The Reader Critic

Infantile Paralysis

D. H., New York:

Congratulations! You have the capacity for suddenly turning back and becoming young enough to say “All or nothing.” And subconsciously realizing that you will get mostly nothing, you threaten your readers with blank pages. And all those who thought that The Little Review did publish only artistic writing have had the veil torn from their eyes and their faith in you begins to waver. Perhaps to vanish altogether!

Is all of the Meistersinger one continuous “Preislied”? Is all of Beethoven equal to his “Ninth”? Is all of Pachman as marvelous as his Chopin? All or nothing! You would feast, and have your readers feast, upon the perfection of art and give them none of its strivings?

Your challenge will remain unanswered. If you dare, or through sheer carelessness, allow this to appear in the next issue, I shall suspect you of considering the writing of an artist a work of art—even though he speak not in his own tongue.

Your challenge will remain unanswered! For who are you, to expect a staff of ready geniuses to fill your pages? You should be grateful for one pearl you may find among hundreds of near-jewels. And the world is grateful for one Ave Maria (Schubert) among a thousand near-songs. I preach no gospel of meekness to you, for I know you will turn again and leave your youthful—nay, puerile,—cry of “All or nothing.” It is the cry of the mad—of the foolish, impatient ones! You only want the miracle? You are like the child crying for the moon and, like him, you will accept a round cheese instead.

Do come to New York, and I will play more than an hour uninterrupted for you, and perhaps for five minutes (if I am lucky) you will have a miracle. If I am unlucky you will have only a near-miracle, which will be just very good violin playing.

But what did I say about wanting only the perfection of art and none of its strivings? I said—Art. That includes the strivings, doesn’t it? Surely we needn’t go back to definitions. Ezra Pound has a nice analysis somewhere—to this effect: In such measure as an artist expresses himself truthfully, he will be a good artist; in such measure as he himself exists, he will be a great one. I want a record of the process of that “existing” from as many artists as possible. The process of each will include many things that are not perfection, but who ever told you that perfection and Art are synonymous terms? Some one sent me a sketch, in answer to my editorial, with this note: “You said you wanted Beauty. I am sending you something which I think has it.” I thought it had beauty, too; but it had no Art. What do you people think I meant by the “miracle”? I meant simply those strivings and achievements which show that the great process is really “on.” We published Ben Hecht’s Night Song. It had much beauty and no perfection, but it had Art quite apart from either of those elements. Amy Lowell’s poems (not Off the Turnpike) have an Art that happens to include perfection. The “miracle” was very much present in Malmaison, for instance. Flint’s London My Beautiful has it. The principal trouble is that miracles usually have to be explained to be recognized. It’s like the painter who took a friend to hear Powys. The friend went to hear what Powys had to say—“and I told her what he looked like,” said the painter—M. C. A.

From your letter you sound like a lot of other young things paralyzed by smugness and complacency. You become a one-stringed instrument and you hope to play the violin. If you dared to be an artist, and all that means of madness and impatience and foolishness and crying for the moon, you’d dare promise more than five minutes miracle in an hour. It would be outside of promises.—jh.

A Word From Real Art

Frank Lloyd Wright, Chicago:

The less money The Little Review has the better it looks anyway! Your resolve is interesting—but it looks like the end.... I don’t see where you can find the thing you need.

But miracles do happen—I wish I had a million or a pen.

Freudian

A Contributor, Chicago:

The Little Review sickens me. I don’t understand why in the devil you talk imagism and color and beauty and fill your magazine full of that sputtering trash, that colorless-degenerate edgarleemasters junk. Why not leave blank pages? And your article.... Good Lord!... It was like warm candle grease just after the little candle flame has been sniffed out. I see and feel The Little Review as a case of feminine callowism gone mad.

The idea of writing anything about Masters fills me with disgust. Masters doesn’t even inspire me with rage. I regard his work as a pretentious mediocrity. There isn’t a poem in his books that I couldn’t have written myself in twenty minutes on a typewriter. Why write about Masters? He’s only one of the many dub artists overrunning the country. He isn’t to blame, even if he is cocky about his success. In fact, he is to be commended for putting it over. The fault, in my mind, lies with the great tribe of morons who yap over his doggerel—pro or con. I have read three or four things in his first book, and as many in his second book, and I see no occasion for rubbing it in on him any more than on Luke McGluke, the poet laureate of The Hickville Clarion. Put him out of your head, why don’t you? Criticism doesn’t concern itself with the feverishly inflated mob banalities of the moment. Selah!

You say The Little Review sickens you? With the above temperature and tongue? I should diagnose the case as autointoxication.—jh.

Query

Mitchell Dawson, Chicago:

I have read the August number, and have read only the poetry—which makes me sad. Does the new cover represent the Western afterglow?

Consoling Us

Rex Lampman, Portland:

Don’t you think you’re asking a little too much of yourself and your contributors, that The Little Review be absolute in each number?

No. I don’t mean that. It’s fine to aim at Art, always, but it isn’t failure to miss it most of the time.

As for me, The Little Review has been an inspiration and a delight. A paper that will publish anything so wonderful as John Gould Fletcher’s Green Symphony doesn’t need, so far as I’m concerned, to “do it again” for quite a while, and I’m quite content that you should fill in with such stuff as Ben Hecht’s The Poet Sings to the World until you get something as good, again, as the Symphony.

I’m a newspaper man, and I’m supposed to “write something” every day. Of course, it can’t be done; but once in a while, when the powers are kind, I am permitted to write something that delights me and others. That’s the best I can do, so help me, and I am reminded of the Western epitaph, which went something like this:

And so I hope you’ll never get out a Little Review with any of the pages blank.

You are wonderfully honest—one of the honestest persons, I think, that I know, and I shout for joy at your godlike impatience with imperfection. But patience—pardon the platitude—is also a godlike attribute.

More Consolation

C. A. C., Chicago:

Bully! Since your outburst of righteous indignation towards yourself and your contributors I have been comparing your magazine with the others I receive. The Forum, Vanity Fair (Oh, dear, yes!), The Masses, and sometimes I see The Bang—a weekly pamphlet of Alexander Harvey’s, which he distributes discriminately. Your wail seems not wholly justified. True, Arthur Symons’s Spiritual Adventures, Plays, Acting, and Music, and other essays, are things to be sought after by any editor. His stuff is appearing in America in Vanity Fair and The Forum; it seems to lack his first fire, except that he has put a new ring to Cleopatra’s statement of herself:

And his poems—Symons never was much of a poet. Then, again, that Wright person who writes for The Forum—any magazine is the better without his squibs on Art.

Max Eastman had an article in a recent number of Vanity Fair on “Magazine Writing.” He claims it is amazingly well done, so well done that there is “not a speck on it”—the main fault being that “it is professional. It is work and not play. And for that reason it is never profoundly serious, or intensely frivolous enough to captivate the soul. It lacks abandon. It is simply well done.” Now, the fact that the very essence of your magazine seems “pure living,” brings it out of Eastman’s indictment. One cannot say that Sherwood Anderson, Hecht, and Kaun, or even yourself, have been guilty of “earning your living” at the expense of play. “In that play alone is the heart altogether gay and inconsiderate.”

And The Bang has been pounding away steadily for a magazine that exists for the fun of it, the joy of it, and is not built upon the circulation manager’s point of view. Does Harvey get your magazine? Does he ever feel, if he sees it, that the “Ideal” he holds for magazinedom is being realized in your magazine?

Summing it up, Miss Editor, you who once declared you had none of the qualifications of an editor, it seems to me you have been doing rather well. We don’t want you to stand still—you can’t do that—or to stop trying. Please, for our sake, keep it up.

Casting a Slur Upon What?

Ruth C. Sweeney, Chicago:

I simply cannot understand how a person who could write such a beautiful thing as your poem, Life, could allow The Nymph to appear in The Little Review.

How can you hope to encourage Art when you will print such a thing? I have noticed these free-thinkers, and with the casting aside of “forms that have to be respected” has gone whatever taste they had. They gulp down everything, provided it casts a slur upon something. Does one have to lose all his finer sensibilities because he wishes to be free and open minded?

I have thought of you people when Nietzsche says, “Sensualists are they now become—a trouble and a terror is the hero to them.”

I join with you in your cry of blank pages if The Nymph is the alternative.

Give over reading Nietzsche for a bit; you belong in the primary class. The person who wrote The Nymph has a background of life, if not of Art. And your hero? “A Trouble and a Terror” would make him appear the villain.—jh.

Why Editors Go Insane

Alice Groff, Philadelphia:

I am going to tear to pieces your “A Real Magazine.”

No one ever reaches the “Ideal.” The moment he does, there has ceased to be an “Ideal.” Our ideal is an ever-advancing goal. Art is the embodiment of the human ideal—which ideal is the ever-advancing goal of human life.

Art is not the ultimate reason for Life. Life is,—for its own sake. Life lives for the ideal—for the ever-advancing goal, which embodies itself in Art—that Life may become ever more and more abundant life. Life continually seeks to express its absolute essence in Art, and it will never cease this seeking through all eternity. Such expression will always be compelled by the aspiration to reach the ever-advancing goal—the Ideal which will continually incarnate, and reincarnate, itself in an ever-renewing body—Art.

Art is the incarnation of the Ideal—the shed Chrysalis. The Ideal is the Psyche—continually wending its way toward a new goal and a new Chrysalis (which it continually sheds, leaving with us its mortal part only—Art.)