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.

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

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):

... treacle on bread over all these different stylic bases, this operation requiring ... ... treacle on bread over all these different stylistic bases, this operation requiring ...

... What encouragement is there for sincere artists ... ... What encouragement is there for sincere artists? ...