And——

There is Frank Harris’s Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions—a book that will never disturb Wilde’s legend here, his peace of mind where he has gone, nor his reputation as an artist anywhere.

Chicago—always bragging about having a sooner eye for Art.... And Sokoloff out here in San Francisco.... And the Chicago Orchestra being led on to the goal of music by efficiency like the Germany army getting to Paris.

At the Grand Opera in Paris, in the première of The Miracle, an opera by two young Swiss, I saw the great Marthe Chenal, who will sing in the Chicago Opera Company this winter. I have had a creative memory of her for five years. But I wonder what will become of it up against that pinnacle of earthly glory, Mary Garden.

A. C. H. in Poetry has done all that can be done for the new quarterly Form. “Form”—that’s a name to start hope and the imagination; and then ... we have a story we’ll print sometime called “The Funny Shape.”

Why so much comment on John Cowper Powys’s One Hundred Best Books? Powys should never write anything. People like Q. K. in The New Republic come about as near to getting Powys as they would come to catching a comet. Powys is not for culture-snatchers, matinee girls, or glorifiers of the obvious. He is merely for those possessed enough of their imaginations to fall for a miracle when they see one. Who goes to hear a lecture on Nietzsche and Dostoevsky to find out what Powys thinks of those men? You go—hoping through the gloom of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky to catch a flash of Powys. Powys is the best thing that has come to us—that mad wolf! I always feel sorry for Velasquez that he never had a chance at him.

“Everything is just perfect,” as our Editor so ecstatically says: Paderewski will make three concerts in San Francisco this month.

The Roadside Press is to come out with a Chicago Anthology, a hundred and fifty poems, by Chicago authors. As Poetry would say: “Most of these appeared first in The Little Review; and will probably be reprinted without any acknowledgment whatever.”

We have been waiting for what we hoped would be a good comment on Sherwood Anderson’s first novel, Windy McPherson’s Son. All we will say now is that it’s so much worse than Sherwood should ever be.

A few years ago you couldn’t talk to any one who wasn’t writing a play. Now you can’t talk to any one who isn’t starting a theatre. If everyone is mad for theatres, who are they that aren’t? Or why haven’t we municipal theatres? One, out of all this, and that in the town of Northampton, Massachusetts; and that isn’t what any one but a town would call a municipal theatre. Sometime I’ll write about Donald Robertson’s idea for a municipal theatre. He is always damned for being an idealist—a sure sign that what he has is an idea.

Rabindranath Tagore is coming back to America to lecture. Go, if you have never seen that slight presence with features drawn of air—with eyes that seem never to have looked out—and let him put that white spell of peace upon your complex futility.

You sometimes wonder why men like Dr. Coomaraswamy come telling us border-ruffians of Art about Ajanta frescoes and sculpture and the music of India. Perhaps they know our homesickness and know that alone we can’t even find the road.

Bernhardt is coming again. Well, that’s all right, too. And those who jeer at her age never could have appreciated her youth. But you, young ones, see her; and have the double joy of seeing her now; and, if you have it in you, you will see her then, too.

At bottom everything in literature is useless except literary pleasure, but literary pleasure depends upon the quality of sensibility. All discussions die against the wall of personal sensibility, which is flesh on the inside and on the outside a wall of stone. There is a way to turn it about, but this you do not know.—Remy de Gourmont.