woman had just come out of war-ridden Poland, had got out of that +stricken land with her husband by God knows what miracles of effort. She +made me feel the war, that woman did, and she told me the tale that I +want to tell to you. + +I don’t remember the beginning of our talk, nor can I tell you of how +the strangeness of my mood grew to match her mood, until the story she +told became a part of the mystery of the still night outside the +car-window and very pregnant with meaning to me. + +There was a company of Polish refugees moving along a road in Poland in +charge of a German. The German was a man of perhaps fifty, with a beard. +As I got him, he was much such a man as might be professor of foreign +languages in a college in our country, say at Des Moines, Iowa, or +Springfield, Ohio. He would be sturdy and strong of body and given to +the eating of rather rank foods, as such men are. Also he would be a +fellow of books and in his thinking inclined toward the ranker +philosophies. He was dragged into the war because he was a German, and +had steeped his soul in the German philosophy of might. Faintly, I +fancy, there was another notion in his head that kept bothering him, and +so to serve his government with a whole heart he read books that would +re-establish his feeling for the strong, terrible thing for which he +fought. Because he was past fifty he was not on the battle-line, but was +in charge of the refugees, taking them out of their destroyed village to +a camp near a railroad where they could be fed. + +The refugees were peasants, all except the woman in the American train +with me and her mother, an old woman of sixty-five. They had been small +land-owners and the others in their party were women who had worked on +their estate. Then there was the one man, my companion’s lover, weak in +body and with bad eyes. + +Along a country road in Poland went this party in charge of the German, +who tramped heavily along, urging them forward. He was brutal in his +insistence, and the old woman of sixty-five, who was a kind of leader of +the refugees, was almost equally brutal in her constant refusal to go +forward. In the rainy night she stopped in the muddy road and her party +gathered about her. Like a stubborn old horse she shook her head and +muttered Polish words. “I want to be let alone, that’s what I want. All +I want in the world is to be let alone,” she said, over and over; and +then the German came up, and putting his hand on her back pushed her +along, so that their progress through the dismal night was a constant +repetition of the stopping, her muttered words, and his pushing. They +hated each other with whole-hearted hatred, that old Polish woman and +the German. + +The party came to a clump of trees on the bank of a shallow stream. The +German took hold of the old woman’s arm and dragged her through the +stream while the others followed. Over and over she said the words: “I +want to be let alone. All I want in the world is to be let alone.” + +In the clump of trees the German started a fire. With incredible +efficiency he had it blazing high in a few minutes, taking the matches +and even some bits of dry wood from a little rubber-lined pouch carried +in his inside coat-pocket. Then he got out tobacco, and, sitting down on +the protruding root of a tree, smoked, and stared at the refugees, +clustered about the old woman on the opposite side of the fire. + +The German went to sleep. That was what started his trouble. He slept +for an hour, and when he awoke the refugees were gone. You can imagine +him jumping up and tramping heavily back through the shallow stream and +along the muddy road to gather his party together again. He would be +angry through and through, but he would not be alarmed. It was only a +matter, he knew, of going far enough back along the road, as one goes +back along a road for strayed cattle. + +And then, when the German came up to the party, he and the old woman +began to fight. She stopped muttering the words about being let alone +and sprang at him. One of her old hands gripped his beard and the other +buried itself in the thick skin of his neck. + +The struggle in the road lasted a long time. The German was tired and +not as strong as he looked, and there was that faint thing in him that +kept him from hitting the old woman with his fist. He took hold of her +thin shoulders and pushed, and she pulled. The struggle was like a man +trying to lift himself by his boot-straps. The two fought and were full +of the determination that will not stop fighting, but they were not very +strong physically. + +And so their two souls began to struggle. The woman in the train made me +understand that quite clearly, although it may be difficult to get the +sense of it over to you. I had the night and the mystery of the moving +train to help me. It was a physical thing, the fight of the two souls in +the dim light of the rainy night on that deserted muddy road. The air +was full of the struggle, and the refugees gathered about and stood +shivering. They shivered with cold and weariness, of course, but also +with something else. In the air, everywhere about them, they could feel +the vague something going on. The woman said that she would gladly have +given her life to have it stopped, or to have some one strike a light, +and that her man felt the same way. It was like two winds struggling, +she said, like a soft yielding cloud become hard and trying vainly to +push another cloud out of the sky. + +Then the struggle ended and the old woman and the German fell down +exhausted in the road. The refugees gathered about and waited. They +thought something more was going to happen, knew in fact something more +would happen. The feeling they had persisted, you see, and they huddled +together and perhaps whimpered a little. + +What happened is the whole point of the story. The woman in the train +explained it very clearly. She said that the two souls, after +struggling, went back into the two bodies, but that the soul of the old +woman went into the body of the German and the soul of the German into +the body of the old woman. + +After that, of course, everything was quite simple. The German sat down +by the road and began shaking his head and saying he wanted to be let +alone, declared that all he wanted in the world was to be let alone, and +the Polish woman took papers out of his pocket and began driving her +companions back along the road, driving them harshly and brutally along, +and when they grew weary pushing them with her hands. + +There was more of the story after that. The woman’s lover, who had been +a school-teacher, took the papers and got out of the country, taking his +sweetheart with him. But my mind has forgotten the details. I only +remember the German sitting by the road and muttering that he wanted to +be let alone, and the old tired mother-in-Poland saying the harsh words +and forcing her weary companions to march through the night back into +their own country. + + + The feeble and poor in spirit must not be allowed to judge + life.—_Nietzsche._ + + + + + A Mischievous Rhapsody of the First Recurrence + + +I Zarathustra, declare myself! Ye have dulled me with priests; ye have +sweetened me with girls; ye have betrayed me with envious anarchists. + +Lo, I am not for the preacher, I am not for the woman, I am not for the +oppressed! Ye say that by me ye shall save the world; I say that I shall +destroy the world! + +These things do I hold sacred—my strength, my lust, my joy. These ye +shall feed, and die. + +Too long have I stood silent in the cackle of my followers. Poultry +after my corn! I have said, “Dost thou seek to multiply thyself? Find +ciphers!” + +I will give you a new law:—Love your enemy, for him ye may destroy. Fear +your friend, for he shall steal your raiment. + +Dost thou think that my aloofness is thy aloofness? Dost thou flutter +upon a ridgepole because I stand upon a mountain? Fool, thou shalt +starve unless thou peck the earth. + +I say unto the preacher: Stick to the Nazarene; he hath deserved his +Golgotha. But who shall make my words a law for me? + +I say unto the woman: My scourge is yet upon thee. Dost thou set thyself +against myself? I shall ravish thee when I desire thee. Who art thou to +pretend manhood? Submit or deny thy life. Serve, or go barren into the +earth. + +I say unto the poor and lowly: I denied you my pity; now ye think to rob +me of my scorn. Paltry ones! Shall I deny myself because of you? Lo, if +I delight in riches, I shall take them. My life is not your life; my +children are not your children. Cry not at my oppression; ye shall not +move me. And if ye mock me with my own words, they shall scorch your +tongues; ye shall go to a blacker oppression, ye shall find harder +masters—yourselves! + +And I say unto the priest, the woman, and the lowly: Touch me not; ye +are my enemies! I have declared myself, and ye have not known me. I am +life, I am splendor, I am eternity. Ye deny me as ye lay your hands upon +me. Remain afar off; then may I be in you. I will keep you slaves; thus +only shall I live. + +_Also sprach Zarathustra!_ + + + + + Poems + + + DAPHNE CARR + + + Welt Schmertz + + I have crushed so many roses + That my hands + Drip with red fragrance. + But I would crush to death against my breast + The wind + That is raging drunk with the perfume of all flowers. + + I have bathed in a hundred cool springs— + Still I am burning. + I would plunge into the ocean, + Diving down and down + To find myself + Freshly fluid + As a wave. + + + Prisoners + + A wind runs through the room, + And leaps out of the window. + The white curtain springs after + Fluttering out. + But it is fastened tight inside. + + My love kisses me + And goes + Waving good-bye + And laughing. + Am I also held fast in this room? + + + + + Leo Ornstein + + + MARGARET C. ANDERSON + +Nietzsche thought Wagner was the artist of decadence; Arthur Symons +thinks he was a unique genius. Nietzsche regarded him as the great +corrupter of music:—“he has made music sick”; Symons says that to find a +parallel for Wagner’s achievement we must look back to the Greeks, to +the age of Æschylus and Sophocles. Each one proved his point. It’s a bit +confusing, and you begin to wonder what Art is. + +Have you ever found a definition of aesthetic values that will hold +through the whole art miracle? I never have and never expect to. Even in +Pater’s _The School of Giorgione_ you are merely told that since all art +constantly aspires toward the condition of music, toward that perfect +identification of matter and form, the chief function of aesthetic +criticism is to estimate the degree in which all the arts approach to +musical law. But musical law is constantly changing; and the criterion +of the degree to which matter and form become identical will be a sort +of sliding scale. And what every one wants to know is how to gauge that +scale. Can you think of a single art judgment in the whole realm of +aesthetics that you can use as an infallible touchstone; with which you +can make a mediocre poet realize why his work is bad instead of good? +You can make him realize, by the desperate wildness with which you +shriek “It’s not well done”, that something is wrong; but to save your +life you can’t convince him that you are talking about anything except +your own instinct—as you aren’t; and of course he feels that his +instinct may be just as good as yours—which of course it can’t! Suppose +you choose one of the best definitions ever thought of,—Mérimée’s “all +art is exaggeration _à propos_”; you find that you’re just as badly off +as before: by what standard is the _à propos_ measured? + + * * * * * + +It was in this frame of mind that I heard Leo Ornstein’s music. First he +came one night and played for us alone, on our Mason and Hamlin, in a +half light and an atmosphere of intense excitement. None of us had +decided beforehand that we should want to laugh or hiss or throw things +at him, as they did in London two years ago. We expected something +beautiful and we got it. He played his _Impressions of the Thames_, +which he afterward described as a river of “towers and turrets and +stars, of dark rushing water, of bridges and buildings, of desolate +muddy banks, and then something which you cannot bear to look at any +longer.” I can’t “see” music, so I only know that it was sound which +interested and pleased and shook me. Then he played his _Funeral March_, +which had something dark and vast in it; then some Ravel, the music of +which interested me more than his playing of it; and finally the +Schumann _Arabesque_, which he did so beautifully that I thought “Here +is a man who plays just as he wants to, and probably comes nearer to +what Schumann would have liked than all the strict interpreters with +their flawless ‘taste’ have done.” It seemed to me that Ornstein did +what he did with it—stretched its slenderness to a lovelier curve—in the +interest of the piano; and that is the very best thing anyone can do +with written music for the piano, even if the pedagogues can’t beat time +to it. + +So at the end I was beginning to think: perhaps this is the man who is +to bring to the piano that something it still needs. + + * * * * * + +But the next morning, at his recital, I made an interesting discovery. +Ornstein has brought nothing to the piano. He has brought something to +the world of music: compositions which show that the piano music is more +pliable than we had thought, and interpretations which show an +exaggeration _à propos_. To the piano, as an instrument, he has brought +what all the others have brought: virtuosity—and in this case a not +exceptional virtuosity. This may sound like hair splitting, but it +really is not. + +Ornstein has done this: he has written some very interesting music, and +he plays it as most composers of talent—perhaps of genius—would play +their things if they had studied the piano as thoroughly as he. What is +there in this to cause hysterics? The fact that it sounds different from +the music you have been hearing? But that would seem to be a reason for +interest, not merely for mirth. This reaction belongs in the same plane +with patriotism and duty:—you laugh at what is strange, you love what is +familiar, you obey what has been tested:—the three ready-made emotions, +with which you can escape most effectively from art and life. So they +howled at Ornstein. Two respectable women sitting near me, who would not +have dared—what do I say? who would not have _been able_—to laugh at a +minister’s treatise on good and evil or a president’s speech on loyalty +to a flag, were so convulsed over Ornstein’s _Impressions of the Thames_ +that they moved their seats to the rear of the theatre where they could +not be watched,—where they could merely disturb the pianist by their +audible snortings. The critics have done the same thing—laughed at +Ornstein’s own music and criticised scathingly his manner of playing +familiar music. Ornstein’s interest, I am sure, is chiefly in what he +has to say, and second in the way he says it. He is a composer-virtuoso. +I had hoped he would be a piano-lover. That is the kind of artist I am +looking for with more interest than I have for anything else in this +world. + +As for Ornstein himself, I think he is a sincere person who means to go +on doing his work. I sometimes judge the sensitiveness of a nature by +the intensity of expression that moves across the cheek-bones. You might +look carefully at Ornstein’s face instead of judging him by the fact +that his hair falls into his eyes when he plays. Of course he has been +indiscreet enough to mention that he does not like Beethoven. Why that +is unforgivable I can’t imagine. A man may surely like what he pleases. +The high genius of a Mozart or a Haydn is a thing he feels intensely. He +admires Chopin deeply as an artist who could do one thing very well and +was content to let it go at that. Grieg he thinks is not a worthy +mouthpiece for all that Norway has to give a musician. He loves Debussy, +but thinks that Ravel is the greater man: “Debussy stands beside a pond +and tells you beautifully of all he sees there; Ravel plunges into the +pond and gives you the life of it.” Stravinsky and Scriabine are the two +he cares for most, as I remember. “Schönberg has worked out his theory +before he has worked out his art.” Something of that sort might apply to +Ornstein himself, as in the case of his Chopin _Nocturne in E Flat_: I +disliked his “exaggeration” in it as much as anything I have ever heard +on a piano. + + * * * * * + +Oh, does no one realize what the unique beauty of a piano is, and that +there are secrets of sound in it which have not yet been touched upon? + + + + + Nocturne + + + (_From the French of Paul Verlaine_) + + CLARA SHANAFELT + + Your soul is like a lovely garden place + Where masque and bergamasque move graciously, + Playing the lute and dancing, yet of face + Half sad beneath their guise of fantasy. + + The while they sing in minor key + Love conquering, life opportune, + They seem to doubt their own felicity— + Their song floats faintly upward in the moon, + + In the clear moonlight, sad and fair, + That makes birds dream where dim boughs sway, + And fountains sigh their rapture on the air + From marble pools—the tall slim fountain spray. + + + + + White Mists[1] + + + There are grey stone rat-traps on the earth + Where human beings are put to die + By other human beings. + They die hour after hour, a million million times, + And still face death.... + + There is blue air between the clouds and the earth + Which they once saw; + There are gold stars, + And suns that come up red, + And trees that turn to purple in the evening— + But they cannot remember.... + + Now their days are bundles of soiled rags, + Their nights are stone.... + I dare not think of them: + It drives me toward the whiteness of insanity. + + M. C. A. + +---------- + + [1] _In the year of our Lord 1916 Emma Goldman was sent to jail + for advocating that “women need not always keep their mouths shut + and their wombs open.” Some extracts from letters written during + her fifteen-day sentence appear on the next page._ + + + + + Letters from Prison + + + EMMA GOLDMAN + + _Queen’s County Jail, + Long Island City, New York. + April, 1916._ + +What am I doing? I am watching human misery. There is no misery so +appalling as imprisoned misery. It is so helpless, so humiliated. + +Yes, I think the prisoners do love me, at least those who have been +thrown in with me. It is so easy to get their love. The least bit of +kindness moves them—they are so appreciative. But what can one do for +them? + +Do you remember that passage from Galsworthy’s _Justice_ in which some +one says to Falder: “No one wishes you harm”? Therein lies the pathos. +No one wishes these social victims harm. The Warden and Matron here are +exceptionally kind. And yet the harm, the irreparable harm, is done by +the very fact that human beings are locked up, robbed of their identity, +their self-respect, their self-hood. + +Oh, I am not sorry I was sentenced. In fact I am glad. I needed to get +to these pariahs who are the butt of all the horrors. It would be well +if every rebel were sent to prison for a time; it would fan his +smouldering flame of hate of the things that make prisons possible. I am +really glad. + + * * * * * + +... We are awakened at six and unlocked at seven in the morning. Then +comes breakfast, of which I have so far eaten only oatmeal with what +pretends to be milk. The coffee or tea I have not managed to get down. +At seven-thirty we are taken out into the yard. I walk up and down like +one possessed, to get the exercise. At eight-thirty we are back, and the +women keep themselves busy scribbling; but my girls will not let me do +that; I must talk to them. (The Warden, by the way, is reading my +_Anarchism_, and the Matron my _Social Significance of the Modern +Drama_). In fact, I seem to have more devotion here than on the outside. +At eleven we have dinner, and at four in the afternoon supper—which I +will describe to you when I come out. Then we are locked up until seven +A. M.—fifteen hours, the hardest of all to bear. Do you remember the +line in _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_: “Each day a year whose days grow +old”? To me it is “each night a year whose nights grow long”. I have +always loved the night, but jailed nights are ghastly things. + +The lights are on until nine P. M., and we can read and write all +day—which is a god-send. Also this prison is one of the cleanest in the +country. + + * * * * * + +... What on earth have I done that people should go into such ecstasies? +No one raves because you breathe; why rave if you take a determined +stand when that means the very breath of life to you? Really I feel +embarrassed with all the love and devotion and adulation for so little a +thing, so infinitesimal compared with the truly heroic deeds of the +great souls. My only consolation is that the fight is not at an end and +that I may yet be called upon to do something really great. But for the +present it is hardly worth the fuss. + + * * * * * + +Today is Sunday and we were taken out to the yard for a walk. It was a +glorious day, marred only by the monotony of the stripes and the +spiritless slouching figures. Yet the sky excluded no one; its glorious +blue spread over them all, as if there were no sorrows in all the world +and man was never cruel to his kind. + + * * * * * + +The days pass quickly between the study of my fellow prisoners, my +letters, and other writing. The evenings are taken up with reading. But +jailed nights are so oppressive. They lie like stone upon your heart. +The thoughts, the sobs, the moans that emerge like pale shadows from +every human soul. It is stifling. Yet people talk of hell. There is no +more threatening thing in all the world than the hell of jailed nights. + + * * * * * + +Good morning. Another crazing night has gone.... + + + + + Off The Turnpike + + + AMY LOWELL + + Good ev’nin’, Mis’ Priest. + I jest stepped in to tell you Good-bye. + Yes, it’s all over, + All my things is packed + And every last one o’ them boxes + Is on Bradley’s team + Bein’ hauled over to th’ station. + No, I ain’t goin’ back agin. + I’m stoppin’ over to French’s fer to-night, + And goin’ down fust train in th’ mornin’. + Yes, it do seem kinder queer + Not to be goin’ to see Cherry’s Orchard no more, + But Land Sakes! When a change’s comin’, + Why, I allus say it can’t come too quick. + Now, that’s real kind of you, + Your doughnuts is always so tasty. + Yes, I’m goin’ to Chicago, + To my niece, + She’s married to a fine man, hardware business, + And doin’ real well, she tells me. + Lizzie’s be’n at me to go out ther fer the longest while. + She ain’t got no kith nor kin to Chicago, you know. + She’s rented me a real nice little flat, + Same house as hers, + And I’m goin’ to try that city livin’ folks say’s so pleasant. + Oh, yes, he was real generous, + Paid me a sight of money fer the Orchard, + I told him ’twouldn’t yield nothin’ but stones, + But he ain’t farmin’ it. + Lor’, no, Mis’ Priest, + He’s jest took it to set and look at the view. + Maybe he wouldn’t be so stuck on the view + Ef he’d seed it every mornin’ and night for forty year + Same’s I have. + I dessay it’s pretty enough, + But it’s so pressed into me + I c’n see’t with my eyes shet. + No. I ain’t cold, Mis’ Priest, + Don’t shet th’ door. + I’ll be all right in a minit. + But I ain’t a mite sorry to leave that view. + Well, maybe ’tis queer to feel so, + And maybe ’tisn’t. + My! But that tea’s revivin’. + Old things ain’t always pleasant things, Mis’ Priest. + No, no, I don’t cal’late on comin’ back, + That’s why I’d ruther be to Chicago, + Boston’s too near. + It ain’t cold, Mis’ Priest, + It’s jest my thoughts. + I ain’t sick, only— + Mis’ Priest, ef you’ve nothin’ ter take yer time, + And have a mind to listen, + There’s somethin’ I’d like ter speak about. + I ain’t never mentioned it, + But I’d like to tell yer ’fore I go. + Would yer mind lowerin’ them shades, + Fall twilight’s awful grey, + And that fire’s real cosy with the shades drawd. + Well, I guess folks about here think I’ve be’n dret’ful unsociable. + You needn’t say ’taint so, ’cause I know diff’rent. + And what’s more, it’s true. + Well, the reason is I’ve be’n scared o’ my life. + Scared ev’ry minit o’ th’ time, fer eight year. + Eight mortal year it is, come next June. + It was on the eighteenth of June, + Six months after I’d buried my husband + That somethin’ happened ter me. + Maybe yer’ll mind that afore that + I was a cheery body. + Hiram was too, + Allus liked to ask a neighbor in, + And ev’n when he died, + Barrin’ low sperrits, I warn’t averse to seein’ nobody. + But that eighteenth o’ June changed ev’rythin’. + I was doin’ most o’ th’ farmwork myself, + With jest a hired boy, Clarence King ’twas, + Comin’ in fer an hour or two. + Well, that eighteenth June + I was goin’ round, + Lockin’ up and seein’ to things fore I went to bed. + I was jest steppin’ out to th’ barn, + Goin’ round outside ’stead of through the shed, + ’Cause there was such a sight of moonlight + Somehow or another I thought ’twould be pretty outdoors. + I got settled for pretty things that night, I guess. + I ain’t stuck on em no more. + Well, them laylock bushes side o’ th’ house + Was real lovely. + Glitt’rin’ and shakin’ in the moonlight, + And the smell o’ them rose right up + And most took my breath away. + The colour o’ the spikes was all faded out, + They never keep their colour when the moon’s on ’em, + But that smell fair ’toxicated me. + I was allus partial to a sweet scent, + And I went close up t’ th’ bushes + So’s to put my face right into a flower. + Mis’ Priest, jest’s I got breathin’ in that laylock bloom + I saw, layin’ right at my feet, + A man’s hand! + It was as white’s the side o’ th’ house, + And sparklin, like that lum’nous paint they put on gateposts. + I screamed right out, + I couldn’t help it, + And I could hear my scream + Goin’ over an’ over + In that echo behind th’ barn, + Hearin’ it agin an’ agin like that + Scared me so, I dar’sn’t scream any more. + I jest stood there, + And looked at that hand. + I thought the echo’d begin to hammer like my heart, + But it didn’t. + There wus only th’ wind, + Sighin’ through the laylock leaves, + An’ slappin’ them up agin’ the house. + Well, I guess I looked at that hand + Most ten minits, + An’ it never moved, + Jest lay there white as white. + After a while I got to thingin’, that o’ course + ’Twas some drunken tramp over from Redfield. + That calmed me some, + An’ I commenced to think I’d better git him out + From under them laylocks. + I planned to drag him inter th’ barn + An’ lock him in ther’ till Clarence come in th’ mornin’. + I got so mad thinkin’ o’ that all-fired brazen tramp + Asleep in my laylocks, + I just stooped down and grabbed th’ hand and give it an awful pull. + Then I bumped right down settin’ on the ground. + Mis’ Priest, ther’ warn’t no body come with the hand. + No, it ain’t cold, it’s jest that I can’t bear thinkin’ of it + Ev’n now. + I’ll take a sip o’ tea. + Thank you, Mis’ Priest, that’s better. + I’d ruther finish now I’ve begun. + Thank you, jest the same. + I dropped the hand’s ef it’d be’n red hot + ’Stead o’ ice cold. + Fer a minit or two I jest laid on that grass + Pantin’. + Then I up and run to them laylocks + An’ pulled ’em every which way. + True as I’m settin’ here, Mis’ Priest, + Ther’ warn’t nothin’ ther’. + I peeked an’ pryed all about ’em, + But ther’ warn’t no man ther’ + Neither livin’ nor dead. + But the hand was ther’ all right, + Upside down, the way I’d dropped it, + And glist’ning fit to dazzle yer. + I don’t know how I done it, + And I don’t know why I done it, + But I wanted to get that dre’tful hand out o’ sight. + I got in t’ th’ barn, somehow, + An’ felt roun’ till I got a spade. + I couldn’t stop fer a lantern, + Besides, the moonlight was bright enough in all conscience. + Then I scooped that awful thing up in th’ spade. + I had a sight o’ trouble doin’ it. + It slid off, and tipped over, and I couldn’t bear + Ev’n to touch it with my foot to prop it, + But I done it somehow. + Then I carried it off behind the barn, + Clost to an old appletree + Where you couldn’t see from the house, + An’ I buried it, + Good an’ deep. + I don’t rec’lect nothin’ more o’ that night. + Clarence woke me up in th’ mornin’, + Hollerin’ for me to come down and set th’ milk. + When he’d gone + I stole roun’ to the appletree + And seed the earth all newly turned + Where I left it in my hurry. + I did a heap o’ gardenin’ + That mornin’. + I couldn’t cut no big sods + Fear Clarence would notice and ask me what I wanted ’em fer, + So I got teeny bits o’ turf here and ther,’ + And no one couldn’t tell ther’d be’n any diggin’ + When I got through. + They was awful days after that, Mis’ Priest, + I used ter go every mornin’ and poke about them bushes, + And up and down the fence, + Ter find the body that hand come off of. + But I couldn’t never find nothin’. + I’d lay awake nights + Hearin’ them laylocks blowin’ and whiskin’. + Finally I had Clarence cut ’em down + An’ make a big bonfire of ’em. + I told him the smell made me sick, + An’ that warn’t no lie, + I can’t a’ bear the smell on ’em now. + An no wonder, es you say. + I fretted somethin’ awful about that hand. + I wondered could it be Hiram’s, + But folks don’t rob graveyards hereabouts. + Besides Hiram’s hands warn’t that awful, starin’ white. + I give up seein’ people, + I was afeared I’d say somethin’. + You know what folks thought of me + Better’n I do, I dessay, + But maybe now you’ll see I couldn’t do nothin’ diffrent. + But I stuck it out, + I warn’t goin’ to be downed + By no loose hand, no matter how it come ther’. + But that ain’t the worst, Mis’ Priest, + Not by a long way. + Two years ago Mr. Densmore made me an offer for Cherry’s Orchard. + Well, I’d got used to th’ thought of bein’ sort o’ blighted, + And I warn’t scared no more. + Lived down my fear, I guess. + I’d kinder got used t’ the thought o’ that awful night, + And I didn’t mope much about it. + Only I never went out o’ doors by moonlight; + That stuck. + Well, when Mr. Densmore’s offer come, + I started thinkin’ about the place + An’ all the things that had gone on ther’. + Thinks I, I guess I’ll go and see where I put the hand. + I was foolhardy with the long time that had gone by. + I knew the place real well, + Fer I’d put it right in between two o’ the apple-roots. + I don’t know what possessed me, Mis’ Priest, + But I kinder wanted to know + That the hand had been flesh and bone, anyway. + It had sorter bothered me, thinkin’ I might ha’ imagined it. + I took a mornin’ when the sun was real pleasant and warm, + I guessed I wouldn’t jump for a few old bones. + But I did jump, somethin’ wicked. + Thar warn’t no bones! + Thar warn’t nothin’! + Not even the gold ring I minded bein’ on the little finger. + I don’t know ef there ever was anythin’. + I’ve worried myself sick over it. + I be’n diggin’ and diggin’ day in and day out + Till Clarence ketched me at it. + Oh, I knowed real well what you all thought, + An’ I ain’t sayin’ you’re not right, + But I ain’t goin’ to end in no country ’sylum + If I c’n help it. + The shiv’rin’ fits come on me sudden like. + I know ’em, don’t you trouble. + I’ve fretted considerable about the ’sylum, + I guess I be’n frettin’ all the time I ain’t be’n diggin’. + But anyhow I can’t dig to Chicago, can I? + Thank you, Mis’ Priest, + I’m better now. I only dropped in in passin’! + I’ll jest be steppin’ along to French’s. + No, I won’t be seein’ nobody in the mornin’, + It’s a pretty early start. + Don’t you stand ther’, Mis’ Priest, + The wind’ll blow yer lamp out, + An’ I c’n see easy, I got aholt o’ the gate now. + I ain’t a mite tired, thank you. + Goodnight. + + + + + Potatoes in a Cellar + + + R. G. + +I am not here to harry institutions, to prod up mummies swathed in red +tape and embalmed in routine and respectability, nor am I here to bury +the unburied dead. + +People say, “Why do you jump on the Art Institute for becoming a trade +school? It is only following the tendencies of the times. Art is like +everything else.” There you have it!—the whole trouble. There is no +consciousness of art, no consciousness that art is beyond all these +things—that it is as the sun to the earth, and if it were to fail us we +should grow like potatoes in a deep cellar. + +It is only when art students say, “This is not what we sought. Where +shall we go, what shall we love, what do, to find what we sought?” that +the Art Institute is brought into it, and then only to serve as an +example of the lack of art consciousness everywhere, and to emphasize +the fact that the artist has no place in this land of wasteful virtues. + +An artist almost disgraces the family into which he is born, he is +pitied a little by outsiders, he is left alone. At last, when he can +stand it no longer, he breaks the parent heart, and goes out full of +high hope to find his own kind and to keep his own faith. After a short +time he finds the art school very much like a factory; he learns to do +his piece, when he had thought to create a new beauty, and he finds, +too, that he is still an outcast for his beliefs and desires. + +More than ninety-nine percent of the students who study art never +qualify as artists. We are all born into the world creators. In the +interval some wander into by-paths, play nicely upon the piano or +violin, do art, or write poetry. Maiden aunts and fond grandmas proclaim +them geniuses, all the time praying that they do not become artists. +When love comes, they leave the by-paths to fall into lock step on the +old worn way. + +It is not what is accomplished on these journeys along the outposts of +art, but it is the experience that counts. If they have met there one or +two who stirred their senses with the impression of bearing a “fragile +and mighty thing,” who could rise above the earth and shout in a +flamelight of joy, or fall upon the earth and moan with the dark trouble +of Things; if they have caught from these a quickened sense of Life, and +learned a broader observation and consciousness of beauty; even though +they cannot create as the artist creates—still from this experience they +should feel the power to create a new life for those whom they in their +turn may meet. If they would so much as teach the children, not the old +formidable “Fear God and keep his commandments,” but rather + + “Find in every foolish little thing that lives but a day + Eternal Beauty wandering on its way” + +we should grow a race with a deep desire for the “free, unsullied things +which never fail and never can decay.” + +The Artist knows as surely as though he walked with God upon those six +days of creation that _this_ He made and nothing more—but here He made +all. Other men fill in the gap between what they are and what they feel +they could be, what they long for and cannot find, what they attain and +aspire to, with Religion. Then, walled in with the belief of finding +completion in a future life, they live on unconscious of the passionate +splendor and ecstasy of this life. The artist, realizing that here we +must live our life and our immortality, cries out to men to know all, to +feel all, to be all here, and he strives with his whole soul, gives up +his life to show men what he has seen. But the turning of great wheels, +the blasts of furnaces, and the straining of millions of human beings +that a few may be comfortable, drown his voice. And because he does not +take part in this great struggle for physical contentment, does not live +the cramped, dwarfed life of society, there is no place for him in +modern life. Even though the wisest seem deceived, still the artist must +believe that a consciousness of Art will come, and that even the most +stupid will sometime know that he must have Art before bread. + + + I know—for I have experienced it and perhaps experienced little + else!—that art is of more value than truth.—_Nietzsche._ + + + + + New York Letter + + + ALLAN ROSS MACDOUGALL + + (_The Poetry Society of America Meets and I Attend, Taking with + Me a Sense of Humor._) + +There is, in this city, a Poetry Society. Once a month they gather +together at a handsome club to talk and be talked to. Once a year they +foregather at a grand hotel for a handsome dinner and some more talk. + +I am inquisitive, God help me! He and good training have made me so. To +gratify my curiosity concerning the makers of American poetry, I asked +Master Witter Bynner, one of their band, to take me to their monthly +meeting at the National Arts Club. I ache still from suppressed +laughter. (Dear sense of humor, what would I do without you when I visit +the habitations of the pretentious and the congregation of the +hum-bugs?) + +It is the custom of this body of—of—the word I want will come to me +later. It is their custom, I say, to ask for unpublished verse to be +read aloud to the assemblage. The reader of the evening was Witter +Bynner. Now Mr Bynner is a poet with a fine, vibrant voice and a rare +appreciation for pause and effect, but when he read the verse of those +anonymous poets such feeling did he put into them that his legs quivered +and showed great emotion. That distressed and distracted me. + +After each poem was read it was criticized by the audience. Criticism of +a certain type is the easiest thing in the world. That type, that petty, +empty, wordy type, was present in all its glory. Its chief exponent was +one Shaemas O’Sheel, a wordy fellow loving the sound of his own voice +and giving vent to many empty phrases with much gusto and argumentative +fervor. Mr O’Sheel once wrote and had published in a book this plaintive +thing: + + My song is such a little thing + Oh, such a little thing! + It is not loud; it is not long, + And wherefor should I sing? + +Echo answers, Wherefor? + +Another fellow who fancied himself as critic was a youth named Joyce +Kilmer. Perhaps you have heard of him. He is the author of charming +conceits, in verse, on trees and delicatessen stores. He has also +written some sweet roundels and ballades. Incidentally he is a member of +the staff of _The New York Times_. Occasionally he makes excursions to +Women’s Clubs and other intellectual organizations to tell them all he +knows about poetry. God save him! And God save me from ever hearing +another night of such criticism from ponderous youths and knowing old +maids! + +After the reading of the poems, and the stupid remarks that followed the +reading, there came what was called the “social intermission”. During +this time insipid punch and silly little biscuits were served to as many +of the mob as could grab them, and a noise as of a host of parrots in a +small place filled the room. (Curious what bad punch will do to good, +respectable people!) Following the excitement of the jabber and the +near-wine the audience settled down to be sobered up by the reading of +two seeming epics by Cale Young Rice. Mr Rice is dull—oh, very dull he +is. Not only so, but his verse is—I won’t say; and he reads it with the +voice of the spirit of a one-time virtuous Methodist minister chanting a +prayer in the coolest part of Hell. + +So he read his dreary interminable poems. So I had visions of all the +precious Sundays my Presbyterian parents had forced me to waste. That +vision passed and I still heard the whining drone. Back to my mind again +where I had vicious thoughts of the tortures I would like to play upon +bad poets who write bad verse and read it with bad accent and bad voice +to good harmless people. By the time I had thought out and perfected a +most amazing and subtle form of torture for such disturbers of human +happiness, the dismal noise had stopped. Some day.... + +After the effort of the Rice man, Laurence Houseman read some of his +fanciful poems. They were welcome. A Spring wind among the reeds after a +prolonged dull thaw. + +Poetry flourishes in America. + +The poets are paid well by the Magazines; and strange women dine and +wine them and pay them sweet homage. + +The majority own and sport dress suits. They are eminently decent and +respectable. + +Poetry readings are now a well-attended form of afternoon time-killing. + +Poetry flourishes. + + + _THE PASSING OF FORBES-ROBERTSON_ + +The stops are in. The organ is closed. For forty years it has +“discoursed much excellent sweet music.” Now the organist is weary, and +would fain rest. He has played many things and played them well. A +gentle sweet melody like _Mice and Men_ was made more sweet by his +playing; and even if he did sometimes play a popular tune like _The +Third Floor Back_ were we not the more thrilled and moved when we heard +the beauty of his playing of the symphony of _Hamlet_? + +On Saturday, April 22, I watched, now from the wings, now from a side +box, the last public performance of this artist’s _Hamlet_. Oh that I +could write as well as I feel; that my words had the strength and the +bursting keenness of my emotions. Then might I tell something. + +Have you seen the sudden brilliant leap of a flame sometimes before it +finally goes out? There was the same sort of spurt in that past +performance. I had seen Robertson play Hamlet a year ago; in Brooklyn a +week before I had watched him wearily play his part, and by the +comparison I understood the effort involved in the brilliancy of his +playing that day. There was a heart-bursting poignancy about his swan +song. I cried with the Queen: “Oh Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in +twain!” And when at the end of it all he sat there on the throne of +Denmark with that unforgettable look, purged from all the suffering and +weariness; and when they bore him off to the music of Tchaikovsky’s +_Dead March_, what could a feeling mortal do but—but—I cannot tell what +I did. + + “The rest is silence.” + + “Good night, sweet prince.” + + + + + Amber Monochrome + + + MARK TURBYFILL + + I pass + Outside into the amber night. + + A lamp within + Prints shadow-flowers + On the stiffness of an amber screen. + + My dream is like that— + An amber scheme + Straining through cold, stiff screens. + + + + + Three Imagist Poets + + + JOHN GOULD FLETCHER + + + I. + +The question is being asked, re-asked and debated, What is Imagism? The +fact that this question is constantly raised anew proves that it is not +an academic one. For if we are to see clearly the underlying principles +of the new poetry, and to understand the relationship of the group which +call themselves the Imagists to those principles, we must first +disassociate Imagism, strictly speaking, from all that body of verse now +being produced in the free-verse forms. As a critic not long ago pointed +out, vers libre and Imagism are not to be confused. Vers libre can be +produced and has been produced which is not Imagistic, but realistic, +symbolistic, or merely dull. Imagism is an attitude of mind which can +appear just as well under the guise of metre and rhyme, or prose, as in +verse itself. What, then, is Imagism? + +Briefly, the doctrine we call Imagism has four cardinal points or +principles. The first of these concerns presentation of the subject. The +Imagist aims to present his subject as an image; that is to say, he +presents the sum-total of the emotions in any given subject in such a +way that the reader experiences the self-same emotions from them. To do +this it is necessary for the Imagist to regard his subject-matter from +its most imaginative aspect, and to present it visually. For the reader, +not having experienced the emotion which moved the author to create his +poem, is incapable of grasping that emotion save through a direct and +complete appeal to his imagination through his higher senses of sight +and hearing. By stimulating these senses, through appropriate choice of +words, the Imagist aims to arouse the reader to such a pitch that the +reader re-creates imaginatively for himself the emotional complex which +gave birth to the poem. Imagism is, therefore, first of all a means of +arousing the emotions through the imagination. The Imagists must +therefore be sharply distinguished from the realistic school, and also +from the symbolists of the nineteenth century, from which latter they +have, in some sense, derived. Through the constant insistence on emotion +as the underlying essence of poetry, the Imagists approach closely to +the Elizabethans of the sixteenth and the early romantics of the +nineteenth century. + +The second principle of Imagism concerns style. The Imagists desire to +accomplish that renovation of the English language which is always +periodically necessary if good poetry is to continue to be created in +it. The Imagists have certain prejudices against inversions, clichés, +journalese, highfalutin bombast, literary jargon, messy padding with +adjectives. Each word must be an exact word, that is to say the sole +word necessary for its particular place and purpose in the poem. This +careful consideration for style relates the Imagists to the classicists +of the eighteenth century, who undoubtedly rescued the English language +from the absurdities of the “metaphysical” school. The Imagists also +insist on it as a useful check to too great an exuberance of +imagination. + +The third principle of Imagism concerns form. The rhythmical form of the +poem should not be a mere empty pattern, but should follow, as far as +possible, the ebb and flow of the emotion throughout the poem. It should +be an integral part of the poem itself, as indissoluble from it as the +substance of the words themselves. Therefore the Imagists hold that the +theory and practice of vers libre is necessary, although they do not go +so far as to demand it in every case, or to say that rhyme and metre +have not their uses. In their desire to create a full emotional range of +rhythmical nuances, inclusive of both rhyme and metre as well as freer +rhythmical figures, the Imagists derive direct from the first great +romantic poets of England—Blake and Coleridge. + +The last principle of Imagism concerns the attitude of the artist to +life. The artist should realize that if he is not to be the slave of +life he must not attempt to be its judge. He must not obtrude his petty +personal judgments and vanities between the reader and the subject he +writes about. He must not, in short, moralise about life, or gush over +it, or make others feel anything else except what he has felt about it. +In this respect the Imagist poets are in very firm reaction against the +sentimental and pious optimism of the mid-nineteenth century, against +the equally sentimental and fallacious aestheticism of the eighties and +nineties, and—it may be added—against a good deal of the wishy-washy +suggestiveness and sex-obsession that seems to be getting the upper hand +of so many writers of today. The Imagist does not weight the balance, +either for “morality” or “immorality”: he states, and lets the reader +draw his own conclusion. + +With these four principles in mind, we may now ask ourselves how the +Imagists have carried them into practice. For practice is, after all, +the supreme test of any theory of art. There are signs that Imagism is +getting itself taken more seriously, not as a mere passing fad, but as +something that has at least established certain guide-posts and +land-marks for future poets, who wish to renew the traditions of good +writing. I maintain that it has done more. It has permitted three poets, +at least, to start from the same principles and to produce among them a +very respectable body of poetry, which in each case is filled with the +individual flavour of the personality who wrote it. That the Imagist +principles should display such applicability and elasticity is, I +maintain, very remarkable. We shall now see who these three poets are. + + + II. + +Mr Richard Aldington, the first of the three to be considered, has +recently brought together some thirty of his poems in a small volume, +entitled _Images_. That this selection does not represent all of Mr +Aldington’s work, must be apparent to all who are familiar with it. His +long poem, _Childhood_, is not here; nor is his other long poem on the +war, which surely deserves mention as being one of the few really +humorous war poems ever written. To come to the shorter pieces, surely +all admirers of Mr Aldington’s talent must deplore the absence of +_Daisy_, _Round Pond_ and _The Poplar_—the latter one of the most +beautiful poems he has ever written. But whether Mr Aldington has +omitted these pieces from a too severe critical judgment, or whether +because they seem to interfere with the unity of his book, the fact +remains that they were omitted, but that enough is left to give nearly +all sides of his achievement. + +Mr Aldington is a sophisticated, a cultivated, even a bookish poet. He +has translated Anyte of Tegea, the Latin Poets of the Renaissance, and +even that astounding farrago of poetry and buffoonery called Les +Chansons de Maldoror. Recently he has given us, in the columns of _The +Egoist_, a glimpse at his library which ranges from Euripides, via +Apuleius, Hooker and Crowley, to Ford Madox Hueffer! “And is it for this +I have laboured?” he cries. “To be the object of derision of some +bibliophile looking at his books as cynically and disgustedly as I look +at mine?” + +No, it is not for this. It is for a handful of strange and satisfying +poems that Mr Aldington has laboured. Every artist knows that it takes a +great deal of life, an immense amount of experience and appreciation, to +make even a little art. Life is like a many-faceted prism. We must walk +around it, observe it on every side, see it not as we ourselves would +care to see it, but as others have seen it, before we can induce it to +show a new side to our efforts, to cast a few rays which it has not +already cast before. Matthew Arnold, who was one of the few English +critics able to look at literature from the standpoint of its historical +development, declared that poetry was a criticism of life. And so it is. +The task of a modern poet is not to shut his eyes to the past, but to +see the work of the generations that preceded him as an uncompleted +structure, the living intention of whose builders is again born in him, +and seeks fruition in the additions he can make to it. In this sense Mr +Aldington is a modern poet. He is a poet for the well-read, intelligent, +cultivated man or woman. + +The first poem of his I can remember seeing in print was the one +entitled _Choricos_: + + The ancient songs + Pass deathward mournfully. + + Cold lips that sing no more, and withered wreaths + Regretful eyes, and drooping breasts and wings, + Symbols of ancient songs, + Mournfully passing + Down to the great white surges + Watched by none— + + And we turn from the Kyprian’s breasts, + And we turn from thee, + Phoibos Apollon— + And we turn from the fiery day, + And the lips that were over-sweet; + For silently, + Brushing the fields with red-shod feet, + With purple robe, + Searing the grass as with a sudden flame, + Death, + Thou hast come upon us. + + O Death, + Thou art the silence of beauty, + And we look no more for the morning, + We yearn no more for the sun— + We kneel before thee; + And thou, leaning towards us, + Caressingly layest upon us + Flowers from thy thin cold hands, + And smiling as a chaste woman, + Knowing love in her heart, + Thou seelest our eyes + And the illimitable quietude + Comes gently upon us. + +There is nothing in all the literature I know which can be safely set +beside this poem (of which I have only quoted a few fragments) except a +few lines of Leopardi: + + In te, Morte, si pose + Nostra ignuda natura; + Lieto, no, ma sicura + Del antico dolor. + +Other than that, it is unique. And since it is the fashion to despise a +poet because he does not write of aeroplanes and locomotives and +socialism, but of the eternal verities of life, death, beauty, irony, +let us first of all brush away the shallow assumption that Mr Aldington +is an imitator of the classics and that all his work seems a derivation +from the Greek. + +The mood of the poem from which I have just quoted is not a mood which +can be found in any Greek poet, or which any Greek would ever have +understood. I have quoted enough to show what that mood is. It is a mood +of mutability, of the sadness that arises in us when we see the +instability of all earthly things. The first Occidental poet who ever +expressed this mood, to my knowledge, was François Villon. In the East, +of course, it was felt and expressed much earlier. For one must have +seen kingdoms pass away and empires crumble to the dust and “the owl +sing his watch-song from the towers of Afrasiab” before one can feel +this mood, which Mr Aldington has here so beautifully and poignantly +expressed. + +Throughout his poetry Mr Aldington has frequently given us this emotion +of a civilized man, a modern, brought face to face with some beautiful +fragment of the past. Thus he cries to a Greek marble: + + I am thy brother, + Thy lover of aforetime crying to thee, + And thou hearest me not. + +Surely no one would contend that a Greek could ever have said this! And +in some quite recent poems we have the same feeling applied to the +Renaissance, and even to modernity: + + I turn the page and read: + “I dream of silent verses where the rhyme + Glides noiseless as an oar.” + + The heavy, musty air, the black desks, + The bent heads and the rustling noises + Vanish— + The sun hangs in the cobalt sky + The boat drifts over the bare shallows— + The oleanders drop their rosy petals on the lawns + And the swallows dive and swirl and whistle + About the cleft battlements of Can Grande’s castle. + +Or take this: + + + London, (May, 1915) + + Glittering leaves + Dance in a squall: + Above them, bleak immovable clouds. + + A church spire + Holds up a little brass cock + To peck at the blue wheat fields— + + A pear tree, a broken white pyramid, + In a dingy garden, troubles one + With ecstasy— + And I am tormented, + Obsessed, + Along all this beauty. + With a vision of ruins, + Of walls tumbling into clay. + +Such a poet is not what we vulgarly choose to call an optimist. No! Let +us admit once for all, Mr Aldington is a pessimist. (So, by the way, +were Sophocles and Leopardi and Shakespeare when he wrote _King Lear_, +and Mr Thomas Hardy, to mention only a few; but I have never heard they +were worse poets for it.) At times he gives us a very bitter dose indeed +to swallow, as in his _Childhood_, _Cinema Exit_, or _In the Tube_. Yet +he is not devoid of humour, playful and fantastic. Witness _The Faun +Sees Snow for the First Time_, the _Interlude_, the _Evening_ (a +beautiful grotesque which I am tempted to quote), or for a grimmer note +the conclusion of _Lesbia_. He will not admit that life is altogether +without compensations. Herein he is honest. He even admits sentiment as +a compensation, and he treats it delicately, fastidiously, with an +unexpected touch of purely fourteenth-century feeling in the following +piece: + + + After Two Years. + + She is all so slight, + And tender and white, + As a May morning. + + She walks without hood + At dusk. It is good + To hear her sing. + + It is God’s will + That I shall love her still + As he loves Mary. + And night and day, + I will go forth to pray + That she love me. + + She is as gold; + Lovely, and far more cold. + Do thou pray with me, + For if I win grace + To kiss twice her face + God has done well to me. + +Altogether an unusual poet. One who never takes up the pen except when +he has something individual to say, and whose utterance is at times so +varied as to make him almost bafflingly individual. But not a Greek, +although he has written finely on Greek themes. A modern? Yes; and not +only a modern but, au fond, a Romantic. Remember the conclusion of the +beautiful _Night Piece_: + + “Very faint and shrill and far away the whistle sounds—more like + a wild bird than ever. And all my unsatisfied desires and empty + wishes and vague yearnings are set aching by that thin tremulous + whistle—the post-horn of the Coach of Romance.” + + (_For lack of space, Mr Fletcher’s article will be concluded in + the June issue._) + + + + + Rossica + + + ALEXANDER S. KAUN + +It is still on—the Russian invasion. + +Across the ocean the triumphant Prussian drives a hedge into the heart +of Russia. With blood and iron and fire Efficiency celebrates its +victory over Nihilism. + +And we, the neutrals, the note-writers, attempt to thwart the grand +march of Efficiency by delivering shells to the port of Vladivostok. +Shells that do not always explode, despite their “moderate” prices. + +In exchange we are getting thoughts, ideas. Unobstructed by Krupps or +U’s or Zeppelins, they invade our peaceful shores, and intend to stay. + +Woe to the Chambers and Herricks and Pooles and Dreisers and McCutcheons +and other best sellers! The enemy is raining in torrents, in avalanches. +What if the good, good public will be forced to taste the new food. What +if after having tasted it they will rebel and demand real meat +thereafter, rejecting as indigestible the canned affairs and the +oleomargarine surrogates. What if.... + +No danger, I am assured by my friend who has great faith in the +uncorruptible taste of the American public. + +Surely no one will accuse the American publishers of being pure +idealists or Ford-like fanatics who are ready to squander their hard +dollars for propaganda purposes. Surely those gentlemen know their +market and adjust the supply to the demand. The extraordinary deluge of +Russian literature is evidently a paying proposition. + +It is gratifying. We need the injection of new blood into our anemic +literature. + +New blood. Not even Gogol is too old for us. No matter that he died in +1852. His _Dead Souls_, _Tarass Bulba_, and just published stories[2] +belong to the category of works that do not age in spite of their +technical flaws. If you use this perspective, _The Mantle_ will loom up +as the peak of Russian realism. “We have all come out of _The Mantle_”, +admitted Gogol’s disciple, Dostoevsky. If in that tale we recognize the +forerunner of the relentless soul-vivisectionists of the later days, we +get in the other stories a glimpse of the mystic Gogol, the poet of +Goyaesque witches and devils. Do not read _Viy_ before bed-time lest you +go through a heavy nightmare. + +It is an enormous leap from Gogol to Korolenko[3], Gorky[4], and +Kuprin[5]. These are living authors, although they belong rather to the +past century in their motives and modes. Vladimir Korolenko is a writer +whose very name causes the heart of every Russian to beat with emotion. +Not for the greatness of his art: as an artist he ranks among the +lesser. It is the charm of his personality that places him far above all +his colleagues. His long years of exile in Siberia, his never-flagging +championship of the oppressed classes and races, his tireless +encouragement of the young beginners, and his smile, the deep, broad +smile that flows like a sunny stream through his writings, have endeared +him to his countrymen beyond parallel. Korolenko is the bridge between +the heroic, idealistic seventies and the ultra-individualistic moderns. +His stories are not idylls, yet they smile; he deals with tragedies, +describes horrifying situations, but he bears no ill feeling for the +universe, he loves it with all its evils and follies, loves it with that +keen understanding which spells forgiveness. Gorky tells us that he owes +to Korolenko not only his discovery and introduction to the public, but +also his style. I seldom trust an author’s self-criticism. Gorky differs +from his alleged teacher in his style as well as in his philosophy. +Korolenko is gentle, mild, refined, loving, forgiving. Gorky is rude, +loud, hating, revenging. Both have known misery and hardships, both have +rubbed shoulders with the humiliated and down-trodden. But Korolenko +came out of the crucible with a radiant smile, with universal compassion +and sympathy. Gorky neither forgets or forgives. His body and soul +shriek out vengeance for man enslaved, maimed, bestialized. Korolenko +and his “disciple” both exalt human personality, but the first does so +indiscriminatingly, wholesalely, while Gorky glorifies only the strong, +proclaims the “beauty of power”, and scorns the weak worms, the lazy +adders who are content to stagnate in the mire. Gorky’s philosophy may +appeal to us who have drunk from the waters of Zarathustra, but +Korolenko’s art is purer, free from preaching, and hence more +convincing. + +Alexander Kuprin has been hailed as an anarchist, a free-love preacher, +a social reformer, a cynic, a retrograde, and what not. He may be all +these, or none, or more. Of all the Russian writers he is the only true, +unaffected Dionysian. His love for women, for wine, for horses, for +nature—in a word, for life, is spontaneous and elemental. None of the +hectic morbidity of the consumptive Artzibashev. Kuprin is a healthy +artist with an enormous eye. He sees to the bottom the mind of man and +animal, of the thief and the intellectual, of the empty military officer +and of the street-woman, of the artist and of the gambler, and he makes +us see what he sees with a cheerful gracefulness, with no other purpose +but the presentation of his sweetheart, life. His novel, _The Duel_, +stirred Russian society as a vigorous indictment of militarism, a +picture of the dehumanizing garrison life. Kuprin guffawed at that +accusation over a glass of vodka, as he is usually drawn by cartoonists. +Far be it from him to advocate or condemn. He rejoices in all his +heroes, whether they be garrison dummies, or artistic pickpockets (_The +Outrage_), or Japanese spies (_Captain Ribnikov_), or petty philistines +(_The River of Life_). He floats upon the “river of life”, observes, +absorbs, delights, and chuckles at the very fact of his existence. “Even +if I were to fall under a railway train, and were left lying on the line +with broken and bleeding limbs, and any one were to ask me if life were +beautiful, I should none the less, and even by summoning my last remains +of strength, answer enthusiastically, ‘Ah, yes, even now life is +glorious!’” (_The Duel_). + +From the charming, lithe, joyous Kuprin I pass reluctantly to a book on +the lugubrious “cruel genius”, Dostoevsky[6]. It is deplorable that the +publisher who has given us the excellent translation of Dostoevsky by +Constance Garnett should throw on the market such a mediocrity as Mr. +Soloviev’s work, as if there were not excellent books on the novelist +written by Merezhkovsky, Volynsky, Vladimir Solovyov, Veresayev! Mr. +Soloviev presents the accepted view of Dostoevsky as the preacher of +repentance and atonement, the retrograde, the pillar of church and +autocracy. Superficially, the view appears to be correct. Dig deeper +into the chaotic, epileptical soul of the author of _Crime and +Punishment_, gaze into the abysses of the dual characters of +Raskolnikov, Prince Myshkin, Stavrogin, Svidrigailov, the Karamazovs, +fling your imagination into the hellish crater of the novelist’s mind, +and Mr. Soloviev’s symmetrical structure evaporates like mist. Again I +ask, Why are such useless school-exercises reproduced by intelligent +publishers? Why should such a fine translator as Mr. Hogarth waste his +energy on puerilities? + +The same Whys can be applied to another recent publication[7], +Doroshevich’s impressions. Doroshevich is the most popular journalist in +Russia, a witty, entertaining _feuilletonist_, who employs an original +staccato rhythm. But there is no reason under the sun to translate his +reportorial impressions of the war fugitives, written for a Moscow daily +paper. Their value is purely local. How can we be interested in the +management of the Russian relief-points, or their mismanagement? True, +at times Doroshevich flashes brilliant impressionistic colors, as in +describing the fugitives’ bonfires in the forest. But the rare gems do +not justify the journalistic heap. + +I am uneasy about these fallacies of the publishers. Few though they +are, they may serve the part of a spoonful of vinegar in a pot of honey. + +---------- + + [2] _The Mantle and other stories, by Nikolai Gogol. New York: + Frederic A. Stokes._ + + [3] _Makar’s Dream and other stories, by V. Korolenko. New York: + Duffield._ + + [4] _Twenty-six Men and a Girl, by M. Gorky. New York: Frederic + A. Stokes._ + + [5] _The Duel, by A. Kuprin. New York: Macmillan. The River of + Life, by A. Kuprin. Boston: John W. Luce._ + + [6] _Dostoevsky, by Evgenii Soloviev. New York: Macmillan._ + + [7] _The Way of the Cross, by Doroshevich. New York: G. P. + Putnam._ + + + + + The Independent Exhibition + + + LUPO DE BRAILA + +The rich aunt with whose aid the Chicago Society of Artists has managed, +up to the present, to check all artistic impulses in this city, has lost +her magic attraction and power. Her golden smiles and soft pillows have +failed lately to captivate and hold. There is a new breed of young +artists. They seem to be an energetic lot, and decline to live in the +future of promises; and, what is more horrible, they decline to flirt +with the rich aunt through the aid of the honorable society. + +For many years she was the bubbling liquid within the life-giving +bottle. The magic corkscrew was in the safe, the combination known to +the initiated few. According to these few, young artists had to go +through a certain process of taming and self-effacement before they were +gradually given the secret. A certain amount of artistic ignorance plus +an ability to pull strings was required of every aspirant. A soft +backbone bent by many kicks was also one of the main requirements. +“Don’t knock, you’ll break the magic bottle” was their watchword. If you +dared to ask questions concerning the sacred duty of the initiated few, +you aroused a hatred that took years to melt,—a hatred that seemed +impossible in such delicate souls. The few artists who refused to be +tamed left the city and have settled in other parts. + +And the philanthropic aunt, like all true philanthropists, acquired all +she could get and paid the minimum price. The paying was usually +accompanied by a lot of pompous actions and was supposed to be received +like a first-class iron cross by a common soldier. You see, the young +talented artist was actually compelled to bribe the art patron to get to +the secret of the combination, and was compelled to listen to all kinds +of insults besides. Here are a favorite few: “I have discovered him”; “I +helped him to get where he is now”; “If it were not for me....” The +artist was also used as a rare orchid at their dinner tables and as +Chinese embroidery at unusual occasions. I know one of these patrons who +even resorted to threats, when a young and independent sculptor refused +to be “discovered.” And such creatures pose as art patrons and +connoisseurs, and hold the combination to the life-giving bottle of this +city. + +As a matter of fact, almost all the prestige and almost all the artistic +knowledge possessed by these same patrons was given them by their +so-called protegees at starvation prices. However, the patrons are +hardly to be blamed for this state of affairs. They were made by +well-meaning but mediocre artists whose highest ambitions were foggy +imitations of a certain kind of realism practiced abroad when my +grandmother’s dolls used up most of her time. The saddest or funniest +side of this spectacle is that the patrons have, for the last few years, +advanced in understanding beyond the possibilities of the artists who +have made them. As you can easily see, a most discouraging and +impossible state of affairs. It reached its climax at the last Chicago +Artists’ exhibition, when those in control, to use a popular saying, +rubbed it in. It was a show of the aged and crippled, and prizes were +awarded on the basis of an Old-Age Benefit. It was a slow sickness and +positive in retarding all artistic endeavor in this city. + +But like a clear and promising path in this dark jungle comes the first +International Exhibition of Independent Artists. It is a jury-free +exhibition, and every man is allowed to hang two paintings, provided he +pays for the space. And it was a strong indictment against the old +order. It showed how thoroughly it has managed to kill all originality +and individuality in the younger artists. In spite of the fact that it +was a jury-free exhibition you could easily see that almost everyone had +painted with this little thought in the back of his head: This must +please Messrs. Albright, Juergens, and Company. To pick out the few who +made a good showing this time would be unfair to the rest. The whole +show was conceived and arranged in six weeks, and to me it was more +interesting and held more promise than any other show held in this city. + +It is a young oak whose knotty branches, like playful fists, shoot in +unexpected directions. It grows up near a grey solemn mausoleum. The +mausoleum acts as if it does not notice the sturdy youngster; but it +knows in its heart, if it has one, that it will soon be hidden in the +shadow of this tree’s branches. Virile roots will crack the walls and +decay will be the deserved fate. + + + + + The Reader Critic + + + _SHE IS NO FRIEND OF OURS!_ + +_Arthur Davison Ficke, Davenport, Iowa_: + +Will you be so kind as to ask your friend, “Virginia York”, to refrain +from re-misprinting for a third time, a bit hacked from my _Café +Sketches_? If she finds the poem so interesting, why does she not print +it in its entirety, and correctly? Then perhaps her readers could decide +just where the joke lies—in the light of “Virginia York’s” Olympian +pronouncement that “maybe you think this is funny, but certainly it is +not intended to be.” Just because a little learning would be dangerous +for her, I shall never disclose to her what the poem _was_ intended to +be. Besides, she wouldn’t believe me; for her, a thing has to be either +_Lear_ or _Charley’s Aunt_, evidently. + +I have harbored doubts as to the value of _vers libre_; but now they are +gone. For I see that it does shut out a certain type of mind. + +Harriet Dean’s _Pillar_ is admirable! Also Sandburg’s four. + +Tell your “sixteen year old boy” that his poem is damn interesting—but +to cut out the “only sixteen” and “one could not expect me to know much +about poetry” stuff. At sixteen most of us had read all the poetry in +existence, and were busy writing epics that were to re-make the world. +Tell him to stop being a sixteen-year-old worm, and to get up on his +hind legs and bite the stars. Tell him to write arrogantly of this +“charming” world he sees. It’s time enough to be humble when one is old. + + + _THE PROPHET IN HIS OWN COUNTRY._ + +_Daphne and Michael Carr, Columbia, Missouri_: + +We have been greatly enraged by reading Mr Charles Zwaska’s article, _An +Isaiah without a Christ_, in the April number of THE LITTLE REVIEW. It +reminds us of a review of the same book in _Judge_. It ran something +like this: “Vachel Lindsey has out a new book on the Art of the Moving +Picture. It might be all right, but for the fact that the movie can +never be Art.” In just the same sententious way Mr Zwaska seems to be +peeved that Lindsay should suggest the possibility of art in a thing +which is at present clumsily done. Some one has said that when Miriam +led the women of Israel to a dance of rejoicing, all of the women who +were too fat or too stiff to dance stood back and deplored the immodesty +of their nimble sisters. Perhaps Mr Zwaska is too fat, or too stiff, or +too old. I don’t know: may be he is so young that he still creeps and +doesn’t think of dancing. For Lindsay has sung out humanly and +delightfully a more acceptable ideal of democracy than any American has +yet sung. The rest of us would-be artists are creating things that can +appeal to a small number. Lindsay is chanting to all America, and all +America is listening—we, the artists, as well as the littlest country +school-boy. + + “Says the swift black horse + To the swift white horse: + ‘There goes the alarm + There goes the alarm. + They are hitched, they are off, + They are gone in a flash, + And they strain at the driver’s iron arm.’” + +We shout it when the fire-engines fly down the street. We croon the moon +poems together in the evenings, and we chant _The Santa Fé Trail_ as we +tramp across country. + +Mr Zwaska seems to catch a glimmering of the fact that Lindsay is a +rhyming poet, because he is singing to all the people. Why does he not +apply this a little farther? Lindsay’s message, as I catch it, is this: + +The Moving Picture has in it possibilities of a great art. Furthermore, +it is for all America, for every farm boy, for every little dish-washer +as well as for every millionaire. Let us make this art as perfect, as +inspiring, as possible, since it has a wider influence, be it good, bad, +or indifferent, than any other art in the history of humanity. The +exquisite Parthenon, Sophocles’s tragedies performed in the theater of +Dionysus, were for the Athenians, and for such as could reach Athens. +Fortunately, that included a large percentage of the Greeks. But how +many Americans, proportionately, can see such wonders as New York has to +offer? + +When a moving-picture as perfect as the Parthenon has been produced +there need be no soul in America who has not seen it. + +This being the ideal, we proceed toward its realization. Lindsay points +out some means of attaining beauty in the moving-pictures. The producers +can, he says, learn from the painters beauties of composition, of +symbolism, of mood. Beautiful sculpture can teach the rhythm, the speed, +the grace of motion. And architecture will help to interpret big social +emotions, such as patriotism and religion in terms of crowds, +pageantlike, of landscapes, and, upon occasion, of architecture itself. + +But here Mr Zwaska objects. He says that Lindsay is making the +moving-picture a parasite on the other arts. I am not going to quote +Noah Webster, or Dr Johnson, but it is generally understood that a +parasite is an organism that steals its life from its host, weakening +the host thereby. Has Mr Lorado Taft, or Mr Frank Lloyd Wright, or Mr +Jerome Blum, been robbed of any tittle of artistic ideas, or of artistic +technique, or of admiration by Lindsay’s book, or by the producers who +have tried so ineffectually to follow his suggestions? I don’t want to +quibble with metaphors, but if horticulture is to be the basis of them I +should rather say that Lindsay proposes to burbank a wonderful new +nectarine art by crossing painting, sculpture, architecture, and +pantomime. + +At present the difficulty is that there is no one in the producing field +with the artistic training, and feeling, and the burning genius withal +to produce a wonderful film. Max Reinhardt or Gordon Craig could do it, +but even they would be working against the difficulties of a new medium. +D’Annunzio did pretty well with _Cabiria_ but——Have you ever read +Aeschylus’ _Suppliants_? It was the first and afterwards came _Electra_ +and _Œdipus_. + +Well, along in his article Mr Zwaska grows boisterous at Lindsay who +has, supposedly working on a suggestion from his friend, James +Oppenheim, spoken of the possibility of a highly symbolic film +production of _The Book of the Dead_. And this because Mrs Moore of +Chicago, has worked out beautiful dances, and costumes and libretto for +a stage production of the wonderful Nile and Sun myth. Bless Mrs Lou +Wall Moore! We love her and her devotion. We have been wonder-struck by +the loveliness of her Egyptian costume designs. When she does produce +_The Book of the Dead_ we will, Fate permitting, make a pilgrimage from +this movie-ridden Missouri town to see it wherever it may he. And I know +that we will be rejoiced to be able to do so. But I am sure that dear +Mrs Moore would be the last person to object to a film production of +_The Book of the Dead_, _IF_ the production be a beautiful one. For, as +Lindsay iterates and reiterates, the stage and the moving-pictures +_MUST_ be different. Mrs Moore’s production will have “the splendor of +color, space, height, distance, and most magical of all, the voice.” And +the worthy moving-picture production, when it arrives, will have, in +black-and-white symphony, the infinite depths of the sky, waving palm +branches, the width of the desert, and above all, beautifully controlled +actors, streaming hundreds, directed and co-ordinated as was the +Diaghileff corps-de-ballet. And this beauty will travel all over the +country, touching, among others, this drama-starved town of Missouri, +where we suffer for want of visual beauty. + +Mr Zwaska deplores the lack of composition—“moving lines” he calls it—in +the moving pictures. He says that he has seen it “only in the flight of +gulls (unconscious actors) or in pictures of rivers and trees, and the +sea; in short—Nature. But Nature is Nature” wailed Mr Zwaska. And pray, +why pervert the facts you bring forth? If the cinematograph can record +the beautiful motion of the birds, can it not equally well record the +beautiful motion of humans when the producer has learned to direct his +actors as M. Fokine directs his dancers? _There_ is room for Art. + +Why—why, in the name of all that is lovely, must people howl at any +expression of belief in possibilities of a new art? The moving-picture +is Shakespearean, Hugoesque, Zolaesque, in its method. We see through it +not only Antony and Cleopatra, but the two great hungry struggling +groups that each impersonates. We see not only the typical coal-miner +and his typical sorrows; we see the mass of his comrades under the same +oppression, the same evil conditions. We see better, because more +swiftly, than Hugo could paint it with his wonderful vocabulary, Notre +Dame de Paris, the symbol, the social motif which embodies in a unity +all that the story tries to show of the beauty, the horror, the fate, +and the aspirations of the pre-Renaissance, an ever-present condition +behind the actors. Are such possibilities to be shoved aside and denied +a place among the arts where pageantry is admitted? Is the fact that +thousands of bad, atrociously bad, films are turned out to discredit the +few well-constructed, symbolic film-plays? Look at our abominable +American poster-makers. Does this discredit Mr Blum, whose praises we +hear sung? + +There is one really vital criticism in Mr Zwaska’s hectic article. That +is, upon Lindsay’s “too ruthless a theory” of no music in the movie +theater. From the first we shied at that. We are surprised at the author +of poems to be read aloud. Another of our admirable countrymen, who +qualifies not only as a sociologist, but as a philosopher and a poet, +has his say on the subject quite incidentally. I speak of Max Eastman, +who, in his _Enjoyment of Poetry_, says, “I have yet to find one in +which the reality of the pictures is not enhanced with the beating of an +old piano. Nobody notices the piano, nobody remembers what the piano +plays, or how badly, but there it is, always keeping up a metre.” The +audiences’ “voluntary mind is on the canvas but the music slips all the +deeper into their beings, and it makes them live the pictures.” I can +well believe Mr Zwaska’s account of the after-midnight picture show. +Granted that most picture-show music is terrible, that the electric +piano is agonizing, that it is deeply shocking to hear the _Miserere_ +when sweet Mary Pickford is acting the Un Bel Di Vedremo scene in +Butterfly, the music is far less dreadful than silence, and we talk +through it all the same. I do not know a possible remedy, but it is +worth the thought of every person interested or disgusted. This is +merely one of Vachel Lindsay’s acknowledged “paw paws.” + +So here we are at the end of our wrath. And here’s a cheer and a hearty +greeting for Lindsay, who is scaling the Pike’s Peak of idealism. And +here’s congratulations to Mr Zwaska for directing a few more telescopes +at him. + + + _FOR THE BRAHMINS._ + +_A Poet, Chicago_: + +I am sick of hearing Chicago audiences go into raptures over Brahms. +Here is my impression of him as I listened to the last concert of the +Chicago Symphony: _Symphony No. 4, E Minor, Opus 98_. + + First Movement: + Milk and Liver. + Second Movement: + Bed-bugs crawling over the body of a fat burgher. Occasionally he + snorts sonorously (’cellos). + Third Movement: + Ten-ton joviality—beer, cheese, saurkraut, ham. Grazioso—Ach, du + lieber Augustine! The end suggests his Academic: + Fourth Movement: + a. Hungarian dancing—(Brahms’ only successful field). + b. Falls into pompernickel sentimentalism. + c. The German policeman (trombones). + d. More liver. + e. Gas. + +_Yours Sylph-fully_: + +Please let me “register” my appreciation of your April number. I read +the extract from _The Interstate Medical Journal_ with intense +purposefulness, have ordered Vance Thompson’s “epoch-making book, _Eat +and Grow Thin_”, and begin to feel that I am getting even more than I +subscribed for. + +Incidentally, didn’t you love Carl Sandburg’s _Gone_? Chick Lorimer! +What a name! It makes one almost sorry to be “respectable”, somehow—it’s +so full of gayety and courage! + + + Statement of Ownership, Management, + Circulation, Etc., required by the Act of + August 24, 1912 + + of _THE LITTLE REVIEW_ published monthly at + _Chicago, Ill._ for April 1st, 1916. + + Editor, _Margaret C. Anderson, 834 Fine Arts + Building, Chicago_. + + Managing Editor, _Same_ + + Business Manager, _Same_ + + Publisher, _Same_ + + Owners: (If a corporation, give its name and + the names and addresses of stockholders holding + 1 per cent or more of total amount of stock. If + not a corporation, give names and addresses of + individual owners.) + + _Margaret C. Anderson + 834 Fine Arts Building, Chicago_ + + Known bondholders, mortgagees, and other + security holders, holding 1 per cent or more of + total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other + securities: _None._ + + _MARGARET C. ANDERSON_, + + Sworn to and subscribed before me this _31st_ + day of _March, 1916_. + + _MITCHELL DAWSON, Notary Public._ + (My commission expires _December 20, 1917_.) + + + + + ART SCHOOL or + ART FACTORY + WHICH? + + Charles A. Kinney’s story of his fight for individual rights in + the Art Institute: + + A few of the topics Mr. Kinney will discuss: + + The seven cases in the law courts—what they mean to students and + faculty. + + The Art Student Fellowship organization—why it was forced on the + students of the Institute. + + Why faculty members were forced to support it on penalty of + losing their positions. + + Organization and discipline, or art spirit? Which is most + essential in an art school? + + Student activities—shall the Dean or the students control them? + + Art Schools—shall men trained in Business or men trained in Art + control them? + + What encouragement is there for sincere artists? + + When at least half the scholarships are awarded because of + influence and favoritism rather than meritorious work? + + When faculty members of the Institute have practically no + independence? + + Mr. Kinney’s article will appear in the June issue of THE LITTLE + REVIEW. + + + + + THE FLAME + + + A JOURNAL FOR THE NEW AGE + + Irwin Granich and Van K. Allison, Editors. + 3 Bellingham Place, Boston, Mass. + + “The Flame” is to be a monthly journal of revolution, soon to + take life. It is to burn against oppression and authority + everywhere, and is to be as pure and merciless as the flower of + light after which it is named. + + We want you to help us make “The Flame.” It is not to be one of + those vehicles for the delivery of the vast thoughts of an + unrecognized “genius,” but a little forum where every + revolutionist of high heart and purpose can speak. We can pay + nothing, of course. Cartoons, poems, stories, sketches, tracts, + philosophies, news reports—all will be welcomed. + + No creed or philosophy will be barred from our columns if only + its devotee writes in a beautiful and furious and yes-saying + gesture. The editorials will be flavored by the anarchy of the + publishers. + + + THE DRAMA For May Offers Two Plays + + REMY DE GOURMONT, whose dramatic work has never been accessible + in English. The translation has been made by the celebrated + Imagist poet, RICHARD ALDINGTON, who contributes also a skillful + critique of de Gourmont’s work. The plays are printed by an + authorization given a few weeks before the playwright’s death. + + Among the other articles is one by Alexander Bakshy, an associate + of the Russian producer, Meyerhold, on The Cinematograph as Art. + In this the author shows that the great field open to the + “movies” has not even been discovered by the film producer of + today. + + Mr. Charles Lemmi contributes a brilliant discussion of The + Italian Stage of Today, not so much a study of the individual + plays as an attempt to analyze and explain the forces in the + present-day Italian theatre. + + The Hull House Players, an organization of more than local fame, + is the subject of a brief history by the founder and director, + Laura Dainty Pelham. + + Many other articles on the current problems of the drama, reviews + and bibliographies complete the number. + + 736 Marquette Building + CHICAGO + + Three Dollars Per Year + + Two Dollars Per Year to Members of The Drama League of America + + Seventy-five Cents Per Copy + + + + + PIANO TRIUMPHANT + + The artistic outgrowth of forty-five years of constant + improvement—a piano conceived to better all that has proven best + in others. + + + GEO. P. BENT GRAND + + Could you but compare it with all others, artistically it must be + your choice. Each day proves this more true. + + Geo. P. Bent Grand, Style “A”—a small Grand, built for the + home—your home. + + + GEO. P. BENT COMPANY + + Manufacturers of Artistic Pianos + Retailers of Victrolas + 214 South Wabash Avenue, Chicago + + + + + Transcriber’s Notes + + +Advertisements were collected at the end of the text. + +The table of contents on the title page was adjusted in order to reflect +correctly the headings in this issue of THE LITTLE REVIEW. + +The original spelling was mostly preserved. A few obvious typographical +errors were silently corrected. All other changes are shown here +(before/after): + + [p. 3]: + ... treacle on bread over all these different stylic bases, this + operation requiring ... + ... treacle on bread over all these different stylistic bases, + this operation requiring ... + + [p. 44]: + ... What encouragement is there for sincere artists ... + ... What encouragement is there for sincere artists? ... + + + + +*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75706 *** diff --git a/75706-h/75706-h.htm b/75706-h/75706-h.htm new file mode 100644 index 0000000..652702c --- /dev/null +++ b/75706-h/75706-h.htm @@ -0,0 +1,3426 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html> +<html lang="en"> +<head> +<meta charset="UTF-8"> +<title>The Little Review, May 1916 (Vol. 3, No. 3) | Project Gutenberg</title> + <link rel="coverpage" href="images/cover.jpg" type="image/x-cover"> + <!-- TITLE="The Little Review, May 1916 (Vol. 3, No. 3)" --> + <!-- AUTHOR="Margaret C. Anderson" --> + <!-- LANGUAGE="en" --> + <!-- PUBLISHER="Margaret C. 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} + .x-ebookmaker a.pagenum:after { display:none; } + + .x-ebookmaker .trnote { margin:0; } + + .x-ebookmaker span.firstchar { clear:left; float:left; } + .x-ebookmaker div.ads .fl { float:left; } + .x-ebookmaker div.ads .fr { float:right; } + +</style> +</head> + +<body> +<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75706 ***</div> + +<div class="frontmatter chapter"> +<h1 class="title"> +<span class="smallcaps">The Little Review</span> +</h1> + +<p class="subt"> +<em>Literature</em> <em>Drama</em> <em>Music</em> <em>Art</em> +</p> + +<p class="ed"> +<span class="line1">MARGARET C. ANDERSON</span><br> +<span class="line2">EDITOR</span> +</p> + +<p class="issue"> +MAY, 1916 +</p> + + <div class="table"> +<table class="tocn"> +<tbody> + <tr> + <td class="col1"><a href="#THREEFLESHTINTS">Three Flesh-tints:</a></td> + <td class="col2"><em>Ben Hecht</em></td> + </tr> + <tr class="i"> + <td class="col1" colspan="2"><a href="#THEINCENSEBURNER">The Incense Burner</a></td> + </tr> + <tr class="i"> + <td class="col1" colspan="2"><a href="#THEGOLDFISHINABOWL">The Goldfish in a Bowl</a></td> + </tr> + <tr class="i"> + <td class="col1" colspan="2"><a href="#ANUDE">A Nude</a></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"><a href="#THECOMPLEATAMATEUR">“The Compleat Amateur”</a></td> + <td class="col2"><em>Harold Bauer</em></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"><a href="#THREEJAPANESEPAINTINGS">Three Japanese Paintings:</a></td> + <td class="col2"><em>Arthur Davison Ficke</em></td> + </tr> + <tr class="i"> + <td class="col1" colspan="2"><a href="#DREAMOFACHINESELANDSCAPE">Dream of a Chinese Landscape</a></td> + </tr> + <tr class="i"> + <td class="col1" colspan="2"><a href="#DREAMOFACHINESEROCKPROMONTORY">Dream of a Chinese Rock Promontory</a></td> + </tr> + <tr class="i"> + <td class="col1" colspan="2"><a href="#THEGOLDENSYMPHONY">The Golden Symphony</a></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"><a href="#THESTRUGGLE">The Struggle</a></td> + <td class="col2"><em>Sherwood Anderson</em></td> + </tr> + <tr class=""> + <td class="col1"><a href="#AMISCHIEVOUSRHAPSODYOFTHEFIRSTRECURRENCE">A Mischievous Rhapsody of the First Recurrence</a></td> + <td class="col2"> </td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"><a href="#POEMS">Poems:</a></td> + <td class="col2"><em>Daphne Carr</em></td> + </tr> + <tr class="i"> + <td class="col1" colspan="2"><a href="#WELTSCHMERTZ">Welt Schmertz</a></td> + </tr> + <tr class="i"> + <td class="col1" colspan="2"><a href="#PRISONERS">Prisoners</a></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"><a href="#LEOORNSTEIN">Leo Ornstein</a></td> + <td class="col2"><em>Margaret C. Anderson</em></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"><a href="#NOCTURNEFROMPAULVERLAINE">Nocturne (from Paul Verlaine)</a></td> + <td class="col2"><em>Clara Shanafelt</em></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"><a href="#WHITEMISTS">White Mists</a></td> + <td class="col2"><em>M. C. A.</em></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"><a href="#LETTERSFROMPRISON">Letters from Prison</a></td> + <td class="col2"><em>Emma Goldman</em></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"><a href="#OFFTHETURNPIKE">Off the Turnpike</a></td> + <td class="col2"><em>Amy Lowell</em></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"><a href="#POTATOESINACELLAR">Potatoes in a Cellar</a></td> + <td class="col2"><em>R. G.</em></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"><a href="#NEWYORKLETTER">New York Letter</a></td> + <td class="col2"><em>Allan Ross Macdougall</em></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"><a href="#AMBERMONOCHROME">Amber Monochrome</a></td> + <td class="col2"><em>Mark Turbyfill</em></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"><a href="#THREEIMAGISTPOETS">Three Imagist Poets</a></td> + <td class="col2"><em>John Gould Fletcher</em></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"><a href="#ROSSICA">Rossica</a></td> + <td class="col2"><em>Alexander S. Kaun</em></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"><a href="#THEINDEPENDENTEXHIBITION">The Independent Exhibition</a></td> + <td class="col2"><em>Lupo de Braila</em></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"><a href="#THEREADERCRITIC">The Reader Critic</a></td> + <td class="col2"> </td> + </tr> +</tbody> +</table> + </div> +<p class="monthly"> +Published Monthly +</p> + + <div class="table"> + <div class="footer"> +<p class="pricel"> +15 cents a copy +</p> + +<p class="pub"> +MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Publisher<br> +Fine Arts Building<br> +CHICAGO +</p> + +<p class="pricer"> +$1.50 a year +</p> + + </div> + </div> +<p class="postoffice"> +Entered as second-class matter at Postoffice, Chicago +</p> + +</div> + +<div class="frontmatter chapter"> +<a id="page-1" class="pagenum" title="1"></a> +<p class="tit"> +<span class="smallcaps">The Little Review</span> +</p> + + <div class="table"> + <div class="issue"> +<p class="vol"> +VOL. III +</p> + +<p class="issue"> +MAY, 1916 +</p> + +<p class="number"> +NO. 3 +</p> + + </div> + </div> +<p class="cop"> +Copyright, 1916, by Margaret C. Anderson +</p> + +</div> + +<h2 class="article1" id="THREEFLESHTINTS"> +Three Flesh-tints +</h2> + +<p class="aut"> +BEN HECHT +</p> + +<h3 class="section" id="THEINCENSEBURNER"> +The Incense Burner +</h3> + +<div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">A bending flower rises from its mouth</p> + <p class="verse">And sways like the vein of a zephyr.</p> + <p class="verse">Threads of moonlight float entangled over it,</p> + <p class="verse">Delicate as the breath of a dying woman.</p> + <p class="verse">Souls come whispering from its ancient lips,</p> + <p class="verse">Laden with thin secrets,</p> + <p class="verse">And torn by the long nails of idiot Gods....</p> + <p class="verse">Pale dancers arise, whirling listlessly,</p> + <p class="verse">Expiring in a writhing languor.</p> + <p class="verse">Heavy-lidded eyes crawl out and open vacantly and close....</p> + <p class="verse">Dried whisps of water break into blue wings.</p> + <p class="verse">A sleeping woman’s arm reaches up and curves into a sigh</p> + <p class="verse">And scratches at the air with opalescent claws.</p> + <p class="verse">Dead pearls drift in a dead circle—till, quivering,</p> + <p class="verse">A slow finger rises, balancing a grey moon on its tip.</p> + <p class="verse">And then a severed face squeezes out and lolls to and fro,</p> + <p class="verse">Its washed purple lips leering with a grotesque sin.</p> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<h3 class="section" id="THEGOLDFISHINABOWL"> +<a id="page-2" class="pagenum" title="2"></a> +The Goldfish in a Bowl +</h3> + +<div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">A tiny shimmering courtesan</p> + <p class="verse">Dressed in red spangles,</p> + <p class="verse">Weaves a monotonous thread of painted rubies</p> + <p class="verse">Through the stagnant curtains of her room.</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Stifling under faint rags,</p> + <p class="verse">A dumb enchanted nightingale</p> + <p class="verse">Tosses in droll anguish,</p> + <p class="verse">Dreaming of the sapphire roses and the crystal fringe and the topaz silks</p> + <p class="verse">That were her lovers.</p> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<h3 class="section" id="ANUDE"> +A Nude +</h3> + +<div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">The rich brocade of night,</p> + <p class="verse">Sewn with the red dust of roses</p> + <p class="verse">And the topaz breath of the sleeping sun</p> + <p class="verse">Hangs from the cool ivoried silk of her shoulders.</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">The winged beacons of her breasts</p> + <p class="verse">Gleam with golden moonlight.</p> + <p class="verse">And her eyes are like purple bosomed birds</p> + <p class="verse">That circle and beat against the azure gloom.</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Her nakedness is an opal mirror,</p> + <p class="verse">Quivering with splintered images.</p> + <p class="verse">Her nakedness is a white kiss.</p> + <p class="verse">Burning on the shadowed lips of the night.</p> + <p class="verse">Her nakedness is the flowing of ghostly water</p> + <p class="verse">Under fierce moons—</p> + <p class="verse">The poplar silver of the wind that dances in the gardens at night.</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Her nakedness is the golden fabric woven out of bloody grapes</p> + <p class="verse">And the dead mists of incense.</p> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2 class="article" id="THECOMPLEATAMATEUR"> +<a id="page-3" class="pagenum" title="3"></a> +“The Compleat Amateur” +</h2> + +</div> + +<p class="u subt"> +or<br> +How Not to be An Artist +</p> + +<p class="aut"> +HAROLD BAUER +</p> + +<p class="note"> +(<em>No, I cannot write you an article. And I add to this the expression +of my fervent hope that no Amateurs are going to be allowed to scribble +for</em> <span class="smallcaps">The Little Review</span>. <em>Speaking as a subscriber, I haven’t the least +desire to read any of H. Bauer’s clumsy attempts to express himself in a +medium that is foreign to him. Let him stick to his business.... +You must write the article you have in mind yourself. From the depths of +your artistic intuitions draw forth the material and give away the secrets—which +are no secrets. Moreover, don’t confine yourself to music, much less +to piano playing; take in the whole field of art and call it “The Compleat +Amateur, or, How Not To Be an Artist.” I suggest the following headings.—Extract +from a letter of the Author.</em>) +</p> + +<h3 class="section" id="ILESTYLEFAITLHOMME"> +I. “<em>Le Style fait l’homme</em>” +</h3> + +<p class="first"> +<span class="firstchar">I</span><span class="postfirstchar">f</span> you want to become an author, give up your life to the study of +calligraphy, if a painter, devote yourself to the manufacture of paints +and brushes, if a composer, commit to memory the number of notes in +every standard classical work, and if a singer or instrumentalist, spend +your whole energy in the establishing of a “sound technical foundation.” +Emotional expression can then, if desired, be subsequently smeared like +treacle on bread over all these different <a id="corr-0"></a>stylistic bases, this operation requiring +neither skill nor expression. +</p> + +<h3 class="section" id="IIMEANSTOANEND"> +II. “<em>Means to an End</em>” +</h3> + +<p class="noindent"> +The amateur must learn that technique represents an obstacle to be +overcome and a set of tools to be acquired. It has nothing to do with +expression. Only an imaginative artist like Maeterlinck would suggest +that the road along which the student travels towards his destination is +in reality a link, a connection joining one with the other—an umbilical +cord partaking of the nature and attributes of both traveler and goal. +To a perfectly rational person the road is merely a distance to be covered, +a separation. +</p> + +<h3 class="section" id="IIIPERSONALITYORASSOMEAUTHORITIESHAVEITINDIVIDUALITY"> +III. <em>Personality, or, as some authorities have it: Individuality</em> +</h3> + +<p class="noindent"> +This is the greatest asset of the Amateur. An artist is like everybody +in the world. The book we read, the picture we see or the music +<a id="page-4" class="pagenum" title="4"></a> +we hear which renders tangible our own dimly-felt thoughts and emotional +stirrings shows that we are in reality one with the artist and with +the universe of which these expressions are but reflections of unseen +and unheard forces. An artist combines the power and responsibilities +of the aristocrat with the feelings of an anarchist, he is the guardian +of privilege and the destroyer of authority, the leveler of barriers and +the creator of the superman, the leader and the servant of humanity +and ... the Arch Enemy of the Amateur! The artist is like all +humanity, but the Amateur is not like the Artist. The Amateur must +hang on for dear life to his precious soul and resist to the last gasp the +incursions of any outside force in which he can trace the semblance of +his own nature, for if anything gets in something may get out and he +won’t be able to sort himself out afterwards. Hence the Amateur must +be an Individualist; otherwise he is doomed to extinction. The Amateur’s +business is to interpret the universe in terms eternally incomprehensible +to anyone but himself, and to compromise with the necessity for intercourse +with his fellow-creatures by the adoption of an artificial language +which can convey thoughts and feelings of a superficial character, but +nothing more. +</p> + +<p> +The tale that points a moral, the picture that suggests a tale, and the +music that evokes a picture; these are the vehicles for “personality” +and your fine amateur must cultivate the pride that the realization of an +exclusive understanding of these things gives. If Hamlet had been an +amateur instead of being an artist he would never have suggested that a +cloud was like a camel, a weasel, or a whale; he would have pointed out +its resemblance to a mathematical calculation or a treatise on political +economy, and Polonius would have been far more impressed—for this +would have shown Great Individuality. +</p> + +<h3 class="section" id="IVTHEMISSIONOFAMATEURISM"> +IV. <em>The Mission of Amateurism</em> +</h3> + +<p class="noindent"> +A true Amateur must learn the value of success, the immense importance +of achievement, the inward meaning of gratified self-conceit. +Praise from small minds represents the highest possible attainment of +accomplished Amateurism. The object of Amateurishness is, like the puzzle +pictures in the daily papers, to present a pretty little problem with a perfectly +simple and obvious solution, thus giving effortless pleasure and satisfaction +to all concerned. +</p> + +<p> +The opportunities afforded by collective Amateurism for the repression +of Art are invaluable and as the study of the subject is within the +reach of all, including those who are congenitally afflicted with artistic +talent, it devolves upon everyone who holds the opinion that this is the best +of all possible worlds, to make it his life’s occupation and aim to be a +“compleat amateur”. +</p> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2 class="article" id="THREEJAPANESEPAINTINGS"> +<a id="page-5" class="pagenum" title="5"></a> +Three Japanese Paintings +</h2> + +</div> + +<p class="aut"> +ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE +</p> + +<h3 class="section u" id="DREAMOFACHINESELANDSCAPE"> +I.<br> +Dream of a Chinese Landscape<br> +(<em>A Screen by Soga Shubun</em>) +</h3> + +<div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Mists are rolling</p> + <p class="verse">Over the grey mountains,</p> + <p class="verse">Over the quiet waters</p> + <p class="verse">And marshy shores—</p> + <p class="verse">Rolling up into valleys</p> + <p class="verse">Where pagodas rise,—</p> + <p class="verse">Rolling over slopes</p> + <p class="verse">Along whose crests</p> + <p class="verse">Monasteries dream.</p> + <p class="verse">Wild geese soar</p> + <p class="verse">Above the marshes</p> + <p class="verse">In downward flight—</p> + <p class="verse">In flight from unknown shore</p> + <p class="verse">To unknown shore.</p> + <p class="verse">Over all</p> + <p class="verse">Mists are swaying.</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse2">The shadowy bridge</p> + <p class="verse">And wandering roadway,</p> + <p class="verse">The dark gnarled tree by the road</p> + <p class="verse">And the pale tree afar,</p> + <p class="verse">Are touched with doubtful mists</p> + <p class="verse">Or emergent from lifting mists,—</p> + <p class="verse">Trembling in mist; born of mist; shadows....</p> + <p class="verse2">O mountains, shores, and streams!</p> + <p class="verse">Beautiful transient illusion!</p> + <p class="verse">Mortal world, dream world,</p> + <p class="verse">Vanishing into mist, into mist only!</p> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<h3 class="section u" id="DREAMOFACHINESEROCKPROMONTORY"> +<a id="page-6" class="pagenum" title="6"></a> +II.<br> +Dream of a Chinese Rock Promontory<br> +(<em>A Screen by Sesshu</em>) +</h3> + +<div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse2">Across quiet waters, far off,</p> + <p class="verse">Faint, misty mountains unfold in limitless ranges,</p> + <p class="verse">Guarding some dream-world,—</p> + <p class="verse">Some dim and tranquil world of golden pagodas,</p> + <p class="verse">Lawns and pools, terraces and deep groves,</p> + <p class="verse">Vermilion palaces, and peacock-haunted gardens.</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse2">But that is afar;</p> + <p class="verse">And the quiet waters lie between.</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse2">Here at our feet</p> + <p class="verse">Rises out of the quiet water</p> + <p class="verse">Stormily, ridge by ridge,</p> + <p class="verse">Buttress by buttress,</p> + <p class="verse">Cliff beyond cliff beyond cliff,</p> + <p class="verse">The jagged headland.</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse2">Here,</p> + <p class="verse">Gigantic, primeval,</p> + <p class="verse">Juts the grey promontory.</p> + <p class="verse">It is bleaker than death, though temples deck it;</p> + <p class="verse">Starker than ice, though pines bestrew it;</p> + <p class="verse">Inhuman, though the village at its base</p> + <p class="verse">Humanly nestles.</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse2">With writhing turrets,</p> + <p class="verse">With dizzy gulfs,</p> + <p class="verse">With winding abysses</p> + <p class="verse">And cloven brinks,</p> + <p class="verse">The rock rises</p> + <p class="verse">In ripples, in waves, in spires—</p> + <p class="verse">It rises fiercely, with an appalling passion,—</p> + <p class="verse">An apparition of dark monstrous life,—</p> + <p class="verse">And foaming up at last to its highest crest</p> + <p class="verse">Stands frozen</p> + <p class="verse">To freeze the blood of generations.</p> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<h3 class="section u" id="THEGOLDENSYMPHONY"> +<a id="page-7" class="pagenum" title="7"></a> +III.<br> +The Golden Symphony<br> +(<em>A Screen by Sotatsu</em>) +</h3> + +<div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse2">Golden clouds, and a golden bridge</p> + <p class="verse">Lifting in a great arc, swinging in a high arc,</p> + <p class="verse">Under clouds of gold, over clouds of gold,—</p> + <p class="verse">From the long slow curve of a golden shore</p> + <p class="verse">Across wide spaces of dark river!...</p> + <p class="verse">And behold! a drifting miracle—</p> + <p class="verse">Behold the long steady advancing prow</p> + <p class="verse">Of a golden boat, heavier than the sun,</p> + <p class="verse">Quiet upon the dark river; bearing two lovers</p> + <p class="verse">In robes of state, intricate, luminous,</p> + <p class="verse">Upon this dim river—where the great arc</p> + <p class="verse">Of the bridge from clouds into clouds</p> + <p class="verse">Swings, from golden shore to golden shore,</p> + <p class="verse">From the gold earth to the gold heaven.</p> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2 class="article" id="THESTRUGGLE"> +The Struggle +</h2> + +</div> + +<p class="aut"> +SHERWOOD ANDERSON +</p> + +<p class="first"> +<span class="firstchar">T</span><span class="postfirstchar">he</span> story came to me from a woman, met on a train. The car was +crowded, and I took the seat beside her. There was a man in the +offing, who belonged with her,—a slender, girlish figure of a man, in a +heavy brown canvas coat such as teamsters wear in the winter. He moved +up and down in the aisle of the car, wanting my place by the woman’s +side, but I did not know that at the time. +</p> + +<p> +The woman had a heavy face and a thick nose. Something had happened +to her. She had been struck a blow or had a fall. Nature could +never have made a nose so broad and thick and ugly. She talked to me +in very good English. I suspect now that she was temporarily weary of +the man in the brown canvas coat, that she had travelled with him for +days, perhaps weeks, and was glad of the chance to spend a few hours in +the company of some one else. +</p> + +<p> +Everyone knows the feeling of a crowded train in the middle of the +night. We ran along through western Iowa and eastern Nebraska. It +<a id="page-8" class="pagenum" title="8"></a> +had rained for days and the fields were flooded. In the clear night the +moon came out and the scene outside the car-window was strange and +in an odd way very beautiful. You get the feeling: the black bare trees +standing up in clusters as they do out in that country, the pools of water +with the moon reflected and running quickly as it does when the train +hurries along, the rattle of the car-trucks, the lights in isolated farmhouses, +and occasionally the clustered lights of a town as the train rushed +through it into the west. +</p> + +<p> +The woman had just come out of war-ridden Poland, had got out of +that stricken land with her husband by God knows what miracles of effort. +She made me feel the war, that woman did, and she told me the tale that +I want to tell to you. +</p> + +<p> +I don’t remember the beginning of our talk, nor can I tell you of how +the strangeness of my mood grew to match her mood, until the story she +told became a part of the mystery of the still night outside the car-window +and very pregnant with meaning to me. +</p> + +<p> +There was a company of Polish refugees moving along a road in +Poland in charge of a German. The German was a man of perhaps fifty, +with a beard. As I got him, he was much such a man as might be professor +of foreign languages in a college in our country, say at Des Moines, +Iowa, or Springfield, Ohio. He would be sturdy and strong of body and +given to the eating of rather rank foods, as such men are. Also he would +be a fellow of books and in his thinking inclined toward the ranker philosophies. +He was dragged into the war because he was a German, and +had steeped his soul in the German philosophy of might. Faintly, I fancy, +there was another notion in his head that kept bothering him, and so to +serve his government with a whole heart he read books that would re-establish +his feeling for the strong, terrible thing for which he fought. +Because he was past fifty he was not on the battle-line, but was in charge +of the refugees, taking them out of their destroyed village to a camp near +a railroad where they could be fed. +</p> + +<p> +The refugees were peasants, all except the woman in the American +train with me and her mother, an old woman of sixty-five. They had been +small land-owners and the others in their party were women who had +worked on their estate. Then there was the one man, my companion’s +lover, weak in body and with bad eyes. +</p> + +<p> +Along a country road in Poland went this party in charge of the German, +who tramped heavily along, urging them forward. He was brutal +in his insistence, and the old woman of sixty-five, who was a kind of leader +of the refugees, was almost equally brutal in her constant refusal to go +forward. In the rainy night she stopped in the muddy road and her party +gathered about her. Like a stubborn old horse she shook her head and +muttered Polish words. “I want to be let alone, that’s what I want. All +I want in the world is to be let alone,” she said, over and over; and then +<a id="page-9" class="pagenum" title="9"></a> +the German came up, and putting his hand on her back pushed her along, +so that their progress through the dismal night was a constant repetition +of the stopping, her muttered words, and his pushing. They hated each +other with whole-hearted hatred, that old Polish woman and the German. +</p> + +<p> +The party came to a clump of trees on the bank of a shallow stream. +The German took hold of the old woman’s arm and dragged her through +the stream while the others followed. Over and over she said the words: +“I want to be let alone. All I want in the world is to be let alone.” +</p> + +<p> +In the clump of trees the German started a fire. With incredible +efficiency he had it blazing high in a few minutes, taking the matches and +even some bits of dry wood from a little rubber-lined pouch carried in his +inside coat-pocket. Then he got out tobacco, and, sitting down on the +protruding root of a tree, smoked, and stared at the refugees, clustered +about the old woman on the opposite side of the fire. +</p> + +<p> +The German went to sleep. That was what started his trouble. He +slept for an hour, and when he awoke the refugees were gone. You can +imagine him jumping up and tramping heavily back through the shallow +stream and along the muddy road to gather his party together again. He +would be angry through and through, but he would not be alarmed. It +was only a matter, he knew, of going far enough back along the road, as +one goes back along a road for strayed cattle. +</p> + +<p> +And then, when the German came up to the party, he and the old +woman began to fight. She stopped muttering the words about being let +alone and sprang at him. One of her old hands gripped his beard and the +other buried itself in the thick skin of his neck. +</p> + +<p> +The struggle in the road lasted a long time. The German was tired +and not as strong as he looked, and there was that faint thing in him that +kept him from hitting the old woman with his fist. He took hold of her +thin shoulders and pushed, and she pulled. The struggle was like a man +trying to lift himself by his boot-straps. The two fought and were full +of the determination that will not stop fighting, but they were not very +strong physically. +</p> + +<p> +And so their two souls began to struggle. The woman in the train +made me understand that quite clearly, although it may be difficult to get +the sense of it over to you. I had the night and the mystery of the moving +train to help me. It was a physical thing, the fight of the two souls in +the dim light of the rainy night on that deserted muddy road. The air +was full of the struggle, and the refugees gathered about and stood shivering. +They shivered with cold and weariness, of course, but also with +something else. In the air, everywhere about them, they could feel the +vague something going on. The woman said that she would gladly have +given her life to have it stopped, or to have some one strike a light, and +that her man felt the same way. It was like two winds struggling, she +<a id="page-10" class="pagenum" title="10"></a> +said, like a soft yielding cloud become hard and trying vainly to push another +cloud out of the sky. +</p> + +<p> +Then the struggle ended and the old woman and the German fell +down exhausted in the road. The refugees gathered about and waited. +They thought something more was going to happen, knew in fact something +more would happen. The feeling they had persisted, you see, and +they huddled together and perhaps whimpered a little. +</p> + +<p> +What happened is the whole point of the story. The woman in the +train explained it very clearly. She said that the two souls, after struggling, +went back into the two bodies, but that the soul of the old woman went +into the body of the German and the soul of the German into the body +of the old woman. +</p> + +<p> +After that, of course, everything was quite simple. The German sat +down by the road and began shaking his head and saying he wanted to be +let alone, declared that all he wanted in the world was to be let alone, and +the Polish woman took papers out of his pocket and began driving her +companions back along the road, driving them harshly and brutally along, +and when they grew weary pushing them with her hands. +</p> + +<p> +There was more of the story after that. The woman’s lover, who +had been a school-teacher, took the papers and got out of the country, +taking his sweetheart with him. But my mind has forgotten the details. +I only remember the German sitting by the road and muttering that he +wanted to be let alone, and the old tired mother-in-Poland saying the harsh +words and forcing her weary companions to march through the night back +into their own country. +</p> + +<div class="filler"> +<p class="noindent"> +The feeble and poor in spirit must not be allowed +to judge life.—<em>Nietzsche.</em> +</p> + +</div> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2 class="article" id="AMISCHIEVOUSRHAPSODYOFTHEFIRSTRECURRENCE"> +<a id="page-11" class="pagenum" title="11"></a> +A Mischievous Rhapsody of the First Recurrence +</h2> + +</div> + +<p class="first"> +<span class="firstchar">I</span> Zarathustra, declare myself! Ye have dulled me with priests; +ye have sweetened me with girls; ye have betrayed me with envious +anarchists. +</p> + +<p> +Lo, I am not for the preacher, I am not for the woman, I am not for +the oppressed! Ye say that by me ye shall save the world; I say that I +shall destroy the world! +</p> + +<p> +These things do I hold sacred—my strength, my lust, my joy. These +ye shall feed, and die. +</p> + +<p> +Too long have I stood silent in the cackle of my followers. Poultry +after my corn! I have said, “Dost thou seek to multiply thyself? Find +ciphers!” +</p> + +<p> +I will give you a new law:—Love your enemy, for him ye may destroy. +Fear your friend, for he shall steal your raiment. +</p> + +<p> +Dost thou think that my aloofness is thy aloofness? Dost thou flutter +upon a ridgepole because I stand upon a mountain? Fool, thou shalt +starve unless thou peck the earth. +</p> + +<p> +I say unto the preacher: Stick to the Nazarene; he hath deserved +his Golgotha. But who shall make my words a law for me? +</p> + +<p> +I say unto the woman: My scourge is yet upon thee. Dost thou set +thyself against myself? I shall ravish thee when I desire thee. Who art +thou to pretend manhood? Submit or deny thy life. Serve, or go barren +into the earth. +</p> + +<p> +I say unto the poor and lowly: I denied you my pity; now ye think +to rob me of my scorn. Paltry ones! Shall I deny myself because of +you? Lo, if I delight in riches, I shall take them. My life is not your +life; my children are not your children. Cry not at my oppression; ye +shall not move me. And if ye mock me with my own words, they shall +scorch your tongues; ye shall go to a blacker oppression, ye shall find +harder masters—yourselves! +</p> + +<p> +And I say unto the priest, the woman, and the lowly: Touch me not; +ye are my enemies! I have declared myself, and ye have not known me. +I am life, I am splendor, I am eternity. Ye deny me as ye lay your hands +upon me. Remain afar off; then may I be in you. I will keep you slaves; +thus only shall I live. +</p> + +<p> +<em>Also sprach Zarathustra!</em> +</p> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2 class="article" id="POEMS"> +<a id="page-12" class="pagenum" title="12"></a> +Poems +</h2> + +</div> + +<p class="aut"> +DAPHNE CARR +</p> + +<h3 class="section" id="WELTSCHMERTZ"> +Welt Schmertz +</h3> + +<div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">I have crushed so many roses</p> + <p class="verse">That my hands</p> + <p class="verse">Drip with red fragrance.</p> + <p class="verse">But I would crush to death against my breast</p> + <p class="verse">The wind</p> + <p class="verse">That is raging drunk with the perfume of all flowers.</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">I have bathed in a hundred cool springs—</p> + <p class="verse">Still I am burning.</p> + <p class="verse">I would plunge into the ocean,</p> + <p class="verse">Diving down and down</p> + <p class="verse">To find myself</p> + <p class="verse">Freshly fluid</p> + <p class="verse">As a wave.</p> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<h3 class="section" id="PRISONERS"> +Prisoners +</h3> + +<div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">A wind runs through the room,</p> + <p class="verse">And leaps out of the window.</p> + <p class="verse">The white curtain springs after</p> + <p class="verse">Fluttering out.</p> + <p class="verse">But it is fastened tight inside.</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">My love kisses me</p> + <p class="verse">And goes</p> + <p class="verse">Waving good-bye</p> + <p class="verse">And laughing.</p> + <p class="verse">Am I also held fast in this room?</p> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2 class="article" id="LEOORNSTEIN"> +<a id="page-13" class="pagenum" title="13"></a> +Leo Ornstein +</h2> + +</div> + +<p class="aut"> +MARGARET C. ANDERSON +</p> + +<p class="first"> +<span class="firstchar">N</span><span class="postfirstchar">ietzsche</span> thought Wagner was the artist of decadence; Arthur Symons +thinks he was a unique genius. Nietzsche regarded him as the +great corrupter of music:—“he has made music sick”; Symons says that +to find a parallel for Wagner’s achievement we must look back to the +Greeks, to the age of Æschylus and Sophocles. Each one proved his point. +It’s a bit confusing, and you begin to wonder what Art is. +</p> + +<p> +Have you ever found a definition of aesthetic values that will hold +through the whole art miracle? I never have and never expect to. Even +in Pater’s <em>The School of Giorgione</em> you are merely told that since all art +constantly aspires toward the condition of music, toward that perfect identification +of matter and form, the chief function of aesthetic criticism is +to estimate the degree in which all the arts approach to musical law. But +musical law is constantly changing; and the criterion of the degree to which +matter and form become identical will be a sort of sliding scale. And what +every one wants to know is how to gauge that scale. Can you think of a +single art judgment in the whole realm of aesthetics that you can use as an +infallible touchstone; with which you can make a mediocre poet realize +why his work is bad instead of good? You can make him realize, by the +desperate wildness with which you shriek “It’s not well done”, that something +is wrong; but to save your life you can’t convince him that you are +talking about anything except your own instinct—as you aren’t; and of +course he feels that his instinct may be just as good as yours—which of +course it can’t! Suppose you choose one of the best definitions ever thought +of,—Mérimée’s “all art is exaggeration <em>à propos</em>”; you find that you’re just +as badly off as before: by what standard is the <em>à propos</em> measured? +</p> + +<hr class="tb"> + +<p class="noindent"> +It was in this frame of mind that I heard Leo Ornstein’s music. First +he came one night and played for us alone, on our Mason and Hamlin, in a +half light and an atmosphere of intense excitement. None of us had decided +beforehand that we should want to laugh or hiss or throw things at +him, as they did in London two years ago. We expected something beautiful +and we got it. He played his <em>Impressions of the Thames</em>, which he +afterward described as a river of “towers and turrets and stars, of dark +rushing water, of bridges and buildings, of desolate muddy banks, and +then something which you cannot bear to look at any longer.” I can’t “see” +<a id="page-14" class="pagenum" title="14"></a> +music, so I only know that it was sound which interested and pleased and +shook me. Then he played his <em>Funeral March</em>, which had something dark +and vast in it; then some Ravel, the music of which interested me more +than his playing of it; and finally the Schumann <em>Arabesque</em>, which he did +so beautifully that I thought “Here is a man who plays just as he wants to, +and probably comes nearer to what Schumann would have liked than all +the strict interpreters with their flawless ‘taste’ have done.” It seemed to +me that Ornstein did what he did with it—stretched its slenderness to a +lovelier curve—in the interest of the piano; and that is the very best thing +anyone can do with written music for the piano, even if the pedagogues +can’t beat time to it. +</p> + +<p> +So at the end I was beginning to think: perhaps this is the man who +is to bring to the piano that something it still needs. +</p> + +<hr class="tb"> + +<p class="noindent"> +But the next morning, at his recital, I made an interesting discovery. +Ornstein has brought nothing to the piano. He has brought something to +the world of music: compositions which show that the piano music is more +pliable than we had thought, and interpretations which show an exaggeration +<em>à propos</em>. To the piano, as an instrument, he has brought what all the +others have brought: virtuosity—and in this case a not exceptional virtuosity. +This may sound like hair splitting, but it really is not. +</p> + +<p> +Ornstein has done this: he has written some very interesting music, +and he plays it as most composers of talent—perhaps of genius—would play +their things if they had studied the piano as thoroughly as he. What is +there in this to cause hysterics? The fact that it sounds different from +the music you have been hearing? But that would seem to be a reason +for interest, not merely for mirth. This reaction belongs in the same plane +with patriotism and duty:—you laugh at what is strange, you love what is +familiar, you obey what has been tested:—the three ready-made emotions, +with which you can escape most effectively from art and life. So they +howled at Ornstein. Two respectable women sitting near me, who would +not have dared—what do I say? who would not have <em>been able</em>—to laugh +at a minister’s treatise on good and evil or a president’s speech on loyalty to +a flag, were so convulsed over Ornstein’s <em>Impressions of the Thames</em> that +they moved their seats to the rear of the theatre where they could not be +watched,—where they could merely disturb the pianist by their audible +snortings. The critics have done the same thing—laughed at Ornstein’s +own music and criticised scathingly his manner of playing familiar music. +Ornstein’s interest, I am sure, is chiefly in what he has to say, and second in +the way he says it. He is a composer-virtuoso. I had hoped he would be +a piano-lover. That is the kind of artist I am looking for with more interest +than I have for anything else in this world. +</p> + +<p> +As for Ornstein himself, I think he is a sincere person who means to +<a id="page-15" class="pagenum" title="15"></a> +go on doing his work. I sometimes judge the sensitiveness of a nature +by the intensity of expression that moves across the cheek-bones. You +might look carefully at Ornstein’s face instead of judging him by the fact +that his hair falls into his eyes when he plays. Of course he has been indiscreet +enough to mention that he does not like Beethoven. Why that is +unforgivable I can’t imagine. A man may surely like what he pleases. The +high genius of a Mozart or a Haydn is a thing he feels intensely. He admires +Chopin deeply as an artist who could do one thing very well and +was content to let it go at that. Grieg he thinks is not a worthy mouthpiece +for all that Norway has to give a musician. He loves Debussy, but thinks +that Ravel is the greater man: “Debussy stands beside a pond and tells +you beautifully of all he sees there; Ravel plunges into the pond and gives +you the life of it.” Stravinsky and Scriabine are the two he cares for +most, as I remember. “Schönberg has worked out his theory before he has +worked out his art.” Something of that sort might apply to Ornstein himself, +as in the case of his Chopin <em>Nocturne in E Flat</em>: I disliked his “exaggeration” +in it as much as anything I have ever heard on a piano. +</p> + +<hr class="tb"> + +<p class="noindent"> +Oh, does no one realize what the unique beauty of a piano is, and that +there are secrets of sound in it which have not yet been touched upon? +</p> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2 class="article" id="NOCTURNEFROMPAULVERLAINE"> +Nocturne +</h2> + +</div> + +<p class="note"> +(<em>From the French of Paul Verlaine</em>) +</p> + +<p class="aut"> +CLARA SHANAFELT +</p> + +<div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Your soul is like a lovely garden place</p> + <p class="verse">Where masque and bergamasque move graciously,</p> + <p class="verse">Playing the lute and dancing, yet of face</p> + <p class="verse">Half sad beneath their guise of fantasy.</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">The while they sing in minor key</p> + <p class="verse">Love conquering, life opportune,</p> + <p class="verse">They seem to doubt their own felicity—</p> + <p class="verse">Their song floats faintly upward in the moon,</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">In the clear moonlight, sad and fair,</p> + <p class="verse">That makes birds dream where dim boughs sway,</p> + <p class="verse">And fountains sigh their rapture on the air</p> + <p class="verse">From marble pools—the tall slim fountain spray.</p> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2 class="article" id="WHITEMISTS"> +<a id="page-16" class="pagenum" title="16"></a> +White Mists<a class="fnote" href="#footnote-1" id="fnote-1">[1]</a> +</h2> + +</div> + +<div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">There are grey stone rat-traps on the earth</p> + <p class="verse">Where human beings are put to die</p> + <p class="verse">By other human beings.</p> + <p class="verse">They die hour after hour, a million million times,</p> + <p class="verse">And still face death....</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">There is blue air between the clouds and the earth</p> + <p class="verse">Which they once saw;</p> + <p class="verse">There are gold stars,</p> + <p class="verse">And suns that come up red,</p> + <p class="verse">And trees that turn to purple in the evening—</p> + <p class="verse">But they cannot remember....</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Now their days are bundles of soiled rags,</p> + <p class="verse">Their nights are stone....</p> + <p class="verse">I dare not think of them:</p> + <p class="verse">It drives me toward the whiteness of insanity.</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza attr"> + <p class="verse">M. C. A.</p> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<hr class="footnote"> + +<p class="footnote"> +<a class="footnote" href="#fnote-1" id="footnote-1">[1]</a> <em>In the year of our Lord 1916 Emma Goldman was sent to jail for +advocating that “women need not always keep their mouths shut and their +wombs open.” Some extracts from letters written during her fifteen-day +sentence appear on the next page.</em> +</p> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2 class="article" id="LETTERSFROMPRISON"> +<a id="page-17" class="pagenum" title="17"></a> +Letters from Prison +</h2> + +</div> + +<p class="aut"> +EMMA GOLDMAN +</p> + +<p class="date"> +<em>Queen’s County Jail,<br> +Long Island City, New York.<br> +April, 1916.</em> +</p> + +<p class="first"> +<span class="firstchar">W</span><span class="postfirstchar">hat</span> am I doing? I am watching human misery. There is no +misery so appalling as imprisoned misery. It is so helpless, so +humiliated. +</p> + +<p> +Yes, I think the prisoners do love me, at least those who have been +thrown in with me. It is so easy to get their love. The least bit of kindness +moves them—they are so appreciative. But what can one do for +them? +</p> + +<p> +Do you remember that passage from Galsworthy’s <em>Justice</em> in which +some one says to Falder: “No one wishes you harm”? Therein lies the +pathos. No one wishes these social victims harm. The Warden and Matron +here are exceptionally kind. And yet the harm, the irreparable harm, is +done by the very fact that human beings are locked up, robbed of their +identity, their self-respect, their self-hood. +</p> + +<p> +Oh, I am not sorry I was sentenced. In fact I am glad. I needed to +get to these pariahs who are the butt of all the horrors. It would be well +if every rebel were sent to prison for a time; it would fan his smouldering +flame of hate of the things that make prisons possible. I am really +glad. +</p> + +<hr class="tb"> + +<p class="noindent"> +... We are awakened at six and unlocked at seven in the morning. +Then comes breakfast, of which I have so far eaten only oatmeal with +what pretends to be milk. The coffee or tea I have not managed to get +down. At seven-thirty we are taken out into the yard. I walk up and +down like one possessed, to get the exercise. At eight-thirty we are back, +and the women keep themselves busy scribbling; but my girls will not let +me do that; I must talk to them. (The Warden, by the way, is reading +my <em>Anarchism</em>, and the Matron my <em>Social Significance of the Modern +Drama</em>). In fact, I seem to have more devotion here than on the outside. +At eleven we have dinner, and at four in the afternoon supper—which I +will describe to you when I come out. Then we are locked up until seven +A. M.—fifteen hours, the hardest of all to bear. Do you remember the +line in <em>The Ballad of Reading Gaol</em>: “Each day a year whose days grow +old”? To me it is “each night a year whose nights grow long”. I have +always loved the night, but jailed nights are ghastly things. +</p> + +<p> +<a id="page-18" class="pagenum" title="18"></a> +The lights are on until nine P. M., and we can read and write all day—which +is a god-send. Also this prison is one of the cleanest in the country. +</p> + +<hr class="tb"> + +<p class="noindent"> +... What on earth have I done that people should go into such +ecstasies? No one raves because you breathe; why rave if you take a +determined stand when that means the very breath of life to you? Really +I feel embarrassed with all the love and devotion and adulation for so +little a thing, so infinitesimal compared with the truly heroic deeds of the +great souls. My only consolation is that the fight is not at an end and +that I may yet be called upon to do something really great. But for the +present it is hardly worth the fuss. +</p> + +<hr class="tb"> + +<p class="noindent"> +Today is Sunday and we were taken out to the yard for a walk. It +was a glorious day, marred only by the monotony of the stripes and the +spiritless slouching figures. Yet the sky excluded no one; its glorious blue +spread over them all, as if there were no sorrows in all the world and man +was never cruel to his kind. +</p> + +<hr class="tb"> + +<p class="noindent"> +The days pass quickly between the study of my fellow prisoners, my +letters, and other writing. The evenings are taken up with reading. But +jailed nights are so oppressive. They lie like stone upon your heart. The +thoughts, the sobs, the moans that emerge like pale shadows from every +human soul. It is stifling. Yet people talk of hell. There is no more +threatening thing in all the world than the hell of jailed nights. +</p> + +<hr class="tb"> + +<p class="noindent"> +Good morning. Another crazing night has gone.... +</p> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2 class="article" id="OFFTHETURNPIKE"> +<a id="page-19" class="pagenum" title="19"></a> +Off The Turnpike +</h2> + +</div> + +<p class="aut"> +AMY LOWELL +</p> + +<div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Good ev’nin’, Mis’ Priest.</p> + <p class="verse">I jest stepped in to tell you Good-bye.</p> + <p class="verse">Yes, it’s all over,</p> + <p class="verse">All my things is packed</p> + <p class="verse">And every last one o’ them boxes</p> + <p class="verse">Is on Bradley’s team</p> + <p class="verse">Bein’ hauled over to th’ station.</p> + <p class="verse">No, I ain’t goin’ back agin.</p> + <p class="verse">I’m stoppin’ over to French’s fer to-night,</p> + <p class="verse">And goin’ down fust train in th’ mornin’.</p> + <p class="verse">Yes, it do seem kinder queer</p> + <p class="verse">Not to be goin’ to see Cherry’s Orchard no more,</p> + <p class="verse">But Land Sakes! When a change’s comin’,</p> + <p class="verse">Why, I allus say it can’t come too quick.</p> + <p class="verse">Now, that’s real kind of you,</p> + <p class="verse">Your doughnuts is always so tasty.</p> + <p class="verse">Yes, I’m goin’ to Chicago,</p> + <p class="verse">To my niece,</p> + <p class="verse">She’s married to a fine man, hardware business,</p> + <p class="verse">And doin’ real well, she tells me.</p> + <p class="verse">Lizzie’s be’n at me to go out ther fer the longest while.</p> + <p class="verse">She ain’t got no kith nor kin to Chicago, you know.</p> + <p class="verse">She’s rented me a real nice little flat,</p> + <p class="verse">Same house as hers,</p> + <p class="verse">And I’m goin’ to try that city livin’ folks say’s so pleasant.</p> + <p class="verse">Oh, yes, he was real generous,</p> + <p class="verse">Paid me a sight of money fer the Orchard,</p> + <p class="verse">I told him ’twouldn’t yield nothin’ but stones,</p> + <p class="verse">But he ain’t farmin’ it.</p> + <p class="verse">Lor’, no, Mis’ Priest,</p> + <p class="verse">He’s jest took it to set and look at the view.</p> + <p class="verse">Maybe he wouldn’t be so stuck on the view</p> + <p class="verse">Ef he’d seed it every mornin’ and night for forty year</p> + <p class="verse">Same’s I have.</p> + <p class="verse">I dessay it’s pretty enough,</p> +<a id="page-20" class="pagenum" title="20"></a> + <p class="verse">But it’s so pressed into me</p> + <p class="verse">I c’n see’t with my eyes shet.</p> + <p class="verse">No. I ain’t cold, Mis’ Priest,</p> + <p class="verse">Don’t shet th’ door.</p> + <p class="verse">I’ll be all right in a minit.</p> + <p class="verse">But I ain’t a mite sorry to leave that view.</p> + <p class="verse">Well, maybe ’tis queer to feel so,</p> + <p class="verse">And maybe ’tisn’t.</p> + <p class="verse">My! But that tea’s revivin’.</p> + <p class="verse">Old things ain’t always pleasant things, Mis’ Priest.</p> + <p class="verse">No, no, I don’t cal’late on comin’ back,</p> + <p class="verse">That’s why I’d ruther be to Chicago,</p> + <p class="verse">Boston’s too near.</p> + <p class="verse">It ain’t cold, Mis’ Priest,</p> + <p class="verse">It’s jest my thoughts.</p> + <p class="verse">I ain’t sick, only—</p> + <p class="verse">Mis’ Priest, ef you’ve nothin’ ter take yer time,</p> + <p class="verse">And have a mind to listen,</p> + <p class="verse">There’s somethin’ I’d like ter speak about.</p> + <p class="verse">I ain’t never mentioned it,</p> + <p class="verse">But I’d like to tell yer ’fore I go.</p> + <p class="verse">Would yer mind lowerin’ them shades,</p> + <p class="verse">Fall twilight’s awful grey,</p> + <p class="verse">And that fire’s real cosy with the shades drawd.</p> + <p class="verse">Well, I guess folks about here think I’ve be’n dret’ful unsociable.</p> + <p class="verse">You needn’t say ’taint so, ’cause I know diff’rent.</p> + <p class="verse">And what’s more, it’s true.</p> + <p class="verse">Well, the reason is I’ve be’n scared o’ my life.</p> + <p class="verse">Scared ev’ry minit o’ th’ time, fer eight year.</p> + <p class="verse">Eight mortal year it is, come next June.</p> + <p class="verse">It was on the eighteenth of June,</p> + <p class="verse">Six months after I’d buried my husband</p> + <p class="verse">That somethin’ happened ter me.</p> + <p class="verse">Maybe yer’ll mind that afore that</p> + <p class="verse">I was a cheery body.</p> + <p class="verse">Hiram was too,</p> + <p class="verse">Allus liked to ask a neighbor in,</p> + <p class="verse">And ev’n when he died,</p> + <p class="verse">Barrin’ low sperrits, I warn’t averse to seein’ nobody.</p> + <p class="verse">But that eighteenth o’ June changed ev’rythin’.</p> + <p class="verse">I was doin’ most o’ th’ farmwork myself,</p> + <p class="verse">With jest a hired boy, Clarence King ’twas,</p> + <p class="verse">Comin’ in fer an hour or two.</p> +<a id="page-21" class="pagenum" title="21"></a> + <p class="verse">Well, that eighteenth June</p> + <p class="verse">I was goin’ round,</p> + <p class="verse">Lockin’ up and seein’ to things fore I went to bed.</p> + <p class="verse">I was jest steppin’ out to th’ barn,</p> + <p class="verse">Goin’ round outside ’stead of through the shed,</p> + <p class="verse">’Cause there was such a sight of moonlight</p> + <p class="verse">Somehow or another I thought ’twould be pretty outdoors.</p> + <p class="verse">I got settled for pretty things that night, I guess.</p> + <p class="verse">I ain’t stuck on em no more.</p> + <p class="verse">Well, them laylock bushes side o’ th’ house</p> + <p class="verse">Was real lovely.</p> + <p class="verse">Glitt’rin’ and shakin’ in the moonlight,</p> + <p class="verse">And the smell o’ them rose right up</p> + <p class="verse">And most took my breath away.</p> + <p class="verse">The colour o’ the spikes was all faded out,</p> + <p class="verse">They never keep their colour when the moon’s on ’em,</p> + <p class="verse">But that smell fair ’toxicated me.</p> + <p class="verse">I was allus partial to a sweet scent,</p> + <p class="verse">And I went close up t’ th’ bushes</p> + <p class="verse">So’s to put my face right into a flower.</p> + <p class="verse">Mis’ Priest, jest’s I got breathin’ in that laylock bloom</p> + <p class="verse">I saw, layin’ right at my feet,</p> + <p class="verse">A man’s hand!</p> + <p class="verse">It was as white’s the side o’ th’ house,</p> + <p class="verse">And sparklin, like that lum’nous paint they put on gateposts.</p> + <p class="verse">I screamed right out,</p> + <p class="verse">I couldn’t help it,</p> + <p class="verse">And I could hear my scream</p> + <p class="verse">Goin’ over an’ over</p> + <p class="verse">In that echo behind th’ barn,</p> + <p class="verse">Hearin’ it agin an’ agin like that</p> + <p class="verse">Scared me so, I dar’sn’t scream any more.</p> + <p class="verse">I jest stood there,</p> + <p class="verse">And looked at that hand.</p> + <p class="verse">I thought the echo’d begin to hammer like my heart,</p> + <p class="verse">But it didn’t.</p> + <p class="verse">There wus only th’ wind,</p> + <p class="verse">Sighin’ through the laylock leaves,</p> + <p class="verse">An’ slappin’ them up agin’ the house.</p> + <p class="verse">Well, I guess I looked at that hand</p> + <p class="verse">Most ten minits,</p> + <p class="verse">An’ it never moved,</p> + <p class="verse">Jest lay there white as white.</p> +<a id="page-22" class="pagenum" title="22"></a> + <p class="verse">After a while I got to thingin’, that o’ course</p> + <p class="verse">’Twas some drunken tramp over from Redfield.</p> + <p class="verse">That calmed me some,</p> + <p class="verse">An’ I commenced to think I’d better git him out</p> + <p class="verse">From under them laylocks.</p> + <p class="verse">I planned to drag him inter th’ barn</p> + <p class="verse">An’ lock him in ther’ till Clarence come in th’ mornin’.</p> + <p class="verse">I got so mad thinkin’ o’ that all-fired brazen tramp</p> + <p class="verse">Asleep in my laylocks,</p> + <p class="verse">I just stooped down and grabbed th’ hand and give it an awful pull.</p> + <p class="verse">Then I bumped right down settin’ on the ground.</p> + <p class="verse">Mis’ Priest, ther’ warn’t no body come with the hand.</p> + <p class="verse">No, it ain’t cold, it’s jest that I can’t bear thinkin’ of it</p> + <p class="verse">Ev’n now.</p> + <p class="verse">I’ll take a sip o’ tea.</p> + <p class="verse">Thank you, Mis’ Priest, that’s better.</p> + <p class="verse">I’d ruther finish now I’ve begun.</p> + <p class="verse">Thank you, jest the same.</p> + <p class="verse">I dropped the hand’s ef it’d be’n red hot</p> + <p class="verse">’Stead o’ ice cold.</p> + <p class="verse">Fer a minit or two I jest laid on that grass</p> + <p class="verse">Pantin’.</p> + <p class="verse">Then I up and run to them laylocks</p> + <p class="verse">An’ pulled ’em every which way.</p> + <p class="verse">True as I’m settin’ here, Mis’ Priest,</p> + <p class="verse">Ther’ warn’t nothin’ ther’.</p> + <p class="verse">I peeked an’ pryed all about ’em,</p> + <p class="verse">But ther’ warn’t no man ther’</p> + <p class="verse">Neither livin’ nor dead.</p> + <p class="verse">But the hand was ther’ all right,</p> + <p class="verse">Upside down, the way I’d dropped it,</p> + <p class="verse">And glist’ning fit to dazzle yer.</p> + <p class="verse">I don’t know how I done it,</p> + <p class="verse">And I don’t know why I done it,</p> + <p class="verse">But I wanted to get that dre’tful hand out o’ sight.</p> + <p class="verse">I got in t’ th’ barn, somehow,</p> + <p class="verse">An’ felt roun’ till I got a spade.</p> + <p class="verse">I couldn’t stop fer a lantern,</p> + <p class="verse">Besides, the moonlight was bright enough in all conscience.</p> + <p class="verse">Then I scooped that awful thing up in th’ spade.</p> + <p class="verse">I had a sight o’ trouble doin’ it.</p> + <p class="verse">It slid off, and tipped over, and I couldn’t bear</p> + <p class="verse">Ev’n to touch it with my foot to prop it,</p> +<a id="page-23" class="pagenum" title="23"></a> + <p class="verse">But I done it somehow.</p> + <p class="verse">Then I carried it off behind the barn,</p> + <p class="verse">Clost to an old appletree</p> + <p class="verse">Where you couldn’t see from the house,</p> + <p class="verse">An’ I buried it,</p> + <p class="verse">Good an’ deep.</p> + <p class="verse">I don’t rec’lect nothin’ more o’ that night.</p> + <p class="verse">Clarence woke me up in th’ mornin’,</p> + <p class="verse">Hollerin’ for me to come down and set th’ milk.</p> + <p class="verse">When he’d gone</p> + <p class="verse">I stole roun’ to the appletree</p> + <p class="verse">And seed the earth all newly turned</p> + <p class="verse">Where I left it in my hurry.</p> + <p class="verse">I did a heap o’ gardenin’</p> + <p class="verse">That mornin’.</p> + <p class="verse">I couldn’t cut no big sods</p> + <p class="verse">Fear Clarence would notice and ask me what I wanted ’em fer,</p> + <p class="verse">So I got teeny bits o’ turf here and ther,’</p> + <p class="verse">And no one couldn’t tell ther’d be’n any diggin’</p> + <p class="verse">When I got through.</p> + <p class="verse">They was awful days after that, Mis’ Priest,</p> + <p class="verse">I used ter go every mornin’ and poke about them bushes,</p> + <p class="verse">And up and down the fence,</p> + <p class="verse">Ter find the body that hand come off of.</p> + <p class="verse">But I couldn’t never find nothin’.</p> + <p class="verse">I’d lay awake nights</p> + <p class="verse">Hearin’ them laylocks blowin’ and whiskin’.</p> + <p class="verse">Finally I had Clarence cut ’em down</p> + <p class="verse">An’ make a big bonfire of ’em.</p> + <p class="verse">I told him the smell made me sick,</p> + <p class="verse">An’ that warn’t no lie,</p> + <p class="verse">I can’t a’ bear the smell on ’em now.</p> + <p class="verse">An no wonder, es you say.</p> + <p class="verse">I fretted somethin’ awful about that hand.</p> + <p class="verse">I wondered could it be Hiram’s,</p> + <p class="verse">But folks don’t rob graveyards hereabouts.</p> + <p class="verse">Besides Hiram’s hands warn’t that awful, starin’ white.</p> + <p class="verse">I give up seein’ people,</p> + <p class="verse">I was afeared I’d say somethin’.</p> + <p class="verse">You know what folks thought of me</p> + <p class="verse">Better’n I do, I dessay,</p> + <p class="verse">But maybe now you’ll see I couldn’t do nothin’ diffrent.</p> +<a id="page-24" class="pagenum" title="24"></a> + <p class="verse">But I stuck it out,</p> + <p class="verse">I warn’t goin’ to be downed</p> + <p class="verse">By no loose hand, no matter how it come ther’.</p> + <p class="verse">But that ain’t the worst, Mis’ Priest,</p> + <p class="verse">Not by a long way.</p> + <p class="verse">Two years ago Mr. Densmore made me an offer for Cherry’s Orchard.</p> + <p class="verse">Well, I’d got used to th’ thought of bein’ sort o’ blighted,</p> + <p class="verse">And I warn’t scared no more.</p> + <p class="verse">Lived down my fear, I guess.</p> + <p class="verse">I’d kinder got used t’ the thought o’ that awful night,</p> + <p class="verse">And I didn’t mope much about it.</p> + <p class="verse">Only I never went out o’ doors by moonlight;</p> + <p class="verse">That stuck.</p> + <p class="verse">Well, when Mr. Densmore’s offer come,</p> + <p class="verse">I started thinkin’ about the place</p> + <p class="verse">An’ all the things that had gone on ther’.</p> + <p class="verse">Thinks I, I guess I’ll go and see where I put the hand.</p> + <p class="verse">I was foolhardy with the long time that had gone by.</p> + <p class="verse">I knew the place real well,</p> + <p class="verse">Fer I’d put it right in between two o’ the apple-roots.</p> + <p class="verse">I don’t know what possessed me, Mis’ Priest,</p> + <p class="verse">But I kinder wanted to know</p> + <p class="verse">That the hand had been flesh and bone, anyway.</p> + <p class="verse">It had sorter bothered me, thinkin’ I might ha’ imagined it.</p> + <p class="verse">I took a mornin’ when the sun was real pleasant and warm,</p> + <p class="verse">I guessed I wouldn’t jump for a few old bones.</p> + <p class="verse">But I did jump, somethin’ wicked.</p> + <p class="verse">Thar warn’t no bones!</p> + <p class="verse">Thar warn’t nothin’!</p> + <p class="verse">Not even the gold ring I minded bein’ on the little finger.</p> + <p class="verse">I don’t know ef there ever was anythin’.</p> + <p class="verse">I’ve worried myself sick over it.</p> + <p class="verse">I be’n diggin’ and diggin’ day in and day out</p> + <p class="verse">Till Clarence ketched me at it.</p> + <p class="verse">Oh, I knowed real well what you all thought,</p> + <p class="verse">An’ I ain’t sayin’ you’re not right,</p> + <p class="verse">But I ain’t goin’ to end in no country ’sylum</p> + <p class="verse">If I c’n help it.</p> + <p class="verse">The shiv’rin’ fits come on me sudden like.</p> + <p class="verse">I know ’em, don’t you trouble.</p> + <p class="verse">I’ve fretted considerable about the ’sylum,</p> + <p class="verse">I guess I be’n frettin’ all the time I ain’t be’n diggin’.</p> + <p class="verse">But anyhow I can’t dig to Chicago, can I?</p> +<a id="page-25" class="pagenum" title="25"></a> + <p class="verse">Thank you, Mis’ Priest,</p> + <p class="verse">I’m better now. I only dropped in in passin’!</p> + <p class="verse">I’ll jest be steppin’ along to French’s.</p> + <p class="verse">No, I won’t be seein’ nobody in the mornin’,</p> + <p class="verse">It’s a pretty early start.</p> + <p class="verse">Don’t you stand ther’, Mis’ Priest,</p> + <p class="verse">The wind’ll blow yer lamp out,</p> + <p class="verse">An’ I c’n see easy, I got aholt o’ the gate now.</p> + <p class="verse">I ain’t a mite tired, thank you.</p> + <p class="verse">Goodnight.</p> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2 class="article" id="POTATOESINACELLAR"> +Potatoes in a Cellar +</h2> + +</div> + +<p class="aut"> +R. G. +</p> + +<p class="first"> +<span class="firstchar">I</span> am not here to harry institutions, to prod up mummies swathed in red +tape and embalmed in routine and respectability, nor am I here to bury +the unburied dead. +</p> + +<p> +People say, “Why do you jump on the Art Institute for becoming a +trade school? It is only following the tendencies of the times. Art is +like everything else.” There you have it!—the whole trouble. There is +no consciousness of art, no consciousness that art is beyond all these things—that +it is as the sun to the earth, and if it were to fail us we should grow +like potatoes in a deep cellar. +</p> + +<p> +It is only when art students say, “This is not what we sought. Where +shall we go, what shall we love, what do, to find what we sought?” that +the Art Institute is brought into it, and then only to serve as an example of +the lack of art consciousness everywhere, and to emphasize the fact that +the artist has no place in this land of wasteful virtues. +</p> + +<p> +An artist almost disgraces the family into which he is born, he is pitied +a little by outsiders, he is left alone. At last, when he can stand it no +longer, he breaks the parent heart, and goes out full of high hope to find +his own kind and to keep his own faith. After a short time he finds the +art school very much like a factory; he learns to do his piece, when he had +thought to create a new beauty, and he finds, too, that he is still an outcast +for his beliefs and desires. +</p> + +<p> +More than ninety-nine percent of the students who study art never +qualify as artists. We are all born into the world creators. In the interval +some wander into by-paths, play nicely upon the piano or violin, do art, +or write poetry. Maiden aunts and fond grandmas proclaim them geniuses, +all the time praying that they do not become artists. When love comes, +they leave the by-paths to fall into lock step on the old worn way. +</p> + +<p> +<a id="page-26" class="pagenum" title="26"></a> +It is not what is accomplished on these journeys along the outposts +of art, but it is the experience that counts. If they have met there one +or two who stirred their senses with the impression of bearing a “fragile +and mighty thing,” who could rise above the earth and shout in a flamelight +of joy, or fall upon the earth and moan with the dark trouble of +Things; if they have caught from these a quickened sense of Life, and +learned a broader observation and consciousness of beauty; even though +they cannot create as the artist creates—still from this experience they +should feel the power to create a new life for those whom they in their +turn may meet. If they would so much as teach the children, not the old +formidable “Fear God and keep his commandments,” but rather +</p> + +<div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">“Find in every foolish little thing that lives but a day</p> + <p class="verse">Eternal Beauty wandering on its way”</p> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +we should grow a race with a deep desire for the “free, unsullied things +which never fail and never can decay.” +</p> + +<p> +The Artist knows as surely as though he walked with God upon those +six days of creation that <em>this</em> He made and nothing more—but here He +made all. Other men fill in the gap between what they are and what they +feel they could be, what they long for and cannot find, what they attain and +aspire to, with Religion. Then, walled in with the belief of finding completion +in a future life, they live on unconscious of the passionate splendor +and ecstasy of this life. The artist, realizing that here we must live our +life and our immortality, cries out to men to know all, to feel all, to be all +here, and he strives with his whole soul, gives up his life to show men what +he has seen. But the turning of great wheels, the blasts of furnaces, and +the straining of millions of human beings that a few may be comfortable, +drown his voice. And because he does not take part in this great struggle +for physical contentment, does not live the cramped, dwarfed life of society, +there is no place for him in modern life. Even though the wisest seem +deceived, still the artist must believe that a consciousness of Art will come, +and that even the most stupid will sometime know that he must have Art +before bread. +</p> + +<div class="filler"> +<p class="noindent"> +I know—for I have experienced it and perhaps +experienced little else!—that art is of more +value than truth.—<em>Nietzsche.</em> +</p> + +</div> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2 class="article" id="NEWYORKLETTER"> +<a id="page-27" class="pagenum" title="27"></a> +New York Letter +</h2> + +</div> + +<p class="aut"> +<span class="smallcaps">ALLAN ROSS MacDOUGALL</span> +</p> + +<p class="note"> +(<em>The Poetry Society of America Meets and I Attend, Taking +with Me a Sense of Humor.</em>) +</p> + +<p class="first"> +<span class="firstchar">T</span><span class="postfirstchar">here</span> is, in this city, a Poetry Society. Once a month they gather +together at a handsome club to talk and be talked to. Once a year +they foregather at a grand hotel for a handsome dinner and some more +talk. +</p> + +<p> +I am inquisitive, God help me! He and good training have made +me so. To gratify my curiosity concerning the makers of American +poetry, I asked Master Witter Bynner, one of their band, to take me to +their monthly meeting at the National Arts Club. I ache still from +suppressed laughter. (Dear sense of humor, what would I do without +you when I visit the habitations of the pretentious and the congregation +of the hum-bugs?) +</p> + +<p> +It is the custom of this body of—of—the word I want will come to +me later. It is their custom, I say, to ask for unpublished verse to be +read aloud to the assemblage. The reader of the evening was Witter +Bynner. Now Mr Bynner is a poet with a fine, vibrant voice and a rare +appreciation for pause and effect, but when he read the verse of those +anonymous poets such feeling did he put into them that his legs quivered +and showed great emotion. That distressed and distracted me. +</p> + +<p> +After each poem was read it was criticized by the audience. Criticism +of a certain type is the easiest thing in the world. That type, that +petty, empty, wordy type, was present in all its glory. Its chief exponent +was one Shaemas O’Sheel, a wordy fellow loving the sound of +his own voice and giving vent to many empty phrases with much gusto +and argumentative fervor. Mr O’Sheel once wrote and had published +in a book this plaintive thing: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> + <div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">My song is such a little thing</p> + <p class="verse">Oh, such a little thing!</p> + <p class="verse">It is not loud; it is not long,</p> + <p class="verse">And wherefor should I sing?</p> + </div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +Echo answers, Wherefor? +</p> + +<p> +Another fellow who fancied himself as critic was a youth named +Joyce Kilmer. Perhaps you have heard of him. He is the author of +charming conceits, in verse, on trees and delicatessen stores. He has +also written some sweet roundels and ballades. Incidentally he is a +<a id="page-28" class="pagenum" title="28"></a> +member of the staff of <em>The New York Times</em>. Occasionally he makes +excursions to Women’s Clubs and other intellectual organizations to tell +them all he knows about poetry. God save him! And God save me +from ever hearing another night of such criticism from ponderous +youths and knowing old maids! +</p> + +<p> +After the reading of the poems, and the stupid remarks that followed +the reading, there came what was called the “social intermission”. +During this time insipid punch and silly little biscuits were served to as +many of the mob as could grab them, and a noise as of a host of parrots +in a small place filled the room. (Curious what bad punch will do to +good, respectable people!) Following the excitement of the jabber and +the near-wine the audience settled down to be sobered up by the reading +of two seeming epics by Cale Young Rice. Mr Rice is dull—oh, very +dull he is. Not only so, but his verse is—I won’t say; and he reads it +with the voice of the spirit of a one-time virtuous Methodist minister +chanting a prayer in the coolest part of Hell. +</p> + +<p> +So he read his dreary interminable poems. So I had visions of +all the precious Sundays my Presbyterian parents had forced me to +waste. That vision passed and I still heard the whining drone. Back +to my mind again where I had vicious thoughts of the tortures I would +like to play upon bad poets who write bad verse and read it with bad +accent and bad voice to good harmless people. By the time I had thought +out and perfected a most amazing and subtle form of torture for such +disturbers of human happiness, the dismal noise had stopped. Some +day.... +</p> + +<p> +After the effort of the Rice man, Laurence Houseman read some of +his fanciful poems. They were welcome. A Spring wind among the reeds +after a prolonged dull thaw. +</p> + +<p> +Poetry flourishes in America. +</p> + +<p> +The poets are paid well by the Magazines; and strange women dine +and wine them and pay them sweet homage. +</p> + +<p> +The majority own and sport dress suits. They are eminently decent +and respectable. +</p> + +<p> +Poetry readings are now a well-attended form of afternoon time-killing. +</p> + +<p> +Poetry flourishes. +</p> + +<h3 class="section" id="THEPASSINGOFFORBESROBERTSON"> +<em>THE PASSING OF FORBES-ROBERTSON</em> +</h3> + +<p class="noindent"> +The stops are in. The organ is closed. For forty years it has “discoursed +much excellent sweet music.” Now the organist is weary, and +would fain rest. He has played many things and played them well. A +gentle sweet melody like <em>Mice and Men</em> was made more sweet by his +playing; and even if he did sometimes play a popular tune like <em>The Third +<a id="page-29" class="pagenum" title="29"></a> +Floor Back</em> were we not the more thrilled and moved when we heard the +beauty of his playing of the symphony of <em>Hamlet</em>? +</p> + +<p> +On Saturday, April 22, I watched, now from the wings, now from +a side box, the last public performance of this artist’s <em>Hamlet</em>. Oh that +I could write as well as I feel; that my words had the strength and the +bursting keenness of my emotions. Then might I tell something. +</p> + +<p> +Have you seen the sudden brilliant leap of a flame sometimes before +it finally goes out? There was the same sort of spurt in that past performance. +I had seen Robertson play Hamlet a year ago; in Brooklyn +a week before I had watched him wearily play his part, and by the comparison +I understood the effort involved in the brilliancy of his playing +that day. There was a heart-bursting poignancy about his swan song. +I cried with the Queen: “Oh Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain!” +And when at the end of it all he sat there on the throne of Denmark with +that unforgettable look, purged from all the suffering and weariness; and +when they bore him off to the music of Tchaikovsky’s <em>Dead March</em>, what +could a feeling mortal do but—but—I cannot tell what I did. +</p> + +<div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">“The rest is silence.”</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">“Good night, sweet prince.”</p> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2 class="article" id="AMBERMONOCHROME"> +Amber Monochrome +</h2> + +</div> + +<p class="aut"> +MARK TURBYFILL +</p> + +<div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">I pass</p> + <p class="verse">Outside into the amber night.</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">A lamp within</p> + <p class="verse">Prints shadow-flowers</p> + <p class="verse">On the stiffness of an amber screen.</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">My dream is like that—</p> + <p class="verse">An amber scheme</p> + <p class="verse">Straining through cold, stiff screens.</p> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2 class="article" id="THREEIMAGISTPOETS"> +<a id="page-30" class="pagenum" title="30"></a> +Three Imagist Poets +</h2> + +</div> + +<p class="aut"> +JOHN GOULD FLETCHER +</p> + +<h3 class="section" id="I"> +I. +</h3> + +<p class="first"> +<span class="firstchar">T</span><span class="postfirstchar">he</span> question is being asked, re-asked and debated, What is Imagism? +The fact that this question is constantly raised anew proves that it +is not an academic one. For if we are to see clearly the underlying principles +of the new poetry, and to understand the relationship of the group +which call themselves the Imagists to those principles, we must first +disassociate Imagism, strictly speaking, from all that body of verse now +being produced in the free-verse forms. As a critic not long ago pointed +out, vers libre and Imagism are not to be confused. Vers libre can be produced +and has been produced which is not Imagistic, but realistic, symbolistic, +or merely dull. Imagism is an attitude of mind which can appear just +as well under the guise of metre and rhyme, or prose, as in verse itself. +What, then, is Imagism? +</p> + +<p> +Briefly, the doctrine we call Imagism has four cardinal points or principles. +The first of these concerns presentation of the subject. The +Imagist aims to present his subject as an image; that is to say, he presents +the sum-total of the emotions in any given subject in such a way that the +reader experiences the self-same emotions from them. To do this it is +necessary for the Imagist to regard his subject-matter from its most +imaginative aspect, and to present it visually. For the reader, not having +experienced the emotion which moved the author to create his poem, is +incapable of grasping that emotion save through a direct and complete +appeal to his imagination through his higher senses of sight and hearing. +By stimulating these senses, through appropriate choice of words, the +Imagist aims to arouse the reader to such a pitch that the reader re-creates +imaginatively for himself the emotional complex which gave birth to the +poem. Imagism is, therefore, first of all a means of arousing the emotions +through the imagination. The Imagists must therefore be sharply distinguished +from the realistic school, and also from the symbolists of the nineteenth +century, from which latter they have, in some sense, derived. +Through the constant insistence on emotion as the underlying essence of +poetry, the Imagists approach closely to the Elizabethans of the sixteenth +and the early romantics of the nineteenth century. +</p> + +<p> +The second principle of Imagism concerns style. The Imagists desire +to accomplish that renovation of the English language which is always +periodically necessary if good poetry is to continue to be created in it. The +<a id="page-31" class="pagenum" title="31"></a> +Imagists have certain prejudices against inversions, clichés, journalese, highfalutin +bombast, literary jargon, messy padding with adjectives. Each +word must be an exact word, that is to say the sole word necessary for its +particular place and purpose in the poem. This careful consideration for +style relates the Imagists to the classicists of the eighteenth century, who +undoubtedly rescued the English language from the absurdities of the +“metaphysical” school. The Imagists also insist on it as a useful check to +too great an exuberance of imagination. +</p> + +<p> +The third principle of Imagism concerns form. The rhythmical form +of the poem should not be a mere empty pattern, but should follow, as far +as possible, the ebb and flow of the emotion throughout the poem. It should +be an integral part of the poem itself, as indissoluble from it as the substance +of the words themselves. Therefore the Imagists hold that the theory +and practice of vers libre is necessary, although they do not go so far as to +demand it in every case, or to say that rhyme and metre have not their +uses. In their desire to create a full emotional range of rhythmical +nuances, inclusive of both rhyme and metre as well as freer rhythmical +figures, the Imagists derive direct from the first great romantic poets of +England—Blake and Coleridge. +</p> + +<p> +The last principle of Imagism concerns the attitude of the artist to life. +The artist should realize that if he is not to be the slave of life he must not +attempt to be its judge. He must not obtrude his petty personal judgments +and vanities between the reader and the subject he writes about. He must +not, in short, moralise about life, or gush over it, or make others feel anything +else except what he has felt about it. In this respect the Imagist +poets are in very firm reaction against the sentimental and pious optimism +of the mid-nineteenth century, against the equally sentimental and fallacious +aestheticism of the eighties and nineties, and—it may be added—against +a good deal of the wishy-washy suggestiveness and sex-obsession +that seems to be getting the upper hand of so many writers of today. The +Imagist does not weight the balance, either for “morality” or “immorality”: +he states, and lets the reader draw his own conclusion. +</p> + +<p> +With these four principles in mind, we may now ask ourselves how the +Imagists have carried them into practice. For practice is, after all, the +supreme test of any theory of art. There are signs that Imagism is getting +itself taken more seriously, not as a mere passing fad, but as something +that has at least established certain guide-posts and land-marks for future +poets, who wish to renew the traditions of good writing. I maintain that +it has done more. It has permitted three poets, at least, to start from the +same principles and to produce among them a very respectable body of +poetry, which in each case is filled with the individual flavour of the personality +who wrote it. That the Imagist principles should display such +applicability and elasticity is, I maintain, very remarkable. We shall now +see who these three poets are. +</p> + +<h3 class="section" id="II"> +<a id="page-32" class="pagenum" title="32"></a> +II. +</h3> + +<p class="noindent"> +Mr Richard Aldington, the first of the three to be considered, has +recently brought together some thirty of his poems in a small volume, +entitled <em>Images</em>. That this selection does not represent all of Mr Aldington’s +work, must be apparent to all who are familiar with it. His long +poem, <em>Childhood</em>, is not here; nor is his other long poem on the war, which +surely deserves mention as being one of the few really humorous war poems +ever written. To come to the shorter pieces, surely all admirers of Mr +Aldington’s talent must deplore the absence of <em>Daisy</em>, <em>Round Pond</em> and <em>The +Poplar</em>—the latter one of the most beautiful poems he has ever written. +But whether Mr Aldington has omitted these pieces from a too severe +critical judgment, or whether because they seem to interfere with the unity +of his book, the fact remains that they were omitted, but that enough is +left to give nearly all sides of his achievement. +</p> + +<p> +Mr Aldington is a sophisticated, a cultivated, even a bookish poet. He +has translated Anyte of Tegea, the Latin Poets of the Renaissance, and +even that astounding farrago of poetry and buffoonery called Les Chansons +de Maldoror. Recently he has given us, in the columns of <em>The Egoist</em>, a +glimpse at his library which ranges from Euripides, via Apuleius, Hooker +and Crowley, to Ford Madox Hueffer! “And is it for this I have +laboured?” he cries. “To be the object of derision of some bibliophile looking +at his books as cynically and disgustedly as I look at mine?” +</p> + +<p> +No, it is not for this. It is for a handful of strange and satisfying +poems that Mr Aldington has laboured. Every artist knows that it takes +a great deal of life, an immense amount of experience and appreciation, to +make even a little art. Life is like a many-faceted prism. We must walk +around it, observe it on every side, see it not as we ourselves would care to +see it, but as others have seen it, before we can induce it to show a new +side to our efforts, to cast a few rays which it has not already cast before. +Matthew Arnold, who was one of the few English critics able to look at +literature from the standpoint of its historical development, declared that +poetry was a criticism of life. And so it is. The task of a modern poet +is not to shut his eyes to the past, but to see the work of the generations +that preceded him as an uncompleted structure, the living intention of whose +builders is again born in him, and seeks fruition in the additions he can +make to it. In this sense Mr Aldington is a modern poet. He is a poet +for the well-read, intelligent, cultivated man or woman. +</p> + +<p> +The first poem of his I can remember seeing in print was the one +entitled <em>Choricos</em>: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> + <div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">The ancient songs</p> + <p class="verse">Pass deathward mournfully.</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Cold lips that sing no more, and withered wreaths</p> + <p class="verse">Regretful eyes, and drooping breasts and wings,</p> +<a id="page-33" class="pagenum" title="33"></a> + <p class="verse">Symbols of ancient songs,</p> + <p class="verse">Mournfully passing</p> + <p class="verse">Down to the great white surges</p> + <p class="verse">Watched by none—</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">And we turn from the Kyprian’s breasts,</p> + <p class="verse">And we turn from thee,</p> + <p class="verse">Phoibos Apollon—</p> + <p class="verse">And we turn from the fiery day,</p> + <p class="verse">And the lips that were over-sweet;</p> + <p class="verse">For silently,</p> + <p class="verse">Brushing the fields with red-shod feet,</p> + <p class="verse">With purple robe,</p> + <p class="verse">Searing the grass as with a sudden flame,</p> + <p class="verse">Death,</p> + <p class="verse">Thou hast come upon us.</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">O Death,</p> + <p class="verse">Thou art the silence of beauty,</p> + <p class="verse">And we look no more for the morning,</p> + <p class="verse">We yearn no more for the sun—</p> + <p class="verse">We kneel before thee;</p> + <p class="verse">And thou, leaning towards us,</p> + <p class="verse">Caressingly layest upon us</p> + <p class="verse">Flowers from thy thin cold hands,</p> + <p class="verse">And smiling as a chaste woman,</p> + <p class="verse">Knowing love in her heart,</p> + <p class="verse">Thou seelest our eyes</p> + <p class="verse">And the illimitable quietude</p> + <p class="verse">Comes gently upon us.</p> + </div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +There is nothing in all the literature I know which can be safely set +beside this poem (of which I have only quoted a few fragments) except a +few lines of Leopardi: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> + <div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">In te, Morte, si pose</p> + <p class="verse">Nostra ignuda natura;</p> + <p class="verse">Lieto, no, ma sicura</p> + <p class="verse">Del antico dolor.</p> + </div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +Other than that, it is unique. And since it is the fashion to despise a +poet because he does not write of aeroplanes and locomotives and socialism, +but of the eternal verities of life, death, beauty, irony, let us first of all +brush away the shallow assumption that Mr Aldington is an imitator of +the classics and that all his work seems a derivation from the Greek. +</p> + +<p> +The mood of the poem from which I have just quoted is not a mood +which can be found in any Greek poet, or which any Greek would ever +have understood. I have quoted enough to show what that mood is. It is +a mood of mutability, of the sadness that arises in us when we see the instability +<a id="page-34" class="pagenum" title="34"></a> +of all earthly things. The first Occidental poet who ever expressed +this mood, to my knowledge, was François Villon. In the East, of course, +it was felt and expressed much earlier. For one must have seen kingdoms +pass away and empires crumble to the dust and “the owl sing his watch-song +from the towers of Afrasiab” before one can feel this mood, which +Mr Aldington has here so beautifully and poignantly expressed. +</p> + +<p> +Throughout his poetry Mr Aldington has frequently given us this +emotion of a civilized man, a modern, brought face to face with some beautiful +fragment of the past. Thus he cries to a Greek marble: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> + <div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">I am thy brother,</p> + <p class="verse">Thy lover of aforetime crying to thee,</p> + <p class="verse">And thou hearest me not.</p> + </div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +Surely no one would contend that a Greek could ever have said this! +And in some quite recent poems we have the same feeling applied to the +Renaissance, and even to modernity: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> + <div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">I turn the page and read:</p> + <p class="verse">“I dream of silent verses where the rhyme</p> + <p class="verse">Glides noiseless as an oar.”</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">The heavy, musty air, the black desks,</p> + <p class="verse">The bent heads and the rustling noises</p> + <p class="verse">Vanish—</p> + <p class="verse">The sun hangs in the cobalt sky</p> + <p class="verse">The boat drifts over the bare shallows—</p> + <p class="verse">The oleanders drop their rosy petals on the lawns</p> + <p class="verse">And the swallows dive and swirl and whistle</p> + <p class="verse">About the cleft battlements of Can Grande’s castle.</p> + </div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +Or take this: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<h3 class="noindent" id="LONDONMAY1915"> +London, (May, 1915) +</h3> + + <div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Glittering leaves</p> + <p class="verse">Dance in a squall:</p> + <p class="verse">Above them, bleak immovable clouds.</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">A church spire</p> + <p class="verse">Holds up a little brass cock</p> + <p class="verse">To peck at the blue wheat fields—</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">A pear tree, a broken white pyramid,</p> + <p class="verse">In a dingy garden, troubles one</p> + <p class="verse">With ecstasy—</p> + <p class="verse">And I am tormented,</p> + <p class="verse">Obsessed,</p> + <p class="verse">Along all this beauty.</p> + <p class="verse">With a vision of ruins,</p> + <p class="verse">Of walls tumbling into clay.</p> + </div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +<a id="page-35" class="pagenum" title="35"></a> +Such a poet is not what we vulgarly choose to call an optimist. No! +Let us admit once for all, Mr Aldington is a pessimist. (So, by the way, +were Sophocles and Leopardi and Shakespeare when he wrote <em>King Lear</em>, +and Mr Thomas Hardy, to mention only a few; but I have never heard +they were worse poets for it.) At times he gives us a very bitter dose +indeed to swallow, as in his <em>Childhood</em>, <em>Cinema Exit</em>, or <em>In the Tube</em>. Yet +he is not devoid of humour, playful and fantastic. Witness <em>The Faun Sees +Snow for the First Time</em>, the <em>Interlude</em>, the <em>Evening</em> (a beautiful grotesque +which I am tempted to quote), or for a grimmer note the conclusion of +<em>Lesbia</em>. He will not admit that life is altogether without compensations. +Herein he is honest. He even admits sentiment as a compensation, and +he treats it delicately, fastidiously, with an unexpected touch of purely fourteenth-century +feeling in the following piece: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<h3 class="noindent" id="AFTERTWOYEARS"> +After Two Years. +</h3> + + <div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">She is all so slight,</p> + <p class="verse">And tender and white,</p> + <p class="verse">As a May morning.</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">She walks without hood</p> + <p class="verse">At dusk. It is good</p> + <p class="verse">To hear her sing.</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">It is God’s will</p> + <p class="verse">That I shall love her still</p> + <p class="verse">As he loves Mary.</p> + <p class="verse">And night and day,</p> + <p class="verse">I will go forth to pray</p> + <p class="verse">That she love me.</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">She is as gold;</p> + <p class="verse">Lovely, and far more cold.</p> + <p class="verse">Do thou pray with me,</p> + <p class="verse">For if I win grace</p> + <p class="verse">To kiss twice her face</p> + <p class="verse">God has done well to me.</p> + </div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +Altogether an unusual poet. One who never takes up the pen except +when he has something individual to say, and whose utterance is at times +so varied as to make him almost bafflingly individual. But not a Greek, +although he has written finely on Greek themes. A modern? Yes; and not +only a modern but, au fond, a Romantic. Remember the conclusion of the +beautiful <em>Night Piece</em>: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +“Very faint and shrill and far away the whistle sounds—more like a +wild bird than ever. And all my unsatisfied desires and empty wishes and +vague yearnings are set aching by that thin tremulous whistle—the post-horn +of the Coach of Romance.” +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="note"> +(<em>For lack of space, Mr Fletcher’s article will be +concluded in the June issue.</em>) +</p> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2 class="article" id="ROSSICA"> +<a id="page-36" class="pagenum" title="36"></a> +Rossica +</h2> + +</div> + +<p class="aut"> +ALEXANDER S. KAUN +</p> + +<p class="first"> +<span class="firstchar">I</span><span class="postfirstchar">t</span> is still on—the Russian invasion. +</p> + +<p> +Across the ocean the triumphant Prussian drives a hedge into the +heart of Russia. With blood and iron and fire Efficiency celebrates its +victory over Nihilism. +</p> + +<p> +And we, the neutrals, the note-writers, attempt to thwart the grand +march of Efficiency by delivering shells to the port of Vladivostok. Shells +that do not always explode, despite their “moderate” prices. +</p> + +<p> +In exchange we are getting thoughts, ideas. Unobstructed by Krupps +or U’s or Zeppelins, they invade our peaceful shores, and intend to stay. +</p> + +<p> +Woe to the Chambers and Herricks and Pooles and Dreisers and +McCutcheons and other best sellers! The enemy is raining in torrents, in +avalanches. What if the good, good public will be forced to taste the new +food. What if after having tasted it they will rebel and demand real +meat thereafter, rejecting as indigestible the canned affairs and the oleomargarine +surrogates. What if.... +</p> + +<p> +No danger, I am assured by my friend who has great faith in the +uncorruptible taste of the American public. +</p> + +<p> +Surely no one will accuse the American publishers of being pure +idealists or Ford-like fanatics who are ready to squander their hard dollars +for propaganda purposes. Surely those gentlemen know their market and +adjust the supply to the demand. The extraordinary deluge of Russian +literature is evidently a paying proposition. +</p> + +<p> +It is gratifying. We need the injection of new blood into our anemic +literature. +</p> + +<p> +New blood. Not even Gogol is too old for us. No matter that he +died in 1852. His <em>Dead Souls</em>, <em>Tarass Bulba</em>, and just published stories<a class="fnote" href="#footnote-2" id="fnote-2">[2]</a> +belong to the category of works that do not age in spite of their technical +flaws. If you use this perspective, <em>The Mantle</em> will loom up as the peak +of Russian realism. “We have all come out of <em>The Mantle</em>”, admitted +Gogol’s disciple, Dostoevsky. If in that tale we recognize the forerunner +of the relentless soul-vivisectionists of the later days, we get in the other +stories a glimpse of the mystic Gogol, the poet of Goyaesque witches and +devils. Do not read <em>Viy</em> before bed-time lest you go through a heavy +nightmare. +</p> + +<p> +It is an enormous leap from Gogol to Korolenko<a class="fnote" href="#footnote-3" id="fnote-3">[3]</a>, Gorky<a class="fnote" href="#footnote-4" id="fnote-4">[4]</a>, and +Kuprin<a class="fnote" href="#footnote-5" id="fnote-5">[5]</a>. These are living authors, although they belong rather to the +<a id="page-37" class="pagenum" title="37"></a> +past century in their motives and modes. Vladimir Korolenko is a writer +whose very name causes the heart of every Russian to beat with emotion. +Not for the greatness of his art: as an artist he ranks among the lesser. +It is the charm of his personality that places him far above all his colleagues. +His long years of exile in Siberia, his never-flagging championship of the +oppressed classes and races, his tireless encouragement of the young +beginners, and his smile, the deep, broad smile that flows like a sunny +stream through his writings, have endeared him to his countrymen beyond +parallel. Korolenko is the bridge between the heroic, idealistic seventies +and the ultra-individualistic moderns. His stories are not idylls, yet they +smile; he deals with tragedies, describes horrifying situations, but he bears +no ill feeling for the universe, he loves it with all its evils and follies, loves +it with that keen understanding which spells forgiveness. Gorky tells +us that he owes to Korolenko not only his discovery and introduction to +the public, but also his style. I seldom trust an author’s self-criticism. +Gorky differs from his alleged teacher in his style as well as in his +philosophy. Korolenko is gentle, mild, refined, loving, forgiving. Gorky +is rude, loud, hating, revenging. Both have known misery and hardships, +both have rubbed shoulders with the humiliated and down-trodden. But +Korolenko came out of the crucible with a radiant smile, with universal +compassion and sympathy. Gorky neither forgets or forgives. His body +and soul shriek out vengeance for man enslaved, maimed, bestialized. Korolenko +and his “disciple” both exalt human personality, but the first does +so indiscriminatingly, wholesalely, while Gorky glorifies only the strong, +proclaims the “beauty of power”, and scorns the weak worms, the lazy +adders who are content to stagnate in the mire. Gorky’s philosophy may +appeal to us who have drunk from the waters of Zarathustra, but Korolenko’s +art is purer, free from preaching, and hence more convincing. +</p> + +<p> +Alexander Kuprin has been hailed as an anarchist, a free-love preacher, +a social reformer, a cynic, a retrograde, and what not. He may be all +these, or none, or more. Of all the Russian writers he is the only true, +unaffected Dionysian. His love for women, for wine, for horses, for +nature—in a word, for life, is spontaneous and elemental. None of the +hectic morbidity of the consumptive Artzibashev. Kuprin is a healthy +<a id="page-38" class="pagenum" title="38"></a> +artist with an enormous eye. He sees to the bottom the mind of man and +animal, of the thief and the intellectual, of the empty military officer and +of the street-woman, of the artist and of the gambler, and he makes us +see what he sees with a cheerful gracefulness, with no other purpose but +the presentation of his sweetheart, life. His novel, <em>The Duel</em>, stirred +Russian society as a vigorous indictment of militarism, a picture of the +dehumanizing garrison life. Kuprin guffawed at that accusation over +a glass of vodka, as he is usually drawn by cartoonists. Far be it from +him to advocate or condemn. He rejoices in all his heroes, whether they +be garrison dummies, or artistic pickpockets (<em>The Outrage</em>), or Japanese +spies (<em>Captain Ribnikov</em>), or petty philistines (<em>The River of Life</em>). He +floats upon the “river of life”, observes, absorbs, delights, and chuckles +at the very fact of his existence. “Even if I were to fall under a railway +train, and were left lying on the line with broken and bleeding limbs, and +any one were to ask me if life were beautiful, I should none the less, +and even by summoning my last remains of strength, answer enthusiastically, +‘Ah, yes, even now life is glorious!’” (<em>The Duel</em>). +</p> + +<p> +From the charming, lithe, joyous Kuprin I pass reluctantly to a book +on the lugubrious “cruel genius”, Dostoevsky<a class="fnote" href="#footnote-6" id="fnote-6">[6]</a>. It is deplorable that the +publisher who has given us the excellent translation of Dostoevsky by Constance +Garnett should throw on the market such a mediocrity as Mr. +Soloviev’s work, as if there were not excellent books on the novelist written +by Merezhkovsky, Volynsky, Vladimir Solovyov, Veresayev! Mr. Soloviev +presents the accepted view of Dostoevsky as the preacher of repentance +and atonement, the retrograde, the pillar of church and autocracy. Superficially, +the view appears to be correct. Dig deeper into the chaotic, epileptical +soul of the author of <em>Crime and Punishment</em>, gaze into the abysses +of the dual characters of Raskolnikov, Prince Myshkin, Stavrogin, Svidrigailov, +the Karamazovs, fling your imagination into the hellish crater of +the novelist’s mind, and Mr. Soloviev’s symmetrical structure evaporates +like mist. Again I ask, Why are such useless school-exercises reproduced +by intelligent publishers? Why should such a fine translator as Mr. +Hogarth waste his energy on puerilities? +</p> + +<p> +The same Whys can be applied to another recent publication<a class="fnote" href="#footnote-7" id="fnote-7">[7]</a>, Doroshevich’s +impressions. Doroshevich is the most popular journalist in +Russia, a witty, entertaining <em>feuilletonist</em>, who employs an original staccato +rhythm. But there is no reason under the sun to translate his reportorial +impressions of the war fugitives, written for a Moscow daily paper. Their +value is purely local. How can we be interested in the management of the +<a id="page-39" class="pagenum" title="39"></a> +Russian relief-points, or their mismanagement? True, at times Doroshevich +flashes brilliant impressionistic colors, as in describing the fugitives’ +bonfires in the forest. But the rare gems do not justify the journalistic +heap. +</p> + +<p> +I am uneasy about these fallacies of the publishers. Few though they +are, they may serve the part of a spoonful of vinegar in a pot of honey. +</p> + +<hr class="footnote"> + +<p class="footnote"> +<a class="footnote" href="#fnote-2" id="footnote-2">[2]</a> <em>The Mantle and other stories, by Nikolai Gogol. New York: Frederic +A. Stokes.</em> +</p> + +<p class="footnote"> +<a class="footnote" href="#fnote-3" id="footnote-3">[3]</a> <em>Makar’s Dream and other stories, by V. Korolenko. New York: +Duffield.</em> +</p> + +<p class="footnote"> +<a class="footnote" href="#fnote-4" id="footnote-4">[4]</a> <em>Twenty-six Men and a Girl, by M. Gorky. New York: Frederic A. +Stokes.</em> +</p> + +<p class="footnote"> +<a class="footnote" href="#fnote-5" id="footnote-5">[5]</a> <em>The Duel, by A. Kuprin. New York: Macmillan.<br> +The River of Life, by A. Kuprin. Boston: John W. Luce.</em> +</p> + +<p class="footnote"> +<a class="footnote" href="#fnote-6" id="footnote-6">[6]</a> <em>Dostoevsky, by Evgenii Soloviev. New York: Macmillan.</em> +</p> + +<p class="footnote"> +<a class="footnote" href="#fnote-7" id="footnote-7">[7]</a> <em>The Way of the Cross, by Doroshevich. New York: G. P. Putnam.</em> +</p> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2 class="article" id="THEINDEPENDENTEXHIBITION"> +The Independent Exhibition +</h2> + +</div> + +<p class="aut"> +LUPO DE BRAILA +</p> + +<p class="first"> +<span class="firstchar">T</span><span class="postfirstchar">he</span> rich aunt with whose aid the Chicago Society of Artists has +managed, up to the present, to check all artistic impulses in this +city, has lost her magic attraction and power. Her golden smiles and +soft pillows have failed lately to captivate and hold. There is a new +breed of young artists. They seem to be an energetic lot, and decline to +live in the future of promises; and, what is more horrible, they decline +to flirt with the rich aunt through the aid of the honorable society. +</p> + +<p> +For many years she was the bubbling liquid within the life-giving +bottle. The magic corkscrew was in the safe, the combination known to +the initiated few. According to these few, young artists had to go through +a certain process of taming and self-effacement before they were gradually +given the secret. A certain amount of artistic ignorance plus an ability +to pull strings was required of every aspirant. A soft backbone bent by +many kicks was also one of the main requirements. “Don’t knock, you’ll +break the magic bottle” was their watchword. If you dared to ask questions +concerning the sacred duty of the initiated few, you aroused a hatred +that took years to melt,—a hatred that seemed impossible in such delicate +souls. The few artists who refused to be tamed left the city and +have settled in other parts. +</p> + +<p> +And the philanthropic aunt, like all true philanthropists, acquired all +she could get and paid the minimum price. The paying was usually accompanied +by a lot of pompous actions and was supposed to be received +like a first-class iron cross by a common soldier. You see, the young talented +artist was actually compelled to bribe the art patron to get to the secret +of the combination, and was compelled to listen to all kinds of insults +besides. Here are a favorite few: “I have discovered him”; “I helped +him to get where he is now”; “If it were not for me....” The artist +was also used as a rare orchid at their dinner tables and as Chinese embroidery +<a id="page-40" class="pagenum" title="40"></a> +at unusual occasions. I know one of these patrons who even resorted +to threats, when a young and independent sculptor refused to be “discovered.” +And such creatures pose as art patrons and connoisseurs, and +hold the combination to the life-giving bottle of this city. +</p> + +<p> +As a matter of fact, almost all the prestige and almost all the artistic +knowledge possessed by these same patrons was given them by their so-called +protegees at starvation prices. However, the patrons are hardly +to be blamed for this state of affairs. They were made by well-meaning +but mediocre artists whose highest ambitions were foggy imitations of a +certain kind of realism practiced abroad when my grandmother’s dolls +used up most of her time. The saddest or funniest side of this spectacle +is that the patrons have, for the last few years, advanced in understanding +beyond the possibilities of the artists who have made them. As you +can easily see, a most discouraging and impossible state of affairs. It +reached its climax at the last Chicago Artists’ exhibition, when those in +control, to use a popular saying, rubbed it in. It was a show of the aged +and crippled, and prizes were awarded on the basis of an Old-Age Benefit. +It was a slow sickness and positive in retarding all artistic endeavor in +this city. +</p> + +<p> +But like a clear and promising path in this dark jungle comes the +first International Exhibition of Independent Artists. It is a jury-free exhibition, +and every man is allowed to hang two paintings, provided he pays +for the space. And it was a strong indictment against the old order. It +showed how thoroughly it has managed to kill all originality and individuality +in the younger artists. In spite of the fact that it was a jury-free +exhibition you could easily see that almost everyone had painted with +this little thought in the back of his head: This must please Messrs. Albright, +Juergens, and Company. To pick out the few who made a good +showing this time would be unfair to the rest. The whole show was conceived +and arranged in six weeks, and to me it was more interesting and +held more promise than any other show held in this city. +</p> + +<p> +It is a young oak whose knotty branches, like playful fists, shoot in +unexpected directions. It grows up near a grey solemn mausoleum. The +mausoleum acts as if it does not notice the sturdy youngster; but it knows +in its heart, if it has one, that it will soon be hidden in the shadow of +this tree’s branches. Virile roots will crack the walls and decay will be +the deserved fate. +</p> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2 class="article" id="THEREADERCRITIC"> +<a id="page-41" class="pagenum" title="41"></a> +The Reader Critic +</h2> + +</div> + +<div class="letters"> +<h3 class="section" id="SHEISNOFRIENDOFOURS"> +<em>SHE IS NO FRIEND OF OURS!</em> +</h3> + +<p class="from"> +<em>Arthur Davison Ficke, Davenport, Iowa</em>: +</p> + +<p> +Will you be so kind as to ask your friend, “Virginia York”, to refrain from +re-misprinting for a third time, a bit hacked from my <em>Café Sketches</em>? If she finds +the poem so interesting, why does she not print it in its entirety, and correctly? +Then perhaps her readers could decide just where the joke lies—in the light of +“Virginia York’s” Olympian pronouncement that “maybe you think this is funny, +but certainly it is not intended to be.” Just because a little learning would be +dangerous for her, I shall never disclose to her what the poem <em>was</em> intended to be. +Besides, she wouldn’t believe me; for her, a thing has to be either <em>Lear</em> or <em>Charley’s +Aunt</em>, evidently. +</p> + +<p> +I have harbored doubts as to the value of <em>vers libre</em>; but now they are gone. +For I see that it does shut out a certain type of mind. +</p> + +<p> +Harriet Dean’s <em>Pillar</em> is admirable! Also Sandburg’s four. +</p> + +<p> +Tell your “sixteen year old boy” that his poem is damn interesting—but to cut +out the “only sixteen” and “one could not expect me to know much about poetry” +stuff. At sixteen most of us had read all the poetry in existence, and were busy +writing epics that were to re-make the world. Tell him to stop being a sixteen-year-old +worm, and to get up on his hind legs and bite the stars. Tell him to +write arrogantly of this “charming” world he sees. It’s time enough to be humble +when one is old. +</p> + +<h3 class="section" id="THEPROPHETINHISOWNCOUNTRY"> +<em>THE PROPHET IN HIS OWN COUNTRY.</em> +</h3> + +<p class="from"> +<em>Daphne and Michael Carr, Columbia, Missouri</em>: +</p> + +<p> +We have been greatly enraged by reading Mr Charles Zwaska’s article, <em>An Isaiah +without a Christ</em>, in the April number of <span class="smallcaps">The Little Review</span>. It reminds us of a +review of the same book in <em>Judge</em>. It ran something like this: “Vachel Lindsey +has out a new book on the Art of the Moving Picture. It might be all right, +but for the fact that the movie can never be Art.” In just the same sententious +way Mr Zwaska seems to be peeved that Lindsay should suggest the possibility of +art in a thing which is at present clumsily done. Some one has said that when +Miriam led the women of Israel to a dance of rejoicing, all of the women who +were too fat or too stiff to dance stood back and deplored the immodesty of their +nimble sisters. Perhaps Mr Zwaska is too fat, or too stiff, or too old. I don’t +know: may be he is so young that he still creeps and doesn’t think of dancing. +For Lindsay has sung out humanly and delightfully a more acceptable ideal of +democracy than any American has yet sung. The rest of us would-be artists are +creating things that can appeal to a small number. Lindsay is chanting to all +America, and all America is listening—we, the artists, as well as the littlest country +school-boy. +</p> + + <div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">“Says the swift black horse</p> + <p class="verse">To the swift white horse:</p> + <p class="verse">‘There goes the alarm</p> +<a id="page-42" class="pagenum" title="42"></a> + <p class="verse">There goes the alarm.</p> + <p class="verse">They are hitched, they are off,</p> + <p class="verse">They are gone in a flash,</p> + <p class="verse">And they strain at the driver’s iron arm.’”</p> + </div> + </div> + </div> +<p class="noindent"> +We shout it when the fire-engines fly down the street. We croon the moon +poems together in the evenings, and we chant <em>The Santa Fé Trail</em> as we tramp +across country. +</p> + +<p> +Mr Zwaska seems to catch a glimmering of the fact that Lindsay is a rhyming +poet, because he is singing to all the people. Why does he not apply this a little +farther? Lindsay’s message, as I catch it, is this: +</p> + +<p> +The Moving Picture has in it possibilities of a great art. Furthermore, it is +for all America, for every farm boy, for every little dish-washer as well as for +every millionaire. Let us make this art as perfect, as inspiring, as possible, since +it has a wider influence, be it good, bad, or indifferent, than any other art in the +history of humanity. The exquisite Parthenon, Sophocles’s tragedies performed in +the theater of Dionysus, were for the Athenians, and for such as could reach +Athens. Fortunately, that included a large percentage of the Greeks. But how +many Americans, proportionately, can see such wonders as New York has to offer? +</p> + +<p> +When a moving-picture as perfect as the Parthenon has been produced there +need be no soul in America who has not seen it. +</p> + +<p> +This being the ideal, we proceed toward its realization. Lindsay points out +some means of attaining beauty in the moving-pictures. The producers can, he +says, learn from the painters beauties of composition, of symbolism, of mood. Beautiful +sculpture can teach the rhythm, the speed, the grace of motion. And architecture +will help to interpret big social emotions, such as patriotism and religion in +terms of crowds, pageantlike, of landscapes, and, upon occasion, of architecture +itself. +</p> + +<p> +But here Mr Zwaska objects. He says that Lindsay is making the moving-picture +a parasite on the other arts. I am not going to quote Noah Webster, or +Dr Johnson, but it is generally understood that a parasite is an organism that steals +its life from its host, weakening the host thereby. Has Mr Lorado Taft, or Mr +Frank Lloyd Wright, or Mr Jerome Blum, been robbed of any tittle of artistic ideas, +or of artistic technique, or of admiration by Lindsay’s book, or by the producers +who have tried so ineffectually to follow his suggestions? I don’t want to quibble +with metaphors, but if horticulture is to be the basis of them I should rather say that +Lindsay proposes to burbank a wonderful new nectarine art by crossing painting, +sculpture, architecture, and pantomime. +</p> + +<p> +At present the difficulty is that there is no one in the producing field with the +artistic training, and feeling, and the burning genius withal to produce a wonderful +film. Max Reinhardt or Gordon Craig could do it, but even they would be working +against the difficulties of a new medium. D’Annunzio did pretty well with <em>Cabiria</em> +but——Have you ever read Aeschylus’ <em>Suppliants</em>? It was the first and afterwards +came <em>Electra</em> and <em>Œdipus</em>. +</p> + +<p> +Well, along in his article Mr Zwaska grows boisterous at Lindsay who has, supposedly +working on a suggestion from his friend, James Oppenheim, spoken of the +possibility of a highly symbolic film production of <em>The Book of the Dead</em>. And +this because Mrs Moore of Chicago, has worked out beautiful dances, and costumes +and libretto for a stage production of the wonderful Nile and Sun myth. Bless +Mrs Lou Wall Moore! We love her and her devotion. We have been wonder-struck +by the loveliness of her Egyptian costume designs. When she does produce +<em>The Book of the Dead</em> we will, Fate permitting, make a pilgrimage from this movie-ridden +Missouri town to see it wherever it may he. And I know that we will be rejoiced +<a id="page-43" class="pagenum" title="43"></a> +to be able to do so. But I am sure that dear Mrs Moore would be the last +person to object to a film production of <em>The Book of the Dead</em>, <em>IF</em> the production +be a beautiful one. For, as Lindsay iterates and reiterates, the stage and the moving-pictures +<em>MUST</em> be different. Mrs Moore’s production will have “the splendor +of color, space, height, distance, and most magical of all, the voice.” And the +worthy moving-picture production, when it arrives, will have, in black-and-white +symphony, the infinite depths of the sky, waving palm branches, the width of the +desert, and above all, beautifully controlled actors, streaming hundreds, directed and +co-ordinated as was the Diaghileff corps-de-ballet. And this beauty will travel all +over the country, touching, among others, this drama-starved town of Missouri, +where we suffer for want of visual beauty. +</p> + +<p> +Mr Zwaska deplores the lack of composition—“moving lines” he calls it—in +the moving pictures. He says that he has seen it “only in the flight of gulls (unconscious +actors) or in pictures of rivers and trees, and the sea; in short—Nature. +But Nature is Nature” wailed Mr Zwaska. And pray, why pervert the facts you +bring forth? If the cinematograph can record the beautiful motion of the birds, +can it not equally well record the beautiful motion of humans when the producer +has learned to direct his actors as M. Fokine directs his dancers? <em>There</em> is room +for Art. +</p> + +<p> +Why—why, in the name of all that is lovely, must people howl at any expression +of belief in possibilities of a new art? The moving-picture is Shakespearean, +Hugoesque, Zolaesque, in its method. We see through it not only Antony and +Cleopatra, but the two great hungry struggling groups that each impersonates. We +see not only the typical coal-miner and his typical sorrows; we see the mass of +his comrades under the same oppression, the same evil conditions. We see better, +because more swiftly, than Hugo could paint it with his wonderful vocabulary, +Notre Dame de Paris, the symbol, the social motif which embodies in a unity all +that the story tries to show of the beauty, the horror, the fate, and the aspirations +of the pre-Renaissance, an ever-present condition behind the actors. Are such possibilities +to be shoved aside and denied a place among the arts where pageantry +is admitted? Is the fact that thousands of bad, atrociously bad, films are turned +out to discredit the few well-constructed, symbolic film-plays? Look at our abominable +American poster-makers. Does this discredit Mr Blum, whose praises we hear +sung? +</p> + +<p> +There is one really vital criticism in Mr Zwaska’s hectic article. That is, upon +Lindsay’s “too ruthless a theory” of no music in the movie theater. From the +first we shied at that. We are surprised at the author of poems to be read aloud. +Another of our admirable countrymen, who qualifies not only as a sociologist, +but as a philosopher and a poet, has his say on the subject quite incidentally. I +speak of Max Eastman, who, in his <em>Enjoyment of Poetry</em>, says, “I have yet to +find one in which the reality of the pictures is not enhanced with the beating of +an old piano. Nobody notices the piano, nobody remembers what the piano plays, +or how badly, but there it is, always keeping up a metre.” The audiences’ “voluntary +mind is on the canvas but the music slips all the deeper into their beings, and +it makes them live the pictures.” I can well believe Mr Zwaska’s account of the +after-midnight picture show. Granted that most picture-show music is terrible, +that the electric piano is agonizing, that it is deeply shocking to hear the <em>Miserere</em> +when sweet Mary Pickford is acting the Un Bel Di Vedremo scene in Butterfly, +the music is far less dreadful than silence, and we talk through it all the same. I +do not know a possible remedy, but it is worth the thought of every person interested +<a id="page-44" class="pagenum" title="44"></a> +or disgusted. This is merely one of Vachel Lindsay’s acknowledged “paw +paws.” +</p> + +<p> +So here we are at the end of our wrath. And here’s a cheer and a hearty +greeting for Lindsay, who is scaling the Pike’s Peak of idealism. And here’s congratulations +to Mr Zwaska for directing a few more telescopes at him. +</p> + +<h3 class="section" id="FORTHEBRAHMINS"> +<em>FOR THE BRAHMINS.</em> +</h3> + +<p class="from"> +<em>A Poet, Chicago</em>: +</p> + +<p> +I am sick of hearing Chicago audiences go into raptures over Brahms. Here +is my impression of him as I listened to the last concert of the Chicago Symphony: +<em>Symphony No. 4, E Minor, Opus 98</em>. +</p> + + <div class="table"> +<table class="movements"> +<tbody> + <tr> + <td class="col1">First Movement:</td> + </tr> + <tr class="i"> + <td class="col1">Milk and Liver.</td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1">Second Movement:</td> + </tr> + <tr class="i"> + <td class="col1">Bed-bugs crawling over the body of a fat burgher. Occasionally he snorts sonorously (’cellos).</td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1">Third Movement:</td> + </tr> + <tr class="i"> + <td class="col1">Ten-ton joviality—beer, cheese, saurkraut, ham. Grazioso—Ach, du lieber Augustine! The end suggests his Academic:</td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1">Fourth Movement:</td> + </tr> + <tr class="i"> + <td class="col1">a. Hungarian dancing—(Brahms’ only successful field).</td> + </tr> + <tr class="i"> + <td class="col1">b. Falls into pompernickel sentimentalism.</td> + </tr> + <tr class="i"> + <td class="col1">c. The German policeman (trombones).</td> + </tr> + <tr class="i"> + <td class="col1">d. More liver.</td> + </tr> + <tr class="i"> + <td class="col1">e. Gas.</td> + </tr> +</tbody> +</table> + </div> +<p class="from"> +<em>Yours Sylph-fully</em>: +</p> + +<p> +Please let me “register” my appreciation of your April number. I read the +extract from <em>The Interstate Medical Journal</em> with intense purposefulness, have +ordered Vance Thompson’s “epoch-making book, <em>Eat and Grow Thin</em>”, and begin +to feel that I am getting even more than I subscribed for. +</p> + +<p> +Incidentally, didn’t you love Carl Sandburg’s <em>Gone</em>? Chick Lorimer! What +a name! It makes one almost sorry to be “respectable”, somehow—it’s so full +of gayety and courage! +</p> + +</div> + +<div class="impressum"> +<p class="b c"> +Statement of Ownership, Management, Circulation, Etc., required by +the Act of August 24, 1912 +</p> + +<p class="noindent"> +of <em>THE LITTLE REVIEW</em> published monthly at <em>Chicago, Ill.</em> +for April 1st, 1916. +</p> + +<p> +Editor, <em>Margaret C. Anderson, 834 Fine Arts Building, Chicago</em>. +</p> + +<p> +Managing Editor, <em>Same</em> +</p> + +<p> +Business Manager, <em>Same</em> +</p> + +<p> +Publisher, <em>Same</em> +</p> + +<p> +Owners: (If a corporation, give its name and the names and addresses of stockholders +holding 1 per cent or more of total amount of stock. If not a corporation, give +names and addresses of individual owners.) +</p> + +<p class="u c"> +<em>Margaret C. Anderson<br> +834 Fine Arts Building, Chicago</em> +</p> + +<p> +Known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders, holding 1 per cent or +more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities: <em>None.</em> +</p> + +<p class="sign"> +<em>MARGARET C. ANDERSON</em>, +</p> + +<p> +Sworn to and subscribed before me this <em>31st</em> day of <em>March, 1916</em>. +</p> + +<p class="sign"> +<em>MITCHELL DAWSON, Notary Public.</em><br> +(My commission expires <em>December 20, 1917</em>.) +</p> + +</div> + +<div class="ads chapter"> +<p class="h1 u adh"> +ART SCHOOL or<br> +ART FACTORY<br> +WHICH? +</p> + +<p> +Charles A. Kinney’s story of his fight for individual rights in +the Art Institute: +</p> + +<hr> + +<p> +A few of the topics Mr. Kinney will discuss: +</p> + +<p> +The seven cases in the law courts—what they mean to +students and faculty. +</p> + +<p> +The Art Student Fellowship organization—why it was +forced on the students of the Institute. +</p> + +<p> +Why faculty members were forced to support it on penalty +of losing their positions. +</p> + +<hr> + +<p> +Organization and discipline, or art spirit? Which is most +essential in an art school? +</p> + +<p> +Student activities—shall the Dean or the students control them? +</p> + +<p> +Art Schools—shall men trained in Business or men trained in +Art control them? +</p> + +<hr> + +<p> +What encouragement is there for sincere artists<a id="corr-7"></a>? +</p> + +<p> +When at least half the scholarships are awarded because of +influence and favoritism rather than meritorious work? +</p> + +<p> +When faculty members of the Institute have practically no independence? +</p> + +<hr> + +<p> +Mr. Kinney’s article will appear in the June issue of <span class="smallcaps">The +Little Review</span>. +</p> + +</div> + +<div class="ads chapter"> + <div class="box"> +<p class="h1 adh"> +THE FLAME +</p> + +<p class="h2 adh"> +A JOURNAL FOR THE NEW AGE +</p> + +<p class="u ade"> +Irwin Granich and Van K. Allison, Editors.<br> +3 Bellingham Place, Boston, Mass. +</p> + +<p> +“The Flame” is to be a monthly journal of revolution, soon to +take life. It is to burn against oppression and authority everywhere, +and is to be as pure and merciless as the flower of light +after which it is named. +</p> + +<p> +We want you to help us make “The Flame.” It is not to be +one of those vehicles for the delivery of the vast thoughts of an +unrecognized “genius,” but a little forum where every revolutionist +of high heart and purpose can speak. We can pay nothing, of +course. Cartoons, poems, stories, sketches, tracts, philosophies, +news reports—all will be welcomed. +</p> + +<p> +No creed or philosophy will be barred from our columns if +only its devotee writes in a beautiful and furious and yes-saying +gesture. The editorials will be flavored by the anarchy of the publishers. +</p> + + </div> + <div class="box"> +<p class="h2 adh"> +THE DRAMA For May Offers Two Plays +</p> + +<p> +<b>REMY DE GOURMONT</b>, whose dramatic work has never +been accessible in English. The translation has been made by +the celebrated Imagist poet, <b>RICHARD ALDINGTON</b>, who contributes +also a skillful critique of de Gourmont’s work. The +plays are printed by an authorization given a few weeks before +the playwright’s death. +</p> + +<p> +Among the other articles is one by Alexander Bakshy, an +associate of the Russian producer, Meyerhold, on <b>The Cinematograph +as Art</b>. In this the author shows that the great field +open to the “movies” has not even been discovered by the film +producer of today. +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Charles Lemmi contributes a brilliant discussion of +<b>The Italian Stage of Today</b>, not so much a study of the individual +plays as an attempt to analyze and explain the forces in +the present-day Italian theatre. +</p> + +<p> +The Hull House Players, an organization of more than local +fame, is the subject of a brief history by the founder and +director, Laura Dainty Pelham. +</p> + +<p> +Many other articles on the current problems of the drama, +reviews and bibliographies complete the number. +</p> + +<p class="u c"> +<b>736 Marquette Building<br> +CHICAGO</b> +</p> + +<p class="noindent"> +Three Dollars Per Year +</p> + +<p class="noindent"> +Two Dollars Per Year to Members of The Drama League of America +</p> + +<p class="r"> +Seventy-five Cents Per Copy +</p> + + </div> +</div> + +<div class="ads chapter"> +<div class="centerpic bent fl"> +<img src="images/bent.jpg" alt=""></div> + +<p class="h1 adh"> +<span class="smallcaps">Piano Triumphant</span> +</p> + +<p> +The artistic outgrowth +of forty-five years of +constant improvement—a +piano conceived to +better all that has +proven best in others. +</p> + +<p class="h2 adh"> +GEO. P. BENT GRAND +</p> + +<p> +Could you but compare it +with all others, artistically it +must be your choice. Each +day proves this more true. +</p> + +<p> +Geo. P. Bent Grand, Style +“A”—a small Grand, built +for the home—your home. +</p> + +<p class="h2 adh"> +<span class="smallcaps">Geo. P. Bent Company</span> +</p> + +<p class="u c"> +Manufacturers of Artistic Pianos<br> +Retailers of Victrolas<br> +<span class="larger">214 South Wabash Avenue, Chicago</span> +</p> + +<p class="cb vspace"> + +</p> + +</div> + +<div class="trnote chapter"> +<p class="transnote"> +Transcriber’s Notes +</p> + +<p> +Advertisements were collected at the end of the text. +</p> + +<p> +The table of contents on the title page was adjusted in order to reflect correctly the +headings in this issue of <span class="smallcaps">The Little Review</span>. +</p> + +<p> +The original spelling was mostly preserved. A few obvious typographical errors +were silently corrected. All other changes are shown here (before/after): +</p> + + + +<ul> + +<li> +... treacle on bread over all these different <span class="underline">stylic</span> bases, this operation requiring ...<br> +... treacle on bread over all these different <a href="#corr-0"><span class="underline">stylistic</span></a> bases, this operation requiring ...<br> +</li> + +<li> +... What encouragement is there for sincere artists ...<br> +... What encouragement is there for sincere artists<a href="#corr-7"><span class="underline">?</span></a> ...<br> +</li> +</ul> +</div> + + +<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75706 ***</div> +</body> +</html> + diff --git a/75706-h/images/bent.jpg b/75706-h/images/bent.jpg Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..c435c35 --- /dev/null +++ b/75706-h/images/bent.jpg diff --git a/75706-h/images/cover.jpg b/75706-h/images/cover.jpg Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..1b3e102 --- /dev/null +++ b/75706-h/images/cover.jpg diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b5dba15 --- /dev/null +++ b/LICENSE.txt @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +This book, including all associated images, markup, improvements, +metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be +in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES. + +Procedures for determining public domain status are described in +the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org. + +No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in +jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize +this book outside of the United States should confirm copyright +status under the laws that apply to them. diff --git a/README.md b/README.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..40bb686 --- /dev/null +++ b/README.md @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for +book #75706 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/75706) |
