Chapter III

Lover of Chaos and the Sacred Seven!
Scorner of Midas and St. Francis, too!
Wearied of earth, yet dubious of Heaven,
Fain of old follies and of pastures new—
Why should the great, whose spirits haunt the void
Between Orion and the Northern Wain,
Make you their mouthpiece? Why have they employed
So brassed a trumpet for so high a strain?
Perhaps, like you, they count it little worth
To pipe save for the piping; so they take
You weak, infirm, uncertain as the earth,
And down your tubes the thrill of music wake.
Well, God preserve you!—and the Devil damn!—
And nettles strew the bosom of Abraham!

A Letter from London

EZRA POUND

I should be very glad if someone in America could be made to realize the sinister bearing of the import duty on books. I have tried in vain to get some of my other correspondents to understand the effect of this iniquity ... but apparently without success. It means insularity, stupidity, backing the printer against literature, commerce and obstruction against intelligence. I have spent myself on the topic so many times that I am not minded to write an elaborate denunciation until I know I am writing to someone capable of understanding and willing to take up the battle. Incidentally the life of a critical review depends a good deal on controversy and on having some issue worth fighting. Henry IV. did away with the black mediaevalism of an octroi on books, and the position of Paris is not without its debt to that intelligent act. No country that needs artificial aid in its competition with external intelligence is fit for any creature above the status of pig.

The tariff should be abolished not only for itself but because dishonest booksellers shelter themselves behind it and treble the price of foreign books, and because it keeps up the price of printing.

If there is one thing that we are all agreed upon: It is that the canned goods of Curtis and Company and Harper and Company and all the business firms should be set apart from the art of letters, and the artist helped against the tradesman.

As a matter of fact a removal of the tariff wouldn’t much hurt even publishers, as the foreign books we really want in America are the sort which the greed of American business publishers forbids their publishing ... but that is no matter.

It affects every young writer in America, and every reader whether he wish merely to train his perceptions or whether he train them with a purpose, of, say, learning what has been done, what need not be repeated, what is worthy of repetition. There is now the hideous difficulty of getting a foreign book, and the prohibitive price of both foreign and domestic publications. I don’t know that I need to go on with it.

Again and yet again it is preposterous that our generation of writers shouldn’t have the facility in getting at contemporary work, which one would have in Paris or Moscow. It’s bad enough for the American to struggle against the dead-hand of the past generation composed of clerks and parasites and against our appalling _decentralization_, i. e., lack of metropoles and centers, having full publishing facilities and communication with the outer world—(which last is being slowly repaired)—also our scarcity of people who know.

When all the world goes mad, one must accept madness as sanity,
since sanity is, in the last analysis, nothing but the madness on
which the whole world happens to agree.—_Bernard Shaw_, 1916.

A Sorrowful Demon[1]

ALEXANDER S. KAUN

How he hates us, ordinary mortals! No, he seldom hates; he reserves his hatred for God, for life, for the universe. For us, weak bubbles driven on the surface by uncontrollable forces, he has only contempt. Yet, though hating and despising, he is infinitely dear to us: the thick melancholy vein that bulges across his wildcat forehead makes him almost human; the taut string of his remote harp vibrates at times with such yearning and pain that we feel nearly at home with that alien-on-earth, Mikhail Lermontov. We are glad with a petty gladness whenever we discover in him this weakness, his humaneness; we chuckle at the comfortable feeling of being able to observe him on the level plane, freed from the necessity of throwing our heads far back in order to perceive him on the lonely peak. He is our brother, we boast; and we inflict on him the severest punishment for a genius—forgiveness.

But his contemporaries could not forgive him. A general sigh of relief echoed the official announcement of his death “in a fearful storm accompanied by thunder and lightning on the Beshta mountain in the Caucasus”. “Bon voyage”, exclaimed Nicholas I, rubbing his hands in glee over the departure of one of his most undesirable subjects, the uncompromising mutineer. The church refused to bury the arrogant denier. Society applauded Major Martinov whose bullet snapped the life of the unapproachable aristocrat, the mocker of customs and conventions, the maimer of feminine hearts, the careless, fearless duellist who played with life, his own or that of others, as with a valueless toy. The people—there was not such a thing in Russia of 1841.

Society organism cannot digest a foreign element. We are too local in our terrestrial standards to tolerate an individual who is made not of the same stuff that we are made of. Lermontov was a child of a different planet who fell upon our earth by some crude mistake, doomed to chafe twenty-six years among humans. As a child he protested against the fatal misplacement; he discharged his venom in demolishing flower-beds, in torturing animals with tears in his eyes, in brandishing his tiny fists against his grandmother, when he observed her mistreating the serfs. When he grew up—and he grew up early: at ten he loved a girl; at fifteen he conceived his greatest poems, _Mtzyri_ and _Demon_—his protest had calmed down. He no longer wept or raged—he hated God and despised mankind. His contemporaries tell us that no one could stand his heavy penetrating look. Men hated and feared him; women hated and loved him, as they always do extraordinary things. Lermontov took revenge for his accidental association with mankind; he left behind him a long row of broken hearts and wounded ambitions. His rebellious spirit sought rest in chaos, in torturing others and himself, in creating around him an atmosphere of tragedy, in reckless fighting with the wild Caucasian mountaineers.

And he, the mutinous, seeks storm,
As if in storm he may find peace.

Pechorin, the hero of his autobiographical sketches collected in _A Hero of Our Time_, is the first Nietzschean in literature. His terse, unpretentious maxims and paradoxes have been re-echoed by Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Przybyszewski, and other writers of the superman-literature. As always is the case with deliberate or unconscious commentators, they liquefy the original. One carelessly dropped sentence of Lermontov is elaborated in tons of Dostoevsky’s gallous psychology, in mountains of Nietzsche’s brain-splittering philosophy, in cognac-oceans of the vivisectionist-Przybyszewski. Pechorin does not talk much; he is too aristocratic for extravagance in words. Pechorin does not compromise; he is not made of that stuff. He neither repents nor seeks atonement; in his hatred for reality he does not erect a consoling phantom in the image of a Superman; he would dismiss with a contemptible shrug Falk’s matrimonial and sexual tribulations. Pechorin is eternally alone. Those who approach him are scorched with his unhuman flame. Alone, in the steppe, after a mad ride which kills his horse, Pechorin hugs the soil and weeps “like a child”. Like a child pressing to its mother’s bosom, plaintively demanding the Why and the Wherefore of existence among strangers. Shall we chuckle at the suddenly-discovered weakness of our enemy? Or shall we modestly turn away our eyes from the stolen sight of a god in his nudity?

I once called Lermontov a sorrowful demon. Not a Lucifer, not a Mephistopheles, but a Russian demon, as the sculptor Antokolsky conceived him. Lermontov-Demon-Pechorin, a quaint superman, neither god nor devil, a pluralistic being, a combination of cruelty and compassion, of contempt and sympathy, of cynicism and sentimentalism, of the loftiest and the basest, of the unhuman and of the human-all-too-human. Dostoevsky?

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[1] A Hero of Our Time, by M. Y. Lermontov. New York, Alfred A.
Knopf.

The Poet Speaks

MARGARET C. ANDERSON

There are people in the world who like poetry if they know the poet. There are a good many people in Chicago just now who understand and enjoy Amy Lowell’s poetry because she read it to them at the Little Theatre.

I know a poet who could make nothing of Vachel Lindsay’s things until Lindsay chanted them to him one day. And I know another who said to me, when I remarked that I didn’t like Alfred Kreymborg’s verse, “Oh, but you would if you knew him.” I am puzzled, because I know this man to be an intelligent being. And somehow I have always been under the naive impression that poetry was a matter of art.

But there are worse things. There is one type of person we always eject promptly from the office of THE LITTLE REVIEW. He is the person who says that Amy Lowell’s poetry has no feeling in it. Now please listen: I want to quote you something. It is called _Vernal Equinox_, it was written by Miss Lowell, and it appeared in the September issue of _Poetry_; but I want to see it put down in these pages so that we may actually know it has been in THE LITTLE REVIEW:

The scent of hyacinths, like a pale mist, lies between me and
my book;
And the South Wind, washing through the room,
Makes the candles quiver;
My nerves sting at a spatter of rain on the shutter,
And I am uneasy at the bursting of green shoots
Outside, in the night.

Why are you not here to overpower me with your tense and
urgent love?

A poet whose new book will soon be talked of said to me, when I showed this to him, “Yes, it’s very clever, but it has no feeling.” He left the office gladly in three minutes.

Still there are worse things. _The Chicago Tribune_ sent a reporter to the Little Theatre to hear Miss Lowell read and to record his impression of her work and personality for those who still peruse the newspapers. You may have seen the reporter’s article....

And still worse?... Lots of people have been splitting hairs over Amy Lowell’s work, but no human being has been heard to remark: “A beautiful thing is happening in America. Amy Lowell is writing poetry for us.”

Poems[2]

ELIZABETH GIBSON CHEYNE

The Cry

Whenever there is silence around me,
By day or by night,
I am startled by the cry
“Take me down from the cross!”
The first time I heard it
I went out and searched
Till I found a man in the throes of crucifixion,
And I said, “I will take you down,”
And I tried to take the nails out of his feet,
But he said “Let be;
For I cannot be taken down
Till every man, every woman, and every child
Come together to take me down.”
And I said, “But I cannot bear your cry—
What can I do?”
And he said “Go about the world,
Telling everyone you meet
‘There is a man upon the cross.’”

The Excuse

I go about the world
Telling all the rich,
And all the happy, and all the comfortable,
“There is a man upon the cross.”
But they all say
“We are sure you are mistaken;
There was a man upon the cross
Two thousand years ago;
But he died, and was taken down
And was decently buried;
And a miracle happened,
So that he rose again
And ascended into Heaven,
And is happy evermore.”
Still I go about the world saying
“There is a man upon the cross.”

The Cross

Any groveller
May be straightened by a cross
If he lies down upon it at night,
And sleeps upon it with outstretched arms;
If he rises in the morning,
And shoulders it bravely,
Neither resenting it
Nor being ashamed of it,
He will find that he can bring his eyes
To look upon life
Instead of upon the grave,
And that he will even be able
To lift them to the stars;
And that he can live
On the levels he is able to look upon.

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[2] I do not know whether these poems have been published
elsewhere or not. They were read by Ellen Gates Starr in a mass
meeting in Kent Theatre on the University of Chicago campus—a
mass meeting in protest against police brutality during the
garment strike.

What Then—?

R. G.

There are signs of life at the Art Institute. In throwing out Charles Kinney, it stated the case against itself more emphatically than Kinney ever could have done. When an “institution” becomes violent over criticism there is too much work for one reformer.

This seems to have been a season for things Art to be stating the case against themselves. At the last meeting of the Chicago Society of Artists, when there was a slight murmur of dissatisfaction with the management of the Institute, one of the older men quickly reminded the painters that they were but guests of the Institute—and there was silence. Art has come by hard ways, but never to worse than this:—the guest of the Corn Exchange Bank!

Again at a meeting for the formation of the new Arts Club, before the matter of the Club could be discussed there had to be a speech assuring the Art Institute that the artists would never, in any way, _ever_ do anything on their own, but would always conform to the ideas of the directors of the Institute. But where they really proved themselves was at the annual dinner, at the opening of the Chicago Artists’ Exhibition. Herded into a room they meekly submitted to oyster stew and a speech by a minister of the Gospel. Artists! That is their case as stated by themselves.

Kinney blames the directors pro tem., and the Dean, for the “factory system” in the school. Knowing that all the small towns in the West and Middle West having any kind of an Art School pattern after the Art Institute, he is excited and fears the factory system will prevail everywhere. But he might have hope that here and there accidentally a few artists may get mixed up among the other students and frustrate this plan.

It would be interesting to know whether the administration by its methods has so completely discouraged artists that they no longer seek the Art Institute as a place of study, or whether the administration is simply changing its methods to meet the demands of the kind of student now attending the Institute.

This much is certain: no administration could take away every ancient prerogative of art students; lead them gently into organization; impose discipline upon them; and appoint God a chaperone over their play—in fact make a crêche of the school—if there were any of the stuff in them of which artists are made.

There always has been a fight on the part of the school to get what it wanted from the directors; but things can be done. Read the list of “illustrious names” of visiting instructors, years ago, and then compare the student roll of the same time. Once the Art Institute was an art school with art students, who were artists, who in spite of everything led the life of artists, knew the analogy between painting and the other Arts, swarmed to concerts and the theatres, and created their own atmosphere. That was the time when Bernhardt came to the school in her yellow-wheeled carriage and walked down a double line of quaking, adoring art students. And when Calvé came to sing.... How many students there now know these names, know anything beyond fashion drawing?

They have indicted themselves. If there were artists the Art Institute could seek exhibitions. If there were art students we could have an art school, not a “factory.” And if the directors of the Art Institute and its patrons really wanted Art, and the directors would throw the Institute open to all kinds of exhibitions, we might even in time find Art.

German Poetry

WILLIAM SAPHIER

Learned essays on this or that poetry make little red devils dance in my brain and my right hand reach for a Japanese sword. They are invariably inferior to the spirit, and occupy only a small section of the horizon of their subject. I have translated these three poems because I felt that they were as good or better than the best things published in this country, and because so little is known of this kind of German poetry here. The first is by Julius Berstl and the second two are by Fritz Schnack. I know of many more, but I am unable to get their work just now. As you perhaps know, they are engaged at present in a different direction.

Highland

(_From the German of Julius Berstl_)

Early light reflexes climb with rose fingers up the cliffs.
The chilly valley slumbers and cowers in its white fog bed,
But nude and cool, unearthly fine and clear,
Glitter the glacier chains.

The morning wind faint-heartedly plays a lyre,
No bird strikes screaming through the distance;
It is as if the sound of a timid harp
Spreads with bird-like wings
Along the stone cliffs and over the valley.

And now, as if breathed by the fragrance and dew,
Out of fog blossoms a wreath of meadows;
Behind them blooms a crystal glacier blue,
And a dream-laden delicate purple grey
Plays all around the giant mountains.

Young Days

(_From the German of Fritz Schnack_)

Soft, delicate morning air ripplings
Sway between the willow bushes
Rustling, as if a woman in silk ruchings
Passes over the meadows ...
Without end and blessedly far
Purls the cajoling sweetness.
O! how anxiously do I bear this air.
Like chords from the cloudland
Fall the deep shining days
Resounding in my trembling hand.

One Morning

(_From the German of Fritz Schnack_)

The light,
Flows spring-like out of the night,
And the big splashing wave
Spreads over the earth’s surface ...
White villas glisten in the light
Glowing all around with red roses;
Laughing young beauty blooms
On every threshold ...

At a distance I stand and watch
And think: whoever thus can build ...
And longingly go my way.

An Isaiah Without A Christ

_And the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Son of Man, prophesy, and say thou unto them that prophesy out of their own hearts, hear ye the word of the Lord; thus sayeth the Lord God: woe unto the foolish prophets that follow their own spirit and have seen nothing. O Israel, thy prophets are like foxes in the desert.—Ezekiel 13:1-4._

CHARLES ZWASKA