EDITORIAL ON SOLICITOUS DOUBT

Ezra Pound

Various people have expressed certain doubts as to whether ... The Little Review ... etc....

Good people, be at rest: the price of The Little Review will never be raised for present subscribers or for those who subscribe before January 1, 1918. After that we can make no promises. The quality will not decline; if we give “twice as much of it” the new readers will have to pay more. If we had given you only Mr. Yeats’s fourteen poems we would already have given you more literature than is to be found in the “four big” magazines since the beginning of our present volume.

Next month you will have a whole play by Lady Gregory. Mr. Lewis, after having been in some heavy fighting is now in hospital, and that leisure has made sure the supply of his prose for some time. I have now at my elbow the first eighty-eight pages of the best book Ford Madox Hueffer has written. Why “the best book”? Five years ago Mr. Hueffer read me this manuscript, an unfinished work for which there was presumably “no market”. I read the typescript which was brought me last evening; so familiar is the text that I can scarcely convince myself that it is five years since I heard the even voice of the author pronouncing it. I do not think my memory is particularly good, I think there must be some quality in a man’s style and matter if it is to stay fresh in another man’s mind for so long. Mr. Hueffer’s Women and Men will run in The Little Review from January 1918 to May 1919 inclusive, unless interfered with by force majeur. Perhaps it is not his best book.

Lest there be any confusion about Olivers, Madoxes, Madox Browns, Francis Hueffers, etc. Ford Madox Hueffer is the author of various novels, and of The Heart of the Country, The Soul of London, Ancient Lights, Collected Poems, of On Heaven, the first successful long poem in English vers libre, after Whitman. This poem appeared in Poetry for June 1914, and has certainly as much claim to permanence as, say, Meredith’s Love in the Valley.

Beside his own achievement, Mr. Hueffer has done one definite service to English letters. This service is unquestioned, and recognition of it does not rest upon any personal liking or disliking of Mr. Hueffer’s doctrines of writing. In 1908 he founded The English Review; for a year and a half he edited that magazine and during that time he printed work not only by the great men of letters, Anatole France, Thomas Hardy, Swinburne, Henry James, not only by men of public reputation like Wells, and Conrad and Bennett, but also by about all the younger men who have since made good. For example by Lewis (in 1909), and by other now well-known young men who have both made good and declined since that date. His editorship of the review marks a very definite period; at the end of it, as its glory was literary, not commercial, it was bought by certain jews, who thought Mr. Hueffer a damn fool (possibly because of his devotion to literature), and who gave the editorship into other hands. Comparison of current numbers of The English Review with the first numbers issued from 84 Holland Park Avenue, will give any thinking person all the data he wants in deciding between the folly of Hueffer and the folly of manufacturing, political hebrews. In fact, if a crime against literature could bring any shame upon that class of person, this family would go into penitence, which needless to say they will not. But the careful historian of literature will record and remember their shame. The files of the review being stored in the British Museum, the data will continue available. There will be no faking the records.

The Little Review is now the first effort to do comparatively what The English Review did during its first year and a half: that is, to maintain the rights and position of literature, I do not say in contempt of the public, but in spite of the curious system of trade and traders which has grown up with the purpose or result of interposing itself between literature and the public.

We act in spite of the public’s utter impotence to get good literature for itself, and in despite of the efforts of the “trade” to satiate the public with a substitute, to still their appetite for literature by providing them, at a cheaper rate and more conveniently, with a swallowable substitute.

Whereanent a very successful journalist has said to me: We, i. e. we journalists, are like mediums. People go to a spiritist séance and hear what they want to hear. It is the same with a leading article: we write so that the reader will find what he wants to find.

That is the root of the matter; there is good journalism and bad journalism, and journalism that “looks” like “literature” and literature etc....

But the root of the difference is that in journalism the reader finds what he is looking for, what he, the reader wants; whereas in literature he must find at least a part of what the author intended.

That is why “the first impression of a work of genius” is “nearly always disagreeable”, at least to the “average man”. The public loathe the violence done to their self-conceit whenever an author conveys to them an idea that is his, not their own.

This difference is lasting and profound. Even in the vaguest of poetry, or the vaguest music, where in a sense the receiver may, or must, make half the beauty he is to receive, there is always something of the author or composer which must be transmitted.

In journalism, or the “bad art” which is but journalism thinly disguised, there is no such strain on the public.

I am now at the end of my space. Of Remy de Gourmont’s feeling toward such a magazine as we are now making I will write in the December number.