Chapter VI: Choleric Comments on Cacophonies

_On the G String_

We are sailing in a gondola along exotic shores. Crystal castles, dewy meadows, weeping cypresses, glowing craters.... We pass through the dreamy regions of Shelley and Keats, we envisage the gigantic cosmos of Shakespeare, of Dante, of Milton, of Goethe, we perceive in a haze the purple-crimson crucifixion of Nietzsche, the cruel gloom of Dostoyevsky, the dizzy abysses of Poe, the all-human chaos of Whitman....

We sail on—but ah, our picturesque gondolier! He is so excited, so restless, so loud—we are forced to turn our eyes from the grandiose landscape and follow bewildered our conscientious cicerone. In his anxiety lest we fail to notice the passing “places of importance,” our industrious guide shrieks and yells, wriggles and gesticulates, beats upon our senses, pricks and tickles, and all this he performs to the accompaniment of a mellow mandolin, so sweet, so touching, so exasperating.

We are weary.

* * * * *

With some apprehension I looked forward to Mr. Powys’s book of “Literary Devotions,”[4] for I had the good luck of listening to his lectures. They are unforgettable, those bewitched moments in the darkened Little Theater, where we sat hypnotized by “the galvanized demi-god vibrating in the green light of the stage,” invoking the spirits of the Great. How will those invocations appear, I worried, when congealed in the static book-form, minus the catacomb-atmosphere, minus the serpent-like, mesmerizing cant of the meteoric sorcerer, minus Raymond Johnson’s light-effects? “And, ah! sweet, tender reader,” to use Mr. Powys’s style, my fears came true: the book is a libretto, sans orchestra, sans singer. I know that many of the lecturer’s devotees, especially the worshipping young ladies, will find little difficulty in mentally supplying the libretto with the dynamic personality of the performer; but my imagination is dewinged at the sight of the motionless symmetric lines, and I fail to vocalize the legions of exclamation-marks, the innumerable capital-letters, the profuse superlatives. With a kaleidoscopic velocity the author displays his personal reflections upon the greatest minds of the world; he bends them, he liquifies them, he moulds them, recreates them according to his whim—good, bravissimo! I am the last person to depreciate subjective criticism; I am tolerant enough to digest even such a statement as that Goethe was typically and intrinsically German, or that Nietzsche was thoroughly Christian. It is not Mr. Powys’s What that nauseates me, but his How, his butaforial Grand Style, his monotonous tremolo, his constant air of discovering new planets, his Pateresque worship of beauty which lacks Pater’s aristocratic calm and reservedness, his Oscaresque paradoxicalness deprived of Wilde’s chiselled wit, his continuous ruminating of a limited stock of long, high words, of dizzying adjectives, of saccharine adverbs.

Pray, “sweet, tender reader,” how long could you endure Mischa Elman playing the Minuet in G?

[4] _Visions and Revisions, by John Cowper Powys._ [_G. Arnold
Shaw, New York_]

_And Pippa Dances_

Yet there are some who complain about the lack of musical devotion among Americans. Nay, music is getting absolutely too popular—witness the crowded concert-halls, especially the ten-cent-Sunday-concerts arranged by philanthropists for the uplift of the masses. It is significant to observe that the so-called Submerged have learned not only to applaud, but also to hiss, not only to accept with gratitude any sort of “divine” music, but to demand a certain kind of music. And, surely, they well know what they want.

Hauptmann’s Huhn, the personification of the mob, wants the fragile Pippa, the symbol of beauty, to dance for him. She is forced to obey, and is of course crushed to death. And Pippa dances. That omnipotent Huhn who can call down all the muses to come and entertain him, to amuse him, to serve him, to degenerate or to perish! Watch that wonderful creature, the amalgamated American Huhn, making love to music, hugging and caressing her; I shudder at the thought of what will become of gentle Pippa in the choking embrace of her boorish suitor.

Yes, Huhn knows what he wants. He expects of music the same service that he gets from illustrations in popular magazine novels. He comes into an ice-cream parlor and orders Banana-Split plus _William Tell_ on the victrola—so digestible and understandable. Last Sunday I observed a crowd at a ten-cent concert enjoying the _Meditation_, good-humoredly assisting the soloist by humming and whistling the familiar tune, their faces expressing the satisfaction of victors. And the night before I witnessed the thousands at Orchestra Hall, the Huhns in sweaters and in décolleté-gowns and in dress-suits, going mad over that vulgarity, Mr. Carpenter’s precise reproduction of barking dogs and of a policeman’s heavy walk. Huhn demands music which he is capable of interpreting in every-day terms, which transparently reflects his little emotions, his petty joys, his sirupy sorrows, his after-meal dreams. Is it to be wondered that Huhn hisses and grumbles when the conductor hesitatingly smuggles in such a risky novelty as Scriabin’s _Prometheus_? What is to Huhn the Poem in Fire, the emerging of a dazed humanity out of Chaos, the collision of gloom and light, the birth of the Winged Man? What is Hecuba to him! And since Pippa must dance, the obliging conductor hastens to appease the growling Huhn by the taffy of Bruch’s concerto.

In recent years some inspired rebels among painters and sculptors have striven towards the elevating of their arts to the highest level, that of music, the noblest medium for the expression of aesthetic emotions, nobler than words or brush or chisel. Recall Kandinsky’s color-symphonies. Alas, music is not any longer a daughter of Olympus; she has been dragged by Huhn from the pure atmosphere of the mountain summit down into the damp valley. Wagner began the prostitution of music by making it subservient to words; he has won the sanction and acclamation of the crowd. Then followed the orgy of Program-music, those wood-cut illustrations, those rich gravies that were invented to sweeten Mr. Huhn’s meals. Now an enterprising Chicago merchant, Mr. Carpenter, has presented us with an apotheosis of vulgarity to the hilarious triumph of the appreciative crowd, to the delight of our “independent” music-critics—“that strange creature, the American music-critic,” to quote a naive English journal.

And Pippa dances.

IBN GABIROL.

Music

GABRILOWITSCH AND THE NEW STANDARD

MARGARET C. ANDERSON

Ideas make their impressions very slowly, but they travel very fast. That is why Gabrilowitsch’s playing of the piano on March 21 was two different kinds of revelation to two different kinds of people. To a great many it was a rich fulfillment of promise; to a few it was the end of something that had had a great beginning.

The trouble is that there’s a new standard to reckon with. We used to argue that what a man had to say was more important than the way he said it. Then we reversed that, claiming that a man may say anything provided he say it well. Then the socialistic school tried to go back to the first premise, but what they were really groping for was the new standard—which is simply this: A man may still say anything he wishes and if he says it well it will be art—_provided he really has something to say_. Tennyson knew how to say things well, but he missed being an artist because he had nothing to say. On what basis do we establish such a criterion? Not merely on that of “ideas,” because you may have no ideas at all and yet have profound reactions; and not merely on that of “socialism” or sincerity or ideals; and not—oh well, I mean to get through this discussion without dragging in the artist’s alleged monopoly of the eternal verities. B. Russell Herts got very close to what I mean when he said that Arnold Bennett missed real bigness because he had only a great and mighty skill without having a great and mighty soul.

Well—you can’t make Art, we think now, unless you belong in the great-and-mighty-soul class. And what does that mean, exactly? Perhaps the whole thing can be explained under the term “enlarged consciousness.” I wish Dora Marsden would discuss it in one of those clear-headed articles she writes for _The Egoist_. The confusion in all our discussions of matter and manner, of subject and form, of what determines genius, has come about in two main ways: first, because we have made Taste a synonym for Art—so that if we like Beethoven or Mozart we don’t accept Wagner or Max Reger, or if we like classic rules we call romanticism “bad art”; and second, because we have decided who had great and mighty souls on an ethical basis. We said that Browning and Tennyson had them—chiefly because they talked a great deal about God, I suppose; which only shows how confusing it is to judge that way; it leaves no room for the distinction that Browning had and Tennyson hadn’t. It’s all as silly as insisting that the cubists ought to be considered great if they are sincere. Grant that they are. To be sincere is easy; to say what you believe is simple; but to believe something worth saying is the test of an art. Sincere stupid people are as bad as any other stupid ones—and more boring.

I don’t know what else to say about it; but I know you can recognize that “enlarged consciousness” in the first bars of a pianist’s playing, or in a singer’s beginning of a song. Paderewski has it to such a degree that he can play wrong notes and it doesn’t matter; and Duse has it, and Kreisler, and Isadora Duncan, and Ludwig Wüllner, who breaks your heart with his songs though he hasn’t even a singing voice. And the disappointment in Gabrilowitsch is that he hasn’t.

I went to hear him play Chopin and Schumann with positive excitement. Godowsky, with all his perfectly worked-out theories, always leaves me with the feeling that he would be an artist if he weren’t an empty shell; and Bauer, with all his beautiful work, leaves me with a sense of how he _might_ play if a fire could be started inside him. I expected that fire in Gabrilowitsch—partly because I heard him play ten years ago and partly, I suppose, because he is Russian. But the ten years have left him unstirred. It’s as though the man in him had stood curiously still; as though life had passed him. He is like a poet who has somehow escaped unhurt; or a technician who perfects his expression and then wonders what he shall express. As for his form, he does many exquisite things; for instance, his _Des Abends_, which was extremely poetic and which seems to be the type of thing he likes to play most. And he played the D Flat Prelude with an exquisite perspective—and then a Chopin Waltz without any perspective at all. Technically his worst feature is his chord-work—Bauer’s chords sound like an organ in comparison. But Bauer knows how to touch the piano for deep, “dark” effects, and Gabrilowitsch appears to like “bright” sounds. He takes his chords with a high, tight wrist and brings them out by pounding. These things are not done any more; the piano has shown new tone-capacities since a few of the moderns abandoned, or modified, what is supposed to be the “straight” Letschitizky method.

Well, all this wouldn’t matter so much if Gabrilowitsch had the ultimate inspiration.... Somehow I keep feeling that the world is waiting for its next great pianist.

BAUER AND CASALS

Two sorts of listeners heard the second Bauer-Casals recital at Orchestra Hall: Those who love great music and those who love to babble about great music. Intermediate classes of the mildly interested, the botching amateurs, the self-adoring students, et al., stayed away, for Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Cesar Franck, in sonata form, have nothing for them. Would that the critics and the exuberant school-girls might forever remain away on such occasions, and choose for their frothing something less than the best.

Beethoven was not “dry” for a moment. One suspects that this composer is perpetually slandered by the “traditional” handling of zealous academics; for Bauer and Casals, with their wonted beauty of piano- and violoncello-playing, made his music warm and pleasantly expansive, with no sacrifice of dignity. He sounded almost romantic in the best sense of the word. This was an experience. And Mendelssohn—what is more truly elegant than his musical grace, or more delightful than his delicate humour—a playfulness so seldom discovered by performers! Humour that becomes subtler than a horse-laugh is beyond the ken of “professional” musicians, although first-rank composers never lack a refined sense of fun, a keen relish for jollity, for all that it may be in ethereal realms. In Cesar Franck there is perhaps the very sublimate of humour, the mystic smile of faith. One cannot escape a feeling of the deeply religious in this French master. A new word should be coined to designate his music; it might be formed by transposing the “passionate” of passionate love and the “fervent” of fervent piety, and by some such amalgamation of cool, impersonal, austere love with deepest faith become sensuous, impassioned, and lovely, the characterizing word is secured. Franck’s music, surcharged with intense experience, renders unnecessary any apology for this left-handed use of English. It is but poorly spoken of in orthodox terms, since it embodies strange blendings of emotion, both common and uncommon—emotions unified and crystallized into the expression of a genius. Cesar Franck’s love, apparently, flowed as readily and as warmly toward God as toward ravishing, although possibly abstract, woman.

This is doubtless a considerable, if not impossible, reach for the imagination of the patiently-groping reader, but it would have been less difficult with Bauer and Casals for interpreters. The ’cellist’s playing was at once sane and poetic, clean-cut and well-rounded; it was chaste without chill, voluptuous without a debauch. And Bauer, master-pianist indeed, as his press-agent styles him, brought from the piano more than enough kinds of tone to shame the monochromatic theory about the restricted nature of the piano. The most individual feature of his art is the production of solemn, organ-like chords in the lower register—chords wonderfully sonorous and rich, powerful enough to obliterate the memory of bedlam. Who cares if he smudges a “run?” This god can sound chords. He redeems a host of piano-jolters.

HERMAN SCHUCHERT.

Book Discussion

AUTUMNAL GORKY

_Tales of Two Countries, by Maxim Gorky._ [_B. W. Huebsch, New
York._]

Gorky’s genius was meteoric. It flashed in the nineties for a brief period with an extraordinary brilliance, illuminating a theretofore unknown world of “has beens,” of Nietzschean _Bosyaki_. Gorky’s genius, we may say, was elemental and local; it revealed a great spontaneous force on the part of the writer in a peculiar atmosphere, on “the bottom” of life, in the realm of care-free vagabonds. As soon as Gorky trespassed his circle he fell into the pit of mediocrity and began to produce second rate plays, sermon-novels, political sketches, and similar writings that may serve as excellent material for the propaganda-lecturer. The present volume may be looked upon as Gorky’s swan-song, if we consider his ill health; in fact he outlived himself long ago as an artist, and in these _Tales_ we witness the hectic flush of the autumn of his career. The exotic beauty of Italy appears under the pen of the Capri invalid in a morbid, consumptive aspect; the author is too self-conscious, too much aware of the fact of his moribund existence to see the intrinsic in life. The tendency to preach socialism further augments his artistic daltonism, which is particularly evident in the _Russian Tales_. The doomed man casts a weary glance over his distant native land, and he sees there nothing but dismal black, hopeless pettiness and retrogression. The satire is blunt and fails the mark; the allegories are of the vulgar, wood-cut variety. Gorky has been dead for many years.

BREAKING INTO AN OPEN DOOR

_Plaster Saints, by Israel Zangwill._ [_The Macmillan Company,
New York._]

The old situation: A revered priest, saint abroad, sinner at home; the old sin—adultery; the old moral about casting the first stone. What is new is the clergyman’s point of view that a “plaster saint” has no right to preach righteousness, that only one who has gone through temptation, sin, and contrition may be fit for the post of God’s shepherd.

A sea captain who has never made a voyage—the perfection of
ignorance—and you trust him with the ship. You take a youth—the
fool of the family for choice—keep him in cotton-wool under a
glass case, cram him with Greek and Latin, constrict his neck
with a white choker, clap a shovel hat on his sconce, and lo! he
is God’s minister!

... When I look at my old sermons, I blush at the impudence and
ignorance with which I, an innocent at home, dared to speak of
sin to my superiors in sinfulness.

It is all very well, if we grant that society is still in need of sermons on chastity, if the Hebraic ideal of monogamy is still the most important problem in the life of a community, to be discussed and advocated from the pulpit, while ignoring the economic and social complexities of the present age. But can we grant this anachronism? Is it not high time to follow the policy of _laisser faire_ in regard to individual morals? Mr. Zangwill appears in the unenvious position of one quixotically breaking into an open door; yet he has been accused of possessing a sense of humor.

MAGAZINE VERSE

_Anthology of Magazine Verse, 1914; selected and published by
William S. Braithwaite._

The proper way to review this collection of verse would be, no doubt, to quote some of the best and some of the worst, make a learned and perfectly empty comment upon so-and-so, and say that the book was better or worse than last year’s compilation. But Mr. Braithwaite has sifted and re-sifted the entire crop of poems until there is in his book nothing but the best, such as it is. And the general trend of the volume is scarcely a matter for enthusiasm. A fair conclusion must be that magazine editors were frequently hard pressed for copy. As a faithful and stupidly patriotic American, one should ponder long over certain attempts to found new “American” verse-forms; but it is to be regretted, possibly, that the most enjoyable poems in the collection are written upon foreign or mediaeval topics. As a true aesthete, one ought to reek with admiration for nameless or badly-labelled sonnets that, for some reason, fail to delight. And, as an exponent of politico-poetic modernity, there should be wild raving over the “radical” art of formless form; but this also is shamefully wanting in one’s reaction to this anthology. A number of intelligent humans have been observed in their expectant approach to this collection; they closed the book with neither smiles nor frowns. It is difficult to forget that good poetry will bear re-reading, or prove its worth by clinging to the memory; and it is still more difficult to remember that art has only to be new, rude, or extreme to be called wonderful. Why is this?

John Cowper Powys on Henry James

(_Some more jottings from one of Mr. Powys’s lectures._)

Henry James is a revealer of secrets, but never does he entirely draw the veil. He has the most reluctance, the most reverence of all the great novelists. He is always reluctant to draw the last veil. This great, plump-handed moribund figure, waits—afraid. All of his work is a mirror—never a softening or blurring of outlines, but a medium through which one sees the world as he sees it. In reading his works one never forgets the author. All his people speak in his character. All is attuned to his tone from beginning to end.

He uses slang with a curious kind of condescension,—all kinds of slang,—with a tacit implicit apology to the reader. So fine a spirit—he is not at home with slang.

His work divides itself into three periods—best between 1900 and 1903. In reading him approximate 1900 as the climacteric period.

His character delineation is superb. Ralph in _The Portrait of a Lady_, is the type of those who have difficulty in asserting themselves and are in a peculiar way hurt by contact with the world. Osborne—in the same book—is one of those peculiarly hard, selfish, artistic, super-refined people who turn into ice whatever they touch. He personifies the cruelty of a certain type of egoism—the immorality of laying a dead hand upon life. Poe has that tendency to lay a dead hand upon what he cares for and stop it from changing. Who of us with artistic sensibilities is not afflicted with this immorality? This is the unpardonable sin—more than lust—more than passion—a “necrophilism,” to lay the dead hand of eternal possession upon a young head.

Nothing exists but civilization for H. J. There has been no such writer since Vergil. And for him (H. J.) there is but one civilization—European. He is the cosmopolitan novelist. He describes Paris as no Frenchman does! Not only Paris, but America, Italy, anywhere the reader falls into a delicious passivity to the synthesis of nations. He knows them all and is at home in all. He is the novelist of society. Society—which is the one grand outrage; it is not pain—it is not pity; it is society which is the outrage upon personality, the permanent insult, the punishment to life. As ordinary people we hate it often—as philosophers and artists we are bitter against it, as hermits we are simply on the rack. But it is through their little conventionalities that H. J. discovers people, human beings, in society. He uses these conventionalities to portray his characters. He hears paeans of liberation, hells of pity and sorrow, and distress as people signal to one another across these little conventionalities. He fills the social atmosphere with rumors and whispers of people toward one another.

In describing city and country he is equally great. He does not paint with words, but simply transports you there. Read _The Ambassadors_ for French scenery! Everything is treated sacramentally. He is the Walter Pater of novelists with an Epicurean sense for little things—for little things that happen every day.

There is another element in his work that is psychic and beyond—magnetic and beyond. His people are held together by its vibrations. Read _The Two Magics_.

H. J. is the apostle to the rich. Money! that accursed thing! He understands its importance. It lends itself in every direction to the tragedy of being. He understands the art of the kind of life in which one can do what one wants. He understands the rich American gentleman in Europe—touches his natural chastity, his goodness, the single-hearted crystalline depths of his purity. Read _The Reverberator_.

In the _Two Hemispheres_ we find a unique type of woman—a lady from the top of her shining head to the tips of her little feet—exquisite, and yet an adventuress.

This noble, distinguished, massive intelligence is extraordinarily refined and yet has a mania for reality. He risks the verge of vulgarity and never falls into it. He redeems the commonplace.

To appreciate the mise en scène of his books—his descriptions of homes—read _The Great Good Place_. He has a profound bitterness for stupid people. He understands amorous, vampirish women who destroy a man’s work. Go to H. J. for artist characters—for the baffled atrophied artists who have souls but will never do anything.

Read _The Tragic Muse_. Note the character of Gabriel Nash, who is Whistler, Oscar, Pater all together and something added—the arch ghost—the moth of the cult of art.

The countenance of H. J. says that he might have been the cruelest and is the tenderest of human beings. To him no one is so poor, so unwanted a spirit but could fill a place that archangels might strive for. James is a Sennacherib of Assyria, a Solomon, a pasha before whom ivory-browed vassals prostrate themselves. He is the Solomon to whom many Queens of Sheba have come and been rejected, the lover of chastity, of purity in the natural state.

He is difficult to read, this grand, massive, unflinching, shrewd old realist, because of his intellect—a distinguished, tender, subtle spirit like a plant. And in the end I sometimes wonder whether H. J. himself in imagination does not stroll beyond the garden gate up the little hill and over to the churchyard, where, under the dank earth he knows that the changing lineaments mold themselves into the sardonic grin of humanity.

The Reader Critic

_William Thurston Brown, Chicago_:

I have just read your article on Mrs. Ellis’s lecture, and I wish to congratulate you upon its sentiments. Although I did not hear Mrs. Ellis, some of my friends did, and their report quite agrees with your judgment.

I must confess I did not expect much from her to begin with. From interviews and quotations it seemed clear that she was simply one who had never faced realities frankly. Besides, her rather mawkish “religiousness” betrayed a mind unfitted to deal adequately with such a problem.

I wish also to congratulate you upon your recognition of the genuine worth of Emma Goldman. I had thought you were in danger of making a fetich of her, but this article shows that you appreciate the things for which she stands.

I cannot believe that the superiority of Emma Goldman to such people as Mrs. Ellis—I mean in the discernment of real values—is due to a difference of psychology, or rather of temperament, but rather to the difference of point of view from which Miss Goldman has seen the problems of human life. Her experience as a protagonist of Labor in its struggle for freedom from exploitation has been a vital factor, I think, in her development.

All good wishes to THE LITTLE REVIEW.

_Albrecht C. Kipp, Indianapolis_:

Some time ago a friend of yours, and mine, under guise of a Yuletide remembrance, innocently and unapprehensive of the consequences no doubt, presented me with a year’s subscription to the magazine which you purport to edit. Our mutual acquaintance made some point of the fact that you were, as I aspire to be, a Truth-Seeker, and also alluded, in passing, to a feminine pulchritude which you possessed, not ordinarily a concomitant of an intellectual curiosity sufficiently keen to delve to the bottom of things material and spiritual. I therefore looked forward with undeniable expectation to a gratification of an insatiable desire to view the remains of many idols and statues still unbroken, which have been laboriously erected by the prejudice, credulity and ignorance of mankind for eons. Permit me to apprise you of my keen disappointment in perusing what I have found ensconced between the covers of your magazine.

I was given to understand that you were a quasi-missionary, in the most elastic sense of that word, and as one who is sincerely trying to fathom your mission, if one you have, I am writing to ascertain what it may be, because, owing either to an utter failure of a somewhat impoverished sense of humor or a too ordinary quantum of common sense, I seem to miss what you are driving at. If your magazine is designed to interest a coterie of semi-crazed, halfbaked, “fin de siècle” ideologists, I would appreciate a recognition of your object. To be quite frank with you, however, I do not yet consider myself in the proper frame of mind to be classified in that category of readers without demur. I am only a humble Searcher for the Truth in Life in all its phases and being congenitally opposed to the baleful spreading of “Buschwa,” I seem to find my mental equipoise disturbed by an attempt to diagnose by any rational standard most of the alleged literary ebullitions which find place in your REVIEW.

If we were still living in the Stone Age and reading matter of any sort were still a scarce article, it might be necessary to put up with the poetical balderdash which you publish. But having the daily newspapers to contend with and other pernicious thiefs of valuable time, it seems a heinous offense to a perfectly respectable mind to offer it, the unripe or overripe, mayhap, products of insane mentalities.

No doubt the fault is entirely that of an unschooled intellect, but at that, I have to take my mind as it is. Just as it is unable to fathom this Christian Science drivel, in that same measure does it utterly fail to be touched by what has appeared in THE LITTLE REVIEW of the past four months.

Let me assure you that I have made an honest effort to understand your viewpoint. Unless, however, I am cleared up as to what your aim and goal may be, I am compelled, in self defense, to request you to kindly discontinue sending your magazine to me. It may deflour my joy of life and ruin a saving and virtuous sense of the funny. You are too kindhearted, I am sure, as our mutual acquaintance informs me, to be an accessory before the fact to such an ungracious crime.

_Sada Cowan, New York_:

Your article on Mrs. Havelock Ellis was wonderful! Mrs. Ellis failed here ... just as in Chicago. I admire the clear and concise way in which you illumined the reason of her failure.

There is so much work to be done it seems wicked that a woman, to whom the world is so ready and willing to listen, who has the gift of poetic expression and direct logical thinking, should waste her powers. It is as though she held understanding and wisdom in her hands—tightly clenched—then when she should hold out those gifts to the world, she opened wide her fingers ... here a flash—there a glimmer!—And all vanishes!

_E. C. A. Smith, Grosse Ile, Michigan_:

I was delighted with your critique on Mrs. Ellis, not that I feel she fell as short as you seem to think, but because your own article made a beginning on things which must be said. I also emphatically endorse your views on enabling the poor to restrict their birthrate, not on sentimental grounds, but because I know by experience it would be a wise economy for the state. It is natural for wholesome people to want children; the rise in the labor market caused by the dropping off in production by the cowardly and incompetent would be amply compensated by the reduction in the ranks of economically valueless dependents. It would take less, per capita, to support orphan and insane asylums, dispensaries, and jails—not to speak of the wasteful drain of unestimated sporadic charity. The contention that it would contribute to immorality is absolutely absurd to anyone who has tried rescue work—girls have child after child, undeterred by pain or shame, just as the mentally deficient in other lines injure themselves in their frenzies.

The only way one has a right to judge life is to look at it from the inside. Before I read Havelock Ellis I was unable to take this view of the subjects you so sanely and clearly project on our imaginations. After laying down his book I found my only shock came from some of the methods employed in “curing” these unfortunates. From the histories of cases he cites, I should consider it fair to conclude that the nervous organization of inverts tended to average below par—as is the usual medical view. This may be a psychic, not physical, result. Personally, I cannot see any effect the reading of that material has had on me except to make me more wisely charitable in my views. It has broadened my ideals, without weakening them. It has put a new value on normality. It has not modified my personal theory of love any more than the not-entirely aesthetic conditions of carrying and bearing my children did. There are points about that sort of experience—especially the attitude of the inexperienced—which makes the prude’s attitude to the whole broad question ridiculous. Another generation will regard ours as we do the Victorians—my shade will grind its spirit teeth to hear them laugh.

I am not sure your point of view as a writer rather than a speaker does not make you overlook legitimate limitations in Mrs. Ellis’s position. A speaker can often suggest far more than she actually utters; the conclusions people are inspired to make for themselves are of far greater value than if they were cast forth with inspired eloquence. To antagonize an audience by forcing your point is to lose efficiency. In print one has not the personal element so strongly and immediately to consider. Perhaps she was subtler than Emma Goldman, but not so much weaker as you think.

THE LITTLE REVIEW is the most satisfactory source of mental stimulation I have yet discovered. If I do not always agree with it I at least have the sense of arguing with a friend whose intellect I respect—never did I feel that for any other publication. And I love freshness and freedom and enthusiasm as I love youth itself—they’re the qualities that promise growth.

_Stella Worden Smith, Monte Vista Heights, Cal._:

For six months or so I have been blessed with the presense of your LITTLE REVIEW. Many times I have wanted to tell you so. It is a matter of deep gratitude that at last one can open the pages of a magazine and feel that sense of freedom and incomparable beauty that one does in, say, looking out at a sunset across the mountains—and no more hampering! You give new horizons, fresh inspiration, and revive the creative impulse that is more likely to be snuffed out than stimulated when one peruses the majority of our “best” magazines. Forgive me if I seem over enthusiastic, but it springs from a gratitude born of great need. And you have filled it.

Your review of Mr. Powys’s lectures have carried me back four years into a period when I was studying music in New York with a Norwegian singer, and she and I listened to him at the Brooklyn Institute week by week! Never will I forget it. And she—well, she is a genius herself, an interpreter of Norwegian folk songs—and Powys lit her soul until it flamed forth like a beacon! If you heard his Shelley, I think you saw the veritable incarnation of that transcendent spirit....

Then I listened to him again in Buffalo, last year, on Keats. And the audience, mostly women (God forgive them!) seemed like school children—no, I will not confound such innocent souls with the inert mass that confronted him! And this is our culture!

I think the spirit of your magazine is to other magazines what Powys is to other lecturers. He makes you forget that he is such. You become part of his theme, or is it, _himself_? And so it is I seem both to lose and find myself when I read the pages of THE LITTLE REVIEW.

The “Little Review” Gives a Party!

On April 27, at 8:15 P. M., the desperados who have helped to
perpetrate THE LITTLE REVIEW will entertain those who have
subscribed to it—and any others who are interested—in the Fine
Arts Building. Having bored you in print for over a year, they
are eager to do so in person.

_Admission 50 cents_ — _Programs ready soon_

_Two Worthwhile Novels for the Thinking Reader_

By the Author of “Carnival”

Sinister Street

By Compton Mackenzie

The story of Michael Fane, Oxford graduate, and his experiences
in London’s moral bypaths. Readers of “Carnival” found in the
author an artist who was as original as he was unusual, and in
this new story by the same author will be found a strong study of
a man worth knowing.

“It is just the book for those who have reached the age to
appreciate the god whom we do not know until we have ourselves
lost him forever—the divinity of youth.”—Truth.

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clearly than anyone else has done that the lives of the people
generally classed as criminals not only negative our morality,
but create a morality of their own which is, in its own sphere,
as negative as our own.”—T. P.’s Weekly.

$1.35 Net

By the Author of “Old Mole”

Young Earnest

By Gilbert Cannan

Mr. Cannan’s new novel is a revelation in the art of character
delineation. It is the story of a young man in search of himself
and his place in the scheme of things. A search in which his days
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and wisdom.

“A fine imaginative insight and an honest facing of reality and
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much about the other sex, reputed easy to understand.”—The
English Review.

“Mr. Cannan is a master in the art of dissecting human
emotion.”—The New York Times.

$1.35 Net