The Reader Critic

“Mutable Emotions”

Alan Adair, Fovant Camp:

Yesterday your paper came to me, sent forward from my home. For the last four months it has come to me through change of camp and bullets, the delays of censorship, and the uncertainties of civil and military posts. And each time it has provoked me, and tonight, as I read it in the flickering obscurity of my hut, it provokes me excessively. For I am a soldier and my life is the immemorial life of soldiers. That is to say it is the life of a barbarian; of an antique legionary; of a serf of the Middle Age; of those that fought before the Arts were born of leisure and the life of cities. I am a soldier and live according to the ancient lore of camps: incessant occupation and equally unceasing tedium; recurring orgies of physical exertion prolonged to the verge of utter exhaustion; an inexorable discipline that is with classic exactness termed blind; the constant and elementary hardships of animal existence experienced in forms unmitigated by any of the devices of civilization; above all, a complete and almost splendid intellectual vacuity, a complete and almost splendid indifference to the customary enthusiasms and inclinations of a life outside the armies: these are the chief elements that shape the life of a soldier on active service and these are the influences amongst which, throughout Europe, the men of my years are coming to maturity. That is why you provoke me, and your paper provokes me, and your contributors all provoke me when there is talk of the Arts. Our experiences are alien to each other; and Art is so completely a matter for man’s inner soul, for that inner soul wherein distil to essence the labors, sufferings and lusts of a man’s life and from which the deepest elements of individual character take form and color. As your quotation from de Gourmont puts it, there is a difference in our sensibility; and that difference lies in this: that we in Europe are soldiers. The other influences that separate us in sympathy are negligible, and spring solely from our different opportunities of acquaintance with the cults and works of contemporary schools and artists. But the military influence has turned the city of Art to a tower of Babel. We who are soldiers no longer understand the tongues that Art once spoke to us. The old language of unrest, of delicate eclecticism, of an indecision of taste that hungers by turn for the remotely archaic and the fantastically modern, is become unintelligible to us who amid the discipline and adventures of arms are learning new values for all the sacraments of life.

In a Philistine world, where money was a god indecently obtruded and death a presence solicitously hidden, it was well enough to seek among the Arts for spells to dissipate reality. With life secure in our lands and without imperative desires in our hearts, it was reasonable to find in contemplation of the creations of man’s love of beauty a satisfaction of the many dissatisfactions of the spirit. But when a man has seen death, very clear and huge, straddling the way, and learned to think patiently of the final extinction; lost many friends; met fear in twenty shapes, and in the light of an unhoped-for morning felt the fresh, unshattered joy of living, the Arts, if they do not lose influence, do at least change in the significance that they have for his soul.

They become not a means for satisfying the inexpressible and vacillating impulses of the spirit, but a means of satisfying the desires of a whole man. To have lived and survived as a soldier teaches a man the worth of his life; and life is desire. To live fully is to desire much and to have found means for the satisfaction of one’s desires. Art as you speak of it, as you advertise for it, is not a thing to minister to the desires of a man. It is a coloring matter to conceal an anaemia of the spirit, a way of spinning dainty webs across the void of a purposeless existence. At the best it is an echo for awakening the senses to the mysteries and subtleties of life, but without power to interpret them into action. I suspect, it is merely a device to avoid boredom. But for us, with lives still in hazard, the world holds too many desirable things for our souls to feel need of an art of this kind.

Art for us is no longer a means for the evocation of emotion; a magic net cast over all the nude and undesirable body of life. We are too full of lusts for such an art. We are done with “the brooding East”, with the Tagores; with the Ajanta caves; with the dun yellows and faded crimsons of Hindustan. We know ourselves again to be of the European tradition: the tradition of men who think and act. Our art must serve life. Which is to say it must serve our wills and desires. For we desire multitudinous things: loves, travels and insurrections. We have lived too long as mud in the hands of chance and a military system. Every fibre of body and soul is athirst. We desire women, horses and dogs, and wines. We desire adventures that are adventures of the spirit and not solely a hazard of blood and health. We desire a society reshaped and to be concerned in that inflaming and organization of the people that alone can precipitate so vast a change. We are ready to turn again to our old purposes: to that large movement that will control the fate of all existing polities and is called Syndicalism, the new Unionism, Industrial Unionism, Anarchy as latitude or language alters; to our intentions in Ireland, Catalonia, or among the broken nations of the Slavs; to the fantastic keenness of a sculpture and a painting become militant and seeking ever further into the reality of man’s consciousness and semblance.

But we return to these enthusiasms disciplined by unaccustomed rigors. We have learned to live directly; to think clearly, to act and have no doubts. Henceforward, for us Art will be a thing of clear outlines, simplicity, and practical purpose. It must administer to our desires. It must be part of our will: that is of our philosophy and lust. It must be evangelist. It must carry a sword in its cloak. We shall have no use for the Imagist telling three lines of the passage of some faint tremor of joy or repugnance. Nor shall we applaud the Vorticist poet jerking in angular words a cinematograph picture across the mind. We want a verse with blood in it. We want verse in a hundred manners—aphrodisiac or insurrectionary, mournful, obscene, or profound. Only we want a verse that is not trivial and is not cold. Similarly we want plays and essays and tales. But we want a drama that is less a drama of discussion than one of action, essays that are shaped to a purpose, stories that show life untruly, venomous, unfair, eloquent tales that inflame, that espouse and condemn. We want an art inspired by a love of action. We want an art that is the evocation of sustained and coherent desire. We want an art astir with the conscious movement of a soul that wills; an art of purposes and lusts. For we have ventured our lives and received them back invigorated by danger: we have learned in hardships the value of desire and through endurance have discovered how contemptible is an art of delicate and unsure pleasures, of dilettantism, of varied, sterile, and mutable emotions.

And such is the Art of your contributors and such the definition of Art that even the blank pages of your paper imply.

[This is so beautiful an expression of the typical confusions about Art that I scarcely know where to begin to answer it.

In the first place, you say that the life of war is an artificial life—a Philistine world. Then why talk about wanting Art in such a world? Art and Philistinism have never mixed.

In the second place, why did you need to go to war to learn to live directly, to think clearly, to act and have no doubts? The artist never has life secure in his hands; he always has an imperative desire in his heart; and he is always “seeing death, very clear and huge, straddling the way,” always “thinking of the final extinction,” always “losing many friends, meeting fear in twenty shapes, and feeling the fresh unshattered joy of living.” If going to war did these things to you, then you simply confess that it took war to “quicken” you: but the artist is born “quickened.” And now that you wish to react against something, after the quickening, you complain that Art will not receive your reaction. Why on earth do you insist on going to Art for all those things you want? If you want blood and lust, go on fighting. If you want meat, eat meat: don’t try to eat Art. Who ever imagined that Art administers to men’s desires? When Bernhardt acts for the French soldiers, are they “too full of lusts for such an Art” or does she change her immortal Art to meet their desires for “women, horses and dogs, and wine”?

You say that Art for you is no longer a means for the evocation of emotion. Remember that the evocation of emotion has never been a test of Art, any more than Art has been “a magic net cast over all the nude and undesirable body of life” or “a spell to dissipate reality.” Life serves life; Art doesn’t do that. Art will never be part of your will: it is the artist’s will. Your philosophy and lust can be served by the claims of philosophy and lust. What you call your Art-need will be served by Art; but only when you have fulfilled your part of the bargain: since you are not a creator your will must go toward appreciation—or, first, toward the capacity for appreciation.—M. C. A.]

Growing Pains

Stephan Böchlin, Denver:

I did enjoy the Greek sketches by Richard Aldington. Some of them are very beautiful: the first, fourth, and sixteenth especially so. I am glad that a few of our writers are beginning to see the capacities of what Baudelaire calls “poetic prose.”

And there is one article, Paderewski and Tagore, which gave me much pleasure. It is an excellent study in contrasts. A score or so of such impressions would be well worth publishing in a more permanent form.

The rest of this issue left me cold—if I may be pardoned for possessing standards as exacting as, if somewhat different from, yours. But this is only saying that nine-tenths of what passes as “art” in America leaves me cold: and on this I suspect you would heartily agree with me.

I should dearly love to open a discussion with you on “art”. Your views, as you expressed them here, interested me greatly, and also tantalized me. I had the feeling that you were eternally trying to catch a flame between your hands—a flame that eternally eluded you—or burned you into silence. You left me wondering whether there was any value in trying to perform this feat: and as I have already told you, I felt that you were nearest to “understanding” art when you were burned into silence.

As for me, I have no “views” at all. Sometimes I write something—a line, a phrase, that seems made to live forever. For lack of any other word I call the result “art”. But I do not know why it is “art”, and I am a little afraid that if I try to find out I shall lose the gift, such as it is. It is something like the Medusa-head: one cannot look upon it direct without being frozen into stone—or, what is worse, into dogma.

You are very fond of the word “miracle”. Your highest praise for anything is to say of it, “It has the miracle”. But tell me: is it not in the very nature of a miracle that we cannot tell in what way or how it will come about—let alone trying to determine within what fixed conditions it ought to come about? Perhaps I am mistaken, but it has seemed to me that you have, in your magazine, frequently taken the stand that this “miracle” has certain fixed qualities, which must be recognized by all. And my own personal feeling is that there are as many kinds of miracles as there are faiths: and that every faith whatsoever can produce a “miracle” which is anything but art—is, indeed, the rankest form of fanaticism or superstition—to the holders of an opposite belief.

You understand, of course, that I am not speaking ex cathedra: I so much dislike to “make a circle” around my ideas: especially when it is a question of things as little understood as the reasons for our belief in immortality—or in beauty.... We seek the beautiful when our sense of the tragic in life becomes too keen, too poignant, too unendurable: we wish to escape from this bitter and sardonic realization, to falsify it somehow, to invest it with qualities that have no existence beyond our own minds. And the result—each after his own fashion—is beauty.

But “art”? Well: one might say that this ceaseless falsification of life through the escape into Beauty becomes Art when it compels all men—or all those men who act as the interpreters of life—to look upon reality and to see there, as though it had always been there, awaiting our attention through the ages, just that one particular type of Beauty. “How strange that we could not see it before!” men will cry, after some great artist has performed a “miracle” through his passionate sensitiveness to the spirit of Tragedy.... And so, we rediscover the meaning of Art....

But I said that I had no “views”—and I immediately give myself the lie. I have views—one must, I suppose, when one deeply believes in anything. Let my genuine interest in your efforts to find a needle in this haystack of American culture-philistinism serve me as a partial buffer against your impatience with my ideas.

[What do you mean by Beauty?—the idea that education puts upon the minds of people, meaning lovely, pleasing to the senses and the emotions? That isn’t Art; it is not necessarily a feature but may be an “instrument” of Art. What of real Beauty, which surpasses the spirit of joy or tragedy? It may be “too keen, too poignant, too unendurable” for the mind; but the soul claims it always. The artist does not falsify or interpret life: he creates with joy!—even if the joy in the creating is the surplus of his agony.—j. h.]

The Blindness of the Social Vision

Louis Puteklis, Cambridge, Mass.:

When I looked on the empty pages of your September issue, two important questions arose, along with many minor ones. Not having the time to go into details I will ask one question: What is your definition of art?

You say: “Art for Art’s sake”; that is only a phrase. But in this world people have different understandings of art: what is beautiful for one is ugly for another. What is praised by the capitalist class with its religious atmosphere is despised by the proletarian class with its progressive atheism. What is a picture of an angel to an atheist? Such a product of an artist’s imagination, which perpetuates religious humbug, is to be condemned without hesitation. What is a poem about the Virgin worth to a class-conscious worker if his own daughter or sister is slaving in the sweat shop, is ever in all kinds of danger and temptations under this glorious capitalistic system? So we cannot say “Art for Art’s sake,” until we know what is meant by Art.

Moreover, nobody fell down from heaven a master artist. We shall teach and train them with patience, and not with ... “scolding”....

Why is there no encouraging editorial on Art? Thirteen empty pages and not a word from the pen of the Art-sick Editor? Why was not the whole magazine a blank, or is only half of it to be devoted to art? What was the idea, for Art’s sake, in printing the frivolous caricatures of the Editor? Her ways of spending her leisure moments have scarcely enough of the universal to stimulate the artistic nature of the readers. I am glad, of course, that she has fudge for breakfast, but I am sorry for the thousands that go without bread. Hunger does not produce art nor does upbraiding....

In looking over the pictures I should judge that in comparison with others the Editor must be placed among the fortunate ones; the unhappiness she lays claim to must come from within her own nature.

Again, for whom is The Little Review published? For artists only, or for all people? I must admit that since I have known The Little Review—for more than a year—it has not always been artistic; many articles have been artificial only (for the simple reason that there are not enough real artists in the country to support such a venture). And as for the general run of readers, they want stories, that, whether artistic or not, have the ring of real life in them.

There can be no art without social vision, and without definite ideas—progressive or retrogressive. If The Little Review takes both of the ways, it can satisfy no class of readers. Art has ever been the handmaid of oppression and superstition, even more than of progress: the church, by music, architecture, oratory, and pictures has held the minds of men enthralled. It is sad to think how artists in the past have used their energies to perpetuate dreamy imaginations, things non-existent. It is painful to see the artists doing the same thing now.

The free human intellect must and will develop the most beautiful art there has ever been, but not for Art’s sake,—for truth’s sake and for humanity’s sake. And if The Little Review will take one of the ways, let her take the progressive one. I appeal to the Editor’s Art-sick heart to make more definite her policy; to look less on the empty form and more on the animating truth which agrees with reality and life.

Life is short. Don’t call on the artists already in the grave, but encourage the genius that lives now and may soon disappear without a chance of development and self-expression. Be sincere and please don’t pose. Don’t put Art in a frame and don’t “frame-up” artists.

[What is this you’re telling us about Art? The greatest and freest human intellects in the past have never created Art. Intellects do not have aesthetic experiences. (You might as well ask a gas-engine to run a human being instead of that indefinable force called life.) The dreamers, the ones of imagination, have the whole vision—the outside and the inside, and the vision of the two working together with all things. Why do you want to limit them to one—the social vision? You say that Art has always been the handmaiden of oppression and superstition, that the Church has used all forms of Art to hold men to it. True. Let me salute the far-seeing and mighty wisdom of the Catholic Church that has so recognized the power of Art. If you who are trying to extend the social vision could learn that one lesson, what a strength you could add unto yourselves:—the only strength.

You say “Look less on the empty form and more on the animating truth which agrees with reality and life.” Form is the only thing that remains forever: truth changes every day; form gives a thing its truth in Art and in life. Even the great social movement will have no truth until it has Form.

And for whom is The Little Review published? God knows.—j. h.]

So This Is Art!

“Sue Golden”:

MURINE AND KOKA-KOLA

I. The Lamp

Darkness enveloped us. I led her under a street-lamp of wrought iron from which hung suspended a round white moon which shone upon her unreal beauty. She turned her hurt eyes away from the hard light, and rested them upon an electric sign overhead which, flashing in and out, read:

“Don’t tell your age. Murine your eyes.”

Sign, if you are a lie, you must be broken. But if you tell the truth, you may increase the ecstasy of our manufactured passion.

II. The Jar

This is a common jar set in the druggist’s window to attract attention. It is without design, filled with a burning red liquid, flashing iridescent lights from concealed depths. Near it is another jar filled with a bright green liquid which leaps like fire whenever the light from a passing automobile falls upon it.

My soul is like the red jar, burning within itself; yours is like the green one, attracted by each passing fancy.

III. After the Orgy

It is morning; the revellers of last night have departed; the music of the phonograph and the voices of the cabaret singers are silent now. In the pale light of morning, frayed wisps of paper float up and down the street; from the brass handle of the saloon door a drenched veil is hanging; on the floor of the automobile lie scattered hair-pins. Ah, frail hair-pins, ah, tender veil, how slight you are beside my grief!

Silence and pale dawn, and empty emptiness. Ah, the last silence and the last heart-ache, and the last nickel, and the last green pickle lying on the last cold plate on the last free-lunch counter in the world! How sad it all is!

[Yes, how sad it all is that some minds have to jeer everything in the world, from Helen’s beauty to Bernhardt’s “wooden leg.”—jh.]

The Iliad of America

Daphne Carr, Columbia, Missouri:

The first number of Blast had among its veins of gold ore and volcanic deposit a certain precious spot: “American Art When It Appears Will be Immense.”

That is the way I feel about Sherwood Anderson’s Art as revealed in his first novel, Windy McPherson’s Son. Here is the beginning of our story telling art, primitive, to be sure, coarse, but a-quiver with that life whose pulsing reality we are forever eager to touch, to know.

Sherwood’s hero is the typically primitive hero—a brother to Aggamemnon and Charlemagne, the born leader, the maker of destinies. But Sam McPherson’s background is not the helmet plumes of the knights or the nodding heads of the Council of Elders. He is of our time, of our own middle West, with our well-known background of nodding corn tassels and steer-fattening farmers, with our stinking, deafening Chicago for a battleground. For he fights, furiously, and, like Achilles, for the love of fighting, but not, like Achilles, with the lives of men, but with their potential lives—foodstuffs—with their time, and their peace of mind, their happiness, their everything—summed up in money. And, for the love of the fight he wins. And then, because he is a white American with twenty centuries of Christianity behind him and not a pagan Aggamemnon to be satisfied with the mere winning, he turns aside from his victory and goes seeking an ideal.

So there is our hero, the forever worshiped König-man. But Sam McPherson is not the glorious part of the book, or the reason that our grandchildren, and probably our great-great grandchildren will still keep Windy McPherson’s Son as living words.

Sherwood Anderson has dredged up from the mud of our prairies the same apalling rhythm of life that Æschylus found in the stone of the Acropolis. And even as Aeschylus built his rhythm in cedar-wood and overlaid it with ivory and gold and polished marble and carved it and set it with jewels balancing his ornaments to the nicety of a hair, and so finished his symphony to please the blue and white spirit of Hellas, so Sherwood Anderson has taken his discovery, re-built its same rhythmic proportions and scooping up grey gravel and sand and concrete rocks from his own prairie has built his symphony. Will we see the wonder of its form in spite of its grey surface? Can we feel the force, the genuineness of Sherwood’s discovery? Can we see the bareness of American reality and yet shut our eyes to that reality?

“Oh, then this Anderson is a realist”, you say. “We’re getting tired of them.”

No, he is not a realist. He does not cypher as the realists do, adding and subtracting cause and effects to reach a hypothetical absolute. Sherwood Anderson is a primitive, reflecting the immense movements of the life about him.

Yes, he is cinematagraphic.

He is the American epic, just appeared.

[I read clear through your spasm about Sherwood Anderson and wondered what was the matter with you until I came upon “He is cinematagraphic.” Then I saw you knew what you were talking about. You’ve got them all in, too—it’s as good as a Griffith show: Aggamemnon, Charlemagne, Achilles, Æschylus, etc.—jh.]

[Windy McPherson’s Son will never be “living words” for any age because it was done before Sherwood Anderson had learned to write. In some of his short stories, done quite recently, he has achieved that organization known as Form. But Windy McPherson is as devoid of Form, and consequently of Art, as any of Theodore Dreiser’s catalogues. It stands as a faithful record of life, touched even with imagination, but quite untouched by that quality which makes a good story literature. As Rebecca West would say: it is simply another book coming out of America teaching the great lesson of style.—M. C. A.]

Information

Charles F. Roth, New York:

That Paderewski and Tagore in the November issue was a delight. But to be exact violin strings are not made of catgut, but of sheep sinews and skins. Can’t you hear the bleat of the sheep—the baah of the tender lamb at times? Can you imagine that such music as Kreisler or Maud Powell draw forth could come from a cat? No! But from a lamb. Ah yes!

STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT, CIRCULATION, ETC., REQUIRED BY THE ACT OF CONGRESS OF AUGUST 24, 1912.

Of THE LITTLE REVIEW, published monthly at Chicago, Ill., for October 1st, 1916.

State of Illinois, County of Cook—ss.

Before me, a Notary Public in and for the State and county aforesaid, personally appeared C. A. Zwaska, who, having been duly sworn according to law, deposes and says that he is the business manager of THE LITTLE REVIEW, and that the following is, to the best of his knowledge and belief, a true statement of the ownership, management (and if a daily paper, the circulation), etc., of the aforesaid publication for the date shown in the above caption, required by the Act of August 24, 1912, embodied in section 443, Postal Laws and Regulations, printed on the reverse of this form, to wit:

1. That the names and addresses of the publisher, editor, managing editor, and business managers are:

Publisher, Margaret C. Anderson, Fine Arts Building; Editor, Margaret C. Anderson, Fine Arts Building; Managing editor, Margaret C. Anderson, Fine Arts Building; Business manager, C. A. Zwaska, Fine Arts Building.

2. That the owners are: (Give names and addresses of individual owners, or, if a corporation, give its name and the names and addresses of stockholders owning or holding 1 per cent or more of the total amount of stock.)

Margaret C. Anderson, Fine Arts Building.

3. That the known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders owning or holding 1 per cent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities are: (If there are none, so state).

None.

4. That the two paragraphs next above, giving the names of the owners, stockholders, and security holders, if any, contain not only the list of stockholders and security holders as they appear upon the books of the company but also in cases where the stockholder or security holder appears upon the books of the company as trustee or in any other fiduciary relation, the name of the person or corporation for whom such trustee is acting, is given: also that the said two paragraphs contain statements embracing affiant’s full knowledge and belief as to the circumstances and conditions under which stockholders and security holders who do not appear upon the books of the company as trustee, held stock and securities in a capacity other than that of a bona fide owner; and this affiant has no reason to believe that any other person, association, or corporation has any interest direct or indirect in the said stock, bonds, or other securities as so stated by her.

MARGARET C. ANDERSON.

Sworn to and subscribed before me this 16th day of November, 1916.

(SEAL)

MITCHELL DAWSON, Notary Public. (My commission expires December 20, 1917.)

The Consumer’s Company

220 South State Street, Chicago

We had hoped to publish the prize poem in this issue, after having arranged to do so for the last four months. But the poems are stuck fast with one of the judges, from whom it has been impossible to extract a verdict.

We promise it definitely for February.

This issue will be officially known as the December-January. (The usual excuse, explanation, and regret.)

The February issue will contain the most inspired article ever written about Mary Garden, and will have a deep-purple label in her honor.

M.A.C.

(Modern Art Collector)

An authoritative magazine published monthly in conjunction with the national movement instituted for the promotion and development of Modern Art in this country.

It abounds in beautifully colored plates which are very suitable for framing. The work of the foremost artists, together with informative text matter, poster stamp and students’ supplements, etc., make this portfolio de luxe, an ideal reference book—something valuable, interesting and exceptional.

Lend your enthusiastic support—write for a copy on approval.

Ten dollars annually. Single copies, one dollar.

SOCIETY OF MODERN ART, INC., 17 West 38th Street, New York City

THE EGOIST

An Individualist Review

Present Features

LINGUAL PSYCHOLOGY: THE SCIENCE OF SIGNS: a series of subtle and illuminating articles working out a new conception of the function of philosophic inquiry—by Miss Dora Marsden (started in July number).

Literary criticism, reviews and other prose articles.

Paris chronicle and a series of articles on modern French prose writers, by Madame Ciolkowska.

DIALOGUES OF FONTENELLE, translated by Mr. Ezra Pound (started in May number).

TARR, a brilliant modern novel by Mr Wyndham Lewis, leader of the English “Vorticist” group (started in April number).

Poem by young English and American poets, mostly belonging to the Imagist group.

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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. Some idiosyncratic spelling was not changed: Aggamemnon, cinematagraphic. All other changes are shown here (before/after):

... said very thoughtfully, “Why doesn’t he come to us? have always been ... ... said very thoughtfully, “Why doesn’t he come to us? We have always been ...

... lie scattered hair-pins. Ah, frail hair-pins, ah, tender vail, how slight you are ... ... lie scattered hair-pins. Ah, frail hair-pins, ah, tender veil, how slight you are ...