The Reader Critic
Reading edition
The Nymph
(Edgar Lee, have you missed anything?—Editor.)
I see it all now: I was born with the soul of a nymph, And they expected me to be law-abiding and moral! Why, I was a nymph from the day my mother lashed me For playing kissing games with the boys, out behind the school, To the day I shot my lover in a South State Street cabaret For flirting with another girl and they put me in the penitentiary. Good God! is it a sin to be young? —Anonymous.
How Stanilaus Szukalski Expresses Life
L. C. B.:
There are trees and valleys and mountains—red, blue, orange and purple—all smothered by a phosphorescent green. The trees stretch up gnarled hands, swollen from too much striving. There is no sky. Dull coal mingles with the earth clods. Diamond mines glitter. The ground is misshapen. Flowers give forth a stale odor. A hideous laugh sounds. It comes from the mouth of a hunch-back who, with prods of burning metal, forces people into the quick-sands. Over the sands sucking, demoniacal waters rush. Here and there an eye or a torso floats on the surface. From the trees and valleys and mountains, luridly colored, come human faces. Blood runs from their opened arteries. Their hands are horribly twisted. In the foreground writhes a shape whose fingers bend back to meet his knuckles. Another rears a massive head, the veins of which stand out further than his purple lips. A woman’s arm is extended, too full of blood. A weird figure hovers over an abyss, swathed with the vapors arising from the gases of the underground. All the people are dying. Everyone breathes hard. A whole mound is composed of a soft substance—disintegrated limbs. The jelly-like mass quivers. This is life.
Did you see his exhibition at the Art Institute? At seventeen one is almost wholly in sympathy with him.
Phantasy
Noncompos Mentis, Napa, California:
Night! A lambient fog * * * * * Stirs the damp echos of the baleful deep, Cimmerian in its fell intensity. Shrouded in mist, pale wraiths flit hitherward Or yon; lured or impelled * * * * * Peace! Ah! Who shall say? Borne on the vagrant breeze she floats; Kelp in her hands; ’twined in her hair The weed from outer seas; writhing yet strangely still. Behold her eyes—shallow, opaque, Yet glaucous with a nascent light, gleaming Its message of appeal to answering soul. * * * * * Ah me! Recall the past; Blot out its infamies; this fiery tumult quell With one tempestuous kiss. My being swoons—my soul is wafted hence, Drowned in its God-like, saccharine ecstasy.[4]
Birth Control
Russell Palmer, Seattle:
... With particular reference to the matter of Birth Control, which the writer has studied in an amateurish fashion for some time, I want to ask you if there has ever been framed a model statute providing for the dissemination of such information by the State.
If such a model statute exists I will arrange to have it introduced in the Washington State Legislature when that body convenes next January. If nothing of this sort is available I would earnestly recommend that steps be taken immediately to prepare a measure which will bring about the maximum amount of good and yet at the same time have an opportunity of receiving the support of law-makers elected by a semi-civilized and bigoted people.
It should be borne in mind that the Initiative and Referendum are both in effect in the State of Washington, so that there would be a strong probability that such a proposed law would be passed upon directly by the people, either through the failure of the legislature to meet the issue squarely or its over cautious desire to have its action approved by the voters individually.
I believe that such an act would have a fair chance of passage. We look upon our State as not altogether unprogressive, for in addition to the legislative progress indicated by the Initiative and Referendum we enjoy woman suffrage, glory in non-partisan direct primaries, carry but do not wave a Red Light Abatement Act, tolerate Prohibition and threaten Single Tax. So you see there are hopes.
What Is the State?
(An answer to Alan Adair’s “What Is Anarchy?”)
Alice Groff, Philadelphia:
Is it not time that thinking people should cease to speak of the social order as “the state”? The very meaning of state is static, and if there be a qualifying word that does not apply to the life of the social order static is that word. The social order is a growing, developing, evolving thing.
Man is a social as well as an individual being. He may be called a political being by virtue of his social activities, and the methods he uses to live best his social life; but the individual man is not a political being—he cannot “flock in a corner all by himself” as Dundreary would say—he is political only in the sense of being an element in a social ego, with a social will toward the desired social end of that ego.
Such social ego is continually being formed anew in the social order. The dominating social ego of any stage is not necessarily the highest ideal which the most advanced and thoughtful minds in that stage can conceive. It is the highest ideal of the largest or most powerful number of individuals that are in unanimity upon that ideal and capable of ruling the rest of the social order with it for the time being. Every form of social dominance that has ever prevailed in the history of the world will come under this head and answer to this description. And who shall say that the prevailing and dominating social ego at any one stage is not the best possible for the social order at that stage?
The individual man with a high philosophic gift and a reasoning mind may say to himself, and to others: “Man is capable of a better social order than this, there are higher and finer ideals than those that prevail”—but he can do absolutely nothing of himself to do away with the prevailing social ego, and to substitute a new one with better ideals, as he thinks, except to teach, to agitate, until he can induce a number of individuals to take up his ideal and to join him in a social ego that shall become powerful enough to drive out the dominating ego and substitute for it the new one. This is all that there is to political activity. This is the whole story of social evolution. And no individual or social ego can possibly decide that the new ideal is better than the old until it is “tried out.” It is of course likely to have better elements than the old in so far as it is born of criticism upon the old which then was being “tried out.” But no dominating social ego can ever hope statically to establish itself in the social order while the world endures; consequently the reasoning mind must say to itself: “The highest social ideal that I can conceive and can induce a social ego to stand for is only the next step in social evolution, which must give place to the next and the next.” Hence, such mind can only smile indulgently upon all static ideals—monarchy, democracy, anarchy, socialism alike; realizing that the only social ideals worthy the name are those based upon demonstrated scientific truth—the collected and collated set of social facts that have been found to work in accordance with natural law in past social evolution; realizing that the personal ideal of the individual man, unless based upon such facts, is socially a child’s soapbubble, whatever it may be in the innermost of his own soul as to the evolution of his own individuality.
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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):
... Se hisse, et regarde par desses le mur. ... ... Se hisse, et regarde par dessus le mur. ...
... Un chaudronnier les achète à la foule traphie. ... ... Un chaudronnier les achète à la foule trahie. ...